Where have all the authors gone?
Philadelphia's days as the literary capital of America are long gone. Local scribes - there actually are quite a few - ponder the possibility of recapturing lost glory.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
January 2, 2000
Can Philadelphia once again become America's center of literary life in the next millennium?
It seems a bit unlikely, given a certain self-infatuated, media-mad metropolis 90 miles to the north. Besides, a perplexing question immediately presents itself.
How?
Find surviving DNA from Franklin and clone it? Copy Miami and start a fantastically successful annual book fair? Bomb Manhattan? Offer rent-free housing to poets and novelists? Get Michael Crichton to turn the clock back two centuries? All of the above?
Just two centuries ago - a mere blip on the screen to the millennium-weary - Philadelphia struck painter Gilbert Stuart and others as "the Athens of America."
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was launching the American novel, and Godey's Lady's Book would soon launch big-time magazine publishing. In 1800, "nearly every leading American writer was contributing stories and articles to magazines published in Philadelphia," Jerre Mangione wrote in his survey of Philadelphia literary history, By Reason of Birth or Residence (1982).
Philadelphia held its own for most of the 1800s. Edgar Allan Poe spent six years here, Walt Whitman strolled Market Street during frequent visits from Camden, and Frances Harper would help invent the African American novel.
These days, Philadelphia's once preeminent literary publishing business barely exists. The same goes for mass-market magazine publishing. And while the area's powerful array of writers - Lorene Cary, Diane McKinney-Whetstone, Chaim Potok, Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Josephine Foo and Lisa Scottoline, to name a few - reflects its bustling character, young writers still don't migrate to Philadelphia to start literary careers, as they do to New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles.
Can that change? Fifty years ago, heading to Seattle to become a business mogul would have seemed crazy, like moving to Miami to soak up Latino culture. Yes, things change in America.
So we asked some literary Philadelphians the "How?" question.
"You mean Philadelphia isn't the center of American literary life now?" jokes hot fiction writer Ken Kalfus. "I should have known our real estate agent was exaggerating things."
"I suppose it would help," Kalfus continues, "if there were more jobs here on the fringe of writing: magazine and publishing jobs, proofreading, editing, publicity - the kinds of jobs writers work at to earn bread while they're learning how to write." Still, he notes, Philadelphia boasts a few, and will remain a "pretty good place to write" so long as "the cost of living stays moderate."
"Of course," Kalfus adds, "if you can get the New Yorker to publish here, that would be great."
Craig Eisendrath, former chairman of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, echoes the need for more publishers. "There is virtually no literary publishing in Philadelphia," he says. "If Philadelphia writers could establish their own cooperative publishing house, with good editing, it would give writing a direct access to publishing and a huge boost. Nonprofit status would enable the publishing house to attract seed money from some of the larger foundations."
Other writers suggest more media coverage. "Why not write about poets and their work the way that movie directors and their work get written about?" asks poet Daisy Fried, a recent Pew Fellow in the Arts. "Visiting poets, local poets, presses, prizes, scenes, whatever. Snazzy photos. Featurey leads, you know: 'Joe Poet fiddles with an unlit Camel filter and swipes his toner-stained fingers through his floppy brown hair. . . . "
Sandy Dolnick, executive director of Friends of Libraries, U.S.A., thinks media and other local institutions ought to start both a major book fair and "an event, be it breakfast, lunch, dinner or tea, for big-name authors once a year."
Both, she suggests, should benefit literacy programs, and, like the Miami Book Fair International, include a school component, free events for students and seniors, authors in other languages, and underwriting by local universities and corporations. "We are a major market," says Dolnick, "and should act like one."
Some area writers stress a separate need for more solidarity among Philadelphia literati.
"The whole notion of a regional identity for writing may be defunct in our little e-culture," comments novelist Lisa Zeidner. "But it is interesting that on amazon, most novelists will get a line showing they have enthusiastic readership in their home ports." Only Philadelphia novelists, it strikes her, don't.
"Philadelphians seem to have a horror of seeming provincial if they celebrate their own," she observes. "My experience is that other places - San Francisco, Houston - allow themselves to get more outright chauvinistic."
Wendy Steiner, culture critic and chairman of the University of Pennsylvania's Humanities Forum - designed in part to build such solidarity - also sees a problem internal to the literary community.
"There's a lot going on in isolated venues," she notes, ". . . But people don't know each other and there's huge distrust and contempt toward each other, on the assumption that there must be something wrong with them or they'd be somewhere else." Steiner thinks "there's not enough high-quality commentary on the arts to create a buzz, and often the few arts journalists in the city show the same contempt for local talent I've been talking about." She'd like to see more use of local writers as "talking heads" on radio and TV.
Steiner's Penn colleague, Al Filreis, thinks one "can't-miss" solution is building smaller literary communities. As faculty director of Penn's highly successful Kelly Writers' House, which draws Penn students and other Philadelphians to its packed schedule of events, he has already created a model.
"If you build it, they will come," he advises. Moreover, he adds, "young talented Philadelphia writers will stay, finding their talents nurtured here."
That Philadelphia already has, in his opinion, five or six models for such communities, may explain why one popular answer to the "How?" question was to deny its premise - at least partially.
"Aren't we already 'the center of American literary life?' " asks Kathleen Volk Miller, editor of Painted Bride Quarterly. "My thoughts leapt to American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Painted Bride Arts Center, the Rosenbach museum, the healthy-sized crowds at public readings I've attended everywhere, to bookstores, to local bars. On any given night of the week something is happening in this city that 'proves' its and our commitment to literature."
Still, Miller acknowledged she'd like to see greater commitment from other sectors of the city, such as having the Avenue of the Arts project include "free office space for arts organizations, free work space, or, yes, even living space for artists." Miller thinks that "if Philadelphia wants to be known as the home of important writers, the city must acknowledge the importance of writing."
Of course, Philadelphia being a home to searching minds, a few couldn't resist finding deeper meaning in the "How" question.
"It's presumptuous to want to be the center of anything," asserts novelist Bill Kent. "America in general, and Philadelphia specifically, is a land of estranged outsiders."
Author and former weekly newspaper editor Dan Rottenberg offers a full-fledged philosophy of the city according to which Philadelphia is perfectly poised to take over.
In the coming millennium, violence, coercion and possibly even government will decline due to a rise of communication skills, greater consumer choice, Gandhian politics, further insights from psychology, and advances in biotechnology; a "far more mature world population" will evolve.
"When that happens," according to Rottenberg, "swaggering, rambunctious 'hot' cities will be out, and mature, cultivated, civilized cities like Philadelphia will be in."
In short, if we want to become the Athens of America again, we should "just keep doing what we've been doing, and have patience."
After that kind of Hegelian analysis, it's nice to know that a few literary Philadelphians think in simpler and quirkier terms.
Novelist Denise Gess suggests that in sports-loving Philadelphia, "photographs of writers and poets should appear on the backs of all Flyers and Eagles jerseys." Poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis advocates community activities to spur people to "slow reading," which, like "slow dancing and slow food," is "a pleasure designed to enhance and expand pleasure."
The prize for most original suggestion, though, goes to novelist and Penn fiction-writing teacher Albert DiBartolomeo: a good, old-fashioned publicity stunt.
" I think all Philadelphia writers should place their names in a hat, which will then be given to the mayor, who will choose one of the names. Instead of being stoned to death, the writer selected will scale one of the suspension cables of the Walt Whitman Bridge to the top of the support tower. He or she will have a choice: to spend three days atop the tower or jump from there attached to a hang-gliding apparatus.
"Whatever choice is made, the writer will drape a 20-foot sign from the tower that reads: 'Philadelphia Writers Rule!', or something similar.
"Before all this, of course, the media should be alerted. The writer will tell them that he or she has climbed to the support tower of the Walt Whitman Bridge to call attention to the fact that many writers in the country live in the area. If this fails to turn heads away from New York, then perhaps the person whose name is lifted from the hat should, indeed, submit to a barrage.
"But instead of rocks, chunks of hard rubber should be thrown - unless the writer has not been able to get his work published in the last 10 years, in which case he might prefer the real thing."
Well, we did ask.
