Meeting Women Power Brokers

Years ago, getting a new book into a bookstore was what all new authors obsessed over. In the Seventies, my friends and colleagues in the poetry community placed their books in favorite bookstores, usually the independents, by merely walking in and leaving a copy of their book on a prominent shelf where browsers were likely to see it. It was a tactic extrapolated from guerrilla theater. Imagine the surprise at the register, if a customer decided this leave-it-on-the-shelf-and-run book was what the buyer wanted.

WHERE DO PEOPLE MEET NOW?

Today, people are spending their reading time with TV, computers, and cell phones. They are buying books online if they buy them at all. Yet people are hungry for meaning in their lives and for community. So as an author, I am trying to reach out to other venues, besides bookstores, where people might congregate and also be interested in books.

EXECUTIVE WOMEN SUPPORTING THE ARTS

Lately, dear friends in my swing dance community have taken me to some high-powered gatherings of executive women. On March 4, 2008, the Business and Professional Women’s Council of the National Museum of Women in the Arts presented Gloria Story Dittus with the 2008 Enterprising Woman of Washington award. My stalwart dance friend Victoria Porter invited me to the award ceremony held in the grand foyer of this grand museum of which I also happen to be a founding member. Here’s where you are invited to ask, “How come you haven’t sat down with the program director at this museum to discuss your book?” I’ll park that answer with my book trailer project and just say, I am not going to forget about this.

Gloria Dittus is one of those extraordinary women who knows how to make things happen and if I’m lucky and smart enough, maybe I can go beyond the handshake of congratulations I extended to her relative to her newly acquired award and her life accomplishments.
Left to right: Wilhelmina Cole Holladay NMWA Executive Committee Chair of the Board; Gloria Dittus; Susan Fisher Sterling, NMWA Director

Right now I am working on a lead given to me by a woman I met at this award ceremony regarding marketing my book to the Washington National Opera. This particular woman directed a gala for WNO and she suggested I speak with a woman in the WNO development office. So now I am following through on a ricocheting path between the WNO publicity and development offices. It might be a series of rabbit holes that yield no immediate benefits, but certainly people in that organization are getting familiar with my book because it promotes their general director Placido Domingo and their young artist program as well as giving accolades for the world premiere of Scott Wheeler’s opera Democracy: An American Comedy.

BACK TO THE HALLS OF GOVERNMENT

In December 2007, my dance friend Kate Perry took me to the annual tea of Executive Women in Government where I met many movers and shakers from the halls of Federal government. (Yes, I did reinforce who I was when I was introduced to various people by handing them my bookmark.) Federal government was the world I left when I got an early out from the U.S. Department of Agriculture so I could pursue my writing career full time. (After all, I was an undercover poet for those decades that I worked on public programs related to energy, labor, justice, and food.) At the EWG tea where 130 people were honoring the Newton Marasco Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing environmental education (this group gives an annual book award for authors who write about environmental stewardship for children and young adults), I was invited to be a speaker at
the EWG March 2008 Summit and Training Conference: Women’s Vision by Marylouise Uhlig, a supreme networker and the chairperson for this training conference.


I arrived on March 12 at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (right across Lafayette Park from the White House) for the Women’s Vision conference on the heels of Michelle Rhee.

Rhee is the Chancellor of DC Public Schools who is daring to shake up the worst public school system in our country in order to establish significant improvements. I have been following the news about her actions with great interest because anything having to do with young people concerns me. The young are the future of this city, country, planet and they are why I carry torches for poetry and opera. So I was thrilled in this quiet moment at the registration table (everyone else had arrived much earlier) to shake the hand of Michelle Rhee, a rabble-rouser of the first degree. What she said in her speech to a conference of over 200 women is I don’t care if no one likes me—the children of Washington, DC need a better school system and I am going to make that happen.

Also on the speakers roster was Elaine Kamarck, author of The End of Government . . . As We Know It: Making Public Policy Work; former Marine Courtney Lynch, co-author of Leading From The Front: No-Excuse Leadership Tactics for Women; Mary E. Peters, Secretary of Transportation; Michealene Cristini Risley, co-author of This Is Not The Life I Ordered" 50 Ways to Keep Your Head Above Water When Life Keeps Dragging You Down; EWG President Lynn Scarlett, Department of Interior Deputy Secretary; and political forecaster Amy Walter, editor in chief of The Hotline, the National Journal Group's online briefing on politics and policies. Everyone who came to conference was given a bag of books from some of these speakers.

WHAT ABOUT THE FLIPPY LADY?

Right now I’m reading Leading From The Front and thinking Wow! I never thought a military officer could ever get my attention and have a message of importance that would speak to me. I’m not saying if I could relive my life that I would join the Marines, an organization I heard about constantly from one of my favorite uncles, but I am inspired by what Courtney Lynch has accomplished as the result of her Marine Corps training. The only thing I regret about this bag of books was that not one of mine was keeping company in this impressive collection. Were the EWG volunteers afraid to ask me for copies of one of my books, thinking I would turn them down or did they think a whole book of poetry was a little too subversive for this group? While it is true I could not afford to give away The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas, I do have other books that I can donate to a worthy cause.

This leads me to: what was the poet’s role in this conference? I’m not entirely sure, but I think the purpose of me speaking was to provide a moment of inspiration, a moment to acknowledge the creative impulse in every woman sitting in that lively audience. So I delivered my Diana, the huntress poem that is part of my opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On.

DIANA AU COURANT

She was a flippy lady—
a real sixer in a deck
of nines. She knew
the handle from the muzzle,

the click of the cock
from the squeeze 

of the trigger.

She listened--

an authentic spoon tuner
in a forest of forks.

Her ear was better 

than a metal detector. 

Sharpened and juicier

than a blowgun, her mouth

tasted the purple plum. 

In short she had more

life in her than the entire

city of New York.

Then I read “Looking for Divine Transportation.”


After the reading, one woman I spoke with recited the lines of this poem to express how much she enjoyed hearing it. As a thank you gift from EWG, I received Women Artists: Works from the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Talk about traveling in interconnected circles!

At the end of the day, I don’t know whom I have touched in a way that will move that person to remember what I said, much less make her or him take action to obtain a copy of any of my books. My business, the business of poetry, is akin to building stalactites. Yes, I’m exhilarated to speak to hundreds of people all at the same time at a conference where everyone seems to be on the same page and listening intently (and I am grateful to get such invitations), but I know it is one-on-one contact that makes the difference. Building those mineral deposits from the ceilings of limestone caves comes one drop of water at a time.

Thanks to Jeuli Barton, Kate Perry, EWG and the National Museum of Women in the Arts for photos seen in this post.

Our Town: A Steiny Road Way Station

Question: What could be better than meeting people who share your interests and therefore might be happy to know about your book? Answer: Going to a conference that deals with your subject matter AND meeting some of the people who are in your book!

The week of February 25 through March 2, 2008, Catholic University of America hosted “Wilder and Wilder (Thornton, that is…).” The conference, or festival as the university gurus labeled this set of events, focused on Wilder’s Our Town—the drama, film, musical premieres, and, most important to me, the opera written by Ned Rorem and J. D. (Sandy) McClatchy.

FIRST A SING-ALONG

Monday February 25, I heard Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder’s nephew, speak. I was lucky actually, I got to this panel a little late and a professor Lincoln Konkle was comparing Our Town, the play, to Our Town, the opera. Quite an in-depth paper on the subject, which I found interesting, but I suspect the 100 students sitting in the audience thought was utterly boring. Goodness, why do academics always read their papers instead of engaging the audience with bits of their paper and lots of eye contact to see who is yawning and maybe questions to shake the sequestered herd awake or at least keep their fingers off the keypads of their cell phones? Tappan, on the other hand, was a live wire. He got everyone singing “Love and Marriage.” The song was in the television musical of Our Town with Frank Sinatra. How many of those kids actually knew who Frankie was? Well, Tappan asked and there were some. He also showed some posters depicting the U.S. stamp minted in Thornton’s honor and a new book in translation from Germany. He poked some fun at both.

STEIN ON WILDER

During the question and answer period, I got Tappan to talk a little about Gertrude Stein’s influence on his uncle. He said there were many influences but provided only this example. The minister who marries Emily and George makes these comments ending on the word interesting, which Tappan said, was a nod to Stein who used that word often. Like Stein, Tappan said, Wilder was not being ironic, just matter of fact. Shall we believe that?

“I’ve married two hundred couples in my day. Do I believe in it? I don’t know. I suppose I do. M marries N. Millions of them. The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford—the first rheumatism—the grandchildren—the second rheumatism—the deathbed—the reading of the will—Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.”

MEETING AN AMERICAN OPERA GURU

Also during the Q and A’s, I realized that a woman asking a question was Elise Kirk who wrote American Opera, a book I consulted in writing about what is American opera, an important chapter in my book.


After the panel discussion, she asked me how I defined American opera (of course there is no answer except the one about holding a passport from the United States) and then she turned our conversation to Lori Laitman and The Scarlet Letter, Laitman’s new opera with poet David Mason. Small world since my article on opera origins that includes an interview with Laitman will be published March on Scene4 Magazine.

OUR TOWN CHEVY CHASE

I also spoke to Tappan Wilder, who turns out to be a fellow Chevy Chaser. I used the bookmark I made when I was in New York recently to introduce myself. I got a chance to ask the moderator professor Grayson Wagstaff if I could offer some of my bookmarks at various events during the week. He thought it was OK as long as I was low key about this. Of course what this meant was that I needed to make more of them.

COLLECTOR EDITION BOOKMARKS

Nothing can be as easy as the original idea. My husband Jim said I really needed an image on the bookmark and some lines to guide the eye. He wanted to help but he’s wrapped up these days with graduate studies so I asked my artist friend Janice Olson to help me. I had the concept and some public domain images but I lacked the skill to use InDesign, the software that most pros use these days for page layout projects. Here’s what Janice did. Well, I had some of the bookmarks produced in color on shiny white card stock and many more produced in black ink on colored paper. I spent my first book royalty check in making these babies. (Helas, $50 doesn’t go very far but maybe the bookmarks will have legs. Jim said I should sign the back of these bookmarks. Not until someone asks is my position on that.)




WERE NED ROREM’S EARS BURNING?

Last night, I went back to Catholic University to hear Sandy McClatchy speak with Tappan Wilder about how the Our Town opera came about.
Each had a different version, which didn’t surprise me since Ned Rorem also has his own version. Ned Rorem was suppose to be on this panel, but he called and said he wasn’t feeling up to it and besides the Julliard School of Music would be mounting a production soon. Composer Maurice Saylor, a Catholic University insider, wondered aloud to Janet Peachey (she’s a composer and part-time professor at CUA) and me why Rorem had to throw in that comment about Julliard. “He’s like that,” I said, “besides, he’s not that young though you can’t tell that by what he says.”

McClatchy got his digs in on Rorem too from the stage. Of course they were tempered by McClatchy's great praise for Rorem’s ability to set poetry and know what good poetry is. “I think composers are lazy,” said McClatchy a couple of times. Rorem wanted Our Town written in one act but agreed to make it two after McClatchy insisted. In the world premiere rehearsals, the creative team suddenly realized that the Indiana audience (Our Town premiered at Indiana University) would not be comfortable sitting through a 90-minute first act.” Luckily, McClatchy explained, breaking the first act into two parts required little of Rorem. The break was there all along.

POCKET OPERA ON BROTHER FIRE AND MORE

After the panel discussion, six new musical works based on three-minute plays by Thornton Wilder and written by CUA students or staff were premiered.


Michael Oberhauser’s operatic version of Wilder’s Brother Fire was superb! Shh! Don’t tell him that. It might break his concentration—Oberhauser loves to write opera he said when I spoke with him after the performance. He thanked me for my compliments, but I assured him I was not flattering him and I gave him my bookmark so he would know I was more than a casual listener. By the way, Tappan Wilder said Brother Fire, written by Uncle Thornton in 1916 is his earliest work in print. The story involves St. Francis of Assisi getting too intimate with a campfire being tended by a young pyromaniac girl and her mother. The play is pure poetry and it also inspired incidental music from another CUA student who together with director Jason Burke produced an entirely different view of this work. Hats also off to John Diomede for the impressive tonal music that worked well with the text of Brother Fire.

My point here is that a conference like Wilder and Wilder offered me a lot of opportunity to meet people who might appreciate what I have done with The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas. If a few of those I talked with buy my book, they will note I have interviewed Ned Rorem, J. D. McClatchy, and one of their prominent professors Andrew Simpson.

They will also see that I discuss the subject what is American opera and hold up Elise Kirk’s book American Opera as a seminal reference. Our Town, the opera and the play, threads through my book. The point is my book is the story they are living.

Getting Collaborative Help Even in New York

The job of promoting your book can be a lonely uphill struggle unless you reach out enthusiastically and offer to help others with their projects. Of course, following your own passions make this exchange genuine.

CRITIC OR POET: WHICH IS IT?

On February 11 and 12, 2008, I went to New York City to see and review In Circles, the revival of the 1967 musical by the late Reverend Al Carmines. The Judson Memorial Church minister set Gertrude Stein’s A Circular Play: A Play in Circles to a wide range of popular musical forms that included blues, ballads, waltz, you name it. The exuberance of Stein’s words and Carmines’ music is a restorative and joyful experience. I have written two essays about the production, which was lovingly and intelligently directed by John Sowle of Kaliyuga Arts. One of these two essays is currently posted on my arts blog The Dressing and the other will appear in my Steiny Road to Operadom column in the March edition of Scene4 Magazine. The play deserves as much promotion as it can get before it closes February 22, 2008.

Noelle McGrath (Mildred/Gertrude Stein)


The In Circle stools spelled out "Ma Jolie," the title of a cubist painting by Pablo Picasso


Robin Manning (Mabel/Alice B. Toklas)




Although I didn’t go to New York with a clear intention for promoting The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas, I knew that just showing up at a play that was based on Gertrude Stein’s work would be beneficial to me. On the morning of February 12, it suddenly occurred to me that if I had a small card of some sort with the title of my book, the name of my Stein opera, a book jacket quote, and the URL of my blog, I would be able to talk to people about my book and leave them with a way to get more information. Of course this isn’t rocket science, but I have a way of promoting everyone else and missing good opportunities for my own projects.

What I was able to do was make a bookmark and get it copied and cut at FedEx Kinko’s. it probably took a total of one hour’s time though I did have to leave the printed page and come back later to retrieve the bookmarks. Here’s what the bookmark said:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas
by Karren LaLonde Alenier

includes the libretto Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On
to order, visit Alenier.blogspot.com

“Karren Alenier’s peripatetic The Steiny Road To Operadom is a must read for any librettist, composer, or opera aficionado in search of an inside look at the creation and performance of a contemporary opera.”

Gordon Ostrowski, 
Director of Opera Studies, 
Manhattan School of Music
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I used a brightly colored cardstock so people would notice the bookmark. When I got to the Judson Church, I spoke to someone at the front door to see if there would be a place where I could leave a stack of these bookmarks and he sent me right to the director John Sowle. Sowle kindly said go ahead and leave some on the table where they were selling tickets. He could have said no. After all, I was there to review his production, but I believe he knew from email interactions that I love Stein and my calling, first and always, is poet. After the show, I had an opportunity to talk to cast members and others in the audience.

27, ANOTHER STEIN MUSICAL, ANOTHER COLLABORATION

Among those people in the audience was my San Francisco-based friend Hans Gallas. Hans collects memorabilia related to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. He told me that Ted Sod, book writer of 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, might be attending the show if he could break away from other theater business and that Ted had invited him to mount an exhibition of his Stein-Toklas collection in the lobby of Urban Stages’s theater during the production of 27. While I didn’t know that Ted might appear in the audience, I did know about Ted’s invitation to Hans about exhibiting at his show. I had seen it on the Urban Stages website and, in fact, had asked Ted to help me get my book linked there. I have been following the progress of Ted's collaboration with composer Lisa Koch since March 2007 when we shared a speaking engagement about our musical works at the Mercantile Library Center. A few weeks ago, Ted put me in touch with his theater director and made that happen. So the world of Steinian theater this month has been really generous to me and I recommend that you, Dear Reader, go out and see these shows if you are in or can get to New York City.

Left to right: Hans Gallas, Ted Sod, Paul Boesing (William)


MORE GUSTO

While I was in New York, I visited two other theater friends in my quest to get support for a special event book reading and signing. First I met with Frank Hentschker, Director of Programs at
 The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of 
The CUNY Graduate Center and later with Nancy Rhodes, director of Encompass New Opera Theatre.
While I was waiting for Nancy at a USDA-certified green restaurant called Gusto Grilled Organics, a young man named Ayael gave me a tutorial on what it means to be a green restaurant and how this business, only one month old, was looking to franchise itself.


What I can pass along is that vegan lentil soup was superb and that each night, they make their menu based on what is in the marketplace that day. What brought a smile to my lips was Ayael telling me that he was brought up on all things green in many countries around the world, that he didn’t drive a car so he wouldn’t pollute our planet, and that he had come to Babylon to make a difference. So, of course, I am thinking to myself now how I can channel that idealism into my own quest to make a difference for poetry and contemporary opera. Well, stay tuned, my discussion with Frank and Nancy might have some wider context than just promoting The Steiny Road to Operadom. Like I said, helping others in a larger landscape can mean helping yourself. Maybe this is part of Stein’s offering on circles. What goes around…

Finding a Model for Your New Book

When an author launches a new book, she or he should be simultaneously looking for a model to follow. Even if the book in question, such as The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas, is unique in the marketplace, there will always be another book whose subject matter intersects with yours. What comes clearly to mind vis-à-vis The Steiny Road is The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. The Rest Is Noise has made the 2007 ten best books list of The New York Times and many other book lists, including Time magazine and Amazon.com.

Of course, Ross already had a huge readership as the well respected music critic of The New Yorker and he has an important Internet presence with his blog therestisnoise.com, now nominated for the 2008 Bloggies award as the best blog about music. It cannot hurt if you, the relatively unknown author, are also writing criticism in the subject area of your book. For example, I went to a memorial service for a fellow traveler recently. (We had been together for two glorious weeks in Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast some years ago besides seeing each other more recently at standup parties at the home of mutual friends.) At this service, which was quite sad since the always vibrant Sarah Francis died quite unexpectedly, I realized the soprano singing the Ave Maria was Claire Kuttler, the same singer who had been featured in the new opera Later the Same Evening: An opera inspired by five paintings of Edward Hopper by composer John Musto and librettist Mark Campbell. After the service, I told Claire how much I believed Sarah would have been pleased that Claire Kuttler had sung in her honor and that I had had her in three separate performances of Later the Same Evening. Looking somewhat shocked, Ms. Kuttler said to me, “Oh my god! You must be the Dresser.” I relate this anecdote not to promote myself as the critic known as the Dresser, but just to say that occasionally a small fish in the large sea of the Internet is occasionally spotted. Now whether those people who read your critical opinions will buy your book is clearly, as it is said (you may groan here), “another kettle of fish.”

On the serious side, I reveled in reading The Rest Is Noise and I refused to write a review of the book until I had read every word of this magnificent tome on a survey of classical music in the Twentieth Century. (My review of The Rest Is Noise is posted on CultureVulture.net.) I also went to hear Ross speak about his book and was amused to hear him say that “classical music is alive in some zombie state” and he was doing his best to disprove the notion that classical music is dead. Of course as a poet, I relate to that struggle but mine is about keeping poetry and opera alive. It tickles me that Ross took a picture of that Washington, DC audience, which included me and then he put that photo on his Website. Even an author who is getting so much good press and great book sales is doing the same things I’m doing. Now what I have to do, besides getting lucky enough to get some major press on my book, is figure out how to make a clever book trailer. Ross has one and it’s not bad. Scroll down on this link to the middle of the page to play his book trailer. So study your model and see what you can learn to advance your book. If you can get your model author to read and comment on your book that's even better!

Book Promotion at a Glamorous Party

Sometimes promoting a new book can take the author to a glamorous setting. Being invited to show and talk about your book at a party can be one of those occasions. On January 20, Encompass New Opera Theatre under the leadership of Nancy Rhodes orchestrated a fundraising party in New York City. Rhodes and Encompass developed, directed, and premiered Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, my opera with composer William Banfield. Since one facet of The Steiny Road to Operadom is about the development of my Stein opera and Encompass was showcasing the innovative work they do in the field of new opera and music theater, it made sense for me to attend with a few books in hand.










Prior to performances by several singers, I had a chance to let them see the book. Tenor Justin Vickers’ name appears in The Steiny Road book because he played Leo Stein (Gertrude’s brother) in the world premiere of the Stein opera. In the showcase program, Vickers sang “O might those sighes and teares,” a poem by John Donne that was set to music by Benjamin Britten. When I complimented Vickers on his performance, he told me he had done extensive study of Britten’s work. I’m a fan of this tenor not only because his singing and acting skills are outstanding but also because he is such an intelligent interpreter of the roles he sings. Participating in workshops prior to the world premiere of my opera, Vickers helped me strengthen the character of Leo Stein, the art critic brother who found his sister’s writing embarrassing.












Because an opera company must always be proactive in raising money to continue its work (even a full house for an entire set of performances will not cover the cost of a production), my interaction with the invited potential patrons needed to be low key. Expecting about fifty to sixty people at this event, I brought three copies of The Steiny Road and put two out on a big coffee table. The third copy I handed to Nancy Rhodes so she could hold it up when she made remarks about her theater and the show she had organized.















I also brought about thirty half sheets of paper that provided information about The Steiny Road book, including a comment from a New York City arts educator and the book’s blog where a potential buyer could order the book. This information also highlighted that Nancy Rhodes wrote the foreword of The Steiny Road. Connecting the dots for people to whom you hope to sell a book is critical. I sold two copies of the book and asked Nancy to take the third copy to her office where she could show it to people visiting her there. Raising awareness and showing who you are aligned with are both important in the party circuit. The event was not about how many books could be sold.

While I was in New York, I also visited two bookstores to see about creating an event focused on selling The Steiny Road book. What I determined is that I need to bring together several organizations to help present a special program with a short performance selected from Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On. One of the two bookstores I visited has a small theater and a great midtown location. One thing I know about bookstore readings is that you need a large invitation list to get just a handful of people and that’s why I need a bunch of organizations behind any event I plan outside of my hometown. Before I say what I have in mind, I need to approach my contacts and see what is possible.

Photos: #1 includes composer John David Earnest (on far left) and Nancy Rhodes. #3 Karren Alenier and composer Philip Hagemann. #4&5 Tenor Justin Vickers. #6 Nancy Rhodes. #7 Mezzo Soprano Yong Kyung Park. #9 Soprano Lorraine Hinds. #10 Baritone Dominic Inferrera.

Opera Links
Encompass New Opera Theatre website
John Yaffe, Music Director of Encompass
John David Earnest
Opera Index
Tenor Justin Vickers
Baritone Dominic Inferrera