What exactly is a Novella

Coming soon...

Departures

A Novella

Benjamin Russack

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What is it about?

Is it good?

How much does it cost?

How do I buy a copy?

What exactly is a Novella?

Who are you, anyway?

Do you have a blog?

How can I contact you?

What else do you have?

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What is it about?

"Departures" chronicles a year in the life of Gregory and Cassie, a couple who live and go to school in Berkeley, CA.

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Is it good?

Yes. You betcha it's good.

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How much does it cost?

I'm not sure yet. We're still binding it. I'm figuring between $20.00 and $30.00 which will barely cover production costs. However, I'm going to have a cheaper version available either as a PDF or just a simple McBook special. I'm of the opinion that books should be for everyone, however, it's nice to own something of real quality. Here’s why I’m offering both: In the old days and especially the really old days, books were expensive because there simply wasn’t a cheaper way to produce them (though I’ve always wondered if sticks and sand ever made any headway). Hence books became valued not only for their content but for the materials and labor from which they were produced. Now, we’re seeing an odd split—books can be either purely content based, or more physically value based (fancy hardcovers, huge coffee-table books, gold plated bibles, people magazine, etc). In a sense books are simultaneously closer to and further way form their original state, as artifacts and sacred texts, than they’ve ever been before.

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How do I buy a copy?

You send me the money, I send you the book. Once "Departures" exists in the physical world, I'll make it very easy for everyone, including myself, to do this.

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What exactly is a Novella?

Technically, a Novella is a work of fiction between 60 and 150 pages in length, or somewhere between the thirty and seventy thousand word mark. A Novellette is around thirty pages, and anything shorter than that is a short story. I have a lot of thoughts about what constitutes fiction, and I'll get into that a little later.

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Who are you, anyway?

My name is Benjamin Russack. I was raised in San Francisco, CA, and currently work at a rehabilitation center in Sausalito, CA, where I have yet to become a patient. I have a degree in literature from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College of California, and an MA in psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. I have a lot of thoughts about MFA's and the so-called "craft" of writing, that are best expressed in the following letter I wrote to a friend of mine.

Dear Amber,

                       I apologize for not getting back to you sooner, I’ve been experiencing a major philosophical crises regarding critique. Last week, I walked out of my shrink’s office feeling like he’d poured
             acid all over me. Unfortunately, that was the day I was to place your stories in the mail.
                        Let me explain: I can’t be sure of any of this. It’s all so new to me. But I have been having some serious reservations about critique, that while helpful in the short term may work to undermine
             the heart and soul of the writer in the long run. In your draft of “Symmetry” I encouraged you to rid the theme of symmetry and focus instead on closeness. I would like to modify that advice, here and
             now. Please, disregard comments underscored by any idea of omission. It is not for anyone to say what should or should not be left out of a piece of writing, even if the piece could suffer the
             improvement. Who are we to dictate the contents of someone’s soul? Because that’s what writing is, at least the strong writing: the ego’s excavation of the self, a wholly intimate process that must
            not be defiled. If the soul is a palace of glass, or better, obsidian, an architecture of our deepest unconscious realms, then who am I to run amok in your halls with my raucous, dirty pen smashing your
            windows and leaving crude, black gouges in your walls? It is the closest thing I can think of to sin, if you believe in that sort of thing.
                     Rather, it is my severely limited job as a reader to point out the delicate, the dimly imagined and the unexplored. I might lead you to a room and ask if you had entered this space, or walked
            through this or that door. You get the idea. Even that seems heavy handed to me at this point. Simple, light questions. That’s it. At least, for now, until I figure more of this out. And even these
            questions may interrupt an important process. What benefit would you accrue from discovering that room yourself? We shall never know. And would such a process encourage you to explore other
            rooms, and make other, deeper, discoveries? Who knows how much knowing has been lost to thoughtless critique? In the MFA programs, in the writing groups world wide, there is a kind of
            thought-genocide occurring. Of course I have an MFA, I am part of a writing group, and what am I to make of what I am saying to you--these outrageous, improbable statements? I suppose I really
            trust you. This is new to me. I am asking you, paradoxically, for what other way is there, to critique this thought. What do you think? I need to know. We’re so alike in our approach, you and I.
                     Here is another paradox: TS Eliot did benefit from his meeting with Ezra Pound, who helped him organize The Wasteland. Still, I wonder if it was not the benefit of the encounter with Ezra
            pound that transformed Eliot’s work? Was there something behind the loops and scribbles on the page that moved Eliot to a new place? And are you and I experiencing such an engagement? Or are
            we too similar in our process that we could not benefit form each other? I have no idea. I only know that close, intense engagement is the only way road to transformation. Anything less is topical, and
            frankly, destructive.
                    Writing is a peculiar art form, a face to face with our self that in a way transcends the composed or the performed. I went down to the literary “Crawl” on Valencia on Saturday and watched the
            readers, the crowds. Amber, they all want to be rock stars. It’s crazy. Everyone there felt to me so anxious and lonely and wanting. But we’re not rock stars. We have no “scene”. We aren’t
            extroverted like the musicians, or even the painters who can at least take much needed lessons in depth perspective. But even that is questionable. I don’t know. Surely Rembrandt had his teachers.
            But where would he have gone had they laid a lighter hand? What genius would have arisen? How much teaching is too much? And for whom? And when? The “Craft” of writing can definitely be
            taught, but craft is nothing more than beauty made apparent, a propagation of the most common liturgical moves that seem to work for some reason. That is, we investigate and discover the links and
            nods made by the writer, we look to what moved us and do our best to copy and perhaps, to understand. We learn, in affect, to paint by the numbers. We investigate the writing from without, from a
            point of extroversion rather than examining the root of the writing and its dim, introverted beginnings.
                     “On The Road” can of course be studied from a craft perspective, and so can “Catcher in the Rye” but the real question, the deeper question, is where were these men when they wrote these
            books? When we read, we are overcome and experience deeply the movement of these writers, and I wonder if that is enough, if that is the best way to “improve” one’s writing. What is gained, on
            the other hand, when on the advice of a particular reader, we hone our themes in order to simplify a story in the name of improvement? What if we have restricted the necessary confusion, the clutter,
            frustration and struggle which we desperately needed to in order truly “improve” our story?
                      But really, it can’t hurt to be taught this or that brushstroke, to lay one shade of red against a particular shade of blue? And I often find myself vainly circling was’s and is’s as though going in
            and making the verb come alive is a good thing. I was taught this technique, and why not? But consider the benefits of taking it from the other direction. Why not permit the writing to breathe, the
            image to come, the stronger verb, if needed, to arise of it’s own accord? You might scan for was’s and ask yourself which one fails to own the image, which one fails to resonate with your deep,
            archetypal experience. Here’s a better way of saying it:

                    If you bring forth what is within you,
                    what you bring forth will save you.
                    If you do not bring forth what is within you,
                    what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
                       --The Gospel of Thomas

                    There’s a lot in that passage. But for our purposes I would like to point out how it alludes to the sheer power of the within. And how can a writing group, or an MFA come close to tapping this
            unearthly, unfathomable power? I took a class with Maxine Hong Kingston, she came the closest. No one else. I felt like it was more of a journey than a class. Still, I argue with myself even as I write
            this: How will I know when a story doesn’t work? How will I view with objectification the content of my writing? How can I expect to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Joyce and Woolf if
            there is no one there to lift me up? I don’t know. I’m lost. I’m lost and I’m not lost. I want to learn to write and I don’t want t o learn to write. Still, keep sending me your material. I enjoy your work
            and you and I both appear to benefit from our correspondence, this letter hopefully not excluded. So what am I advocating, exactly? It must be a notion of trust, to submit entirely to what you have
            written, to what is within you.

Yours,

Benjamin Russack

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Do you have a blog?

No. I will, however, be keeping a record of my progress, or lack thereof, towards binding and selling Departures. Just scroll down.

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How can I contact you?

benjamin_russack(at)hotmail.com

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What else do you have?

I have stacks of writing, short stories, essays, another novella, and even my master's thesis on conspiracy theory as it relates to modern mythology. I've made all of this available on scribd.com. When I figure out how to create a link to that site, I'll probably do it. For now, I will simply illustrate below my rough progress. I really should have taken more pictures during the making of this particular failure. Next time I'll include pictures of the flex shaft drilling holes and of each individual step. Also, I'm not entirely sure what the next version will look like since I think I may switch to a hard-cover. That, of course, is asking for it. However at no point did I ask for any this and it showed up anyway.

Here are the pictures the themselves, taken by the way-more-than-fabulous Alexandra Montclair, which do far more justice to this version than it deserves:

That's all for now. Check back in three days for updates.

Thanks!