About an hour south and east of Portland, Oregon, is the little town of Molalla, pop. 6830. Since moving to Portland in June 2007, we have not ventured out beyond the city limits very often. Running a small publishing company, KenArnoldBooks, and lacking a car, we mostly entertain ourselves in town. But last weekend I was in Molalla as the keynote speaker for the Molalla Writers Faire, now in its third year.
According to Wikipedia, here are the points of interest in Molalla:
“The Molalla River corridor offers opportunities for outdoor activities, including fishing in the Molalla River, hunting, and hiking. Along the corridor to the east, Table Rock is a favorite local rocky promontory that provides visitors with a view of Molalla and the surrounding countryside for miles in every direction.
“Molalla is the home of the over 80-year-old Molalla Buckeroo Rodeo, the Apple Festival and a miniature steam train at Shady Dell Park. It also hosts the Ross Coleman Invitational, an annual PBR minor-league tour event hosted by PBR bull rider and Molalla native Ross Coleman.”
The Writers Faire should be added. What interested me in particular about this event was the number of people who are writing–fiction, nonfiction, poetry–and are serious about developing their craft. I spoke to them about the situation in publishing today, especially the opportunities now open to new writers to promote, publicize, and publish their work to begin to build an audience. I warned them that the Mainstream Publishing World has changed forever–and although all of us would like to be as famous as Stephanie Meyer, and as rich, few of us will be in this economic and publishing climate.
Much of the writing world, as indeed much of our culture, is focused on celebrity. I suggested to the Molalla writers that they want to be writers not celebrities: they are two different goals. Publishing their own work–”self publishing”–is increasingly a reasonable way to reach a difined market. In time, writers who promote their work in this way might well find publishers willing to take the risk of publishing their work for them.
I spoke at the League of Idaho Writers last summer and encountered a similar group of writers working hard and eager to improve their craft. What strikes me as I look at these two groups is that there is a serious movement among people who are mostly excluded from the mainstream publishing world to organize themselves into publishing cells, if you will, focused on promoting themselves and their work through the new technologies. Print on demand and the web give authors all the tools they need to publish and be read, especially if they support each other.
The workshops for the Faire were on Saturday. Sunday morning, I sat with the conference attendees in front of a fireplace on an elk farm just outside of Molalla. There were about twenty of us inside and seventy elk outside. We could see Mt. Hood in the near distance.
I said, “You can create your own writing and publishing renaissance here in Molalla. You don’t need a New York publisher. And, for the most part, New York publishers do not care about you and what you are writing. Do the best work you can, support each other, publish for your network.”
It may be the way publishing is organized in the future, around local communities of writers who support and promote each other. Portland has some of those qualities; its writer and publishing community is growing and beginning to explore new ways of promoting good work. Many of the city’s literary institutions, such as some of the bookstores and writers organizations and events, seem to be blissfully unaware of the changes occurring around them. But as bookstores close and as publishers cut back on their investment in new work, the communities of writers who can take back their work, will.
I think it’s one of the most hopeful aspects of the current economic crisis. Let a thousand writers bloom.
Posted by kenarnold 
