If Books Could Kill
(Page 2 of 2)
January-February 2009
by Heidi Julavits, from Creative Nonfiction
Suddenly, there will be no new books. Shockingly, this will sadden people and make them yearn for a golden literary era none of them actually experienced. The actual writers, those few who are still kicking around, will emerge from their surprisingly swank hovels (not writing will have served them well).
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At first, these writers—mostly buffed, androgynous sorts—will be spotted at farmers market stalls, selling clipped sheaves of laser printouts beside the cider-doughnut lady. They will shake your hand, these writers. They will promise that their literary wares are the product of a single, careful mind, unmutated by mass production and untainted by viral collaboration, and since these writers are plain-looking people, even downright unattractive and badly dressed, they will seem instantly more believable and less possibly evil than the gloss actor-authors of recent yore.
Soon a slogan will attach itself to this phenomenon—“Read Locally”—and the new AgriCultural movement will emerge. Writers will begin to form allegiances with small farmers, and soon every small farm will have a writer. The farmer and the writer will decide that mutual dependency and market diversification are the keys to survival: When the writer produces a less-than-stellar product, he will be buttressed by egg sales; when the farmer has a poor strawberry yield, he will be buttressed by the writer’s pure and homey creative output.
Of course, the success of this system will mean that farms will begin to merge, and writers will begin to work in greater numbers on larger farms, and eventually people from afar will want to read the works of writers whose hands they cannot personally shake, and so the inevitable human impulse to slake all desires and improve efficiency (and thus profit) will mean that by the dawn of the next millennium, we’ll be right back where we are today. But for a few decades at least, just before the seas rise above the writers’ silos and drown us—oh, what a golden age of literature there will be.
Reprinted from Creative Nonfiction(#35), a literary magazine that has helped launch the careers of some of the genre’s most exciting writers; www.creativenonfiction.org.
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