1935: DOBRY by Monica Shannon, with illustrations by Atanas Katchamakoff
Dobry ran to a window, slid back its window-panel carved with buffalo heads.
“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.”
-Rilke
In an early scene in Dobry, a generally pointless novel about a little boy celebrating winter in Bulgaria, the title character hears a cuckoo bird and passes along this story to his sister:
“Grandfather says the cuckoo was once a wife who talked her head off about nothing. Her husband, Kuckoo, never once heard himself think. She talked about nothing - just went around the house saying, ‘Heavens, it’s time to make the buttermilk! No, the milk isn’t half warm enough yet. Kuckoo, did you hear that hen cackle? Another egg! I’ll go right out and get it. Dear me, I forgot to close the door. Flies! I hate flies. Don’t you hate flies, Kuckoo? My, I’m hot! Isn’t it hot, though? Kuckoo, have you seen my vegetable knife? Oh, never mind. Here it is. Right here. Nobody can say I’m not clean - why, I scour everything. There, a nice clean knife! Another cackle - did you hear it, Kuckoo? Don’t bother, I’ll fetch the egg in myself.’ A magician sunned himself along their courtyard wall one morning and though he was very sleepy this peasant wife kept him awake. And while he was staying awake the magician said, ‘Fool of a woman!’ and changed her into a bird. That’s her now. Listen! She still goes around calling to her husband, ‘Kuckoo! Kuckoo!’ because she always wishes to tell him something.”
It’s one of several folkloric stories shoehorned in to an otherwise forgettable novel with a lot of weird stuff in it like a traveling gypsy bear that everyone’s looking forward to seeing, and a snow-melting contest where shirtless men like on giant snowdrifts till they sink to the bottom, and Dobry’s dreams of going to art school. It’s less a book and more just a general bunch of stuff.
So far in this essay series, you’ve read my writing1 on, among other things, how I don’t get poetry, and a Wheel Of Time pilot that may have been a mass hallucination, and the hamburger so irreverent it enraged the Catholic church, and a stupid comedy movie that got canceled when 9/11 happened, and Raffi's position on climate change (which is the correct one), and dozens of other topics which are only loosely connected to the Newbery medalists. I had a hundred books to get through and a hundred essays to write, and I knew that I was going to be pretty fast and loose with my segues and connections. I probably sound like that woman-slash-cuckoo-bird just throwing out words in front of me like salt on a sidewalk. But why do I even throw them out in the first place? And why does anybody?
Here’s the terrible, foul, unspeakable, appalling secret of my writing hobby, one that I have kept locked within myself for years and will now share with you, with great shame: I actually sometimes think it might be kind of nice if I someday found some level of commercial success writing something. I know that I’m a Writer With Integrity who Makes His Work Free because he Cares Too Much About What He Has To Say but, honestly, this is more fun for me than doing my job, it would be nice if I didn’t have to do a job and also do this. That’s not the bad part, though, the bad part is this: there’s always part of me - a very small part, but one that is definitely there - that kind of hopes, which each thing I write, that this is going to be the one, this is going to be what catches on, this is going to finally blow up enough that I can start writing as a job. That’s a completely absurd thing to think, because I don’t do any marketing for any of my writing, I’ve never shown anything to an agent, the number of pitches I’ve made to actual websites is in the single digits2, I’m not on half of the social media sites that you need to be on to have that kind of reach, I’ve never done any of the actually necessary steps to get to any point where I could Write For Real. So my hope is irrational.
But I still had it for my first self-published novel, Anybody But Us, which maybe twenty people bought and ten of them actually read all of the way to the end. A year later, when I published a second novel, Kings Of Candyland, I thought, for sure, this was going to be the one everyone loved. But ten people bought that one, and that was kind of a rough day for me, even though I absolutely knew that this was the most likely outcome for me, by far. In 2019 I published a novella called We Have Fun Here, which was shorter and weirder and cheaper, so a few more people bought it but still not anywhere near on the scale I imagined in my stupid fantasies. And then, in late 2019, I started an email newsletter (not this one), and then something very strange happened in mid-2020, which is that people actually started to read it. Over the next year, my email list started snowballing - not “snowballing” snowballing, because the topic on which I was writing was still very niche and definitely had a ceiling in terms of interest, but still, this was a couple hundred people who were choosing to read my stuff, and a lot of them didn’t know me personally, and that was a big deal for me.
Which meant, as I was finishing up my third novel - Rosemont: A Novel Of Rosemont - in summer 2021, I knew this was going to be the one that took off. I used the newsletter to plug it, I had picked up some Twitter followers so I could hype the book up more. I still hadn't learned anything! Because I'm dumb! And you know what? The book didn't take off! It moved the same twenty-some copies as all the other books! And - this is so humiliating to admit - I was really sad about it! For a couple of weeks!
I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way (although it could be a generational thing), that the next thing I write is going to be the one that really blows up even though the groundwork for "blowing up" was never laid in the first place. But this ended up - at least for the past two years, who knows when this is going to fall apart - being kind of liberating for me. Because I think about what would have happened if I had found any commercial traction writing anything, ever. I’m pretty sure, if that had happened, that I would have tried to get more of that traction. Which would mean I’d be writing stuff that would have gotten me there again, instead of writing about my normal obsessions. I would have felt the obligation to write about things that I didn’t really care about, instead of having the option to say nothing when I had nothing to say. I would have been chasing something stupid instead of writing about the things I wanted to write about, the way I wanted to write about them, in a way that got me connected to people that I really respected and admired. I had a pipe dream that writing could be my job someday, but do you know the thing about jobs? They suck.
When I haven’t been reading children’s novels, I've been reading a collection of 90s and 2000s interviews with one of my favorite authors, Sacramento's William T. Vollmann; the collection was compiled by Michael Hemmingson. I've actually written about Vollman a few times before, like here and here: he is possibly the only writer in the history of American letters with the correct relationship to fame3, he remains my role model for "slowly become obsessed with one topic and keep writing about it until it drives you mad", and he’s been publishing books and making art for almost forty years now, totalling thousands of pages, across fiction and non-fiction, often looking at the parallel worlds to ours that we refuse to acknowledge in any way other than academic: abject poverty, sex work, the unimaginable violence of war zones. His books are long and recursive and very difficult to read; while he has a cult following, you would not characterize any of his books as “bestsellers.” I am in his cult following, and I have started and failed to finish multiple novels of his. Throughout the interviews that Hemmingson collected, it’s striking to see Vollmann’s complete lack of commercial motivations. He’s successful enough to write and make art full-time - winning the National Book Award in the mid-2000s also helped4 - and that appears to be the main thing he’s interested in achieving, just making enough money to keep doing his thing. In multiple interviews, he talks about his reluctance to take any notes from editors on his books, and how his refusal to cut material out of his cinder-block-shaped novels has led to him voluntarily taking cuts on royalties in order to get his work published anyways. And in a 2005 interview with Tony Dushane, when asked if he has any advice for beginning writers, Vollmann says this:
“I would say, don’t fixate on getting published because that’s really the least important concern. If you really care about writing, you should do it because it makes you happy and you should be just as happy if you can write something that you think is beautiful and you can keep it in a drawer and show it to a few people and they’re thrilled. That’s just as important. If you can have that attitude, then no one can take the pleasure of it away from you.”
I will probably never make money writing, but I do have things I’m proud of and can make a few people thrilled, and Vollmann’s words give me a lot of comfort here. I have taken work out of a metaphorical drawer and shown it to a few people, people that I actually got to meet online writing pieces like this, people who cared about the same things I cared about, people who thrilled me with the work they did and humbled me by telling me they were thrilled by some of the stuff I did. Being able to connect with people - individual people that I correspond with rather than hypothetical crowds telling me I’m great or hypothetical publishers that want to buy my stuff - has made it worth it for me.
Near the end of Dobry, Dobry is out in the wintery woods, struck with inspiration, and decides to make a charcoal drawing of the nativity “with great slow tenderness” to celebrate the season. He exhausts himself getting it just right, and finally:
“When it was all done, Dobry looked at it and called it good. It was a dream he alone had dreamed and brought to life. The dream he had carried for months in his mind and heart had been born, and born alive. Dobry knelt in the snow but prayed for nothing. He had already emptied his mind and heart. And now without a thought to disturb him, he felt completely one with morning and snow - at peace.”
I do, occasionally, find peace and pleasure doing this. I hope that reading it brings you some as well.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1990 medalist, Number The Stars by Lois Lowry.
This is assuming that you read each essay in publication order in one sitting, which is the only way I recommend experiencing Newburied.
Plus, every time I’ve ever pitched any essay to a publication, I ended up withdrawing the pitch because I was so impatient with how long these things generally take.
The only other contenders would be Thomas Pynchon or Bill Watterson.
He won the same year as Joan Didion, marking the most significant day in the history of Sacramento.