Poets & Writers – July-August 2019

Note

EDITOR’S

JULY AUGUST 2019 8

© Sean Kernan

Writing Workshops

in Santa Fe, Havana &

San Miguel de Allende

writerslab.santafeworkshops.com

505-983-1400 ext 111

With Pam Houston, Rolf Potts,

Luís Alberto Urrea,

Deborah Madison, Betsy Rapoport,

Jamie Figueroa, and Bill deBuys.

ONE OF THE CHALLENGES OF PUTTING TOGETHER THIS

issue’s feature on literary agents, “Four Lunches and a Breakfast:

What I Learned About the Book Business While Breaking Bread

With Five Hungry Agents” (page 49), was transcribing the in-

terviews that serve as the central framework of the piece. With

advances in automated transcription services such as Trint,

which enables a user to upload an audio file and let the platform’s

speech recognition technology do the rest, this should have been

a relatively simple part of the process. And that might have been

true if not for the environments in which I was recording those

interviews: loud Manhattan restaurants. Consequently, accurate

transcriptions required the ability to parse multiple simultaneous

conversations in order to isolate the ones I’d had with the agents.

Artificial intelligence is a fascinating field of computer science—

one that is altering the way we live our lives in both innovative

and horrifying ways—but for this project it was more artificial

than intelligent, and it made me appreciate how easily the human

ear can block out background noise. (It’s a built-in function of

the brain, specifically the “novelty detector” neurons, which store

information about patterns of sound and stop firing if a sound or

pattern is repeated.) So when you’re having that engaging con-

versation in a crowded restaurant, the babel of other voices, the

music, the clatter all recede into the background, simply ignored.

Can we so easily block out the distractions that accost us

through the screens and devices to which we are tethered every

day? “It’s going to be tough to bring back books in this current age

when even new titles are getting obliterated by the cacophony,”

says Bill Henderson, who has teamed up with Jonathan Lethem

(17) to reprint selected out-of-print titles. “I call it the censor-

ship of clutter. It’s hard for the average reader to find things that

are truly valuable.” Ocean Vuong, author of the novel On Earth

We’re Briefly Gorgeous, found something truly valuable in conver-

sations with peers during his formative years. In this issue’s cover

profile by Rigoberto González (30), Vuong shares an important

detail about the days during which he had those conversations:

“Afterward I went home to the page, not to Facebook or Twitter.”

In these loud times, the voices worth seeking out and

elevating—the ones genuinely worth fighting to hear—belong

to our writers. They lift language up. The rest is noise.

VOICES ABOVE THE NOISE