I joined the Authors Guild in 1978. It’s a terrific organization, one I’m always glad to pay annual dues to. Its Backinprint.com program has brought back four of my out-of-print hardcover books in print-on-demand paperbacks; I’ve got a really sweet deal on an author’s website through the Guild; and, before I became a lawyer myself, got great legal advice from their counsel. I urge everyone who’s published a book to join the Authors Guild.

Anyway, they also send out e-mail alerts from time to time. This one just showed up in my inbox:

Simon & Schuster has changed its standard contract language in an attempt to retain exclusive control of books even after they have gone out of print. Until now, Simon & Schuster, like all other major trade publishers, has followed the traditional practice in which rights to a work revert to the author if the book falls out of print or if its sales are low.

The publisher is signaling that it will no longer include minimum sales requirements for a work to be considered in print. Simon & Schuster is apparently seeking nothing less than an exclusive grant of rights in perpetuity. Effectively, the publisher would co-own your copyright.

The new contract would allow Simon & Schuster to consider a book in print, and under its exclusive control, so long as it’s available in any form, including through its own in-house database — even if no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores.

Other major trade publishers are not seeking a similar perpetual grant of rights.

We urge you to consider your options carefully:

1. Remember that if you sign a contract with Simon & Schuster that includes this clause, they’ll say you’re wed to them. Your book will live and die with this particular conglomerate.

2. Ask your agent to explore other options. Other publishers are not seeking an irrevocable grant of rights.

3. If you have a manuscript that may be auctioned, consider asking your agent to exclude Simon & Schuster imprints unless they agree before the auction to use industry standard terms.

4. Let us know if other major publishers follow suit. Any coordination among publishers on this matter has serious legal implications.

Feel free to forward and post this message in its entirety.

The Authors Guild (www.authorsguild.org) is the nation’s oldest and largest organization of published book authors.

It seems weird to me now that there were only two women of the ten “Young Writers I Admire” article from 1979’s A Critical (Ninth) Assembling – and no writers of color – but in any case, Miriam Sagan was a standout poet on the 1970s small press scene.

A graduate of Harvard with an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University, Miriam published her work in many of the same little magazines that Tom Whalen, Peter Cherches and I did. Her work attracted me from the beginning with its deceptively matter-of-fact voice, its subtle lyricism, its sense of wisdom and humor.

Miriam was one of the editors of the legendary Boston area-based Aspect Magazine, the 1969 brainchild of the late one-man phenomenon Ed Hogan. I’d meet Ed and Miriam at the yearly small press New York Book Fairs in the 70s, meeting at such weekend venues as the Customs House, the Park Avenue armory and the parking lot under Lincoln Center.

Aspect lasted through the whole decade of the 1970s, morphing from a political to a literary magazine in its long and storied run. In 1980 Ed shut Aspect down and he, Miriam and others founded Zephyr Press, still active as a publisher today although Ed’s death in a 1997 canoeing accident definitely caused it to break stride for several years. (Full disclosure: Aspect‘s 1978 double fiction issue contained a story by me and the first critical article about my work, Susan Lloyd McGarry’s “Twenty-seven Statements I Could Make About Richard Grayson,” and Zephyr published my 1983 collection I Brake for Delmore Schwartz).

In 1982 Miriam moved from the Boston area to first San Francisco and then Santa Fe, where Miriam has made her home since 1984. She’s published over twenty books, including Searching for a Mustard Seed: A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story, which won the award for best memoir from Independent Publishers for 2004; her poetry collections Rag Trade, The Widow’s Coat, The Art of Love and Aegean Doorway; and a novel, Coastal Lives.

Miriam has also co-edited such anthologies as New Mexico Poetry Renaissance and Another Desert: The Jewish Poetry of New Mexico and co-authored with her late husband Robert Winson Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery: A Joint Diary. Robert Creeley called her book Unbroken Line: Writing in the Lineage of Poetry “a work of quiet compassion and great heart.” Miriam has written a poetry column for Writer’s Digest and articles for the Albuquerque Journal, Santa Fe New Mexican and New Mexico Magazine, and she directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College

I’m not often in touch with Miriam these days, but we did catch up after nearly 15 years when she came to South Florida to give a talk at the Palm Beach County public library in Boca Raton in November 2003. And last year I got to watch her in action as a poetry workshop leader and lecturer when she was a featured guest at the Celebration of Writing at the Jess Schwartz Jewish Community High School in Phoenix, where I taught AP English.

I wasn’t surprised what a fine teacher she proved to be, because Miriam has always been as good with people as she is with words, the kind of writer on whom nothing is lost. Driving her to the Miami airport during her 1982 visit, I detoured to show her the decaying mock-Arabian Nights architecture of slummy downtown Opa-Locka – only to open a literary magazine a year later and find that in our five-minute drive through town she’d seen enough to create a terrific, haunting, melancholy poem.

Last year in Phoenix, I got to meet Miriam’s second husband, Rich. (He was her high school boyfriend, I think.) Here’s her poem “Remarriage”:

My second husband says
He wishes my first husband
Would get married again—

My first husband
Has been dead for years,
But I dream about him.

At first, he was angry,
Or calling on the phone
Wanting to come home

But I was already
With the man who would become
My second husband.

Recently, I began to dream
My dead husband was dating
A very pretty—

But obviously not Jewish—
Blonde woman,
She seemed very nice.

My second husband
Was getting sick of my dreams—
He said he hoped they’d get married.

In my next dream
My first husband told me
He was indeed marrying her

But he enraged me
By inviting his sisters
But not our daughter to the wedding.

My friends politely mention
They think I am in denial
After all, my first husband

Is dead, not getting married.
But it is as if
He has some kind of life

That goes on without me
Perhaps because I have had
So much go on without him.

From the erratically irritating/illuminating NBCC site, Richard Powers:

The problem is, changing technology invariably produces its own head-on collision of values. The cost of conveying information has plummeted, and we are converging on that moment when everyone will be able to know what anyone else thinks about anything at any given moment. Ideally, I think this is great: it’s the logical extension of the promise implicit in that ancient and most destabilizing of technologies, writing. The complication, of course, is that noise and signal both become cheaper at the same rate, and the novels and reviews that are most capable of making me a better reader may well become harder to find, even as they become more numerous and more thoughtful and more robust. We are in danger of drowning in an ocean of liking or disliking.

I honestly don’t think our crisis is print reviews versus blogs, specialization versus populism, or even the exclusivity of the elite versus the tyranny of the majority. I think our crisis is instant evaluation versus expansive engagement, real time versus reflective time, commodity versus community, product versus process. Substituting a user’s rating for a reader’s rearrangement threatens to turn literature into a lawn ornament. What we need from reviewers in any medium are guides to how to live actively inside a story.

(cross posted at Condalmo)