Matthew Sharpe, in many ways, is the great white hope of independent publishing: a tremendously successful—and very good—writer with an entrenched sense of integrity equally at home with Katie Couric on the Today Show as he is on the phone with Punk Planet.
Despite his family background in the independent press—his father runs the research and academic publishing house ME Sharpe—his first two books (Stories from the Tube and Nothing is Terrible) were published by Villard, a division of Random House. “I really did have this delusion that I think many authors do, that in order to be successful—even in order to be successful in my own self-image—I had to be published by one of these big, widely recognized names.” But the books didn’t sell very well, so when he start sending around the third—which eventually became the overwhelmingly successful Soft Skull Press-published The Sleeping Father—“the book was being rejected not on its merits but on the weakness of the sales of the two previous books. So no corporate-owned house would have me.”
Life at the indie, he says, is “in so many ways to be better, more lucrative, more pleasurable, more personally satisfying than I found my experience of working with the multinational conglomerate. Everything is on a more human scale.” Yet he’s still comfortable enough in the corporate world to allow the latest book, Jamestown, a soft-cover deal with Harcourt. It was a deal brokered in the nick of time, too: not only did it allow Sharpe a decent-sized advance—more than most independent houses can pay—but it offered some stability when it became clear that Soft Skull’s distributor, PGW, could give all its publishers serious financial trouble for some time to come.
His previous books have all focused on families—middle class, mostly—but Jamestown is a fictionalized account of the first ten years of the Jamestown settlement, and reenvisions the lives of real historical figures John Smith, Pocahontas, her father Powhatan, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and John Rolf. But Sharpe, a nearly ridiculously engaging conversationalist with a penchant for knock-knock jokes, adds a psychiatrist/adviser named Sidney Feingold, text-messaging, and a bizarre onslaught of linguistic influences that range from pop songs to urban street lingo. For a story supposedly set 400 years ago, the backdrop the story plays against is far more September 11, 2001 (when a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC killed almost 3,000 people) than January 20, 1607 (when a tsunami swept the Bristol Channel and killed almost 2000 people).
Sharpe sat down with me on the phone on January 10, 2007, the night President Bush announced his plan to call for a surge of 21500 more troops to Iraq, an ongoing part of the post-September 11 War on Terror and a fitting backdrop against which to be discussing the bloody, messy foundations on which we first established this country 400 years ago.
Interview by Anne Eizabeth Moore, cuttings excerpted from the interview in PP79
So, what’s the new year got in store for you?
Oh you know. This.
You’ve planned it through the tenth and that’s it?
What else . . . I’m going to go back to school in a couple weeks and teach. I’m going to travel around reading out loud from my book.
In English?
Yes. Although I thought I might try reading it with sort of a Swedish Chef accent. It’s sort of a grim book, and I think anything would add a little “spice.”
Well, you did put a lot of jokes in there.
Oh! I have so many jokes for you, although they may not be appropriate for the interview.
No, go ahead. We can always cut out the inappropriate ones.
OK, well you know the one that goes, “Knock Knock?”
[There is an awkward pause.] That’s it? That’s not very funny.
Oh, wait! You hate jokes! That’s right! Oh, you’re a terrible person to tell jokes to.
What? No. That’s just not a funny joke.
There’s more. You have to do the second part. There’s two roles for you in this joke.
That’s what I hate about jokes. I have to do all the work.
The payoff here is gonna be so worth it. Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting—
—Moo. Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Schizophrenic horse.
Schizophreni—
—Moo. Isn’t the buildup totally worth it?
The buildup is fantastic, but now I’m tired.
[Laughs.] Would you like to take a nap and call me back?
No, no. I think I’ll be OK. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? The Sleeping Father was extremely successful, and received overwhelmingly positive reviews and netted you an appearance on the Today Show. Do you feel you have a lot to live up to with the new book?
We here at Matthew Sharpe, Writer and Educator, are giving ourselves a manicure with our teeth as we speak. I’m nervous and excited. The Today Show was a lovely, flukey thing. It’s shocking what five minutes on television will do for the life of an obscure literary author. I don’t know that the new book will sell quite as well as the other, but that part of it is really not under my control. The part that is under my control is already done. I tried something different with this book, and I figured out a way within the very limited thing that I do to express my beliefs about American foreign policy. And so I’m happy . . . I shifted to write about something that happened 400 years ago, and so I had to really rethink how I do everything.
Well . . . it was sort of 400 years ago.
Yeah, I guess one of the first things I had to do was figure out how to write about a place and time that is so remote from us, and me not being an historian and not thinking that I could write the way that people talked or wrote back then and really feeling like, as many books as I read on the subject, I did not feel confident that I had the text of what consciousness was at that time. Or even what any 48-hour period of someone’s life would be like. So one of the things I had to do was accommodate my own lack of knowledge and ability. Which is always a big thing that one must do when writing a novel. You have to make the best of your weaknesses.
The remainder of this interview can be found in PP79. Buy it here!