What the?

MobyLives began life in 1998 as a weekly, syndicated newspaper column about books and writers by Dennis Loy Johnson. It appeared in newspapers, alternative news weeklies, and on–line journals across the United States and Canada, such as in The Orlando Sentinel, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Little Rock Democrat–Gazette, Creative Loafing, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Reivew, The Ottawa Citizen, and at Alternet.com. The website was begun as an archive of the column in 2000, then retooled and launched as a blog in March, 2001. After the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, the site was flooded with commentary and eyewitness accounts from writers and poets that Johnson and his wife Valerie Merians decided to collect into a book. Melville House was formed soon thereafter, in February 2002, to publish that book, Poetry After 9/11.

Who the?

Founder Dennis Loy Johnson (New York) has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his fiction writing, and is also the author of The Big Chill: The Great, Unreported Story of the 2001 Bush Inauguration Protest, which is, sadly, not fiction. He is the co–editor, with Valerie Merians, of Poetry After 9/11, and What We Do Now. He comments regularly on publishing and literary culture on such shows as The Charlie Rose Show, National Public Radio, MSNBC, Pacifica Radio, and CSPAN’s Book TV.

UK correspondent Alice Waugh (London) supposes that she is an “emerging writer”, although she hasn’t emerged very far yet and isn’t quite sure what she is supposed to be emerging from. A cloud of obscurity? A vacuum? Let’s say that the very tip of her nose has emerged from underneath a large rock. Her work has appeared in Literary Review and The Drawbridge, one of London’s finest quarterlies, to which she is also a contributing editor. She has just finished her first novel and is enjoying some fresh air while she ponders the next.

“Live Book” author Kari Lydersen (Chicago) is a staff writer at the Washington Post. She is the author of Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration in the Global Age and co-author, with Wafaa Bilal, of Shoot an Iraqi Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, which was recently named a “Best Book of 2008” by Booklist.

Valerie Merians (New York) is the co-publisher of Melville House. After studying poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop, she attended the Sna Francisco Art Institute to study sculpture. “It look like a significantly higher paying profession,” she explains today. With her work showing in several New York galleries, such as the Margaret Thatcher gallery in Soho, and the Pierogi Gallery in Brookyn, she ventured forth into publishing with Johnson, co-founding the company in 2001. “You think this was my idea?” says Johnson. She co-edited two books with Johnson: Poetry After 9/11, and What We Do Now.

Tao Lin (New York) is a Melville House author. He has published three books to date with Melville House: the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, a collection of stoires called Bed, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, a poetry collection. His novella, Shoplifting From American Apparel, is fortchoming in September of 2009. Meanwhile, he runs the website Reader of Depressing Books,recently re-named hehehehehehehehehehe.com.

Raj Patel (Berkeley), a former policy analyst for Food First, is a Melville House author. His book, Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, anticipated the food riots that broke out around the world in the spring of 2008 and has been called “One of the most dazzling books I have read in a long time” by Naomi Klein. Raj lives in Berkeley and is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies.

Kelly Burdick (New York) is the senior editor of Melville House.

Why? Why, why, why?

Why is the column called MobyLives? People ask this a lot. Those who guess it has something to do with Herman Melville are on the right track. Those who recognize that the phrase is evocative of graffiti saying “Bird Lives” that appeared around New York City after Charlie Parker died are also headed the right way. Those inspired to recall, simply, that the whale didn’t die at the end of the book should say to themselves: bingo. The whale survived, unlike his detractors, who had harpoons, no less. Similarly, the literary arts will survive, are surviving, these confusing times. It is, in short, both metaphor and analogy, a slogan reeking of heaviosity.