Three Questions With Michael Ramos
(okay, four!) Assistant Director of the Publishing Laboratory and Art Director of Ecotone Magazine answers three questions + a bonus.
April’s THREE QUESTIONS is with a mentor & friend of mine, Michael Ramos, Assistant Director of the publishing laboratory at UNCW, Art Director of Ecotone Magazine, and author of The After: A Veterans Notes on Coming Home.
In four questions, Ramos discusses his debut essay collection, writing and publishing as a veteran, his design and teaching work in an university publishing setting & program, and teaching publishing courses to BFA and MFA students.
1. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing your writing brilliance for a while (and learning from it, revising from it!) but tell me about your debut essay collection, The After A Veterans Notes on Coming Home.
Thank you for that. You are so kind! First, I want to say I am thankful that I found my editor at UNC Press, who is publishing the book. She recognized my vision and really helped me make my collection the best it could be. We vibed pretty well and it's been a great experience working with her. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Philip Gerard for linking us up.
So, The After is a collection of essays that deals with coming home from war and leaving the military. I found the overwhelming majority of writing is about the war experience—which is complicated and worth exploring, don't get me wrong--and leaves the reader there. But for me the most interesting part of my experiences, and what I was looking for, and didn't find, was writing about what comes next. My work grapples with what it means when you have so many people you know that you have to speak of in past tense while you keep living and enjoying what life offers, or the struggles of feeling out of place in time and space, and the successes and failures of trying to figure it out.
My collection also pushes back against the tired veteran tropes of hero or broken veteran. For years people (not all of course—you being one of the ones who listened) told me what I should think or feel and didn't really ask me what I thought or felt about coming home. I got tired of that and so wrote my version of the story and the experience for people who are interested in what someone has to say outside of the norm.
This collection to takes a more lyric approach than most traditional veteran writing. For me, the traditional essay didn't seem appealing. I found the received form and expectation of a personal essay or memoir too restrictive with what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Since I am pushing back against received narratives in the essays, I wanted to do something outside of usual forms so that my content and the form of that content reflected each other. The forms and craft—use of time, point of view shifts, language, also gave me the added bonus of writing about difficult topics without losing my sanity. Because I was so focused on how I told the stories I didn't suffer (much) emotional damage retelling the stories.
And I think and hope that people who value good literary writing with no military affiliation will value the craft of my work and that the military affiliated crowd will see someone with similar experiences and not feel alone.
2. What are a few things you wish publishing understood about the military and/or veteran population?
I definitely wish the industry understood that we are more nuanced in our stories. I know a lot of veterans who are in MFA programs or have been in one and value solid craft for the sake of craft and not the sexy sensational marketplace stuff. But because the industry thinks that we can only be heroes or victims, it pigeonholes us and doesn't allow us to be the complicated humans that we are. But I don't think that is specific to my community. I remember teaching a class called Access in Publishing and part of the reason I taught that class because I kept hearing things from students like "I am a black woman writer but I want to write love poems not race poems," or "why can't I tell a story that doesn't fit what is in the marketplace." At first, I thought that it was just the military this happened to, and then as I stayed around the industry and speaking with other marginalized communities, I understood that we were all saying the same things and asking the same questions about what stories the industry was interested in.
Which leads me to the next thing, which is recognizing that we are our own community and subculture, which has even more diverse subcultures contained in the larger population. I get it, a lot of the military is made up of white Americans—usually men—so the impulse is just to write off the military and veteran culture as a homogenous mostly white culture which is just part of American culture, but that is really far from the truth.
And finally, and this is a part of both of my first two points. The military isn't full of infantry or special operators and explosions and guns, and tactical stuff or MST and war crimes. I feel like the industry just gravitates to the sensational stories and thinks that we are all war and violence all the time. More often than not, folks are using a mop and a floor buffer than a weapon. And I think that realizing that there are fewer action or horror stories and more quotidian stories in the military that might help the industry and the military and veteran culture.
3. UNCW offers publishing certificates in both their MFA (brand new!) and BFA programs, and you teach and run the publishing laboratory—what does a week in the publishing laboratory look like, and why is it an important part of the program? (ARGUABLY THE BEST PART).
One of my favorite things about the PubLab—besides getting to come to work every day with some stellar TAs—is that there isn't a typical week. This week me and the Ecotone designer are sitting down and laying out the next issue of the magazine, while the remaining TAs are printing broadsides for the MFA thesis readings and working on posters for our Graduate Reading series, I get to see all the broadsides and we have a weekly design meeting that is a fun, energetic collaborative space—as much as a meeting can be. And I am teaching Bookbuilding so I will have class prep and then class.
The two second year TAs are TAing Intro to Publishing, and the third year TA is teaching their own Bookbuilding section. The week before last we were working on AWP printables and such and broadsides and Ecotone. The one constant is the traffic of graduate and undergraduates working in the Lab on bookbuilding classwork or internship projects for Lookout Books, or Chautauqua or Ecotone, or finalizing the BFA senior anthology. As you know, the PubLab TAs are always helpful and professional and to see them get better week to week is just such an amazing transformation to watch. I am in awe of how creative they get and how they grow into leaders and designers and teachers. It's such a humbling experience to be a part of.
4. You drop knowledge on writers every single day about the publishing industry, what are a few of the hardest parts for students not IN it to understand? (Maybe the question is what could gatekeepers do a better job of explaining?)
First, I think it takes patience and sticktoitiveness. We teach writing to students, and I think that with the constant looming deadline of writing assignments or workshop we maybe get trained to think that publishing happens on a schedule, but the truth is publishing takes longer than a classroom setting allows for.
Second, writing is art but publishing is a business. So while we want good, artful writing, publishers still need to be able to keep their imprint afloat financially.
Third, this ties into the second one, people in publishing are book people, too. I think it's easy to forget that. That agents and editors and designers took English classes and creative writing classes and go to bookstores just because like a lot of us who are writers do. I think publishing sometimes does talk about the bottomline and that's what we see in Publisher's Weekly, but the truth is, the industry folks want a well written book just as much as we do.
Michael Ramos, an Iraq War veteran, is the Assistant Director of UNC Wilmington's Publishing Laboratory where he teaches publishing and creative writing. His work has appeared in the Sun, Fourth Genre, O Dark Thirty, Slice, and In Love and War: The Anthology of Poet Warriors. You can also find his work at OAFnation, under his nom de guerre, Beelz. Follow him on Instagram @rp_beelzwrites so you can chat about writing, cigars, and good bourbon--all things he enjoys.
Some extra broadsides created in the Pub Lab by my bestie, Tory Tarpley.
(I was so attached to the title of my thesis as the title of my future book that I never thought I would ever, ever, ever share it anywhere, and yet HERE YOU ARE. MY TITLE. Thanks, summer camp).
