I want to express my sincere thanks to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs for this opportunity to discuss an issue that concerns us all.  The AWP came into being because writers who taught were regarded as too intuitive or peculiar in their methods to preserve the rigors of literature.  The goal of the AWP is to insure a place for writers in the ‘Academy’… to bring them in from the cold.  Much has been accomplished, but from where I stand, the cold wind continues to blow. 
The assimilation of traditional publishing houses into global media mega-corporations has pushed experimental writing, the cutting edge of literature, to the brink of extinction.   The writer as artist is an endangered species. According to some, the migration of the large publishing houses towards the market-place, was a blessing in disguise.  This metamorphosis would create fantastic opportunities for small presses.  But what has actually occurred? 

I have labored 30 years outside the mainstream.  My career has been dedicated to creating a female world, inhabited by women, for women.  Frantic Transmissions is a map of this terrain, where a distinctly female definition and interpretation of male reality exists.

I was thrilled to win the Graywolf Prize. Frantic Transmissions is an experimental work combining reportage, stand-up comedy, personal essays and incantory fiction in an extraordinarily unique way. This book uses bridges of pure poetry and invents transitions in a stylistically radical manner. I was ecstatic that a book so provocative to the traditional borders between genres would find acceptance.

When Mr. Polito initially selected my book, he said, “This is a book of many wonders, an enthralling mix of memoir, history and fever dream and I know of nothing exactly like it. But I was reminded of the great innovative and idiosyncratic personal chroniclers of the past—Virginia Woolf, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Daniel Defoe.” 

Therefore, when I was asked to write a new ending for the book, one that would define America at the millennium as I had the Los Angeles of my childhood, I approached the project with the same voice… as the same “idiosyncratic personal chronicler” who had won the First Graywolf Prize for Creative Nonfiction.  I expected my further literary experimentations to be welcomed, but I was in for a rude and shocking surprise.

When one uses the word censorship, worlds of meaning appear. And they should.  We recognize that censorship can be applied in many forms - from the iron fist to the velvet glove.  When I submitted my new ending for Frantic Transmissions I had the clear intention of adding a substantial political and moral trajectory to the book.  I included abortion, anti-war activism, racism, and the brutal toll that direct involvement in these social issues have on those who chose to stand and fight.  I fully expected my ending would be embraced by a press with the literary reputation of Graywolf.  I was completely wrong and, as a result, the essential denouement of Frantic Transmissions was unilaterally excluded from the book.

Was I truly censored?  Both my editor and publisher informed me they were “utterly dismayed” by what I had written. Given the precarious position of the experimental writer in the marketplace, should I have mustered my forces for battle?  Frankly, I had no forces to muster to search the literary terrain at the eleventh hour for new allies.  After 20 years of critically acclaimed work, after the Best Americans, O. Henry, Carver and Mississippi Review prizes.  After fighting my way into the MFA canon via the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, the Scribner, Vintage, Columbia Companion and numerous other standard college textbooks I was dumbfounded by, yet again, being tasked with proving the value of my work.

Frantic Transmissions is a Kate Braverman book and I am proud of every word in it.  But it should have and could have pushed the boundaries of contemporary writing much further. The real ending of Frantic Transmissions gave the book a moral and literary perspective and gravitas that might have elevated it to National Book Award and Pulitzer status. And I can find no grounds for the exclusion of the material I submitted in good faith.

Since their de facto rejection of the ending of Frantic Transmissions, Graywolf has provided no infrastructure for this book, arranged no college readings, forums, interviews, or panels (save this one).  I have witnessed a systematic attempt to downgrade the book. What forces are in play when an original introduction comparing Frantic Transmissions to Woolf and Defoe is revised into an introduction comparing it to obscure figures: documentary filmmakers and men so peripheral I had to Google® them to find out who they were and what they did?

Even in truncated form, Frantic Transmissions pushes the postmodern journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe into post-millennial, post-historical territory, and I believe the published version of Frantic Transmissions, THE GRAYWOLF PRESS VERSION, will find its place in the MFA and journalism curricula, in feminist, gender, Jewish and cultural history studies.

However, it is also my hope that my final vision of Frantic Transmissions, MY VISION, will see the light of day.   Until that occurs I must take the position that the Graywolf version of Frantic Transmissions is a censored one, contrived to conventionalize, commercialize and sanitize me.  I submit that the fate of Frantic Transmissions is a case worthy of attention.  It’s an opportunity to examine the role of small presses, it frames the question of where editing for the marketplace ends and censorship begins.  It offers an examination of the meaning of publication without resources to bring the book to the attention of one’s potential readership.  I submit to you that the issues raised by the selection, editing, revisionism and publication process of Frantic Transmissions are crucial to the state of contemporary writing in America today. 

It is, therefore, with profound regret that I renounce the Graywolf Prize in Creative Nonfiction and dissociate myself from Graywolf Press until the issues I have raised are resolved.  Those of us who labor outside the mainstream look to prizes such as this as the last manifestation of an objective critical apparatus in literature.  My experience with the Graywolf Prize does not support this assumption.  While I was initially grateful to have been chosen, I no longer understand what I was chosen for.  A manuscript is selected and lauded but further significant input from the author is rejected.  A book is published with no strategy to bring it to the attention of its audience.  I submit to you that we can and must do better in the service of our profession and our art.

Ms. McCrea has already shown me the door more than once. I will leave now and will make myself available to media, AWP officials and those interested in pursuing these profound issues.

Copyright 2005-2006, Kate Braverman.