Robert Root

 

As I lay in bed this morning in Florida, trying to sleep again, my wife already up and busy, I began picturing where we are. Sometimes, when we visit here, I sleepily lose track of our location, confuse it with our Wisconsin home, vaguely envision our surroundings both here and there as if I could simultaneously relocate myself in time and space. And so, blankets over shoulders and eyes closed, I visualized rooms around me, mixing them with similar rooms we reside in elsewhere, conjuring images from two locations: this familiar one-floor condo rental separated from a golf course by a narrow stream north of Sarasota, and our two-floor condo home in a complex along the Fox River in Waukesha.

 

Imagining the rooms presently around me—my bedroom, bathroom and closets, her bedroom, bathroom and closets, the living room and dining area stretched alongside them, the west side kitchen and hallway both ending at front doors leading to a parking lot, the east side screened-in patio where the sun rises directly above trees scattered across a golf course visited early and late by various busy birds—made me aware of where we were now, the country club apartment we've annually rented for five late summer/early autumn weeks over the past six years. Sometimes, because I wake three to five times each night and struggle each time to fall asleep again, I'm drowsily uncertain where I am and woozily attempt to clarify how our present surroundings differ from the ones that we routinely inhabit for forty-seven weeks each year, entirely through winter and spring and some neighboring weeks.

 

This morning, body snugly wrapped, my waning thoughts conjured northern pictures, not like old memories but like recent sightings. I envisioned images of our home—my bedroom, blinds on east-facing windows on the same side of my bed as in Sarasota, the dresser also across from the foot of the bed and the bathroom closer but in the same direction, her smaller bedroom down the hall a similar distance away, the guest bathroom across from the narrow study that separates bedrooms, the laundry closet on the wall above the staircase circling down to pass a heating and water closet facing a supply closet on a short hallway to a third bathroom, all opposite the garage entrance and leading to a joined kitchen and dining/living room area. Our condo faces east, the sun shining daily through our entrance door and patio windows, our back wall adjoining another, west-facing condo. We've lived here seventeen years. With eyes shut in my southern bed this morning, I conjured images of our northern home, unable to sort out the differences between our Palm Aire and Fox River residences—too groggy to separate them distinctly or keep them from blending.

 

Eventually, persisting and growing fully awake, I confused them no longer and, unexpectedly, began to recall vaguely related images of the old neighborhood central Michigan house we lived in for almost thirty years while teaching at a local college and neighboring university and then, pushed further back in time, of the similar house in western New York in which I grew up, random resemblances among them both flashing from memory. But memory didn't linger long on those settings; it quickly returned to those simultaneously immediate ones. Again I wandered slowly through images of both of their now separated interiors, carefully distinguishing their similarities and their differences, until I became too aware of deliberately envisioning them. I rolled onto my back, opened my eyes, and acknowledged daylight entering through window blinds. All those household images evaporated.

 

But, somehow, I couldn't let it all go. I wanted to understand why that confused home-blending occurred. It wouldn't have happened in Wisconsin—it was probably provoked by our temporary relocation here, making a lifestyle comparison more noticeable—and I didn't recall it happening in earlier years—mere repetition couldn't have prompted it inadvertently. We've been visiting our daughter in Florida for roughly a quarter of a century, since she graduated from a northern college and moved south, before her marriage and the birth and growth of three children, before we abandoned cross-country car trips south to visit them and settled on air travel to an annually recurring rental—this year, our oldest grandchild graduated from college and began working towards graduate school, her brother enrolled as a sophomore at a relatively nearby university, their younger sister still living at home with two more years of high school ahead, their parents fully employed, we grandparents no longer occasionally necessary babysitters. Predictable alterations in lifestyle for all of us have become—at least for a grandfather who acknowledges them so slowly—more constantly, more persistently obvious.

 

Something outside the usual circumstances must have triggered the confused blending that haunts me, perhaps an innate awareness that imminent changes are already in process, sufficiently unavoidable and insistent on being noticed. Memory is making me assess changes I've been unable to overlook entirely but can no longer avoid examining more meticulously. In the past, while I was employed at universities, I couldn't avoid preoccupation with—or entirely take a break from—intense course preparations and imminent deadlines for publications and preparations for presentations requiring immediate attention. By now those kinds of responsibilities no longer make persistent demands on me, though I realize, at last, that I still behave as if they are potentially lurking, as if they need the same spaces in time to accomplish what would be necessary to complete them. I still have a familiar—if undirected—energy; I should more thoughtfully determine where to release it now.

 

 

 

I recently read "The Cruelty—and Possibilities—of 21st-Century Book Promotion", a long piece by Michael Castleman in The Authors Guild Bulletin. His book-publishing history and mine both cross the same span of time. He's published 19 books since Sexual Solutions in 1980, the year before my first book, Thomas Southerne, was published; his most recent, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer's History of Book Publishing, was published in 2024, the same year as my most recent books, The Arc of the Escarpment and Time's Passage, were published. His article offers an overview of changes the publishing industry has undergone in the last twenty-five years, particularly in the present decade, and suggests ideas that might help me engage in publishing again.

 

Offering "Marketing Strategies for the 99.99 Percent of Authors Who Aren't Bestsellers," Castleman finds it depressing "that authors are uninformed about the daunting challenges they face in marketing books today." Retracing his publishing history, beginning in 1980 when publishers released 45,000 titles, he claims that "since 2000, releases from Big Five Publishers, indie publishers, pay-to-publish ("hybrid") houses, and self-publishers have averaged more that 2 million annually," nearly 45 times as many titles. (His italics.) He reports that publishing The Untold Story of Books "cost $16,000 over six months" in free copies and shipping to contacts, hiring a publicist and a marketing assistant, and "miscellaneous".

 

In the entire 20th century, he maintains, "American publishers released 2.5 million titles. Today, that many appear every year." He asserts that "each new non-bestselling release [. . . ]  [is] unlikely to garner much attention"; a bestseller like The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store can sell a million copies but there are "only around 200" bestsellers annually, "one title in 10,000." It is estimated that "79 percent of new releases—four out of five—sell fewer than 100 copies. Only 6 percent sell 1,000. Most self-published books sell in two figures—many Big Five titles sell only a few hundred copies." Although he reports that publishing The Untold Story of Books "cost $16,000 over six months" in free copies and shipping to contacts, hiring a publicist and a marketing assistant, and "miscellaneous," he advises authors releasing a book to keep their expectations low: "Only 20 percent of new titles sell 100 titles."

 

Castleman reports that, before 2000, new books needed to find audiences in order to get additional printings; that required continued promotion. (Note: Several of my earliest books are no longer listed in their publishers' catalogs and were only printed once. Some still sell through used book dealers.) "But ever since 2000, when publishing went digital, authors have gained one small but significant advantage. Books no longer go out of print. They've become digital files that can be maintained almost for free and printed when ordered."

 

"Authors now enjoy longer promotional runways," Castleman argues, because publishers aren't backlogging abundant physical copies but mostly printing them when orders come in. (That's likely happening with The Arc of the Escarpment—a limited number exist at the UW Stevens Point Cornerstone Press campus, but additional copies are ordered through a printing firm.) Publishers needn't remove older slightly selling or unselling books to make room for newer potential-selling volumes. The "best way to sell books has always been face-to-face and word-of-mouth endorsements," Castleman asserts, claiming that writers need to "cultivate a wide social circle" by sending a few group emails a year. Amazon uses pre-order buttons, which Castleman used to inform 1,000 names on his list ("family, friends, and associates"), all on his own time, achieving a 15% response rate to his pre-order—"85 percent didn't buy." He also repeats his posters, promoted twice for Christmas gift sales (20 copies a week for seven weeks), and will send them out next Memorial Day and Christmas.

 

"Eight months before pub day," he turned his final manuscript into a PDF and pitched every author he knew. "I distributed 75 PDFs, and within a few months, harvested 38 lovely blurbs. . . . A few of those blurbs grace the back cover, but they all appear as editorial reviews on the book's Amazon and Bookshop pages, and as hype in several pages before the title page." He's not sure how much influence they'll have but "Maybe." He also worked up a cheap website for the book.

 

Though they're harder to get now, Castleman has used print reviews and approved Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. He invested $6,500 "in a publicist with a strategy," whose effectiveness he's unsure of. He's also uncertain about how profitable other enterprises like podcasts and interviews are (he got 25), and thinks its okay to post on Facebook, Instagram, and BookTok and to solicit reviews on Goodreads. He recommends book festivals, Amazon advertising, and repeat marketing to an author's personal list rather than bookstores. "Today it's easier than ever to publish books but harder than ever to promote and sell them." That's an observation that sticks with me.

 

I think The Arc of the Escarpment is a pretty good book but, for mostly time-crunch reasons, I haven't sought sales as hard as I once did, and Castleman's convinced me of the limitations of author promotion in terms of profit and popularity. After reading him, I still feel encouraged to keep writing and keep letting the work go public. Composing the kind of books and essays I've been doing over the past forty-five years has given me a fairly solid sense of how reading and writing taught me to value what I've centered on. I'm feeling assured that I need to continue doing that as long as I can.

 

Notes:

Castleman, Michael. "The Cruelty—and Possibilities—of 21st-Century Book Promotion", The Authors Guild Bulletin (Spring-Summer 2025: pp. 18-24).

 

Lately, I tend to scroll rapidly through items on Facebook and YouTube, looking for something to pay attention to, haphazardly passing random contents or only punching open a comic Jon Stewart or Desi Lydic Daily Show segment or a Stephen Colbert Late Show monologue. I seldom read anything posted at length or review any articles I notice, although I'm supposing—or pretending—that something published online will prompt me to write a thoughtful commentary or reactionary essay of my own, the kind of thing that, for several years, I composed and posted on my lapsed blog, www.rootwriting.com.

 

Last week, after reading "Paper Trail," Melissa Kirsch's online piece about writing a note to herself about herself and what she's doing, a kind of a chatty report that she might put aside, as other writers do, to only read again five years in the future, I wondered if I should follow her example. I haven't recently been writing journal entries, personal essays, or blog posts like the ones I composed regularly a couple years ago. Back then, I maintained a special website that let those short pieces go public. Nowadays, once a week, I only compose private notes—well, usually a single page of four fairly random paragraphs labeled "Notes," "Writing," "Working," and "Reading." The Notes paragraph starts the page with casual mention of personal social or business matters; the Reading paragraph ends it with a very short record of what my wife and I read aloud to one another before supper and what I later read alone in bed. The distinction I make between the two paragraphs in the middle of the page dates a long way back: "Writing" is about composing in process, "Working" is centered on what I'm getting—or at least hoping to get—done.

 

These days, these weeks, actually these months really, it's more of a struggle to find anything to record: sometimes the "Writing" paragraph is often virtually blank; under "Working" I tend to report more fully on accomplishing nothing. When I started this blog series. I usually filled two and a half or even three and a half pages; nowadays I barely ever fill one, although I can claim that this very paragraph is actually a revision of the "Writing" paragraph I originally composed.

 

After copying Melissa Kirsch's "Paper Trail" note to my laptop, I reread it several times. She distinguishes between writing a journal entry, which she sees as "an exercise in immediacy, a way of getting down what happened today, what's on my mind in this instant," and writing a letter, claiming that "[i]n a letter that attempted to capture my experience of being alive right now, I'd pull back, take a wide view and present the situation as more of an offering than a regurgitation. I'd try to convey something essential about who I am, what I believe and hold dear." She fears that, if she reads the letter five years from now, she might not "think my priorities and preoccupations worthwhile"; she hopes she will consider herself "wiser and more evolved" in 2030. "It makes me almost embarrassed to be me today."

 

Kirsch mentions a friend who "writes a letter to herself every year on her birthday, but she doesn't open them." I'm suddenly reminded of a period in my younger years of notetaking when, on my birthday and possibly also at New Year's, I too wrote what I thought updated myself and my situation. I just now went into my computer and found a December 31 Notes entry that listed both what I had accomplished in 2013 and what I hoped to do in 2014—I then taught online for a graduate program at Ashland University and simultaneously was composing The Arc of the Escarpment. Apparently, I also kept a handwritten journal where, I claimed, I would "save my whining for the New Year's Day journal entry." It might still be stashed in a box somewhere in our garage.

 

I'll possibly—probably—celebrate my 83rd birthday in a little over three months. It may not be prudent to expect to delay re-reading whatever I write now for five years. Instead, I'll keep wondering what I might have written in a 2020 New Year's blog entry and hope to track it down. More practically, I ought to write that kind of entry on New Year's Eve this year and make sure I can post it online.

 

 

Notes:

Kirsch, Melissa. "Paper trail." The New York Times The Morning (nytdirect@nytimes.com Sat 8/2/2025 4:05 AM)

 

(728 Words)

As the old year ended, we celebrated part of the holiday season with close-by daughter and grandchildren and intermittently spent time online with more far-flung offspring. The new year began quietly, our Wisconsin and Florida daughters and their families settled into post-holiday employment and pre- and post-graduate schooling. Our son in California left home for a short Asian holiday, enjoyed wrestling events in Japan and wandered briefly in Taiwan. I didn't hear from them often but, as usual, I calmly checked up occasionally on whatever localities they were experiencing. It didn't take long to raise my continental anxiety level.

 

Big storms were predicted for coastal Florida—we'd experienced some in our most recent autumn visits there—and I scanned the news daily, mostly to relief. But then, barely a week into January, alarming news about fierce fires in familiar California locales sent me online several times a day to locate where they were emerging and how they were expanding. The fires were widespread, though when I found our son's neighborhood on whatever telecast maps I located, I was at least briefly reassured. I couldn't know how much he learned in Asia about the Los Angeles fires, which were still raging when he soon returned home, but he then reported that his neighborhood was safe. Until the fires were finally subdued, and rainstorms eventually reassured us of their unlikely resurgence, I still checked in daily, mostly calming whenever he told us what conditions were like nearer to him. His neighborhood avoided the most ferocious blazes of the multiple fires surrounding it, but even after he was confirmed safe, I couldn't stop thinking about them.

 

By chance, among end-of-year birthday/Christmas giftbooks, I'd received John Vaillant's recent Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. Reviewer Robert Macfarlane describes it as "a landmark in nonfiction reportage on the Anthropocene, or what Vaillant here calls 'the Petrocene'—that epoch defined primarily by humanly enhanced combustion." In a recent book of my own, I'd tried to replace the familiar term 'Holocene' with the more appropriate 'Anthropocene' but Fire Weather soon convinced me that 'Petrocene' should be the more accurate term. I quickly became deeply immersed in the book.

 

For me, Fire Weather was a long read: 359 pages of text in small print in three parts, with nearly fifty additional pages of Notes and Bibliography. The narrative's primary setting is Fort McMurray, a once thriving oil industry community in Alberta Province, due north of Montana between British Columbia and Saskatchewan, In May 2015 a tremendous fire devastated the area, sweeping over a vast portion of Alberta and some of Saskatchewan for several days. Vaillant sets up the background of the oil industry there in Part One, provides a deeply detailed account of the fires throughout Part Two, and in Part Three gives us an expansive overview of the future the oil industry and Canada's climate will have to face. I confess I was alarmed throughout the book's first two sections, continually in suspense over the fire's expanding growth and consequences, and then, in the third section, constantly distressed over implications regarding the future we all face because of the approach to climate that we've been engineering throughout the Anthropocene Epoch we're living in.

 

In the past, I suspect, most of us who decided to read about some calamity or another tended to approach the event as something occurring distantly, something one-of-a-kind, notable for its power and its scale but essentially remote from the rest of the world—from the daily living most of us experience. Vaillant acknowledges that, until recently, such stories were seen "as glimpses of a frightening and aberrant event outside normal time, in a place safely far away." He now suggests that they were—and are—"in fact . . . messages from the near future and from very close to home" and asserts that "extraordinary changes have taken place across the entire climate file": atmosphere, energy, forestry, and especially "fire itself". He reports that "a host of states and countries"—he specifically names 32 places from South Africa to North America, from Europe to Australia—where people would find themselves living in a landscape susceptible to fire. "Since 2016, even places we never considered capable of burning"—he mentions the Arctic, the Amazon, the moors of Britain, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Boulder, Colorado—have caught fire and burned.

 

Reporting on the history of the "kind of disruption" occurring "in the context of drought and rainfall," Vaillant informs us that it is "now referred to as a 'phase shift': a dramatic, effectively irreversible change in a region's climate regime. There is abundant evidence that phase shifts are now under way across much of the planet." The example of fire behavior he offers comes from California: "in the 1950s, the state's fire season lasted about four months; today, it is effectively year-round, and the acreage burned during the most severe seasons (1950 versus 2020) has increased eightfold (to say nothing of lives and property lost)." "In New Mexico," he adds, "fire weather days have increased by 120 percent since 1973." His book was published before the January 2025 fires in California.

 

The most discouraging aspect of fire's increasing presence and possibility is that, from a historical perspective, there was a time when fire at such a scale did not take place and only the intervention of human industry and the exploitation of natural resources have brought us to a time in history when reversing the climate change that we persist in keeping in motion may be impossible. Even if we stopped the relentless development of industry, we've likely gone too far to change its potential impact. The Anthropocene, the period of Earth history overwhelmed by human exploitation of natural resources, has probably actually become the Petrocene; the chemical impact on the climate everywhere has overwhelmed the period when people had charge and could have made better choices. In America, as confirmation, the current president has vowed to concentrate on industry and has thoroughly dismissed climatology.

 

Despite how troubled I am by what it portends, Fire Weather is a book everyone should read. As my grandchildren set out into the world of grownups—one will graduate from university this year, one will become a college sophomore, one become a freshman in the fall—I try not to cast my imagination too often into the future of the world they—and their children and their grandchildren—will be living in. For a while still, that's where, attentively, I'll be also be living.

 

Notes:

O'Connor, M. R., "Line of Fire," The New Yorker February 3, 2025: 12-16. An Annals of Disaster essay.

 

Vaillant, John. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024: 252, 354-355.