Conservative Arts: High Plains Writers and The Conservative Literary Renaissance

http://highplainswriters.com/ ^ | Ranger West

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High Plains Writers: The Conservative Arts Renaissance

We're a possee of lone ranger writers planning a book tour across the fruited plains. We've taken our fate in our own hands and become a literary agency, a publisher, a news portal devoted to the rising renaissance, and enforcers of higher literary aesthetics. Whether you're a writer, agent, editor, screenwriter, or artist interested in furthering the new classicism, there're lots of ways to ride with us. And all ye who join should know that I, Ranger West, don't mind the bullets of postmodern cynicism from snarky snipers, as I'm a ghost. So go ahead--make my day.

For too long the publishing industry and greater arts culture have been held hostage by an entrenched postmodern oligarchy of MFAs and ambitious critics gone wild. Not only did they deconstruct the classics, but in order to maintain their ill-gotten power, they deconstruct living poets, shooting them in the back for marrying truth and classical values to rhyme and meter. Their dictatorial sherrifs murder independent writers with corporate-funded snark attacks, tax-subsidized gang-critic brutality, and smut-subsidized deputies. They dissipate the cultural reservoirs, poison what's left with irony, and then call their piss poetry. As temporal postmodernists, they don't believe in poetry, Great Books, and ghosts. And we'll be riding into the City to clean things up.

For the most part we ride alone, as we're the quickest-draws on the frontiers of literature, and when we get together, sometimes we take to shooting one-another just for fun. But we're banding together here, preparing to ride back into town and place our contemporary classics on the front tables of Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Truth be told, you don't need a literary agent today. You don't need a publisher. All you need is Moore's and Metcalfe's Laws. If you're a rugged individual sharing our vision for a revival, we'll do our best to help you get marketing and distribution. Self-publishing rocks. If you're man enough to write it, you might as well be man enough to publish it.

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Yes, but distribution is the problem. You can publish yourself all you want but you got to move the books. It's high time for a brush rebellion against the skanky refuse coming from the major houses and I commend you but there are business problems. Second problem; teaching the young of the writer species to write the quest or adventure novel a la Cormac McCarthy without falling into mindless action. There needs to be workshops on this subject. It's a different technical approach than the self-absorbed narcissistic narrative generally seen as 'serious literature'. And your reply?

[PJ-Comix]

Self-publishing rocks.

Actually self-publishing sucks. You end up with a pile of books that you poured money into with no means of distributing it.

BTW, even though I do a lot of writing, I am loath to describe myself as a "conservative writer" and am not crazy about that whole poltical labeling bit when it comes to writing. When I write I don't think about how the theme fits into a political pattern. I just write the stuff and let others try to figure out the ideology. Plus there are a lot of great writers whose personal political philosophy is unimportant. Was James Jones a liberal? Most likely but that still doesn't discount his fantastic novels.

[jammer]

possee

? Writers? You might fare better with a spell checker. Just a suggestion.

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Self publishing rocks.

Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass; Mark Twain self-published Huckleberry Finn; Walden was self-published by Henry David Thoreau.

The following authors all self-published: Ken Keyes, Jr., Gertrude Stein, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stephen Crane, Mary Baker Eddy, George Bernard Shaw, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Virginia Wolff, E.E. Cummings, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Alexandre Dumas, William E.B. DuBois, and Robert Ringer.

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How can we get our books into Borders & Barnes & Noble?

A national book tour?

http://jollyroger.com/greatbookstour/tour.html