Poets & Writers Magazine welcomes feedback from its readers. Please post a comment on select articles at pw.org, e-mail editor@pw.org, or write to Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine, 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. Letters accepted for publication may be edited for clarity and length.
Letters
Feedback from readers
I was happy to see an article on the complexity of book distribution in the September/October 2024 issue that does a good job explaining why it’s so difficult for small presses to make appreciable amounts of money on book sales (“The Nuts and Bolts of Distribution: How Your Book Ends Up in Stores” by Michael Bourne). One aspect of distribution that isn’t explored in the article, however, is a problem unique to the book industry: returns. When a retailer doesn’t sell all the copies of a book it has ordered, it is able to return them free of charge. What happens in this case is that the publisher (understandably) is charged by its distributor for inspecting and restocking the books. What other industry works this way? If Sears orders a bunch of nondefective toasters and doesn’t sell them, can it return them to the manufacturer for free? I don’t think so. The major offender is Amazon, which routinely returns and orders new copies of the same title in the same month. This costs the publisher every time. These books are waving at each other as they pass in trucks moving opposite directions on the highway. I’m interested in conferring with other publishers about the feasibility of making a commonsense change to the way returns work, industry-wide. It would seem reasonable to charge the retailer a small return fee that would cover the cost of restocking the books. This way publishers would at least be at net-zero for returns rather than in the red, and it would probably help incentivize retailers to order more reasonable quantities of books and actually work on selling the ones they do order.
Luke Hankins
Editor, Orison Books
Asheville, North Carolina
I read Calvin Hennick’s “More MFA Programs Closing” (September/October 2024) with a deep sadness. I am a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA program in creative writing. The article was enlightening, but it didn’t mention one particularly important fact about Goddard: It was the home of the first low-residency MFA program in the country. It was founded by Ellen Bryant Voigt in the mid-seventies, and I attended the program from 1977 to 1979. During those years the faculty included Raymond Carver, Stephen Dobyns, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, John Irving, Heather McHugh, Lisel Mueller, and Tobias Wolff. Voigt is an acclaimed poet and teacher, but she also had an amazing vision in hiring the faculty that she did—many of them at the very beginning of their brilliant careers. She also realized that even in the early years of her program, Goddard College was facing challenges. In the early eighties she moved the program to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. (After this departure, Goddard established a different MFA program years later.) Essentially, Warren Wilson is my alma mater, but that doesn’t make the closing of Goddard any easier to bear. In late July I went back to the Vermont campus to get the original copy of my MFA thesis; the college’s library where it was archived could not mail it to me because of staff shortages. It was a necessary trip and there was a sense of closure. But there was also a sense of feeling bereft, a sense of longing for a place and time.
Linda Nemec Foster
Grand Rapids, Michigan
My heartfelt thanks for “Ukrainian Children Turn to Poetry” (September/October 2024), a timely and compelling article by Ruth Madievsky.
Nicholas Mazza
Tallahassee, Florida
[Corrections]
“Surprise! The Role of the Unexpected in Short Stories” (September/October 2024) by Amor Towles referred to Gabriel García Márquez by his incomplete last name; subsequent references to the Nobel Prize winner should have been García Márquez. “More MFA Programs Closing” by Calvin Hennick implied that all MFA programs at Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) in Montpelier had shut down. In fact, VCFA has not closed its low-residency programs and recently entered into a formal affiliation with the California Institute of the Arts, which will host the program’s semiannual residencies.