From Mentor to Mentoree and Back: Part 1--by Reb MacRath
Who doesn’t love a good brawl between writers…from the safety of the stands? Though the bad boy glory days are gone in our cancel ’em corporate culture, not long ago bad press and scandal were generally tickets to ride.
Ernest Hemingway knocked the stuffing out of the twenty-years-older Wallace Stevens and went on to boast about it. He hit Max Eastman on the head with a heavy tome after Max claimed in a review that Hem wore glued-on chest hair. And he got good press, though he lost, from his boxing match with Morley Callahan.
Norman Mailer, Hem’s disciple, headbutted Gore Vidal in a TV interview. Norm went on to stab his wife and pound for fifteen minutes on Thomas Pynchon’s door, enraged by a bad review–only to learn that Pynchon had fled down the back fire escape.
Hunter S. Thompson engaged in a filmed shootout with a neighbor in the 1980s.
The pint-sized Harlan Ellison was notoriously quick with his fists and so frighteningly aggressive that publishers made like Pynchon when he called in his final years.
Still, most writers fight with their pens not their fists against literary rivals: from Mark Twain vs James Fenimore Cooper…to Hemingway vs Fitzgerald and Faulkner…to Gore Vidal vs. Truman Capote…to Truman Capote vs Harper Lee and Jack Kerouac…to Martin Amis vs. Julian Barnes…
And on.
The literary landscape seems like a minefield of conflicting egos, self-aggrandizement and greed. Friendships that start in earnest seldom survive the changes in one party’s fortune. Envy and rancor prevail.
But in 2010 something remarkable happened. One older writer, now all but forgotten, met a young fan who was just starting out. And a friendship of over a decade was born, one that transcended the minefield and enriched the lives of both.
Richard Monaco
RM, then 71, had done it all in his protean life: written plays, novellas, screenplays and poetry; cofounded the Adele Leone Literary Agency; been editor-in-chief of New York Poetry Magazine and Director of Wildstar Books…plus written a dozen-odd fantasy and speculative novels. For his series of three Parsival novels, he’d been a Pulitzer nominee and a Pulitzer finalist. He’d also written two prequels called The Lost Years and several standalone titles. Throughout his sixties he wrote without making a sale. Then one day a message came from a young fan...
Leverett Butts
LB is the award-winning author of the Guns of the Waste Land series, a four-volume
collection retelling the King Arthur myths as an American Western. When not writing he
teaches American literature at the Gainesville campus of the University of North Georgia, spends time with his family or plays video games.
He lives in Carrollton, Georgia with his family, his dog, an indifferent cat.
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LB recounts the winding road that led to his meeting RB:
I first came to know of Richard when I stumbled across his first novel, Parsival or a Knight's Tale on the shelves of what was then Atlanta's best used bookstore, Oxford Too. A long-time fan of Arthurian literature, I snatched the book up, flipped through it, found there were two more in the series, and bought them too.
When I was in my forties, I began working on Guns of the Waste Land, my Arthurian Western. I decided to re-read the Parsival novels and went online in search of good reading copies since I had first-edition hardbacks and didn't relish taking them to work with me. During my search, I kept running into references to a fifth Parsival book but could find nowhere to purchase it.
On a whim, I decided to ask the author personally. I looked for Richard Monaco on Facebook, found three entries, and sent a private message to each. One wrote back and informed me that he had indeed written a fifth book, but had not published it. He sent me a copy of the manuscript to read.
As I read, I couldn't help but edit the copy, and ultimately convinced him to self-publish since all of his publishing connections had either died or retired. In the process of teaching myself how to format his manuscript for publication, I collected my short storis from college into a collection and used that as a test manuscript.
Once I had formatted that collection, not only could I format Richard's book, I also had my own first book to publish. So Richard is literally responsible for all of my books so far being published.
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Next month I’ll interview LB on the intricate dance in which mentors and mentorees engage.
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