Salvatore Pane

Recently I was hired as the new assistant professor of English creative writing at the University of Indianapolis. It was my second foray on the job market after an unsuccessful–and totally unprepared–attempt last April and May. I started researching jobs in June and spent all of last summer accruing the right materials: letters of recommendation, a statement of  teaching philosophy, an updated CV, writing samples, letters of interest, etc.. I got a lot of amazing advice–mostly from Cathy Day–and a lot of bad, outdated advice that doesn’t really apply to small colleges in the 21st century. I’m thinking I might blog about my experiences. What it was like to do campus interviews, how I found out about jobs, how I kept track of everything. But for now, I figured I’d post the presentation I gave at UIndy. It’s called “Active Literary Citizens in the Age of New Media”. The faculty asked me to present my pedagogy and current creative projects in about 40 minutes, leaving 20 for questions. Before I left Pittsburgh, I wrote the entire presentation out and practiced it a few times. I didn’t just read from the paper during the actual interview, but I like to have everything in front of me just in case. Let me know what you think of it. My goal before I wrote it was to try and highlight the things about my pedagogy, and hopefully my writing, that are the most unique.

1. Creative Writing Classes

In my creative writing courses, I have two major goals: 1) guiding students toward producing more complex, emotionally resonant writing, and 2) helping them become active literary citizens. In my view, both goals are symbiotic and necessary for the young writer. Like all classes, this begins with the syllabus. I am constantly rethinking and challenging my ideas of how classes are structured and what I can do to better serve my students. The first thing I do is craft a dense, aesthetically diverse reading list. When I was an undergraduate, I was mostly given the same type of stories again and again and told those were the only works of fiction that mattered. We read Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus and Bobbie Ann Mason, and although I still deeply love traditional fiction, I believe I’m doing a disservice to my students by only exposing them to one school of thought and one set of voices. Inclusivity in the classroom begins with the syllabus, and I do my best to include writers from a wide range of backgrounds and aesthetic priorities. I’ll often juxtapose the sarcastic realism of Lorrie Moore with the fabulism of Etgar Keret, an Israeli writer primarily interested in flash fiction. We’ll look at the place driven fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri or Junot Diaz in contrast to the meta mind games of Donald Barthelme and Williams Gass. In addition to the old masters like Chekhov and Flannery O’Connor, I also bring in younger, more contemporary writers like Matt Bell and Amber Sparks to give students a sense of not only our literary heritage but what we’re moving toward in the future. What I’m trying to do is expose my students to the many different schools of fiction that have thrived in the past and are thriving now in America and across the globe. I tell them that the last thing I want to do is create twenty-two versions of myself in the classroom. I don’t care which type of fiction they produce, I just want them to become themselves.

I firmly believe that to become a competent writer, students need to have a vast library of published fiction to draw from in their heads. It leads to more advanced workshop discussion when students can refer back to published stories we’ve all read and discussed. To that end, I require that all students write up dense critical analyses of each published piece of fiction we read and post their mini-essays to the discussion board for all to see. The only thing I tell them is off limits is whether or not students like the work in question. I try and get them to move beyond reading like general readers and instead steer them toward reading like writers. I want them questioning how writers accomplish what they do and what aesthetic tools they can steal for their own writerly toolboxes. I often tell my students to read the type of writing they least admire. A student who adores realism can learn a lot by reading the insanity of George Saunders and seeing what lessons they can absorb for their work.

In my workshop courses, we spend the first two to three weeks simply reading and discussing outside work, so that when workshops begin, students are prepared to actively discuss fiction in a way that is constructive and beneficial. Throughout the semester, I take one class period each week in which we only focus on outside work so that they continually get new examples of the diverse fiction currently being produced. The workshops themselves begin at home. Each student is required to comment on the student manuscripts in question using the comments feature in Microsoft Word or the free equivalent Open Office. Then they write a critique letter that focuses on three major areas, 1) Description, 2) Strengths, 3) Prescription. Each student describes what the story is about, then talks about a few strengths, then discusses where there is opportunity for improvement via revision. These critiques and marked up manuscripts are uploaded to the discussion board where everything is transparent. Students can see what other students are saying about a story and can even comment on each other’s critiques. It also gives the writer an idea of what to expect in workshop. In class, we can quickly move beyond the nuts and bolts issues that often bog down workshops. Those issues were already discussed at length on the discussion board, so I can focus the discussion on more advanced topics. Why is this story being told? How does it work? What is it attempting aesthetically? I try very hard to keep the atmosphere in my classes light and friendly. My students feel like we’re all in this together. They know I’m writing every day too, and we’re all working to produce the best writing we can. This leads to criticism that is extremely in-depth. My students feel comfortable enough in my classes to give and receive tough criticism.

After workshop, I meet with every student individually where I give them my critique letter and a marked up version of their manuscript. We discuss their work at length, and I also provide each student with a reading list personally tailored to the type of work they’ve produced. If a student’s work is approaching the point where it might have a legitimate shot at publication, I’ll list a few literary journals they should read and suggest they submit. Inviting students into the critical discourse occurring in print and online, a discourse I’m very much engaged in, is one of my biggest priorities, and I will discuss this at length later in the presentation. For now, I will say that I make it a point to invite students to see how they can connect the writing they do at the university level to the outside world. Once a semester, I give a class-long presentation about literary journals. We discuss print and online journals , both those that are more established and those that focus on the work of emerging writers where they have strong odds of publishing in. I cover the best of the literary blogs, like The Rumpus or HTMLGIANT, where so much exciting discussion is happening. Then we look at writer blogs and the tools real writers use every day like Duotrope, a massive database of literary journals. Later in the course, I cover book reviews and outlets where my students can publish their own. I also try and bring in a writer once a semester. Last year I brought in Matt Bell, editor at Dzanc Books and author of How They Were Found, completely independent from the university to meet with my students during class time and then give a reading on campus. I also make it mandatory that they attend one outside reading. I’m trying to make them see that being a writer in the 21^st century means so much more than working on a manuscript in isolation.  It’s vital for students to become active literary citizens, people who advocate for the literature that truly excites them.

2. Composition and First Year Writing

In my composition and first year courses, I hope to get my students to produce more polished writing but also to view the world through a more complex lens by course’s end. I accomplish this with what I hope is an extremely engaging reading list that combines traditional essays with new media. During my MFA program, I earned a Certificate in Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric. This wasn’t common at all for MFA students, but I found myself very moved by essays from Mike Rose, Richard Rodriguez, Hephzibah Roskelly, and Paulo Freire that in many ways spoke to my working class background and belief that English classes are a means to empower students and make them feel like they have something important to say, that their voices matter. In my composition courses, I teach all of the writers I just mentioned, but we’ll also workshop student essays and treat them the same way we do published work. I want them to see that their essays and in class writing aren’t disconnected islands. I want them to realize that their work is in conversation with theorists, writers, artists, YouTube videos, and just about everything. The conversation is ongoing, and by the end of the course, they hopefully realize there’s no getting outside of that.

I am constantly modifying and upgrading my syllabi and have yet to teach the exact same course twice. But there are some fundamental units I keep going back to again and again. One unit where I’ve really found success with comp students is my art unit. It revolves around a very basic question, “What is art?” But I launch the discussion by first having my students read a Tweet produced by Roger Ebert claiming that video games—a form of media they all know a great deal about—can never be art. Then we watch a TED conference video on YouTube where a USC graduate student, Kellee Santiago, tries to refute Ebert’s argument. We discuss this in class, and afterwards, I have them read Ebert’s rebuttal, a long essay published on his blog. Before the next class, I also ask them to play a web game made to mimic cubicle life. There are no points. Your reflexes aren’t tested. The game simply tries to recreate the tedium and perceived sadness of cubicle life—everything from getting ready in the morning each day, to making the long walk to your desk, to eventually, your death after so many years spent doing the same repetitive tasks. As a class, we then watch Exit Through the Gift Shop, a faux-documentary about Banksy and street art, and read a Roxane Gay essay which discusses the bias against so-called “chick-lit” and how the white, male book reviewing mainstream have positioned themselves where they can deride female authors for writing about “domestic issues”. My essay assignment asks students to come up with a definition of art, and these are always varied and exciting, and they almost always use various forms of media—essays, videos, blog posts, games—not because of any direct instruction, but because they’ve absorbed the idea that all of these forms of media are in concert with one another. Our students have grown up on screens. They don’t partition off essays from movies from games when they do everything on computers and mobile devices anyway. I try and bring that aesthetic into that classroom.

However, the key to all of this is balance. The final unit in the course is more traditional and focuses on educational autobiographies. We focus on the work of Rose, Rodriguez, and Roskelly and connect those threads to No Child Left Behind and the current state of American education. The final essay asks them to write an education autobiography in the vein of Richard Rodriguez or Mike Rose, and these are often the most interesting essays of the semester, a culmination of everything we’ve learned.

3. Literature and Other Courses (Editing and Publishing/Short Story/Graphic Novel)

My approach in more general English classes is relatively similar to what I’ve just outlined. I had the opportunity to create my own independent study with Dr. Nick Coles, the former director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Composition Department, titled Seminar in Course Design. There I gained a lot of experience thinking about what it means to create a course and actually doing that work. I’ve produced a short story survey that is similar in tone to my creative writing courses. The survey focuses on the short story post-1950 and is broken down into four units: 1) Post War Conformity in the USA: The Rise of Traditional Realism, 2) The Counter Culture and Avant-Garde, 3) Dirty Realism in the Age of Reagan, and 4) New Frontiers: The Global Future. Students get a detailed examination of literary history, and I ask them to make connections and see how one writer is affected stylistically by another. The final paper in the course asks them to create a genealogy of writers. They connect the macabre flourishes of Joyce Carol Oates to the work of Dan Chaon, the down and out protagonists of Raymond Carver to the Pittsburgh milieu of Stewart O’ Nan, Jhumpa Lahiri’s interest in the post-colonial world to Jamaica Kincaid’s Antigua.

Another course I’ve designed that I’m ready to teach is a graphic novel survey course. The level of interest from students is very high, and the study or creation of graphic novels would really present an opportunity for interdisciplinary work with the University of Indianapolis’ Art and Design Department. First, using graphic textbooks from Scott McCloud, the course examines what exactly a graphic novel is. Then we move on to how the graphic form can be used to address global politics as diverse as the Holocaust and the Islamic Revolution. From there, we study the reinvention of superheroes and how creators have used these familiar pop culture tropes to say something larger about our burgeoning humanity in the post-atomic area. Then, using the comics journalism of war-torn Eastern Bosnia and the bizarrely pointed work of Grant Morrison, we discuss how the graphic form has been utilized to criticize the military industrial complex and global imperialism. Finally, we finish up by discussing the so-called “new masters” of comics and try to understand what the limits and potentialities are of the graphic novel as a newly legitimatized art form in the 21^st century.

One of the aspects of the job description here that most excites me is the opportunity to teach Editing and Publishing, an area where I have a ton of experience. My vision of the course would involve an in-depth analysis of the big six New York publishers, the independent presses rising out of the internet, the university presses, the more established literary journals, and the recent crop of innovative online journals. I’m not 100% done thinking through the course, but I imagine it will culminate with the students soliciting and producing their own online journal, or possibly a print chapbook or both, and then launching it with a reading.

4. Creative Work

I view my creative work as an extension of the work I do in the classroom. They fuel each other. We’ll often discuss things in class that will get me jazzed about my own writing, or at home, I’ll figure out some problem that’s been bothering me in my own work and try and bring that knowledge into the classroom. There are three major creative projects I’m currently finishing or working on. The first is a novel, Last Call in the City of Bridges, which I finished last year and my agent is currently submitting to publishers. The novel is about a very specific group of overeducated technophiles who make YouTube videos and web comics, but none of them—at least at the outset—have anything substantial to say. The characters are so terrified of revealing anything of themselves that their conversations, for the most part, just orbit around pop culture. One of the themes I go back to again and again is the deemphasizing of physical communication and the rise of digital narcissism I’ve observed in my peers since the widespread proliferation of broadband internet. Everybody has a thousand Facebook friends and “likes” the wedding pictures of people they haven’t seen since high school. So many, myself included, have Twitter accounts and relentlessly update the world about the minute-to-minute minutia of their everyday lives. We have blogs and Tumblrs and legions of followers, and maybe because of that we often find it difficult to connect with real, physical people outside of the internet. I wanted to take my fascination with technology and marry it to the kind of energetic, youthful books I love, especially the early work of Michael Chabon, Lorrie Moore, and Philip Roth.

After Last Call, I began work on a thematically connected short story collection currently called Let’s Bring Abraham Lincoln Back to Life. I’m about 90% of the way finished at the moment, and nearly every story I’ve written for it has been published in places like Annalemma, PANK, Hobart, mostly up and coming journals with print and online components. With Abraham Lincoln, I very much wanted to experiment with something I call the breakdown of reality, the moment in fiction when an otherwise normal world tips into the absurd. George Saunders does this. So does A.M. Homes and Trey Ellis, all writers I very much admire. In the collection I also use pop culture figures as protagonists—Kanye West, Richard Nixon, Abraham Lincoln, the creator of Tetris, the child actor who portrayed Darth Vader in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace—to call into question what it really means to be a celebrity in a fragmented, broadband world. I wanted to challenge myself to use ridiculous characters and ridiculous settings and still hopefully achieve some semblance of emotional honesty. I don’t want my work to just be intellectually stimulating, I want it to hit you in the gut. I love so many postmodern novels, but often at the ends of those books I feel intellectually moved, but not emotionally moved. That emotion is absolutely vital for me as a reader and a writer. In my own work, I’m trying to lower a reader’s defenses by making them laugh, laugh, laugh, then I want to rip out their heart. One of my first fiction teachers, the novelist Tom Bailey, used to say that “fiction makes you feel; if it doesn’t make you feel, it isn’t fiction.” I still try to follow that.

The project I’m spending most of my time on these days is a new novel that I started writing back in April. The working title is No More Heroes, and the aim of the book is to combine the realistic mode of Last Call with the breakdown of reality work I attempted in Abraham Lincoln. My agent describes it as a love triangle between fallen superheroes set in the summer of 2001, and I kind of see it as a cross between Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and the sprawling superhero epics I grew up reading in Scranton comic shops. There is a love triangle, and it does involve former superheroes. But it’s also an alternate history similar to Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. In scope and ambition, I’m aiming for what David Mitchell does with Cloud Atlas and what Jennifer Egan achieves in A Visit From the Goon Squad. It takes cues from an amazing book of critical analysis called Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human.

No More Heroes explores Americana through the lens of fallen superheroes, faux-pop band The Monkees, and the NBA. Richard Nixon and a Kanye West analogue are major characters. The book has sections set during World War II and in Yemen during the War on Terror. With No More Heroes, I’m trying to tell a huge, global narrative that boils down to one deceptively simple question: how can we be good people when so much of what we do negatively impacts others? What does it really mean to be a good person in the 21^st century?

I’d like to read you the epigraph from the novel, taken from the aforementioned Supergods, and then a quick scene. It’s early in the novel. The protagonist, Nessa, is married to John. They’re former superheroes and have been discussing what type of car to buy. Nessa wants something fun because they’re a young, fun couple. John wants something a little larger as he’s ready for a family. The scene exemplifies what I’m really trying to do: combine emotionally honest drama with the absurdity of superhero epics.

We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be. – Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

Nessa sat on the stoop outside the faux-Victorian cupping a steaming mug of green tea. She was still unable to call it her faux-Victorian, or even worse, her home. It just hadn’t sunk in yet. A few years earlier—when she and John still lived in New York finishing up their degrees—they’d gone to see Toy Story. John loved it, although that wasn’t saying much as he pretty much loved all movies or any opportunity to sit in the dark and lose himself to stunning theatrics and sentimental derring-do. But Nessa hated it and was unable to articulate why afterwards over drinks in their favorite coffee shop on 118^th. It wasn’t just that it was a kid’s movie and they were both adults. It was the CGI. How everything looked real but wasn’t. Not a single image in the entire film was true. She looked it up later on the internet in the Fogelman Library. The Uncanny Valley. A theory that posed the idea that people were repulsed whenever confronted with images of robots or computer graphics that skewed too close to human beings. That’s how she felt now sipping tea on her stoop watching the Miller sisters jump rope across the street, their blonde braids dancing wildly beneath the woody shade of Arlington. It all looked so real but wasn’t. She had stumbled into something wrong. Nessa knew these thoughts were clichéd, made her less of an individual than she cared to think of herself, but what worried her, what truly gave her pause, was this: if suburbia really was wrong for her, then where exactly was right?

She set her mug on the concrete and moved her bare feet through the grass. John called twenty minutes earlier, said to wait outside because he had a big surprise. She checked her watch. She had a class to teach in an hour and was growing impatient. The sky overhead was dark with gray clouds and it looked like it might rain. She wanted to know whether or not John had time to drive her into Georgetown or if she should head to the bus stop.

A minivan turned the corner onto Lincoln Avenue and parked in their driveway. Nessa stood. The faux-Victorian was at the end of a cul de sac and this happened occasionally, people would pull into their driveway and turn around, and although this infuriated John, it never bothered Nessa. They didn’t own the driveway, she’d argue, and John would say, Yes, actually they did. But this time the vehicle did not turn around. A man emerged from the driver’s side and it took her an entire blinking second to recognize him as John. John Ditko. Kid Dragonfly. Her husband.

“What do you think?”

Nessa had never seen him so expectant, so genuinely filled with joy as he crossed the yard toward her, a big goofy grin across his face. She looked behind him at the minivan. It was neon red. The ugliest color she could ever imagine. A black hole of neon, it seemed to suck the life out of everything around it. Somehow the houses, the trees, even the grass looked darker, grayer, deader, just from being in the presence of this blood red eyesore. It reminded her of the one and only time she’d gone into outer space with Kid Dragonfly and the overly enthusiastic members of the Teen Super Protectors, how they’d flown up in their Sky Caravan—why, Nessa had wondered even then, had they christened it with such a pathetic name—to fight the Crimson Blob from Beyond the Moon. That pulsating glob of sentient metal looked a lot like the minivan parked before here.

“I don’t know what this is,” she said as calmly as she could, still not comprehending exactly what John had done.

He took her by the elbow and steered her to the trunk. The license plate. Nessa1. Written in bright blue letters above a Kids First sticker. Alongside her name were two imprints of a child’s grubby little hands. She looked at the license plate. Then she looked at John. Nessa1.

“This is a top of the line 2001 Ford Windstar,” John explained.

“Ok.”

“I bought it for you.”

“For me.” She looked at the minivan. She looked at John. “You didn’t even think to consult me on this? This is a huge decision.”

Her voice was raised. John looked nervously up and down the street. Only the Miller sisters were outside, and all three of them stopped jumping rope and moved to the edge of their fence.

“Honey.” He took her by the shoulders. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

She shook loose. “Don’t honey me.” Don’t honey me? How predictable! How had this happened? How had Nine Lives been reduced to this: arguing with her husband about a minivan deep within the catacombs of the DC suburbs?

Nessa started walking. She didn’t have her books or notes or even an umbrella, but that didn’t matter. Retrieving those things would only lessen the gesture of what she was doing, and more than anything, she wanted John to feel this, how stupid he could be. Nessa1!

“Nessa!” he called. “Nessa, wait!”

But she had already passed the house next door, then the next house and the next. All identical faux-Victorians. John jogged beside her, smiling, wiping the sweat from his brow, looking into each window they passed. The Miller sisters trailed them, strolling casually down the middle of the street. Like the houses, Nessa could not tell them apart.

“Nessa, please. What will the neighbors think?”

She didn’t stop. “I don’t care what they think. I have to catch my bus to work.”

“The bus? Don’t you want to take your new car?”

“That’s not my car, John. I’m not going to drive that thing. It looks like the Crimson Blob from Beyond the Moon.”

He looked nervously back at the sisters. “Shit, Nessa, keep it down about that stuff.”

A man turned the corner. Nessa recognized him in his polo and khaki shorts, his hair buoyant and shining. Maybe he and his wife had come over to give them a casserole? Crandle? Crabapple?

“Mr. Cranden.” John actually had the gall to smile and wave. “Just taking a stroll. Good for what ails you.”

Mr. Cranden paused to chit chat, but Nessa side stepped him without even as much as a nod. John stopped and pumped the man’s hand. He looked at Nessa, then back at Mr. Cranden. She sensed the gears turning in his head, knew what her husband looked like while making a decision: the inward slope of his eyebrows, the slight swell of his left cheek from pressing his tongue up against it. “See you after work, honey,” John called. “I love you.”

Nessa said nothing, didn’t look back, wanted to project an image of defiance and strength. But if John had caught up to her he would have seen the tight little line of her mouth. They’d met each other when they were fifteen-years-old, and sometimes she worried they hadn’t gotten any closer to actually understanding each other. She remembered that first good impression, how he’d chased her across the rooftops of Tribeca, a bag of rubies tucked under her arm. How all she could think of at the time was how thin he looked, impossibly thin, so thin she wanted to live inside him. How different from her own body, short and curvy and strange. All these years later she still loved that about him, how totally she could wrap him up in her arms. But she’d always hoped that at some point he’d stop making these blunders, idiotic yet well-intentioned stabs at pleasing her. She turned around and saw that John and Mr. Cranden were already gone, only the Miller sisters followed her now and even they were losing interest.

Nessa watched the 38B lurch by only a block away from her bus stop. She’d missed her bus. She’d left her lesson plan at home, and now she was really stuck, knew she might be late and that she’d have to come up with something on the fly while riding into Georgetown. And then, of course, it started to rain. A torrential downpour really. Noah and the Ark rain. Nessa huddled under the glass bus stop all alone and watched the shoppers across the street scatter like pinballs into the boutiques and cheesecake shops. Even under the alcove she was not spared from the sideways rain. It splashed her blouse, her pants, dotting them wet. And Nessa took it. Because what else could she do other than stand there and get wet, squinting in the distance hoping for another bus to round the turn.

“Come on,” she said softly at first, then louder, louder, louder. “Come on. Come on! Come on!”

5. Outside Activities

To finish up, I just wanted to discuss some of my outside activities that impact my writing and pedagogy. Much of my thinking here comes from the essay “Be an Open Node: Blake Butler on Literary Citizenship” published in Brevity four years ago. He argues that being a writer in an age when traditional publishing is teetering on the edge of collapse means more than just writing. It means being an advocate for all of literature via editing, reviewing, and even through the web.

I find editorial work extremely enriching because it allows me to directly work with, and mentor, a wide range of writers. In terms of literary journals, I was the fiction editor and then the editor-in-chief of Hot Metal Bridge, the official literary journal of the University of Pittsburgh, and since 2009 I’ve served as Emeritus Editor. In 2011, I edited the short fiction section of Corium Magazine. In those roles, I was fortunate enough to interview writers I really admire like Don Lee, Stewart O’Nan, Tom Perrotta, and Jennifer Haigh, and help many emerging writers revise their stories for publication. I also instituted a summer fiction contest and a podcast series and participated in AWP readings. Since last summer, I’ve served as editorial assistant for Patasola Press, a Brooklyn-based independent publisher focusing on work from female and multicultural voices. I edit manuscripts and solicit book reviews. I’d love to bring my editorial knowledge to the University of Indianapolis’ community. In my classes, I often discuss my work with literary journals and presses and try to introduce my students to the various print and online journals and the many forums where literature is being actively discussed. Many of my students have gone onto publish their work, and I publicize what they’ve done through a Students section on my website. There, you can see the stories and book reviews they’ve published and interviews they’ve done. The literature website HTMLGIANT asked me to contribute an essay about workshop pedagogy and I parlayed that into an exit interview with students who had me for Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Workshops. I was really curious if we could imagine an alternative to the workshop model, and I’m using that information for a workshop panel I’m participating in next month at AWP.

I’ve published over 20 book reviews for The Rumpus, BOMB Magazine, PANK, and others. As I mentioned, I truly believe it’s important to be an advocate for writing that excites you. I also moderated a panel about book reviewing at AWP last year. In addition to book reviews, I also write comics. My first graphic novel, The Black List, will be released by Arcana Comics this year, and my web comic is scheduled to debut next month. I’m increasingly interested in graphic novels as a medium and do my best to bring that into the classroom.

Finally, I maintain a blog about writing at www.salvatore-pane.com. At its peak, it recorded 6,000 hits a day. I discuss writing, reviews, editing, comics, pretty much everything I’ve touched upon during the presentation. Feel free to visit it or contact me at salpane@gmail.com, and at this point in the presentation, I’d like to thank you for your time and open the floor to any questions.