V. Ulea: I want to believe it, too, Grace, and I'm quite optimistic regarding the changes the internet brings to innovative writers and publishers. I actually think that the mainstream publishers have been detached from reality for quite some time. Their idea of the Reader is artificial and ridiculous, and the collapse of the book industry is a great confirmation of it. Judging by the mainstream fiction, the publisher thinks of the reader as of a dummy that reads the same story in numerous variations with the same interest, spending more and more money on the same old, year after year, unable to see that he is fooled.

Meanwhile, surfeited with the miraculously growing menu of  junk books, the Reader seeks intellectual nutrition, but between him and the Book there is a Big Salesperson (BS) who proudly calls himself an agent. That chief cook claims he knows better what the Reader needs for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and like Cerberus he is put at the door of the Big Publisher/Merchant (BM) to guard it from the Writer and… the Reader. Their goals are opposite - the BS & BM want "the money" while the Reader wants the magic, and the idea of the magic is very different for each of them. But when the BM & BS face a fiasco they create another myth about the Reader, namely - that the Reader doesn't like to read. Well, the BM just doesn't want to admit that the Reader doesn't like what the BS offers him. But then the boom with Harry Potter occurs, and the BM makes the greatest discovery of the century: the Reader actually does read, and when he likes what he reads he reads a lot, and avidly, and with passion… O, what a shock! It looks like the Reader has been kept on a diet for quite some time, and now, with that Harry Potter, he broke loose, and now he reads without stopping and demands more! Who kept him hungry for so long, anyway? Hmm… "Well, welcome back, dear Reader!" And those same agents who threw poor Potter into a trashcan began to hunt for something like it, rejecting anything unlike it… Incurably idiotic… The BP's conservatism, as you put it, stems from its inability to elaborate a new approach to the market by switching from the statistics of the past sale to the Reader's psychology that differs essentially from the psychology of the commoner - a buyer of  material goods. Is a great intellect truly required to see that the Reader buys not the commodity but a ticket to the unknown? A middle school student would easily understand that Harry Potter attracted adults not because they all of a sudden wanted to read fantasy but because it was simply different. In fact, the market for children's literature was at its worst before the revolutionary Potter jumped onto the shelves, owing to two enthusiastic decision-makers who didn't follow the standard probabilistic thinking. This, however, was above the BS & BM, and so they continued working together with the data regarding the sales, unable to apply modern decision-making to the living and changing book market that resists stagnation and repetition... Now the industry has collapsed, I'm glad we're not asked for another bailout to create the Writers' Union here in the US… Though you never know, keeping in mind the recent scandal with the Endowment of Arts  …

And what's with your publishing house? How do you see its future? Do you prefer to publish your works in your own publishing house or will you try to find a publisher for your next novel?

Grace Andreacchi: Last year I founded Andromache Books as a little experiment - I was already publishing my own work free on-line, and I'd had several people approach me asking to read the longer works, the novels, in the old-fashioned printed book form. A bit of monkeying around with the technology led me to the conclusion that it was not rocket science, and voilà! pretty soon I had produced a handsome book for next to nothing. The publish-on-demand technology makes it very easy to produce a print book now and, providing you put the work into it and get it right, the quality is very high. Our books are beautiful. Having gone to all the trouble of learning how to do this I thought - why not see if there aren't a few other talented authors like myself who would benefit from these new skills of mine? It wasn't  long before I had a little list of very talented people. Each one is very different from the others, the only thing they have in common is that they all write really well. They have to get past me, and I'm very hard to please. I don't have time to waste producing mediocre books, I only produce very fine ones, and not many of those. I've no ambitions as a publisher, really, it's just a bit of a lark. Just because the readers seem to like it, that paper book in your hands. I care about my readers, those intelligent and perspicacious people.

You ask me about plans for my own books and I can say this much - No, I've no plans to submit my novels to that humiliating and fruitless process of submission equals rejection, I've had enough of it. It's time consuming, soul-destroying  and, in my case, ultimately pointless. They don't want me. OK, I get it. After years and years of this sort of thing I get the message. I could get really bitter and twisted about this, but I prefer just to move on. I'm so delighted with the way this whole new technology has opened up that allows me to move on, and I don't think that's an accident either. I believe in the power of art, in people's fundamental need for art, their hunger as you put it, and consequently whenever a system becomes completely blocked so that no art is able to reach us, a new path is sure to open up. We create these pathways because we need them, we need what they give us, this food for the mind and spirit. Man does not live by bread alone.

Having said all that, if anybody out there's interested, they know where to find me! I'd be delighted to have wider acknowledgement, to come to the attention of more readers, and that's something the established publishers can still offer to a certain extent. I bear them no grudge, any time they want to love me they are welcome to do so. I do believe their power is waning though.

I agree with you about the burgeoning of small presses and magazines, I'm already part of a community of like-minded mavericks. The quality can be very patchy out there, I freely admit, but I don't find it any worse on average than the very dubious offerings of the established publishers, just bad in a different way. Great writing will always be thin on the ground, wherever the ground may lie. And I'll just mention a little bugbear of mine: I hate the way some of these small presses go to great lengths and moderate expense to disguise the fact they are using publish on demand. It's as if there's this stigma attached to it, and who is imposing this stigma? The same literary establishment we are aiming to circumvent! Why should we play by their rules? This Cerberus is moribund, his bark is far worse than his bite, and I for one am up front and in your face about what I do at Andromache Books. Yes, I publish my own novels, and what's more I sell them at cost. Yes, I use lulu to publish them, and I'm very happy to do so. Anybody have a problem with that? [She grins fiercely.]

I think another problem is that you need sharp elbows to get ahead, you need a sense of your 'career' and these things I never had and never desired to have. I try to be a decent human being first, and a writer second. What a terrible sacrilege, yes? But it's true. I don't like that whole cult of the monstre sacré, I find it pretty sick actually. I've never ever thought of writing as a 'career' but always as a vocation, something I do because it's what I'm good at, it's my gift and I ought to use it as well and as beautifully as I can. Money doesn't interest me, and I don't see making money from your writing as any kind of validation. I have a very nice husband who makes more than enough money for the two of us, and if I didn't I'd find some other way to feed myself. I'm not a big eater.

V.Ulea: I share every word you've just said about the 'career' and the writer's 'decency' as a stubborn attempt to follow his mind and heart. When I was at the beginning of my writing 'career' in Ukraine - and I knew nothing about 'career' then, naively assuming that it was all about talent! - I was invited by the Secretary of the Writers' Union in Odessa to talk about my future. He was a nice man, really, and he sincerely wanted me to succeed as a writer, but the problem was that our views of success were very different. He complimented me on my talent, said that I had a very interesting voice, but he didn't like the 'lack of the real world' in my poems, and by the 'real world' he meant the Soviet regime, of course. He assured me that if I included a few poems which would be more adequate to the 'contemporary mentality' my first book would be published very soon, and in a year or two my second book would appear, which would give me a green light to the Writers' Union. Any young poet would dream about such a turn of events. The Secretary himself offered me his patronage! I thanked him for his time, we shook hands, he scheduled an appointment with me in a month, and I left. Forever. I think my Dad, who, above all, was a writer and a journalist, had mixed feelings regarding my decision not to come back. On the one hand he was upset since it was the only opportunity for me to become a published poet, but I knew that deep in his heart he was proud of me. Years later I immigrated to the US and - surprise surprise! -  I found a very similar situation in the mainstream media there: publishers pushed forward all that was ideological and ignored all that was art. It looked as if officials took arts into their own hands, overthrowing the "purposeless purposiveness" cultivated for centuries by the best poets, writers, artists and musicians. Feminism, political correctness, minority - you name it! - all those weeds of the ideological garden polluted the stages, screens and pages of the mainstream monopoly on the arts. And that fierce march of  genre literature that ferociously replaced Crime and Punishment with mysteries, The Little Prince with fantasy, Romeo and Juliet with romance, Solaris with sci-fi! Where is literature? I wondered, leafing through bestsellers and trying to comprehend the mentality of these big publishers and famous critics praising in famous periodicals naked kings. This was surreal. I remember I shared my concerns with a friend of mine, Kirstin Breitenfellner - a well-known writer in Vienna who translated my Treatise About Angels into German - and she told me that it was similir in German speaking countries. I found  consolation in rereading Balzac's Lost Illusions… How modern, how real, how applicable… I wonder what your thoughts are about contemporary fiction.

Grace Andreacchi: I think fiction is a vital form, but only when used intelligently. When I was a kid I was deeply moved by the works of the great 19th century novelists, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the Brontës, Dickens, these books had a profound impact on my nascent self. But what is the point of writing 19th century fiction in the 21st century? It was bad enough in the 20th century but to persist in this way is just inexcusable. You do not find it in any other serious art form, visual art, music, architecture - all these have created bold and fascinating new art, some successful some less so, but nobody is taken seriously who say, paints as if he were living in the 19th century. Yet this is exactly the situation with so-called literature. This so-called literature is stillborn, a pastiche, it has nothing to offer me as a resident of the 21st century.

There have been interesting writers in the 20th century, and there are a few working now, but very few of those wrote or are writing in English. You have to look beyond the English speaking world, especially to eastern Europe, and to more exotic outposts such as Turkey and South America to find good modern fiction. The experiments that were begun by such writers as Proust and Virginia Woolf have not been followed up - I won't even bother to mention James Joyce or Samuel Beckett - have not led to any real changes in mainstream literary culture. These people are admired but not, I suspect, read very much. And books keep coming that are just the same old narrative thing. Petit bourgeois novels for a petit bourgeois audience.

V.Ulea: The mainstream has no intention to develop, only to grow. It doesn't strive to be deep - only broad, and it's not mind expanding, only vast. Uniqueness is not on its list. Profit is its general, and mainstream writers are its soldiers who obediently follow the same old orders. The poor readers' pockets are the aim, and the reader's mind is considered a redundancy when they go into the offensive. No wonder the mainstream loses the battle! It's a loss of a clever combinational chess player who has never understood the positional game. For decades, the mainstream publishers celebrated their victory, but it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory…

Anyway, to continue the analogy to the game of chess, how do you maintain, improve and develop your writer's position?

Grace Andreacchi: Without taking myself too seriously, I hope, I do take writing seriously, I mean - we pass this way but once, and I wouldn't want to waste my time doing something stupid. I work very slowly, more and more slowly as the years go by, a kind of refining process goes on whereby the material is continually reduced, throwing off the dross and leaving what is, I hope, the gold. It's a strong mixture, admittedly. I think the big danger for any writer is repeating yourself. To a certain extent you are bound to repeat yourself because you are always trapped inside your own head, it's the only head you've got and you can't have a new one. But by working slowly and considerately I've found ways to outwit this head of mine to a certain extent, only to a certain extent because this 'sameness' of the head is also my personality, my unique voice or vision or whatever you want to call it - the trick is to find some deep and interesting new vein, a new key, a new palette… Not to write the same book again and again! I don't want to do that. So, slow and steady does it. I took seven years over Poetry and Fear and it's under a hundred pages. But they're good pages, I like them. I am not ashamed to have written that book. I can look at myself in the mirror.

There's a danger that, if you fix too much on writing as an end in itself you end up with no life and nothing to write about. I have a real aversion to novels about writers - ugh! 'My life in the English Department' - ugh! 'My struggles as a writer' - who wants to read that sort of self-indulgent solipsistic rubbish? Not I, at any rate. I've had an interesting life so far, and it continues to surprise me, this life of mine. My life is a big adventure, some of it beautiful and some of it terrible - I've always identified with little Dorothy in Oz. 'Most of it was beautiful!' Life should be like Oz, this great big scary beautiful adventure. Then you can write about it.