What is the future of literature in the age of generative AI? How can bookstores build community and be engines for positive social change? What does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life?
Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, Diagram, HAD, and Barrelhouse. He's a co-owner of The Raven Bookstore, Publisher's Weekly's 2022 Bookstore of the Year.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Before we go into the different bookstore stories you recount in How to Protect Bookstores and Why, tell us about your journey. You were a teacher before you became a bookseller at The Raven.
DANNY CAINE
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, but moved to Lawrence, Kansas to get an MFA in poetry at the University of Kansas. And while I was working on that degree, I had the honor of getting a part time job bookselling at The Raven bookstore, which I just fell in love with as soon as I got to Lawrence. And then, once I started working at it, I fell in love with it even more, and fell in love with the bookselling industry in general. Then, as I worked towards finishing my degree, it became clear that the owner of the store was thinking about retiring, and it just felt like an undeniable opportunity for me, a chance to do something really, really cool that I had never even dreamed of. And so we worked out a way for me to take over the store. And then that was it. It was off to the races. I had planned on being a teacher for the rest of my life or a writer. I still am a writer, but I kind of fell into bookselling, and it captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work.
Of course, it's a thrill to be around books, to meet authors, to read all this stuff, and to spend all day with people who love books, but what I think I really fell in love with was the sense of community, the people behind it, and the way a bookstore can really be an engine for positive social change within its community and in a broader sense as well.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
How can we start discussing bookstores with our families and friends who default to buying books on Amazon because of convenience or pricing, and how do we talk to loved ones who might be losing hope in the practicality and future of bookstores? Particularly, how might we respond to the possible reply that I'm just one customer, so I can't influence the market anyway?
DANNY CAINE
My whole nonfiction book project started with a tweet thread. It was about how every bookseller has to be prepared to have this discussion: a customer comes in, and they're like, this book is 50 percent off on Amazon. Why should I buy it here? When this tweet thread five years ago went viral, I started to think about ways to create a resource for that discussion so people will at least have a model for talking about it, some easy source material that they can use. I first self-published a zine that I stapled and sent to bookstores for them to put on their front counters to sell for a couple bucks, as a way to help bridge that gap—booksellers are really good at having this discussion among themselves, but I was interested in if I could provide any resource that could help that discussion happen across the front counter in a way that doesn't alienate people or make them feel ashamed.
And you're right. If I withhold all my purchases from Amazon, statistically, it doesn't make a difference. They're not going to feel that pinch, because they have 170 million other customers. But, if you look at that through a positive stance, who will feel my business is the local bookstore. If I switch from buying a book a month on Amazon to a book a month at the local bookstore, that business is small enough and community-oriented enough that they absolutely will notice the difference of another regular person in their community.
So, I don't think about it quite as withholding from Amazon as much as contributing to these local community-oriented businesses. That's why the book is called "how to resist" and not "how to boycott." Because I think part of the resistance is putting your positive involvement and your money into places that are actively fighting to create the world that Amazon is trying to destroy.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
One thing I noticed about your poems is that a lot of them have this proliferation of very banal objects, like headlights, dishwashers, tennis balls, shoes, spoons, bacon, etc. There are so many of them arranged in such interesting succession and interesting syntaxes that they really "people" the space of the poem. What relationships do your poems have with objects? How do objects make their way into your poems and live in them?
CAINE
The thing that unites my poetry and the nonfiction writing is my main obsession as a writer. It's the question of, how do you live meaningfully in late capitalism? As corporations and global capitalist forces take over the world, what does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? I think the proliferation of objects might reflect that. A lot of what we do in this world is collect objects, and regardless of whether it's good or bad, you build a nest. I think that in Picture Window in particular, I wanted to write about the domestic in a way that I hadn't written in so far. And then the pandemic happened, so I was forced into this weird, uneasy, claustrophobic domesticity. When your attention is so focused within your own home and within your own family, every object in your house takes on a new resonance. So, when a tennis ball that you've never seen somehow shows up in your house, that's weird. It's poetic. It feels dreamlike.
