Cathy Baker's Blog: Demitasse Press

(October 21,2015) A free glass of wine every day for a year at Crook’s Corner Restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC: that’s the prize (along with a cash purse) for the winner of the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, to be awarded in January to a debut work set in the American South. Cathy Baker’s To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories (Demitasse Press) was selected for the longlist alongside 17 other books, many of which were released by the major publishers.

The Shortlist announcement from Crook’s Corner is just around the corner. In hopeful anticipation, Baker sat down with Marcia Sartwell, her longtime mentor, muse, and editor, to converse about the nominated book and its sources of inspiration.

DEFINING “PLACE”

Marcia: Did you set out to write a southern novel?

Cathy: Not at all. In fact, as you surely remember, early drafts of the story weren’t set in any particular geographical location. It was only later that I was convinced of the value of setting them where I live: in Bethesda, a suburb on the boundary of the District of Columbia. Maryland counts as the south because the Mason-Dixon Line runs along the northern border.

Marcia: I think the place that is important in To Do the Deal is late-twentieth century suburban America.

Cathy: The problem with suburbs, though, is that they are alike in so many ways. The main element that differentiates the particular suburb of To Do the Deal is that it lies just outside the nation’s capital, the federal seat of power. So that provides an interesting contrast, because my novel is not about the powerful—it’s about people scrambling to make it in the middle class.

Marcia: Having established Bethesda as a place where middle Americans live alongside the wealthy and powerful, you then make other kinds of place important.

Cathy: You must be referring to interior spaces, such as an auto showroom or a mattress store.

Take that Pull/1991

Marcia: Yes. And a kitchen in which the plumbing goes awry or a living room where two women are getting sloshed. But you have exterior places, too. The first story, “Take That Pull,” has a scene at a tractor pull.

Cathy: The tractor pull occurs at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds, but is that southern? There are tractor pulls wherever they have county fairs. In another story, “One Sunday,” the Bodine family attends a crab feast. Until I moved to the DC area, I had never even heard of a crab feast, so I suppose it’s particular to this geographic place. Yet if you consider as place the food feast—people have them everywhere, though in other parts of the South it might be a pig roast or a fish fry.

Marcia: So all in all, do you think your novel is Southern enough to win the Crook’s Corner Book Prize?

Cathy: If my novel makes it to the short list, that’s what Lee Smith is going to have to decide. She’s the final judge. It’s an important question, because at her web site she says, “Place is paramount for me as a writer.” So it depends on how she defines it. But I’m sure the final judging will not be just about setting. To Do the Deal will have to stand out for plot, characterization, style—the whole package.

MAKING ETHICAL CHOICES

Cathy: If we set aside the question of place, Marcia, what do you think my stories are about?

To Do the Deal at Bed & Bunk/1994

Marcia: Considering all ten stories, I’d say moral conflict. In “To Do the Deal at Bed and Bunk,” for example, Kenneth Bodine has to decide whether to take money for something he didn’t do, or give it back to an impersonal corporation that has exploited him. Everyone has to face ethical dilemmas of this sort. Something comes along that you don’t deserve, but on the other hand there are a lot of things you deserve but don’t get. So what do you do when you get a break?

Cathy: I’d agree with your assessment. In the marketing copy you helped me write, we describe Kenneth as someone “on a hero’s journey” whose quest is “to preserve his essential decency against the need, sometimes, to cut a corner to do the deal.”

Marcia: In “A Short Career at Cathedral Arms,” he’s fired for something he didn’t do. As he’s leaving the job site, he’s confronted with the ethical choice: does he perform an act of mercy, or is it actually revenge?

Cathy: In “Sell Me,” Kenneth has to make a choice against his own interests: does he sell a freezer to somebody who doesn’t need one? But when you think of it, that’s pretty much the business of frozen food sales. It’s kind of hilarious. A new moral order emerges in the margins of the capitalist enterprise, where the rules don’t provide balance between the employer and the employed.

Marcia: There are ambiguities like that all through the book. It’s not as if Kenneth’s doing anything that would send him to jail, but how is he going to feel about himself?

Three Days/1999

Cathy: In “Three Days,” it’s Kenneth’s wife Jodi who faces—not exactly a moral dilemma, but romantic yearnings that disrupt her equilibrium.

Marcia: I love that story.

Cathy: You should. The plumber in the story is based on a tow truck driver you met.

Marcia: Jodi is drawn to this man who is so needy that he bares his soul in the intimate space of her home. For a moment she’s not just a mom; she’s a married woman in close conversation with a man who reminds her of the flat stomach her husband used to have. She likes that after ten years of marriage she is looking deep into the eyes of a stranger. And she lets herself do this because she is curious: “Where is this going?”

What Now, Kenny Boy?/ 2000

Cathy: In the last story, “What Now, Kenny Boy,” both Jodi and Kenneth face ethical dilemmas. He’s trying to persuade her that they should take out a line of credit on their home, just so he can close a deal in his new role as a mortgage salesman. And she starts indulging in remodeling fantasies. Also, Kenneth has to decide whether to throw in his lot with Vicki Redlin, a mortgage broker. She’s a stand-in for the unsavory characters who created the financial crisis that occurs a few years after this novel ends.

Marcia: Vicki Redlin is just delicious. She is so cold and clever and manipulative, and so much smarter in a sense than Kenneth. So the question is, can he work for her, without buying into her values?

Cathy: I’m glad you can see a thematic arc to this collection, because originally you were resistant to the Bodine stories. You kept asking me why I was writing again about this Kenneth fellow. But eventually you were convinced that there was something happening here.

Marcia: I guess I got to like the characters.

THE SHORT STORY FORM

Cathy: You weren’t a big fan of the short story when you started editing my drafts, were you?

Marcia: It was never my favorite genre. But you were working on short stories, and I made up my mind to be interested in this form.

Cathy: We’ve read a lot together along the way: Alice Munro, Ben Fountain, Lydia Davis, Ron Carver, Ron Carlson, George Saunders. Writers from a bygone era, such as Somerset Maugham and Edith Wharton. And New Yorker stories.

Marcia: There is one quality I respect you for and that is your individual style. It isn’t a style that is in vogue today. Your stories don’t push the edge, and there’s not much acute drama, either. The reader who’s been brought up on Mickey Spillane is going to search in vain for the sex and violence. But if you’re looking for sharp observations of character, and people who are basically decent but not perfect, and who run into the moral quandaries that occur all the time and that, by how you resolve them, reveal who you really are—with all of this conveyed in a really graceful way— then you’ll find To Do the Deal good reading.

A WRITING MODEL

Marcia: How would you describe your objective in writing?

Cathy: I’m inspired by the kind of short story I want to read myself. My model is Somerset Maugham, who in his day was the most popular writer in English, which is why I had us reading so many of his stories. It’s a little embarrassing to admire him now, because he was part and parcel of that British colonial enterprise. He wrote about Englishmen and Englishwomen in settings like Malaysia and Burma, without much noticing the humanity of the people being colonized. Nonetheless, the characters he did choose to write about, he could capture in a paragraph or less. And when his stories end, you say, “Yes! That’s a story.” Maugham believed that the first purpose of writing fiction was to entertain.

Marcia: You don’t have to finish his stories for him, and they don’t end with you feeling nauseous.

Cathy: When I reread his stories, which I do often, I always rediscover that they contain more murder, mayhem, and adultery than I had remembered. I think this is because his tone is charming and he’s so witty. He clearly gets a kick out of human frailty.

Marcia: In what way do you use his stories as a model?

Cathy: I try to create a smooth read, and to create memorable characters, and a tight plot, and satisfaction to the reader.

Marcia: You have created some memorable characters, for example, in Dexter DeWinter, Mr. Petrosian, and Samir a/k/a “Scratch.” None of these are quite believable; they are caricatures. But it is almost like you make a deal with the readers: “If I make this entertaining enough, will you let me get away with it?”

Cathy: I’ll concede to that. But Somerset Maugham wasn’t just an entertainer; he also considered himself a moralist. There is no such thing as a “mere storyteller,” he said. An essay online, “W. Somerset Maugham and the Social Question,” explains his point of view. Anyway, I hope readers realize that To Do the Deal is not just pleasure reading, but that it also provides commentary on how we organize work in contemporary American society. This whole commission sales structure! I don’t have an answer for what would be better, but commission sales is a career for suckers. I am probably insulting people when I say this, but it’s how I feel.

Marcia: I feel the same pity for people like my son, who is a professional musician. He’s rarely earned benefits, he’s never had a day of sick leave in his life, and he has no pension. I think more and more Americans are struggling like this.

Cathy: Kenneth represents a lot of people who are just trying to make it.

INSPIRATION MID-STREAM

Marcia: You’re also a fan of Hans Fallada.

Cathy: Yes! I was more than half way through writing my stories when a New York Times article introduced me to the German writer Hans Fallada and his book, Little Man — What Now? It’s the story of a commission salesman, Pinneberg, who’s trying to keep his family afloat, just like Kenneth. But Fallada’s novel was published in 1932 and is set in the Weimar Republic.

Marcia: The situation for Pinneberg and his wife Bunny is more ominous, but the premise is the same as in To Do the Deal.

Cathy: Yes. That’s why I obtained permission to use a quote from the book as the epigraph for To Do the Deal. And it’s such a beautifully written book, it was an honor to link to it.

Marcia: At the end of Fallada’s novel, Pinneberg comes home after having been beaten up on a street in Berlin. He feels like a failure, but Bunny says, we’re in this together. He has her loyalty: what you like to think will see him through.

Cathy: God knows what happens to that couple after the story ends.

Marcia: He gets drafted, I’m sure.

Cathy: He probably dies on the Russian Front and the baby perishes from malnutrition. And after the war Bunny is eating nothing but potatoes and cleaning bricks out of the street. They are decent people, beset by economic and political forces. Like so many people.

MENTOR, MUSE, EDITOR

CATHY: Let’s talk about your process of editing my stories. Thank you very much for what you did.

Marcia: I didn’t do very much.

Cathy: Oh yes you did. You would say, “This is as great as any story being published today, it should be in The New Yorker, but I don’t understand this section, and you need to fix this paragraph, and your grammar is all wrong here.”

Marcia: The velvet glove over the iron fist.

CATHY: I couldn’t have done it without you. It took us a long time.

Marcia: Yes, and your next book is taking too long, too. You should stop running.

Cathy: I won’t stop running, but you’re right. I have to stop privileging running over writing. And that will happen, because I’ve been selected to participate in A Novel Year, a year-long workshop led by author A. X. Ahmad, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. It’s going to help me finish Trios, a collection of un-linked short stories. So many of those stories are inspired by anecdotes from your life, I’m really indebted to you! Will you still stay on as my mentor, muse, and editor?

Marcia: I’d be delighted.

Order information for To Do the Deal is available here.

(October 14, 2015) To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories by Cathy Baker got a good going over by the Sibley Hospital’s book club. Joanne Philleo (a model of sorts for the mother-in-law character in the novel) arranged for distribution of copies and discussion. Thank you, Joanne! All eight of the women in attendance had read all ten stories and engaged in thorough discussion about the novel’s themes on the everyday ethical choices we all must make, the loving binds of family, and the sharp edges of American capitalism.

One participant said she particularly could relate to “A Short Career at Cathedral Arms,” which features an apartment building squatter, because for years a man had managed to live inside her church, which had many doors and hiding places. (Just recently another church was featured in the news after the arrest of a homeless man who had been secretly living inside its building for more than three years.) Life imitating art imitating life.

If your bookclub would like to read To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories, contact us at publisher@demitassepress.com, to arrange for an attractively discounted group order and a visit from the author.

(July 16, 2015) To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories has made the CROOK’S CORNER BOOK PRIZE LONGLIST for best debut novel set in the American South! (Yes, Maryland counts as the south because the Mason-Dixon line runs along the northern border.)

We’ll be keeping watch on the Crook’s Corner Book Prize Facebook page, where they will be posting news clips and passages from each of these books. The finalists will announced in October and the winner, selected by Lee Smith, will be announced in January. Should To Do the Deal win, author Cathy Baker will receive a cash prize and –in a nod to the literary cafés of Paris that inspired the prize–a free glass of wine at Crook’s Corner every day of the prize year.

The Longlist is below. Look what’s first (and don’t point out that it’s alphabetical; we don’t care). Demitasse Press is very pleased to be in the running against several esteemed publishing houses.

The 18 longlisted titles. To Do the Deal is in the very center–we think that’s a good omen!

TO DO THE DEAL, by Cathy Baker (Demitasse Press)

JAM ON THE VINE, by LaShonda Katrice Barnett (Grove Press)

SLIM AND THE BEAST, by Samuel L. Barrantes (Inkshares)

RUBY, by Cynthia Bond (Hogarth)

THE MARAUDERS, by Tom Cooper (Crown)

THE LAST DAYS OF VIDEO, by Jeremy Hawkins (Soft Skull Press)

WHERE ALL THE LIGHT TENDS TO GO, by David Joy (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

THE LATE MATTHEW BROWN, by Paul Ketzle (Apprentice House)

SOIL, by Jamie Kornegay (Simon & Schuster)

MINNOW, by James McTeer (Hub City Press)

AGAINST THE COUNTRY, by Ben Metcalf (Random House)

THE SWEETHEART, by Angelina Mirabella (Simon & Schuster)

THE QUAKER CAFE, by Brenda Bevan Remmes (Lake Union Publishing)

UNBECOMING, by Rebecca Scherm (Viking)

THE STORY OF LAND & SEA, by Kate Simpson Smith (Harper Collins)

MIGRATORY ANIMALS, by Mary Helen Specht (Harper Perennial)

CHARLESTON, by Margaret Bradham Thornton (Ecco)

MY SUNSHINE AWAY, by M.O. Walsh (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

(May 31, 2015) Readers who like To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories will appreciate Off the Reservation, the new novel by Glen Merzer (Vivid Thoughts Press). The tone of this novel is as benign as its protagonist, Evan Gorgoni, a congressman who intended to retire but instead finds himself in the race for president. The magic weapons in his campaign are his willingness to speak his mind on subjects he thinks are important and his determination not to spend energy on what’s unimportant, such as writing campaign speeches. In fact, it is his off-the-cuff nomination acceptance speech, which rambles on for 18 pages, that is the highlight of both his campaign and this novel. But is that great speech enough to get Gorgoni elected? The outcome hinges on happenstance, which couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

It’s not surprising that Merzer, an LA-based comic and comedy scriptwriter, could write a funny book. What’s unexpected is that Off the Reservation—ostensibly a satire about a political campaign—is really about family and right living. This goes against the zeitgeist, to have no oozing orifices, no rapes or scenes of incest, no sweeping intercontinental immigrant saga. There’s not even a vampire in Off the Reservation—unless you consider carnivores vampires.

Instead, with Off the Reservation we’ve got the hero’s journey—a tale about a decent fellow trying to find his way home in an often-immoral profession. Can Merzer sell that? Let’s hope so. Because To Do the Deal’s Kenneth Bodine bears an uncanny resemblance to Evan Gorgoni. Read and compare!

Reality is more absurd than the fiction based on reality in To Do the Deal at Bed and Bunk!

(May 29, 2015) The Washington Post published a feature ripped from our headlines! “Springing into Action” by Monica Hesse deploys the same deadpan humor in her story about real mattress salesmen that Baker uses in “To Do the Deal at Bed and Bunk,” her fictional tale about Kenneth Bodine’s stint in mattress sales. Note the creative color in this graph from the newspaper article:

Shaun adjusted the Mylar balloons he’d tied at the same height on every bed frame. People occasionally told Shaun that he was over-the-top — obsessive, even — but he believed this effort had brought him to where he was, rising through Mattress Warehouse as a stock boy, delivery driver, sales associate and, finally, store manager at a smaller location, where he was working when he sold the Aireloom. The $13,000 Aireloom had been the most expensive mattress in the store, until the early January day when an elegant horse breeder came to buy it.

Is that great writing, or what? Now here’s a test. Which of the following two excerpts is from the Post story, and which is from Baker’s short story?

EXCERPT 1

The young couple, Brian’s customers, were trying to make their first joint mattress purchase — a very firm one, please — but they tried several without success, and eventually Brian was stumped. “Shaun?” he called. “Do you have any suggestions?”

Shaun had a feeling, related to a salesman slogan he’d once heard: “Buyers are liars.” It didn’t mean people intentionally lied. It meant sometimes they didn’t know what they wanted until they were lying on it — so he tried the firm-mattress couple on a slightly softer bed.

“Oh, this is nice,” the boyfriend said.

“You want to feel something really nice?” Shaun said, and led them across a few aisles.

“Oh, wow,” said the girlfriend, lying down on the appointed mattress.

“I never expected this out of a bed,” said the boyfriend.

EXCERPT 2

The customer asked Kenneth the typical questions about warranties, free delivery, removal of the despised old mattress. Kenneth answered the questions and then walked back to his desk. Customers need space to think. After a few moments, the man approached the rear. Kenneth pretended to be too engrossed in paperwork to notice.

“Excuse me.”

“Oh! Yes, sir?”

“How do I know if I want a hard or a soft mattress?”

“Good question, sir. Intelligent question. Come over here.”

Jodi, who liked to hear the play-by-plays when Kenneth came home from work, had nicknamed this stage of the game “the Goldilocks test.” Along the side wall of the floor stood three mattresses in a row: one soft, one hard, one medium. Customers would be instructed to lie down fully on each one. According to Bed & Bunk sales training, the primary purpose of this procedure was to give customers a sense of various mattress densities. It was Jodi’s opinion that this also served to make customers feel foolish and vulnerable, as if they have made use of property that wasn’t theirs and owed the store something.

If you like this kind of prose, you’ll like Baker’s whole book. Makes for great beddtime reading!

(May 6, 2015) Our first, international Goodreads Giveaway contest ended October 29, 2014. Within a week 20 copies of To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories were wending their way to France, Great Britain, India, Poland, the USA of course, and other destinations far and not-so-near.

Unfortunately, a book we shipped to one of our Goodreads Giveaway winners in India never reached its intended destination. We’re hoping the book landed in the hands of some other reader, but if so, why hasn’t that person posted a review on  Goodreads, hmm? In any event, we shipped our India reader another copy, and it too disappeared (see hope, above). Just this week, a copy shipped six months ago to our Philippines-based Goodreads Giveaway winner was returned, “addressee unknown.” These shipping failures might explain why we’ve only seen a smattering of reviews from our international Goodreaders. But check it out: one of the reviews that materialized is in French! 

We are arranging for a hand-carry of To Do the Deal to our patient reader in Bangalore–when an Indian American friend makes a trip home in July–and we are making contact with our thwarted reader in Iloilo to ship her via Internet an ePub version. If you are a Goodreads Giveaway winner  and are still waiting for your copy of To Do the Deal, send an email to publisher@demitassepress.com and we’ll figure out a way to unite you with the book. When we do a deal, we want to keep our end of it!

(April 28, 2015) “An easy read,” says Readers’ Favorite reviewer Jessyca Garcia, referring to Cathy Baker’s To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories:

I enjoyed reading To Do the Deal and found it funny at times, especially with how Kenneth lost his jobs. While Kenneth did get on my nerves, I also completely understood him for not knowing what he wanted to do in his life career wise. I enjoyed that Baker described Kenneth this way because it makes him real as a character. I also really liked the illustrations at the beginning of each chapter. I would recommend To Do the Deal to anyone who enjoys reading about everyday life. I had trouble remembering this was a work of fiction while reading it. This book seemed too similar to real life. Baker has done a great job.

Read the full review here: https://readersfavorite.com/book-revi...

Two reviews of To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories appeared on March 20, 2015

(March 20, 2015) Two pairs of three butterflies were awarded in “his vs. her” tandem reviews at the Truth About Books. We count that as six!

The money graph from J. B. Maynard reads:

I recommend this odd collection of stories to anyone looking for a family-friendly good time. Cathy Baker is right up there with the best of them. I would almost classify this book as self-help/fiction/comedy/ inspirational; there’s a lot to be learned from Kenneth’s struggles, and I think To Do the Deal is something I could read several times just to find every hidden message.

And from Ashley Fae, who is the proprietor of this book blog:

I felt at times like I was watching through their windows as they lived their lives, raised their children, dealt with their parents as they aged, and struggled like the rest of us.

If you want to learn the full truth from Ashley Fae and J.B. Maynard, check out Truth About Books.

(February 13, 2015)

You are now connected with Jude from Nook Press

Cathy Baker: Hi Jude.

Jude: Hello, Cathy!

Jude: Thank you for joining NOOK Press Chat Support. My name is Jude and I will be assisting you today.

Cathy Baker: You are not accepting my business information. I am uploading something wrong, but can’t figure out what.

Jude: Hi Cathy! We apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused you. I understand that you are having a problem uploading your manuscript, right?

Cathy Baker: No, I am not having a problem uploading the manuscript. I am having a problem uploading my business account information.

Jude: I understand that you are having a problem updating your tax information, right?

Cathy Baker: Yes. I have tried before to understand what is the problem but I was just booted over to another department and got the same email telling me there is a problem with my vendor information. Can a human look at what I am uploading wrong vis-a-vis my tax info or something? Maybe it’s my business legal name.

Jude: I’m sorry, but your concern requires escalation to the NOOK Press Business Team by email. I will forward your concern to them. You can expect to receive a response in approximately two business days.

Cathy Baker: Jude, you are not a human are you? Because this is what happened before. The Press Business Team sends me an email but no one tells me what is wrong.

Jude: Please wait for their response. Is there anything else that I can help you with?

Cathy Baker: Yes, Jude. Please become human.

Jude: You are chatting with a real person.

Cathy Baker: Can you then talk with a real person in the business department? I’m sure it’s the most minor thing, but this has taken, literally, months.

Jude: Believe me that I am doing my best to assist you with this. This issue really needs to be escalated. They can assist you in updating your tax information.

Cathy Baker: Ok so what happens then? In 2 days I get an email from them?

Jude: Yes, Cathy.

Cathy Baker: Ok I will wait patiently to hear from a human in your business department. But I have little hope. Have a nice day, Jude!

Jude: Thank you for contacting NOOK Press™ and have a wonderful day!

Hoping soon for success in uploading biz info to NOOK so we can make eBook available through this platform!

(January, 25, 2015) “One of the best books I’ve read this year.”

That’s the headline! Our second Awesome Indies review has come in, with another 5 stars.

“According to conventional wisdom novels and short stories are completely different species, and never the twain shall meet. In To Do the Deal: A Novel in Stories, Cathy Baker shows us that, in the hands of a master craftsman, conventional wisdom is wrong….If you want a good weekend read, this is a definite ‘must-read.’ One of the best books I’ve read this year.”

Read the book and see if you agree; order here.