I’ve seen a lot of “artisan” goods lately. Artisan cheese. Artisan bread. Artisan beer. I haven’t thought about the term “artisan” much, but my impression is that artisan products/wares/foods are marketed as such because they are hand-crafted with loving care by actual humans, as opposed to mass-produced by soulless machines. Makes sense. There’s Wonder Bread, which I’m guessing is spit out of a robot’s gaping oven-mouth, and there’s artisan kalamata olive bread with random seeds and nuts in it. The Wonder Bread might be sterile and flavorless, and every once in awhile a rat might get into the bread machine and end up in a loaf, but overall it’s a consistent product that consumers seek out.
With the artisan bread you never know. It all depends on whose grubby hands did the kneading of the dough, what seeds and nuts they favor, how many olives they eat rather than tossing into the dough, etc. The flavor and quality may not be consistent but that’s part of the fun. It’s a bread lottery. At least you know a fellow human was employed in the production process, and that makes the $5 you spend feel more important and meaningful than the $1.99 you deposit in the bread machine. Sure, sure, it’s not all about money. Artisan products taste better, look better, contain better ingredients…it’s all on the hand-written poster taped up next to the shelf off in the corner of the produce section.
I’ve thought a lot about writers, fiction, literary fiction, genre fiction, and the academic life over the past two years of graduate school. I’ve heard quite a few people in academia bemoan genre fiction, and promote literary fiction. The bemoaning and promoting extends to the writers and readers of both — genre folks are sheep, consuming mass-produced infotainment; of course, literary folks are individuals, artists, scholars, intellectuals, and whatever the opposite of a sheep is. Maybe a lone wolf, but not one that’s feasting on sheep…more like a wolf that sits in the woods and makes notes and judges the sheep for all having the same wool or taste in a particular type of widely available clover.
When I sort through the complaining and bemoaning, what I hear from the literary fiction realm is perfectly reasonable. It’s something we all feel at some point in our lives: Nobody appreciates us. Nobody appreciates the writers, who take all this extra time crafting fine individual stories, and nobody appreciates the readers, who sort through commercially available pop fiction to find hidden literary gems. The readers who go to the local bookstores and look for something unique. The kind souls supporting the little people — the artists. It makes them feel good. Who wants Wonder Bread, anyway? Who wants Dan Brown? Anybody who does is lazy!
(And you know that’s part of it — the need to set oneself apart from the herd.)
So what do writers need to do? We need to jump on this artisan craze. As distasteful as it might sound, we need to embrace marketing.
Today, February 10, 2010, I propose the formation of an Artisan Writers Guild. The AWG would be an association for writers of carefully crafted artisan fiction, and the AWG seal on a book would set it apart from all the others. Just like the artisan bread shelf in the store separates its treasures from the racks of generic, mass-produced breads. Qualifying Writers (oh yes, they would have to qualify, that’s for sure, so we can ensure quality…but not mass-produced quality!) would be “artisan writers.” They’d have more prestige, and they could walk around with pride. They could be more daring wolves, maybe, and actually snap at a few sheep now and then.
Bookstores would start marking off “Artisan Fiction” sections. Just imagine, all that hand-crafted goodness in one place! Complete with all the imperfections you’d expect in a lumpy kalamata loaf.
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