That Thing With All The Drowned Authors: An Apology

That thing with all the drowned authors – I’ve been feeling seriously bad in a way I don‘t expect anyone to really get or empathize with even though you all seem like the kind of people that should, you know – if you‘re being honest with yourselves given previous stances re: humanism and global circumstances and interconnectivities – but forgetting all that, I honestly promise every last one of you ten thousand times: there wasn’t anything sinister or “political” about it. It was basically – and I know, I know how this sounds, especially after all the memorials and stuff, but it was part of an environmental initiative. Reduced flow toilets, no-flow urinals. Enforced recyclable stations, and I know a few people who asked not to be named but who can attest to that enforced thing. We were super serious about sustainability – it was our main thing, which is a step forward given a look around yourselves, even with all the progress. And it’s hard when you’re a publisher to cut down on paper but we did that too: two-sided printing on that half-brown post-consumer product the soy ink doesn’t entirely stick to; e-books.

But the thing with e-books and brown paper, and I don’t mean to get too technical or whatever, but the main thing with e-books is electricity. And I am in no way claiming to be an expert consultant or electrician slash environmentalist but just from living in the world we all know that it takes however many joules or flashes of electricity or whatever to make an e-book run and that electricity mostly comes from the equivalent of blood diamonds, just clear cut coal farming in China or however, which is why we have windmills, which everyone also knows don’t work on any kind of a scale. So e-books never seemed to be the most eco-conscious sort of thing, we all thought, even though it might have seemed that way on the surface to the layman. I’m not meaning to give the impression that I was in any sort of inner circle or meetings, by the way. We were a family though, before the drownings, so of course I knew what was going on, felt able to empower myself to make a few suggestions when it came down to it. And what happened afterward, after the suggestions, well – I feel bad for that like I said before but basically this was just an office policy sort of thing and I’d like to remind everyone that we’re all people here and there’s no reason to make this hard world harder than it already is by default.

So basically what happened, since that seems to be why everyone’s here, for understanding and a postmortem and all that – and my condolences to all the families, you are all heroes, but what happened was that I walked by my supervisors office because we were cutting down on e-mail and I said “Do you know what would be a good idea, just a real good idea for our environmental initiative?” She had one of those Swedish Brazilian French presses – Bodum – but was making tea in it, just to show how far reaching this environmental initiative went, because you all know about the thing with coffee. But so I said “What we should do is something big that embiggens itself, because this electricity and coffee thing, well…” And she looked up from her French press and asked me what I had in mind, which was basically consciousness raising, but more than just marketing bullets and flyers or whatever. Which is how the whole idea of The Seatreat started. But we were just calling it a sea retreat then.

So the thing with sea retreats is that right now you might all be thinking what a terrible idea they are, given your losses of all the dead authors and whatnot, but it was just basically a writer’s retreat, which happen all the time in real life notwithstanding everyone acting like that many writers in one place is such a crazy thing now. It’s the same all over: some rich college or whatever putting some writers in a cabin or pilazzo and either paying or not paying for dinners; authors meeting other authors to talk about Vassar and Wesleyan and that time they met David Milch, who had met some other more famous authors and also wrote NYPD Blue. So we thought, well, lets get all those authors together and put them in the middle of some place where they’d have to write about environmental stuff and blog about how great our green initiative is. We also thought to just keep them in their respective cities and commission a series or whatever but our business manager found a way to write the thing off as some sort of carbon offset, which took care of the whole blood-diamond e-book situation from where we were standing and was roundly considered just a stroke of luck.

So just for the record, everyone seemed very humble to have been asked on the Seatreat, which sounded fun at the time, like Jurassic Park at the beginning of Jurassic Park, and not terrible like later on (both on the Seatreat and in Jurassic Park). We had, you know, basically asked the top twenty or so names on the regional bestseller lists and a few of them were lucky enough ultimately to have IBS or live in Suffolk or whatever, but most of them were happy for the acknowledgement and their publishers were happy to have them off their hands but also a little worried about our green initiative and how much press we’d be getting and what they could do to keep up and not look like whatever, which was good for me until we started getting all this press post-drowning. Not a joke, just a fact. So everyone was happy, though, and that was basically the end of my involvement, walking by S’s desk and saying “Do you know what would be a great idea for the environment….” and then the reigns got taken and half the regional bestsellers were on a boat and Mitch Albom was saying something on the Today Show about how great it is for someone to do something.

And I pretty much forgot about it all, at that point. Just sort of went to work, drank my tea, read the internet. There was a Seatreat blog but our blogs are all so boring so I didn’t go to that one either. Mostly talk about workshops and how humble everyone felt, is what people were saying. But the boat – I do know this – the boat was supposed to go to this place in the ocean between California and Japan that’s just trash you can’t see, which seemed pretty writerly to everyone at the office, just a bunch of bad plastic molecules and nothing living except for all our authors who we were all feeling proud about. Google “Garbage Island” or whatever if you want to really know about it but don’t get too disappointed because it just looks like ocean.

So all these writers are in the middle of nothing, reading each others short stories and pretending Pillsbury biscuits are hard tack and trying to get reception on their Kindles and we’re not worried about going green anymore because basically we are green, which felt pretty goddamn good, to be a part of that. And then I went into work one day to feel superior and read the internet and drink more tea and apparently all the authors had drowned, is the thing that everyone’s all upset about now, which is why you’re all here. You all saw the pictures so I don’t know that you need me really telling you what you already know right now, but if it’s any consolation I did hear from someone close to the whole thing that the plastics acid or whatever worked pretty fast. And not to be too much of a, you know, but no one knew about this stuff before the SeaTreat so there was no way to know it was going to eat the boat, or whatever. So I’m sorry for all your losses but also I don’t see how this is really anyone’s fault.

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