What Would Madame Defarge Knit

I’m not much of a knitter.

I do know how to cast on, knit and purl, but that’s about it.

I haven’t picked up a pair of needles in years, and pretty much the only things I’ve ever knit are a couple of garter-stitched scarves, and a not-quite bubble gum pink sweater with a pattern of periwinkle and green stripes, and china blue and ivory bars. It sounds completely hideous, but it was actually not bad. The problem was I didn’t realize that the bottom of a the sweater was supposed to be more fitted, so I didn’t make the end-zone tighter. Since this was the part I started with, and I didn’t catch the error or my ways until the darned thing was done, I lived with an ill-fitting sweater that just kind of hung square at the bottom, like a tunic. Only shorter. Sigh…

Crocheting is better for me: it goes faster, is somewhat mindless, and is much more forgiving, and requires far less attention, than knitting. So while I’ve done nothing in the last few years, I have crocheted quite a few scarves and afghans in my time.

My sister Kathleen, however, is an expert knitter. She not only makes things that are complex beautiful, but she also designs her own pattern.

One of her designs (along with an essay) was published recently in a book entitled What Would Madame Defarge Knit, or WWMDK, which is edited by Heather Ordover.

The title alone should be a dead (hah!) giveaway that this is not your average Family Circle Christmas Crafters special (Santa Claus toilet paper covers). If you’ve forgotten your Dickens, Madame Defarge was the villain avec knitting needles in A Tale of Two Cities, who I suspect used more than the garter stitch to encode the names of those on the list for the guillotine. Anyway, the book contains a number of patterns, and accompanying essays, inspired by characters in classic fiction: a stole for Jane Eyre, gauntlets for Ibsen’s Nora, and a neck warmer for Hester Prynne, which is my sister Kathleen’s contribution. (That’s the Hester Prynne’s neck warmer to the left. I’ve seen it in “real life” and it’s quite beautiful. If they ever do another film of Scarlet Letter, they absolutely should have Hester wearing this.)

WWMDK is smart, brainy and literary, and, even though I won’t be knitting anything, I avidly read through a number of the essays. (Okay, I didn’t read the H.P. Lovecraft-er ones.) The ones I read were sufficiently interesting that I now have re-reading Jane Eyre, A Scarlet Letter, and A Tale of Two Cities on my bucket list. I may also add a first read of Moby Dick, since that first time around I will confess to not having gotten past “Call me Ishmael” before I fled to the Classic Comics version.

There’s also a number of interesting business angles to the publication of WWMDK, which speaks to a lot of the issues swirling around in the Internet-wrought, “free the content”, how do the creative types get paid, publishing world. The editor had looked at traditional publishers in the knitting/crocheting world, but, as my sister Kath has it:

…the numbers just didn't add up, and there's also the issue of giving up creative control. 

So, the book is being published by the Cooperative Press, founded by Shannon Okey, a.k.a. Stitchgrrl and Knitgrrl, and dedicated to books in the arts and crafts world that might not be of interest to the major houses keen only on those titles with big-run potential. The book is available in hard- or soft-back, as an e-book, via pdf, and on-demand. To keep publishing costs low – and actually in keeping with the old-fashioned, literary classics theme – WWMDK is published in black and white. Given that knitters usually want to see what the finished product will look like, there are all sorts of links to colored illustrations online.

Thus the modern, new-fangled, scary-for-writers world is actually making it possible for a niche product that will have serious appeal to a small but die-hard audience to see the light of day.

I have a number of writer friends, and many of them are caught up in the struggle to get an agent, to get the agent to do anything for them, to find a publisher, to get the publisher to do anything for them, and so on. Even those writers with some track record and commercial success find themselves with incredible shrinking advances, and taking corporate (mostly freelance) writing and editing gigs to support their creative writing jones (and, yeah, their families).

At the end of the day, writers want to get published. They may fantasize that they’ll actually be able to make a living at their “creative stuff”, but we all know that for every Joyce Carol Oates there are ten a thousand folks (for a moment I’d forgotten about all those MFA programs) with the critically well-received collections of short stories that sold 1,000 copies, who are scratching out a living as minimum wage adjuncts and/or writing web copy for banks. And for each of these folks, there’s another 10,000 who don’t even have the critically well-received collection of short stories. They’ve got the $20 story (see below) in the literary journal (circulation 700), and a bunch of moderately encouraging (if you have your happy ears on)  rejection letters.

And so it goes.

For those (of us) without the big name, the benediction of a Joyce Carol Oates, or what is called a “platform” (i.e., your own personal ability to sell a lot of books), the small presses like Cooperative are/will be a godsend.

The Cooperative approach provides an extra benefit for the pattern designers, again, courtesy of my sister Kath:

As an added element:  knit designers are notoriously underpaid (with rates not having changed for a long time.)  In most compilation books (patterns from various designers) the designer is paid a flat fee (most often a pittance).  In the case of WWMDFK, designers will get a royalty based on how the book sells, which is just about unique.  This, of course, aligns the writers with the publishers in desire to promote the book, and offers the potential for a better income than the flat $50 or so they would otherwise receive.  (You know the equivalent in the literary anthology world--20 bucks and a copy of the book.)

Kath’s personal tagline, by the way, is Knitters:  Creating a Better World One Sock at a Time. She ain’t kidding. Her socks are wonderful: comfy and warm. Having a pair almost makes me want it to be winter again.

Literary and knitting types, get yourself a copy of What Would Madame Defarge Knit.