How to Protect Bookstores and Why - Highlights - DANNY CAINE, Bookseller, Poet

How to Protect Bookstores and Why - Highlights - DANNY CAINE, Bookseller, Poet

Interviewed by Mia Funk & Henie Zhang

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.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Henie Zhang with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interview Producer and Associate Text Editor on this episode was Henie Zhang. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk with additional production support by Sophie Garnier and Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 
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Interviews - FEATURED
THE DIPLOMAT
THE DIPLOMAT

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Author of Emotional Intelligence · Optimal · Ecological Intelligence

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Emmy Award-winning · Oscar-nominated Composer · Musician
1 0 0 1 · Silfur · Transparent · Lion

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JEFFREY ROSEN
JEFFREY ROSEN

President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

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BERTRAND PICCARD
BERTRAND PICCARD

Explorer & Aviator of the First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder of Solar Impulse Foundation & Climate Impulse

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ED ZWICK

Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer
Glory · The Last Samurai · Shakespeare in Love · Thirtysomething
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Tokyo Vice · Six Feet Under · Tales of the City · My So-Called Life

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ANGANA CHATTERJI · SIDDHARTHA DEB
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What Do the June 2024 Elections in India Mean?

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JAY JORDAN & ISABELLE FRÉMEAUX
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Artists, Activists & Anarchists Seize Wetlands from the French Republic
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DOUG LARSON
DOUG LARSON

Award-winning Scientist · Ecologist · Professor Emeritus · University of Guelph
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THOMAS CROWTHER
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PETER D. DITLEVSEN
PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

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Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO
KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression
The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA
BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA
MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

 
 

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