Professor Ian Singleton Publishes Debut Novel Two Big Differences
Professor Ian Singleton’s novel, Two Big Differences, was published this month by MGraphics. In Singleton’s book, Zina and Valentine are returning to Odessa during the 2014 Ukrainian Spring (Euromaidan). In this place at this time, one’s tongue can determine whether one lives or dies. Two Big Differences is a story of navigating identity through language. Here, Singleton, who lectures at Fordham, answers some questions about his new book.
What was the publication process for your novel like and do you have any advice for Fordham students and aspiring writers on how to get published?
Ian Singleton: I've been working on this novel since 2012, when I was awarded a contract for a short story collection from a small publisher that ended up closing before my collection was published. I had already begun this project, but I had a lot of difficulty publishing it. I've been actively trying to do so for about four of the last nine years. Perhaps this difficulty had to do with the small niche of the book's content, which is really a story of how learning another language opens up a whole different universe. This publisher, MGraphics, is run by Soviet immigrants, so it is a very good fit for Two Big Differences.
My advice about publishing would be to seek publishers who are more engaged in putting art into the world than in making a profit. Often these publishers are smaller and less well known. But what's important is their attention to your work and the collaborative dynamic you can strike with them. And it's more important that they connect with your work than how "major" they are. In the end, publishing should be about publicizing art and influencing culture. That often doesn't align with making huge profits, yet there's a model out there that rewards books that will simply make a lot of money but not necessarily contribute to our culture.
So, I repeat, seek a publisher that aligns well with the purpose of your work, a publisher who connects with it and be okay with that not necessarily being a "major" publisher more interested in profit than art.
Can you tell us a bit about the centrality of the cities of Detroit and Odessa to your novel?
IS: I was born in the Detroit factory suburb of Dearborn. My mother and her whole family are from that part of Michigan. I lived there on and off through the first few decades of my life. I live here in New York now, of course. But I have always wanted to write about Southeast Michigan. The literature about that region is too sparse, in my opinion. Many writers, many people leave the area. And it's a unique place in terms of labor history, immigration, the "American dream," and now the realization that such a dream doesn't exist for most of us, including African-Americans, who make up the majority of the population of Detroit and who have culturally defined Detroit in many ways for the last several decades.
Professor Ian Singleton
Regarding Odessa, my partner was born and lived the first decade of her life there in Ukraine. We traveled there on our honeymoon. It's different from other Soviet cities: St. Petersburg; Moscow; Kiev, even. It also had great writers, but they left Odessa for bigger, more significant cities, I suppose was the idea. Odessa is a city created to be a kind of palace getaway for Catherine the Great. However, it became one of the major cities of the Soviet Union, and it was also a place where people, especially Jewish people, suffered greatly during the beginning of the Soviet era and in The Great Patriotic War (World War II).
The decline of Detroit, the actual sight of it, is something that everybody who has ever thought about the "American dream" should see. Odessa is also a place that everybody who has ever thought about Soviet culture and how it affected the cities and people within its realm should see. While researching this book, I found issues of a Russian leftist journal, Пробуждение (Probuzhdenie, or Awakening), that was published in Detroit. A now closed Detroit bookstore, John King Books, was in an old factory and had the largest section of Marx' writings of any bookstore of which I've heard. Detroit's immigrant population, like Chicago's, had a greater number of immigrants from Eastern Europe than cities on the West Coast.
Finally, Detroit as the place of Valentine's background, positions that character differently than if that character were from another part of the U.S. and found himself in Odessa, Ukraine. When I talk about seeing Detroit, I mean that it strikes a person. This? This is the American dream? But it was, more than anywhere else in the U.S. You could work in a factory yet own a house and send your children to college. That was something resembling a Soviet version of life, an equitable society where one could truly live a meaningful life whatever one's work was. Of course, that exists in neither place now and, arguably, never really existed in either, at least not for everybody.
Is there an interplay between your teaching and writing of fiction?
IS: I really enjoy teaching First-Year Writing because I meet students from the entire array of disciplines available at Fordham. Some of the courses I teach elsewhere are for multilingual students, and I enjoy these courses the most because of my deep interest in transliteracy, translation, hybrid languages, and variety in language. In Composition, I teach genre awareness, and this lens has also fostered some overlap with my fiction writing. It's allowed me to better integrate my studies in Creative Writing (and its pedagogy) with my professional development and pedagogical training in First-Year Writing. Since high school, I have read my writing out loud in front of audiences, and I enjoy the performative aspects of teaching as well. I'm especially glad to be in-person in the classroom again and am looking forward to reading from my book in-person as well if that happens.
Do you have any other literary projects you’ve been working on?
IS: I'm working on a novella I wrote during the pandemic. There are also some short stories I've written during this time. I'm hoping to put a new manuscript together. I still hope to publish that short story collection I was supposed to publish nine years ago. And my older daughter wants me to write children's books and has promised to help me. So I'm looking forward to that.