Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

It’s a little surreal to be writing this but I’ve gone ahead and self-published two books of my fiction through Amazon:

Half of Something is about 90 pages of “fun” fiction, some of my earlier published stories; and

Dr. Teen is a novel about an adolescent therapist restarting his life after a series of setbacks.

I posted Half of Something a few months ago and haven’t breathed a word of it to anyone. I’m very proud of it, but I’ve continued to send out my “serious” short story manuscript, which is all the things you’d find in the collections coming out from university press contests: sad and somber, thematically linked and rich, with interesting formal experimentation. (I think it’s more than that, of course—funny and weird—but so far only a few presses have agreed, slotting the collection onto their longlists or semifinal rounds.) The stories in Half of Something have (almost all) been published, but sadly a number of the online journals where these stories appeared have gone defunct; I was inspired to collect these stories when a friend asked for a recommendation of my favorite stories I’d written, and combing through the fiction page of my website I saw with horror how many links no longer went anywhere. Publishing this book is as much an act of archiving these pieces as it is an effort to make my name or any of the other goals we associate with publishing.

Dr. Teen is a different situation. I love this novel. My sweat and blood are in this book (I know, gross), but it’s not simply a matter of sunk costs. When I open this document, I still get swept up in the narrative, the scenes; I still think of images and incidents from this book.

I worked on Dr. Teen for years, and it would be true to say I wrote it twice. I wrote it first over the magical summer of 2015, when I’d been married a year and, after my first year as a college instructor, I had my first summer off in almost a decade. I made Dr. Teen by writing one episode each day of that summer, creating a lapidary portrait of the summer of my character, Errol Gropp, who’s trying to regroup and find a new direction in his life after a divorce and the loss of his counseling practice. Some days I’d write a thousand-word scene, and others I might feel pinched for time or uninspired, and write a scene of 100 words.

That summer I wrote Dr. Teen as more of a comedy—Errol was referred to consistently as “Dr. Teen,” as if mirroring how he saw himself, and the episodes were sillier. At some point years before this I’d written a short, incomplete story about a man sitting in an IHOP hectoring the DJs at a college radio station who’d declined to give him a summer program. The scene was based on both my own experience as a summer DJ at Beloit College’s WBCR and a hazy memory of working in the archives in the depths of Beloit’s library, organizing the WBCR files and coming across a prospectus for a call-in advice show aimed at teens. The man who’d proposed the show was a local and he’d been incredibly thorough in preparing this proposal for the consideration of the college students who always managed the station in the summer time: he included multiple suggested names for the show, I remember, as well as a list of equipment he would need. For years, the absurd boldness of these suggestions—I’ll just need a six-line phone system installed, thank you very much, and if you could hire an assistant producer to screen calls for me that would be terrific—stuck with me, and I knew the short story I’d written, really just a sketch, wasn’t sufficient to the rich sense of absurdity I had picked up on, and still remembered, from those materials in the archives.

Because the files contained a number of letters from the call-in DJ to the producers, taking them to task in increasingly strident terms for declining his show. Can you imagine, I asked myself, getting so worked up about something like a summer show on college radio? We didn’t use this word back then but the whole thing was so cringe. That first version of Dr. Teen steered into the cringe, into the overbearing and hilarious absurdity of a 48-year-old man making a federal case out of being passed over for one summer.

I took that version of Dr. Teen through the process of querying literary agents and then trying small presses and contests. I wondered what was wrong with this novel that no one had fallen in love with it the way I had, and so I went back to it. I got some wrongheaded advice from a well-meaning workshop I was in, and floundered around for a summer, but eventually found my way out of the wilderness. I rewrote Dr. Teen, this time in the same style that had meant so much to me—short episodes, each with its own punch and savor, in the style of the novels that had inspired me: Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, and Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder. But this time I added pathos, a deep hurt lurking in Errol’s past that provides ballast for the considerable silliness and humor that are still present in the book. Why would a 48-year-old man be so upset about a silly radio show? What else is going on in his life that might explain it? This time, I found answers to those questions.

The perception of self-publishing has changed so much since I was in graduate school (which was, admittedly, a long time ago). Publishing itself has changed dramatically, not just since the end of grad school but since I first started querying agents re: that first version of Dr. Teen. I can’t deny that I feel some mixed emotions to be self-publishing this novel, but along with disappointment I also feel some disillusionment around the fantasy of publishing that I’ve had for a large part of my life. I’m over the idea that the book will have been a failure if it’s not published by a big house or a cool indie press.

When I was in elementary school and someone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d very often say, “An author.” It’s only with time that I’ve added all these additional qualifications, including not just the size and caliber of the press but the expectation that authorship would be my sole career. I don’t expect to make any money from either of these books but my hope is that I will publish future books and someone interested enough in my work will be able to find Dr. Teen and Half of Something and check out my back catalog.

Before this gets too maudlin I’ll just come to the point: I would be thrilled if anyone who may come across this blog post would check out either book. I’d love to hear what you think of them. That’s the point, in the end: to be read, to be out there in the world. Better to send Dr. Teen out there, whatever happens, than to let this beloved book sit unread in a folder on my hard drive (or, you know, up there in the ether, as the case may be).