Removing blind submissions is a terrible idea, but so is keeping them

Let’s start by acknowledging that writing literary fiction is a bad deal financially for almost everyone right now. It’s bad for privileged cis, white, male writers like me, and it’s bad for nonbinary, poor writers of color. It's bad for writers and it's bad for journals. The economics of the literary journals we need to get to accept our work in order to progress as writers are, to be blunt, a scam. If that seems harsh, consider the similarities between how the average lit mag operates and those kiosks at the mall that grab passersby, telling them they have the face for modeling, and if only they’ll invest a mere $300 in a portfolio, they might be on their way to superstardom. The only thing that differentiates literary magazines is that they typically charge a lot less than $300. However, since you have to apply to many of them to have a hope of getting published, the total cost to the victim of the scam is about the same.

The modeling scam takes advantage of people’s natural tendency to overestimate their own value. Of course someone thinks I should be a model, the victims of the scam believe, so nothing seems out of place when someone suggests that the world sees a similar value in the victims.

For literary magazines, the exploitation of the Dunning-Kruger effect is even more invidious, because most of the people submitting actually do have some talent. The last few decades of MFA programs have generated tens of thousands of graduates, each of whom has, presumably, at least some ability. To go along with all of these, there are the hundreds of thousands more whose teachers or professors recognized they had some skill and encouraged them to make use of it. So the writers submitting their stories aren’t just fooled by their own vanity. They really can write at least passably. Do they write well enough to beat the 50-to-1, 100-to-1, or a million to one odds that some journals put in front of them? Likely not. But it’s three bucks to try, kind of the same as a lottery ticket, and you can’t win if don’t play, so in the three bucks goes. Maybe once in a while, you risk the big money and enter a $20 or $30 contest.

I assume my writing is as sexy as this woman's silhouette.

The people who run literary journals aren’t greedy like the scammers at the mall. In fact, most aren’t getting paid at all. There’s not much money in selling literary fiction these days, which is why they have to resort to squeezing writers to get even the few dollars needed to keep up a website or print a few copies. Stephen March, in a piece in Lithub in 2021 on Sally Rooney, compared literature as a business to the game musical chairs: “There is less and less room. There is less nature, there is less humanism, there is less capacity for argument, there are fewer places to publish, there is less attention to go around. There is less space, generally, from which to affirm life.” There are far too many writers relative to readers, so the only money literary journals can get is from the supply side, rather than demand, giving it its scammy appearance.

It’s important to keep this in mind when discussing the idea of blind submissions, or, more accurately, ending the practice of blind submissions. If the literary ecosystem currently favors certain demographics, it doesn’t favor them that much, because the system is bad for nearly everybody. And if certain proposals might shift the balance of favor in ways that might harm the potential for success of some writers, well, it’s not like the people benefitting are going to find themselves in all that enviable a situation, either. Writers should be kind to one another and try to preserve what dignity they can, rather than let the fight for the remaining scraps get ugly. There isn't much hope for any of us, so let's die with class. 

 The argument against blind submissions

I first became aware of the trend to end blind submissions a few weeks ago when I entered a short story contest. The decision surprised me, as I suppose it has a lot of people, mostly because I thought the research on blind submissions had showed it to be effective. I thought of the success of blind auditions in orchestras, which has been proven to improve the representation of women in orchestras.  

In explaining its decision, the journal cited three articles. Since becoming aware of the practice and looking into it a little further, I've seen these same three articles quoted quite a bit by other journals moving to similar practices. They are:

• The Politics of Gatekeeping: On Reconsidering the Ethics of Blind Submissions, by Joyce Chen
• The Politics of "Blind Submissions" Policies, from the editors of Apogee Magazine
• "How Can Literary Magazines Counter Their Biases?" by Elisa Gabbert

Below, I'm going to try to summarize the main arguments they make. Just in case it's not already clear, what we're talking about is the idea that when a story or poem or essay is submitted, it should either have information identifying the author or it should not. The three essays above all argue that it should include identifying information. 

1. There is a difference between orchestra auditions and literature

Two of the three essays explicitly mention those orchestra studies, and they acknowledge them as a reason why it might seem like a good idea to do the same thing in publishing. However, they argue that there are important differences between playing music and a writing/submitting a piece of literature. One important difference is that musicians typically do not play their own, original pieces in auditions. They are playing someone else's music, and there is, perhaps, while not perfect objectivity, at least relatively more of an objective standard as to how they are to perform. Chen writes: "Blind submissions do not actually have the same effect as, say, blind auditions, which suppose that the strength of a voice or an instrumental skill is more important than the identity of the singer or musician (also, the performed piece is not always an original piece). When it comes to writing, however, acknowledging the totality of the person behind the piece is arguably just as important as the piece itself." 

Gabbert probably explains the argument a little more precisely with: "Two cellists, a man and a woman, might audition with the same Bach piece; they won’t be playing their own music. And there seem to be nearly universally agreed upon standards of what constitutes good playing of Bach, which don’t vary much by gender. If they were each playing music of their own composition, we might run into a problem of bias again: namely, that we have been trained to perceive music written by men as great music. You glimpse this thinking in the common question, “Why are there no great female composers?” (Who says there aren’t?)"

2. The illusion of objectivity within the blind submission allows editors to indulge their conscious and unconscious biases

If writing has historically favored white, cis-male, heteronormative writing, and editors either fit those categories themselves or have been heavily influenced by an academic system that emphasized them, then they will struggle to avoid bringing assumptions fed by that system into their editing about what constitutes good literature. As the editors of Apogee put it, "the problem is that white/male/cis is the assumed standard."  Chen's version of the same idea was: "...in many corners of the literary world, quality has long been judged through a largely white, male, cis, heteronormative lens, and the practice of reading submissions blind perpetuates that standard of excellence and allows it to go unchecked." 

These assumptions might mean that an editor will fail to recognize another mode of storytelling, one that doesn't follow the narrative arc brought down from Aristotle. Or editors might discount diction that doesn't meet their expectations. In short, taking names off manuscripts doesn't mean that editors don't still bring biases with that into reading that can prevent greater inclusivity. Two of the articles cite statistics that show how literary magazines are still not (or as of 2017 were still not) as diverse as they ought to be. They reason from these statistics that editors continue to hold on to biases 

Problems with their arguments

The three articles use somewhat different logic to arrive at these claims, and cite different examples in places, but those two main arguments hold. Furthermore, all three acknowledge that blind submissions are not total evils. They can serve to fight against nepotism and favoritism. The Apogee article wrote" "There are valid reasons for doing blind submissions. Our friends at The James Franco Revieware all about blind submissions in order to stop the cult of celebrity." However, they also feel that in general, the good that blind submissions can do is outweighed by the negatives. Above all, all three alike argue that whether a journal chooses blind or identity-revealing submissions, what is really important is the makeup of the editorial staff. 

Overall, I think their arguments hold a reasonable amount of weight and are hard to dismiss completely. In practical terms, I think most literary journals have never really been blind. Other than in contests, which cost more money to enter, most do want identifying information on the piece being submitted, and it's been that way for a long time. If journals are going to do this, they ought to be all-in about it. Doing it halfway--by, say, asking for the name of the author but not looking at the biography--then they're asking for trouble. They might, in the quest to be inclusive, rule out someone who actually is Chinese or Guatemalan because they were adopted or took a married name or have a white father and now don't "sound" Chinese or Guatemalan. Also, some white writers might be able to present a very convincing world set within a non-white setting. I speak three foreign languages well enough to professionally translate in them. Much of my life has been in the company of non-white people, so I end up writing stories about non-white characters. Because I've been pretty deep in their culture, down to being able to speak the language, I can write a story that will make an editor think it was written by someone sharing the identity of those characters. I might even win a blind contest this way. In fact, I know that I've done this, because one editor told me so. So if a journal wants to avoid mistakenly picking a story by a white author, they need to go all-in. I'd recommend doing what Gordon Square Review has done. Their submission practices, the last time I submitted to them, said this: "We request that no cover letter or author bio be included in your submission. Instead, please share with Gordon Square Review what the story is about, the writing process of the story, and any context you believe is important to know while reading story." That seems to split the difference between not allowing for nepotism by allowing a writer to state how successful they already are, but also allowing a writer to explain how their background contributed to the story. 

Nonetheless, I do think there are some problems with ending blind submissions, and also with the philosophy of putting the author's identity front and center when selecting stories. Because that's really what all three articles are calling for. 

1. The lack of perfect objectivity in literature doesn't mean there are no standards at all. 

All three articles demonstrated what I would consider to be a troubling casualness in dismissing the notion of objective standards in literature. Chen wrote that "there is no such thing as objective quality." Apogee put it less extremely: "However, artistic and literary aesthetics are not an algorithm, and “literary excellence” is not an infallible mathematics." Gabbert, though, echoed Chen's absolute rejection of objectivity: "There is no universal standard of goodness." 

Rejecting the notion of objective aesthetic standards has become so commonplace, it seems many critics don't feel any sense of sorrow pronouncing that there is no such thing as "good" literature. They accept that literature can be reduced to a dialectical struggle between competing political interests and don't seem to feel any sense of loss. I've never been able to understand how. "No objectivity" would seem to mean you could just randomly pick stories for a magazine and do no worse than having a team of supposedly expert editors. Ask a computer to account for identities, pick the mix you want, and ignore the stories altogether. 

I'm sure Chen and Gabbert would reject this idea, if for no other reason than because it would diminish the political power of editors, which presumably they would like to keep in order to allow their kind of editors to fight for political ends they agree with. But they'd also likely agree that just because literary standards are not based on perfect objectivity doesn't mean there is no objectivity at all. It doesn't mean that 50 Shades of Grey is as "good"--yes, I think we can use that word--as Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

In aesthetics and ethics both, we might never be able, absent the decree of the gods, to determine with perfect accuracy where "good" lies, but we can create something like a plot graph, and we will find, over time and across cultures, that most of the dots for "good" are near one another. It can be hard to describe the area they inhabit, but that's really the job of literary and cultural criticism--to try to adduce something close to objectivity in a realm where there will never be absolute standards. 

Kim Yong Ha, a Korean writer I much admire, has written much about his admiration for Aristotle's Poetics. In spite of Kim's different cultural assumptions and identity, he finds a universal applicability in many of Aristotle's principles: "Thanks to (a movie director he heard about who always carried a copy of the Poetics in his pocket), I also started reading it, and that reading had an influence on novels I wrote afterwards...of course, my novels can't be compared to (the great classics Kim had been discussing earlier) but many writers the world over have gone through a similar process and ended up writing "work that seems new, but in reality is old." (From "Reading Dangerous Books," appearing in the collection See, Read, Speak. Translation mine.) 

Speaking three foreign languages may not make me the most globally aware reader, but it does mean I can to a small degree balance Western writing against some other traditions. And those other traditions show a nearly universal preference for a standard of "good" that even a fusty white professor from the 1950s would at least somewhat recognize. Even within Western culture, there have been eras where very different assumptions went into the production of literary work, and therefore those times yielded quite different work from other times. "Western literature" of the last 3,000 years is far from homogenous, but that doesn't mean we can't find something we can call "good" in any of the surviving records. 

2. The level of diversity needed to ensure the goal is impossible 

In this year's Best American Short Stories collection, one of the entries was "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam. As I pointed out in my critique of the story, it included a lot of veiled references to the last sixty years of Ethiopian history that would have been lost on most readers. At least some critics of the story ignored it, figuring one African country is the same as another. But I recognized the references, because, as fate would have it, I spent about five years studying modern Ethiopia rather deeply. So the story read quite differently to me than it would have to other readers. 

America is the most culturally diverse country on Earth. That means a journal can and will get submissions from writers who fully qualify as "American" but who are also writing from deep within other cultural contexts. Can any board of editors be diverse enough to recognize the political bent of a Nepalese-American, how that writer might be coming down on a variety of political issues well known to Nepalese diasporic readers but invisible to others? Can they do this for all the diasporas that might be represented within the submission pool? 

If we followed the recommendations of these three editorials, we might have picked a black, female editor over someone like me in order to achieve the needed diversity to judge a story like Maya's. But white, cis-male, middle-aged, balding, upper-middle-class me would have been a better judge of Maya's story.  (I say "Maya," rather than "Binyam," because Ethiopians use their given names to identify themselves. Did you know that? I do, but some critics of her story did not.) 

All three articles hoped that they could make up for weaknesses in identity-revealed submissions by first ensuring a properly diverse team of editors. But how on Earth is the average journal supposed to do this? How would they know if they are being blown away by something that seems novel to them, when in fact the writer is simply picking some very common item from another culture, one that wouldn't impress readers from that culture at all, the way Yoon Choi did in "The Art of Losing"? (For that matter, isn't it politically problematic that so much of the literary understanding of Americans about other countries comes from diasporic writers, rather than truly foreign writers in either the original language or in translation?) 

3. The statistics cited don't always support the arguments made

All three articles used similar statistics to prove that literary journals are still in thrall to white, cis-male, straight guys. They all seem to have ignored what is very clear from one of the very studies they cite: employees in the publishing industry are about 75% female. This has been an open secret in the literary community for as long as anyone can remember. Personally, as a writer who often creates what I've termed "bro lit," I feel that it's had an effect on what kinds of male stories get published. They are often either over-the-top tales of toxic masculinity, or they feature male characters I don't really recognize. 

One might also note other anomalies in the data. A whopping 19% identify as something other than straight, although the percentage of people in the general population identifying themselves as LGBT is around 7%. As in music and film, if anything, there is an over-representation of non-straight voices, at least in terms of raw numbers. This might be because there is something about literature that tends to attract LGBT people. Indeed, I've taken personality inventories that suggested I was gay, largely based on nothing more than my self-identified love of poetry. So there's likely nothing invidious in it, but it would be hard to claim that if there's an under-representation in publishing of non-straight voices, it's owing to a lack of representation among decision makers. 

That same study from Lee & Low Books identified a number of improvements within publishing that have taken place since the first survey they took. All in all, the assumed dire situation all three share seems overstated. We are in the middle of a shift, and if the slow and steady approach hasn't yielded all the results we'd like right away, that's no reason to suddenly switch to the nuclear option.

You keep on citing those statistics. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

4. Putting the author back in the center of literary study will undo a century of important critical work

In his essay "Authorship in Contemporary American Literature," Anis Shivani traces the history of the place of the author in critical theory over the last 100 years. Once, critics viewed the mind of the author, or the author's true intent, as the transcendental signified it was the critic's duty to discover. However, after first the New Critics and then Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, not only did the author cease to be the central foucs of literary study, but actually, in the more extreme versions, the author disappeared entirely. The author was "dead," to use the title of Barthes' essay. 

However, Shivani observes that, counter to the critical preference for the decentralizing of the author, the publishing industry prefers to have the author at the center of literarture. "From technology to economics to culture, the tendency today ought to be for the supremacy of ecriture (writing), the reduction of the author to scriptor, whereas in fact the literary industry pushes hard for exactly the opposite, the transcendence of the author and the negation of the reader."

Criticism sees the death of the author as an important part of dismantling authoritarianism in general, because of the way it gives freedom to the reader, whereas authors "actively excluding creative readers from interpretation" is exactly what publishers want. The author's "own authenticity deriving in large part from the academic discourse of diversity, authors must blend into this discourse if they are to have any authority in the marketplace of texts. Authority is extracted ultimately from the community of novice writers, rather than freestanding critics, again evoking medieval conditions. Active readership, which may take interpretation in such stray directions, becomes a hindrance to the author's establishment of authenticity, which rests on constraining the possible range of interpretations."

Criticism of all sorts viewed author-centered readings with suspicion. To use one example from feminist theory, Toril Moi's criticism of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic undermines the way the book assumed a unitary and whole female author throughout its history of literature, a move that ironically reified the entire patriarchal structure it was meant to attack: "For the patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin, and meaning of the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of authority, we must take one further step and proclaim with Roland Barthes the death of the author." 

Chen claimed that "When it comes to writing... acknowledging the totality of the person behind the piece is arguably just as important as the piece itself."  What is this if not putting the author's identity at the forefront in a way even the pre-New Critical world would not have? 

My own biases and interests 

I conclude by acknowledging that I, like everyone trying to publish fiction, have my own interests that are affected by the philosophies of editing staffs. If they are to actively, rather than wistfully, push for greater diversity of story tellers--and they should--then this likely makes the odds longer for me. I don't want to write this, because it sounds like "reverse racism" nonsense, but I don't see how the math works out any other way. The majority of writers submitting to any mainstream journal are probably white. Let's say a staff makes a decision to actively pursue diversity by considering the identity of the writer, and says that of the four stories it will chose to publish in its next edition, at least two must be by writers of color. If 80% of the 500 submissions are from white writers, my odds of getting published are now 200 to 1. The odds of a writer of color are 50 to 1. Those odds are still terrible for both of us. The point is not to claim some kind of reverse racism, but I think it's dishonest gasligthing not to admit that at least in the short term, the odds for a non-established white, cis-male, straight author of breaking in through a journal are going to be longer than those of a lesbian Chinese-American woman. 

Of course, the writers of these essays would argue that the practice isn't unfair, because the writer of color had to overcome more obstacles just to get to a place where she could submit a story to a journal at all. There's certainly merit to that argument, and in the big picture of what's good for society, the practice is likely beneficial. But when I get rejections and feel like I'm worthless for a day, I may not care about what's good for society as a whole. I'm not going to argue that my feelings are a reason to keep the old policies, but editors should at least be aware that those feelings will exist. 

The big difference between what I'm saying and what a "reverse racism" proponent would say is that I'm not really arguing that it should be different. Harold Bloom complained about literary awards given out based more on the identity of the writer than on the quality, but I've found, as a close reader of short fiction award winners for the past decade, that the quality of writing of stories hasn't gone down. I would guess that what's more likely happening is that editors are getting an abundance of stories good enough--and here, I'll use "good" unproblematically--to be published. With more good stories than they can publish, they look to authorial identity as a sort of tie-breaker. It's much the way affirmative action college decisions were supposed to be made. This is a fine way to pick stories, and probably as good a way to decide between stories of relatively equal merit as there could be. 

The biggest award I've received as a writer was winning New Letters' Robert Day Award for fiction. I won a contest that was read blind. The judge was a female writer of color. I wonder if she read my story, about a North Korean defector working at a hotel in Seoul, and found it "felt" authentic enough that it likely came from an ethnically Korean writer. I wonder if that helped me win. Nobody ever said anything to me about it, and the magazine still runs this contest without identifying information on entries. That story had been a near-miss at many journals before winning the contest, and I do wonder if it would have ever been published in such a high-quality journal if it hadn't been for a blind contest. If there are no blind contests again, I might never get into such a high quality magazine again. 

If that's true, it's okay. Proponents argue that in the long run, this activist approach might actually help writers like me, because it will grow the community of readers. Ideally, it would make journals less financially strapped in the future as the literary world becomes less moribund. I'm skeptical this will happen, but I do think that of all the attempts to actively improve our society's assumptions about race, the most effective one has been the proliferation of narrative platforms to new and diverse voices. If I have to be a part of the generation of white writers whose prospects shrank for the first time in history in order to get there, then I accept that, based on utilitarian "greatest good for the greatest number" reasoning. I'd only ask that in return, I not be given assurances that things are still easier for white, male writers than they are for everyone else. This might be true for established writers, but I don't think it's true for people trying to break in. The math just doesn't support that. 

The limits of literary fiction: a wrap-up of Best American Short Stories 2020

I believe this is the eighth year I've read Best American Short Stories now, and I'd put the 2020 edition in the top three of those eight in terms of quality of stories.  One of the unique merits it had, which I'll credit to guest editor Curtis Sittenfeld, was something I alluded to in my post on the last story in the anthology, "The Special World" by Tiphanie Yanique. That is, the volume worked better as a whole than any other edition I've seen. It was amazing how much the stories, none of which were written with the other stories in the volume in mind, responded to one another. Nonetheless, in spite of the excellence of many stories individually and how well they worked together (in fact, perhaps because of how good a volume it was), BASS 2020 also kept reinforcing for me a number of limitations of literary fiction that have more or less been in the back of my mind since graduate school. Sittenfeld's own introduction to the anthology served to crystalize a few of these limitations in my mind:  

1. Literary fiction moves slow: BASS in any given year looks at stories published in the year before. The basic model seems to go something like this: series editor Heidi Pitlor picks 120 stories from however many stories she starts with--likely several hundreds that were originally published between December of the year prior to November of the current year. Pitlor then gives those 120 stories to the guest editor in several batches between November and March of the next year. The guest editor finishes picking twenty by the end of March, the proofs get ironed out, and it gets published in October (COVID-19 made it late this year). 

That means the 2020 BASS featured stories originally published as far back as December 2018, which means the stories themselves could have been written as far back as 2017 or even earlier, since once a story is written, it can take over a year to find a market to publish it, and then another several months for it to be published. 

Both Heidi and Curtis mentioned COVID-19 in their remarks on this year's anthology, but because both wrote those remarks in the early spring, by the time BASS came out, their thoughts were completely overtaken by events. Naturally, none of the stories in Best American Short Stories 2020 is aware COVID is a thing, which means the short story anthology bearing the name of the year the pandemic struck doesn't address the pandemic. That will have to wait until the 2021 anthology. Or maybe 2022, since most of the stories published in literary magazines in 2020 were written in 2019, also before the pandemic, meaning nobody was aware of it in those stories, either. (I wrote a pandemic story in the first weeks of the outbreak. Four of the journals I sent it to have not yet looked at it, to give you some idea of the speed at which literary journals work sometimes.) 

Roxane Gay, writing in a BASS introduction a few years ago, defended fiction writers for not being able to crank out the definitive story on the meaning of the Trump election in the months after it happened. She pointed out that fiction writing doesn't work like that. You can't just say "here is crisis X" and expect writers to produce work on that crisis. Great work takes time to process events. Sometimes, it takes a very long time, in order to get enough distance to get control of the subject. (Here, I think of the first chapter of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, where he discusses how his anti-war novel was the first novel he tried to write, but he kept failing at it for decades, until he'd written many other books, before he finally knew how to write it. It's worth noting that BASS 2020 had one story in it about the fallout of the 2016 election, "In the Event," reflecting somewhat how long it can take for art to reflect changes in reality.) 

I understand all of that, and maybe it is enough to be able to point, in an emergency, to a book written earlier though the slow-cooking process that seems to respond to something similar. Maybe there was no great novel in 2020 about the pandemic, but there is The Plague by Albert Camus. 

Still, it feels sometimes like how long it takes to create work that responds to current events is a huge limitation of literary fiction. There are TV shows now that work COVID into the story lines. If a TV show, with all the massive logistics that go into it, can respond on that fast a timetable, why can't literature, which really just requires the ability to transmit text? 

Journalism relies on a two-tiered approach. It does both breaking news and longer-term, in-depth reporting. Both are needed to give a democratic society the information it needs to make good decisions. I can't help but feel that literature could also benefit from stories written from the gut in the middle of a crisis, stories that have limited editing and are turned around quickly. 

There are some places where this exists, some journals that turn things around on a dime. But with so many journals out there, it's difficult for any one story to gain enough traction culturally to have an impact on the public psyche. Fiction writing is failing to inject itself into public discourse meaningfully. For better or worse, anthologies like BASS are required to give a busy public the essential reading they need. Even I rely on the anthologies, because there are thousands of journals, and I'm not going to read through them all or even more than maybe a small handful of them, although I likely read more literary fiction than about ninety-eight percent of the general public. But the time lag with anthologies means the stories people read in them are always going to be unaware of today's events. It has the effect of making literary fiction always feel behind the times, maybe even a little irrelevant. 

I have no doubt editors are always working hard, but books get published on slower schedules than the ones used by general contractors. 

2. Literary fiction as a business suffers from both hegemony and post-hegemony. Sittenfeld wrote in her introduction about being "disenchanted with the so-called literary industrial complex," even while admitting she benefitted from being on the inside of this complex. She felt the industry has a penchant for producing buzz not in line with the quality of a work. Everything is supposedly spell-binding or mesmerizing, while Sittenfeld often finds herself bailing on these supposedly spell-binding works early on. 

The reason every work must be praised to absurd levels is because the supply of quality literary work far outstrips the demand. There are still a few gatekeepers with the power to sell enough books for a work to succeed commercially. Oprah. To a lesser extent, Roxane Gay. High-profile reviewers still have some influence, although not nearly as much as they once did. Awards also tend to give book a much-needed shot in the arm. Outside the few lucky writers blessed by these gods, there are hundreds of finely crafted novels every year languishing for the attention they deserve, along with thousands of short stories. It's like an electronics market in Seoul where everyone is selling the same things; the only thing to distinguish them is how loud the person hawking his wares is. 

BASS is definitely inside the literary-industrial complex. It tends to feature more big-name authors than, say, the Pushcart anthology does, and the guest editor is unfailingly a big name. Being in BASS is one of the few gifts the industry can still bestow on an undiscovered author to give her career a shot in the arm. (Although some of the writers I follow on Twitter were published in BASS and now still seem to be struggling.) BASS helps overcome the lack of hegemony in publishing by providing one place where writers can rise above the noise of the marketplace somewhat. It's hard to sell your work as a writer, but if you've been in BASS, you have a somewhat better chance. In that sense, the power of the few remaining outposts of literary establishment strength are of great value to writers. Hegemony is helpful. It might not be great for those outside it, but at least there's a goal to strive toward that, once achieved, will provide writers with some semblance of what they were hoping for. Without an establishment, there could well be a sort of law of thermodynamics of the marketplace in effect in which there are thousands of writers, none of whom can gain enough notice to sell more than a handful of books. 

Or would it? Are markets really not able to self-regulate? Aren't there always a few outsider books that succeed without the help of the establishment, through word of mouth? 

The establishment's effect on aesthetics 

Sittenfeld listed, as most guest editors do, a sort of "what I look for in a story" summary in her introduction. It's pretty similar to what I'd have said while I was an editor with The Baltimore Review, or what I now say as a fiction editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House: "My favorite feeling as a reader is the confidence that the writer is in control, is one step (or more) ahead of me, possesses a knowing sensibility that he or she is unfurling as the narrative demands." In other words, as readers, we like to have a feeling we're in good hands. I completely agree. 

There's something else I look for in a story, though, that I would describe as the feeling the writer could not help but write this story, that it was eating a hole in her gut, and that she is personally invested in it in much more than a professional sense. Occasionally, this leads to a story, or at least parts of a story, where it seems to me the writer is not totally in control, where it seems the narrative has become so full of fury or passion that the writer is now throwing punches with all his might, heedless of technique or the need to keep his own guard up. Writing with no technique and all passion is unreadable, but writing that's all technique and no passion is unmemorable. 

The literary establishment is useful in that at least some writers can succeed commercially nowadays, but it comes with a cost. The cost is that there is a way to write to get into that establishment and a way not to write. I don't think it's true, as some people charge, that everyone with an MFA writes the same, and I don't believe all the stories in BASS sound the same, but there must be some real thing people feel that makes this such a common statement. 

Maybe it would be accurate to say there is a general center of gravity for the "literary establishment aesthetic." There are certain things a writer does to give editors the feeling of being "in control" of the story, and there are, perhaps, certain political viewpoints that are considered safe, certain topics one is at least advised to stay away from, if none that is specifically recommended. 

On the other hand, the editors of the Pushcart anthology have expressed that a certain unpolished rawness is something they actively seek out. Stories in Pushcart more often seem to speak to issues that affect me on an existential level. They feel more like they were written by people thinking things I think and living the kind of life I live, whereas BASS sometimes has a more rarified feel. (NOTE: This year, Pushcart and BASS overlap on FOUR stories, something I've never seen before.) Not that BASS never allows in outsiders. Clearly, they do. I think every editor strives for balance when putting together a volume, and part of that balance is picking new voices. But the very careful selection of that balance sometimes feels a little contrived, and I might actually prefer something a little unbalanced. The best BASS I've read yet was that one put together by Roxane Gay, which was the one that made the least effort to spread around the demographics equitably. 

Sittenfeld spoke of a middle ground between wide-eyed wonder at the excellence of stories and cynicism about the marketplace. I think there is also, maybe, a middle ground between the well-polished, industry-approved story that makes no impact in the lives of its readers and the written-in-a-coke-addled-weekend raw story of existential dread. Of the stories I thought best from BASS 2020, some fit my "story that felt like the writer had no choice but to write it" criteria ("Godmother Tea," "This is Pleasure," "Rubberdust," "Kennedy," and "Octopus VII") and some did not ("Something Street" and "The Nanny"). Just like a writer can have a burning existential issue and seek to find the fictional technique to fit it, a writer can feel a story come to them from a more aesthetic than existential place, but find the existential importance of the story while writing it. All the stories in BASS 2020 that didn't work for me, though, (and where, unlike Sittenfeld, I don't think it's just a question of the story not being for me, but the story actually not being worth reading) felt like they were written by a professional writer straining to find a story to write about, "The Apartment" being chief among those. ("Liberte" I can chalk up to my own idiosyncrasies, as well, perhaps, as "Enlightenment.")  

I can indulge a writer in almost anything she wants to try, but I cannot abide a writer who does not consider that a reader comes to her work looking for answers to certain burning questions of how to make sense of the world, nor writing that seems as if the writer has left all those burning questions behind her, like only naive and pretentious freshmen like those in "The Special World" ask such questions. I don't have time for writing written by someone who isn't made dizzy continually by being in a world that ultimately makes so little sense. 

Perhaps these two limits of literary fiction, the lack of timeliness and the way establishment fiction sometimes fails to address the central-most questions of its readers, are related. The need for emotional distance needed for art always risks becoming a little too distant, much like the pastor who spends so much time preparing his sermon he is not aware that half his congregation was just laid off. There is both a prophetic role for authors as well as a pastoral one, if I may use that analogy, and in the best writers, the ones who matter most to me, the two roles work together. 

I do not write to indict the literary fiction establishment (which, let's be honest, struggles so much with commercial viability it's a little hard to think of it as an "establishment;" in the big picture, even the giants of lit fic are indie darlings). Obviously, the big names of literary fiction speak to me often enough I spend time every year carefully reading Best American Short Stories, responding to every entry. I mean only to suggest as a reader with existential needs that "establishment" stories tend, when they fail, to do so because they leave me a little cold when I consider why they matter, whereas "outsider" stories, if they fail, do so because the writer has not gained enough control over the thing that matters I learn anything new about it.  

American Blurt: The quest for the hot take is not good for literature

I have humble goals nowadays with this blog, but even those humble goals seem to get waylaid. I had planned to blog through the O.Henry Anthology, but unlike last year, I was only going to blog stories I really connected with, rather than the whole thing. So it was supposed to be easier on me. But after reading Rachael Kondo's "Girl of Few Seasons," the fourth story in the anthology, I got a little sidetracked. Then I got a lot sidetracked, and this post is the result of that sideways meandering. I didn't really have strong feelings about Kondo's story either way, and I could have just passed it by, but I was interested in Kondo's use in the story of Hawaiian Pidgin, also known as Hawaii Creole English. I wondered whether she might have been a user of the language at home, or if she had just used it in a story. Most of the use of HCE in the story was pretty light, the kinds of things most people who live in Hawaii (I lived there for four years in the 90s) pick up and use casually, stuff like "pau hana."

It turns out Kondo has written engagingly and thoughtfully on the subject of using HCE in literature. Pidgin is, in fact, part of her heritage. Her grandmother was among those Japanese imported laborers who helped create the language we now have, although it has morphed from what her grandmother once spoke. The use in Kondo's story of HCE was the story's biggest success; she used it to effectively establish scene and tone. It wasn't overdone, and it felt like it belonged.

Still, I wondered whether there might be some who would take offense to her use of HCE. Although Kondo's grandmother spoke it at home, I get the sense Kondo herself doesn't, or at least not beyond the casual level of most Hawaii residents. She--to her credit, with a great deal of honesty--explains how she grew up programmed to think that speaking "correct" English put her family on a level above the kids around her who spoke HCE. Although her understanding of the language has since matured greatly, I don't get the sense she speaks HCE at home currently much more than any resident of Hawaii. (Even the most foreign haole who lives there for a while will eventually pick up at least some.)

Last year, I wrote about a controversy within literary circles that erupted when a white poet wrote about the experiences of a (possibly) black homeless man. Some readers took offense to the poem's use of what they viewed as African-American Vernacular English. More accurately, they seemed to take offense to the poet's use of AAVE, charging (without proving) that the language was inaccurate and exploitative. Kondo's story, however, didn't seem to enrage anyone. Not that I thought it should, but I wondered rather vaguely why this story didn't, but a poem like "How To" did.

Maybe one of the reasons Kondo's story didn't cause any controversy is because Hawaiians seem to be pretty chill about the use of racial stereotypes. This photo is a comedian born with the name Shawn Kaui Hill, who, using the stage name "Bu La'ia," was all over Hawaiian TV when I lived there in the 90s. As you can see, he is wearing an afro wig and has a tooth blacked out. I was always shocked by his act and the fact it was considered so non-offensive, he was used in commercials doing his over-the-top goofy pidgin schtick. If nobody objected to this, it's hard to believe anyone would object to a story like "Girl of Few Seasons," which is obviously aiming for a sensitive portrayal of characters who speak HCE. It likely wouldn't matter to the community that the writer isn't fully a native speaker.  

American Dirt

I'd have just passed on from thinking about this story without feeling the need to write anything about it, but then the whole public storm surrounding American Dirt happened, and I've been mired in thinking about that and trying in vain to write about it ever since. It's a bit of a personal issue for me. I'm a white, male author who writes a lot of his stories from the point-of-view of people of color. To me, there's nothing exploitative about this. I'm a translator. I'm fascinated by the people I've come in contact with as a translator. I've bought my access to their stories the hard way, by putting in the work to learn other languages and cultures. But some of the dialogue online about Dirt seemed to take the same assumption some took about the poem "How To": if you aren't yourself a member of the same racial and socio-economic community as the characters you write about, you shouldn't write about them, ever. As a guy who wrote this story about an Ethiopian maid and this story about an Ethiopian-American runner and this story about a couple of Eritrean refugees and this story about an Ethiopian-American translator dating a Korean girl, I was sort of dismayed by some of the posts I saw about this book.

The actual story, not the story you'd get on Twitter

My dismay had something to do with how I came to learn about it mostly through posts I saw on Twitter. I'm not going to dignify the posts I saw by re-posting them, but I think they're probably good examples of the inherent limitations of Twitter. It's a great place to recommend thoughtful pieces posted elsewhere, and you can show your support or dislike for the story in an abbreviated form, but almost anytime anyone tries to express something substantive about real ideas, it inevitably gets turned into exaggeration and gratuitous provocation. The quest for traffic, clicks, and overall relevance leads to always looking for a hot take. It's not enough to say that a book may have meant well, but the decision by the publishing industry and Oprah to turn the book into a pampered darling is puzzling, given that there are far better treatments of the same subject by more talented writers who know the subject better. You have to instead scream about how white writers can never, ever write about people of color because it's always exploitative and appropriative.

Among all the heat created by Twitter, I managed to find a bit of light on Latino USA, which interviewed four people, including the author. There is also a nice chronology of the controversy on their page, including how one particularly stinging attack on the book by Myriam Gurba came to be. How it all went down was something like this:

-American newsrooms started getting advanced copies of American Dirt in late 2019. There were blurbs from respected authors, including Don Winslow, who called the book "A Grapes of Wrath for our time." The author praised writer Luis Urrea in the introduction, whom she said she read thoroughly as part of her research.
-Some Latina writers also praised the novel, including Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Reyna Grande.
-Myriam Gurba wrote a fierce take-down of the book, but had a hard time getting it published, because, according to what she says she was told, she was too negative.
-After the book came out, nothing much happened, but then Oprah put it in her book club, which is about the best thing that can happen to a writer as far as sales go.
-At that point, people actually started to notice not only Gurba's criticism, but that of other Latinx writers as well.
-Some people, like actress Salma Hayek, took back their support for the book. One person who did not retract her support was House on Mango Street author Sandra Cisneros, who insisted she thought the book had merit.
-Twitter lost its mind.

The rest of this long post, condensed

When you actually listen to the four people on Latino USA, you'll find that even the most strident of them (Gurba) isn't saying anything like "white people shouldn't write about people of color." That's Twitter dumbing down the conversation. I think literary figures should be very careful of how they interact with Twitter to keep from being part of the dumbing down the medium often leads to.

The longer version

I'll start by condensing what Gurba, Cisneros, Luis Urrea, and the author of American Dirt herself said about the controversy during the hour-long Latino USA program. I think everyone had at least a decent point or two.

Gurba: The book is trash. It wasn't well researched, it was schlock, it traded on a certain version of Mexico that only exist in the uneducated white imagination. She doesn't buy that this book needs to exist in order to humanize Mexicans to Americans who otherwise wouldn't engage with a book like this (i.e., who wouldn't read a book by a writer with a Latino name). She feels Mexicans are capable of telling their own stories. Ultimately, she says she wouldn't have been so angry about the book if it hadn't been billed as such worthy fare, if it hadn't been compared to Steinbeck. If it had been sold as a narco-romance piece of mierda instead, she wouldn't have fretted about it.

My take: In many of her comments, she is presenting her beef as with the publishing industry even more than with the book. She's right, of course. It's mystifying why some books become media darlings and some get gently ignored. There have been great books about the border already, none of which got the media push this pulp novel did. I do think her piece is a little heavy on its joy in Spanglish swear words and a little light on actual literary criticism and interaction with the text. It's going for the hot take, and as a result, it's not great criticism. Instead, it's a polemic about a number of things, only one of which is this book. She starts off her essay by saying that when she tells gringos her father was a publicist in Mexico, their eyes get wide, meaning they are all surprised Mexico even has publicists. I have to wonder if she is intentionally seeking out the stupidest white people on the planet. Starting off in this way makes me think that, even though she said her objection isn't to who wrote it but how she wrote it, it's also maybe a little bit about who wrote it.

And while I accept that Mexicans can tell their own stories just fine, thank you very much, my life's work is in translation, and it is possible that a white writer who really does the work (which American Dirt did not do) to understand his subject may be more successful translating that work into the target audience's idiom than a Mexican writer. When I translate Korean to English, what I really want is to have a native Korean speaker who learned English and a native English speaker who learned Korean working together. Those produce the best overall translations. I think stories in the real world might also work best if we had natives of multiple worlds trying to speak to certain topics. Of course, the problem with American audiences is that we tend to only lean on the work "in translation," the one from the writer who comes from our own community. It's hard to even get Americans to watch a movie that has subtitles.

Cisneros: If you've never heard Cisneros speak, her voice is a little distracting. She's got kind of a Mickey Mouse squeaky voice. And some of what she said was a little nuts. She had a valid point that there's room for more than one person's story. A white lady can tell a story about the border and so can a Chicana from Matamorros and so can a Chinese journalist from Chengdu. What she's mostly been criticized for is saying that American Dirt is necessary because some people just wouldn't read a book by someone with a Latino name. At first, I didn't think that's what she was saying in the interview. I thought she was saying someone would read Dirt because it was a trashy beach novel but they might not read someone like Reyna Grande because it's "serious" fiction. But the interviewer asked if she meant people wouldn't read someone with a Spanish name, and Cisneros agreed that's what she meant.

My take: Cisneros is definitely wrong to co-sign the publishing industry pushing a book about Mexico by a white lady if they're only doing it because they think they can sell that better than a book by someone named Hernandez.

While I agree that there ought to be enough room for everyone to tell their story, I wonder if the fact that pragmatically, there really isn't enough room for everyone is part of why Gurba is so angry. There can only be so many Oprah Book Club books. If this one gets in, there won't be room for a Latinx writer to get a book about the border onto her list. The book industry's quest for equality sometimes helps writers of color, but it can also hurt them. A publisher might not take on a second Chinese-American writer if they already have one who sells well, because they'd think they'd be cannibalizing their own sales. Ethnic groups are sales niches to them, and there's a zero sum game competing for the dollars of a shrinking pool of readers. If a Latinx writer wrote a book about the border this year, nobody would touch it, because we already have one of those. It's kind of easy for Cisneros to talk about there being room for everyone when she's living off the royalties of a book that has sold millions of copies to school children. I have to really ask myself, if I ever really break through, am I possibly making my voice the one American readers will read on certain topics, and if so, is that right? Like most writers, I couldn't stop writing if I tried (I've tried! I'm trying right now!), so I doubt this concern will make me stop, but it ought to sober up my dreams a bit.


Urrea: Luis Alberto Urrea has written a couple of stunning books about the border. They were non-fiction. The best-known is The Devil's Highway. That book is a generation old now. A few people have pointed out that American Dirt seems to plagiarize from Urrea.  Luis spoke slowly during this interview, audibly a little angry, I think, which is probably as strong an indictment of this book as any I can imagine. Luis was an instructor of mine for a poetry class in graduate school. He's as gentle a man as I've ever met. So if someone has made him upset, that person likely really did something wrong. Anyhow, Luis spoke mostly about his sense of violation, because his research had been lived research. "I buried that person," he said about a child in a scene that American Dirt most obviously "borrows" from. Urrea, however, also was the most overt in making it clear that the problem isn't that Cummins is white. "Lots of people have written great stuff about the border from an Anglo perspective," Urrea said. The problem was that the book was derivative and lazy.

My take: I love Luis.

Cummins herself: I totally get that the publishing industry is unfair to people of color. The frustration I'm hearing is totally fair. But I'm not responsible for all that. I wish people would talk about the book and not the industry.

My take: I read one chapter of her book. It wasn't good. Nothing is fair. Publishing is stupid. Publishers are idiots. I don't hate her for writing a bad book. I hate the game, not the player.

This all comes home for me

If you get away from Twitter, everyone seems to be saying the right things. The problem isn't that she's white. It's not who wrote it, but how she wrote it. But I can't help sympathizing with Cummins in one way. She says she wrote an earlier version of the book with a white narrator who was observing, rather than writing from the perspective of the immigrant herself. She later tore that version up and started over, because "who cares what I have to say, really?" In other words, she was more interested in the people she had researched than she was in her own role as researcher.

I can sympathize. I write my fair share of stories about white people in middle class situations, but I really love stories about people who are different from me. They're more interesting than I am. I like stories about Ethiopians and Eritreans and Koreans and Latino migrant workers and the kids from Baltimore Mrs. Heretic taught. Sometimes, when I write about them, I do it from the point of view of the white observer. I did that in this story, about a white father trying to figure things out when his family adopts a black girl. That was an easy way into the story for me, because I've really played that role in my life. That's actually the way I know the "character" I got that story from. But I don't always do that. When I told a story about an Eritrean woman at a refuge center in Italy who needs to decide whether to abort the child she was impregnated with by rape from a kidnapper during her flight from Eritrea, I didn't tell it from the perspective of the white nurse aid worker. I told it from the POV of the girl, Hiwet. Why? I don't know. In my mind, I saw her. A story from the POV of the nurse would have been about craft and technique and how to tell a story through learned details. The story I told was about the girl, what happened to her, and what she did about it. I didn't want a complicated story. I wanted to keep it simple. That felt more respectful to what she went through, and what so many real people like her went through.

I've told stories about Koreans and been told by white editors that they thought I was falling back on cliches. I don't believe they'd have told me that if my name was Pak Nam Won. I think they assume lack of authenticity on my part. Most white editors have no idea what authenticity in a Korean character would look like. One editor responded to a story by telling me he asked his brother who has been to Korea if he thought a Korean would act the way I made her act in a story, and the brother said no. How do I get anywhere with that kind of refusal to accept an ethos I've actually worked to earn?

The winning book

I'm now the lead fiction editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House, the small press that published my own book a few years ago. We publish one poetry book and one fiction book a year. We recently picked this year's winning fiction book, The Rest of the World, by Adam Schwartz.

Like many presses, ours is always looking to try to bring some fairness to publishing by actively looking to publish writers of color. However, we also run a blind contest, meaning we don't know anything about the writers when we're reading their work. We have to pick based on what's on the page. When I was reading Adam's book, I was blown away by a few of the stories. Even though this year had the best crop of books since I started judging the contest three years ago, I knew his was the winner. Four of six judges agreed with me. The two who didn't still thought it was tied for first or in second.

The stories are largely about young people of color in Baltimore, most of whom are living in tough circumstances. I knew the stories rang true, as did the occasional use of dialect, because I've spent enough time with the kids Mrs. Heretic used to teach in Baltimore to have a decent sense of authenticity. I was really excited, because I thought we had a book by a person of color that was a stunner.

I was stunned myself when I realized, after picking the book, that it was written by a white guy. But that white guy came by his authenticity through hard work. He's been a teacher in Baltimore for twenty-two years. I had the chance to meet with Adam recently. His love for his kids is real, and that's what powered his fiction. He has an ear for the language his kids use because he loves them and he pays attention.

I had picked the book blind, so I knew I had to pick it even after I knew who Adam was. But I was worried. Would anyone criticize the press for an American Dirt kind of publication?

It wasn't an idle concern. Adam has recently faced something like that. He got a story (one of the stories that's in the book) accepted for publication in a pretty good journal. The editor said she loved it and he was all set to go. But then, she showed the story to a "sensitivity reader" who found problems on every page. The reader thought Adam was preying on negative stereotypes of poor, black kids. I've read the story. I don't understand how having a story with a young, black man in tough circumstances is the same as trafficking in negative stereotypes. And I don't believe a black writer would have to face these questions about authenticity.

Adam shouldn't have to, either. He's a teacher of young, black kids, many of whom have stories that would crush your heart to hear. That's not white imagination. It's black reality, a reality Adam lives in and does his part every day to try to turn around. Mrs. Heretic still has never recovered from teaching in Baltimore, because her poor, empathetic heart couldn't stop sharing in the trauma of her students, until it became her trauma, too. Adam's not an outsider to the communities he writes about. He's a vital part of those communities.

That incident with the journal wasn't the only time he's faced these kinds of accusations. At a writer's conference, he workshopped the same story. He told me about a fourth of the class was openly hostile to it, calling it "voyeuristic" and an example of the "white gaze." (If there's one thing that's worse for literary criticism than Twitter, it's mediocre intellects who only half understand the jargon of literary theory.) One person cornered him after the session to tell him he shouldn't write about people of color.

This was all for a story whose underlying main plot point came right from a student Adam had. This wasn't a white guy watching rap music videos about gangsters on his couch and letting his imagination run wild. In the words Luis Urrea used, Adam "buried that kid." Adam earned his stories by living within both physical and emotional hearing distance of their origins, then applying a caring and intelligent mind to shaping them.

All that matters is if the story is good

The most-read post I've ever written on this blog was about Danielle Evans's short story "Boys Go to Jupiter," about a white girl who wears a Confederate flag bikini. The third most-read post I've ever written was about Danielle Evans's "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," about a couple of white, emotionally challenged women. Nobody questions whether she ought to be writing about white people as a black writer. Nobody questions whether she is exploiting negative white stereotypes.

The reason nobody questions Evans isn't some reverse racism. It's because Evans absolutely killed those two stories. Her authority to write about white women comes from writing them really well, nothing else.

I'd like the same authority for myself when I write about the people I do, including some people of color. I don't believe there's any kind of reverse racist code keeping me from it, but I do think that for people like me, trying to get our foot in the door, we face a lot of people who don't know the difference between fake authenticity and real, so they rely on the identity of the author to help them. They will make assumptions. There's a reason Michael Derrick Hudson couldn't get a poem published until he said his name was Yi-Fen Chou. Again, I don't think it's an affirmative action program as much as it's befuddled editors, looking for something they haven't seen before, swamped with work that largely seems of roughly equal quality, and looking for some kind of clue to help them out.

I don't want to be mistaken as saying I think the industry is stacked against white men. It obviously isn't. There are numbers to back that up. But getting into the industry is tough for a white guy writing particular kinds of work. I'm as disturbed as anyone when the wrong novel by a white writer writing about people of color gets support it doesn't deserve. It's bad for me. A novel like American Dirt getting unfairly praised, supported, and rewarded--and then lambasted--will only make the top of the industry less likely to pick works like this. The bottom of the industry is likely to follow suit, in a crude, robotic, and likely not very thoughtful way. (Adam Schwartz pitched a similar book to the one we're publishing to an editor before. She said she loved it, but "couldn't think of publishing it in this climate.")

This isn't a manifesto of white male grievance. It's not Matthew Binder's piece. I want to see publishing (if it survives at all) pushing more stories by people of color, not for abstract reasons, but because people of color are so often the right people to tell stories. I don't believe white men are in trouble, or unfairly pushed out of writing. This isn't about any of those things. It's about how gatekeepers pick crap, and how this affects people at the bottom. It's about how for every American Dirt, a book written by someone without the bona fides to tell it that gets unjustified support, there's an Adam Schwartz, being told he doesn't deserve to tell a story he clearly does. It's about how quickly a rational, nuanced discussion of the role of white writers in telling stories of people of color beomes "shut up, cracker," on social media, and how social media then becomes the only version of the discussion that exists.

At the bottom of all this is the quest for the hot take, the spicy take-down. Hot takes have been an unfortunate part of academic life for centuries, as critics writing about literature people have been reading and commenting on for hundreds of years try to find something new to say. Twitter is just a very condensed version of academic nonsense. But unlike academic work, which most people ignore, Twitter drives sales, which means that as vapid as the discourse on Twitter is, publishers can't afford to ignore it. We all have a part to play in not feeding into talk that's more for public consumption than serious talk about serious issues. When we feed that beast, we help contribute to the production of more bad literature from a shaky and uncertain industry. More importantly, we bring literature down to the level of pop culture, or worse, a cheap imitation of wannabe pop culture, every bit as pathetic as a church trying to look relevant by running commercials about how hip it is.

On New Year's Day, at the crossroads as always

On the first day of the new year, I think all aspiring writers are supposed to feel the way this Tweet encourages us to feel:

Am I an aspiring writer? I mean, I write already. I even get published sometimes. I guess I aspire to more with writing, but isn't that every writer? Isn't every writer "aspiring"?

My own current mental state is somewhat less ardent. I never make resolutions, but I do sometimes use the New Year to re-focus on something I've been letting slide. In the past, that has sometimes meant writing. Last year, I submitted stories to a slew of venues on the first day of the year. And 2019 turned out to be a very encouraging year, writing-wise. I got three stories accepted, one of which just got published in what was probably the journal with the biggest cache I've gotten into yet. More importantly, a whole slew of top-tier journals that have never done anything but ignore me before at least gave personal responses. (It's really hard for me to convince friends of mine who aren't writers that getting a personal rejection from some journals is actually a big deal and hard to get.) After six years of focused effort, I felt like I had at least gotten some signs that I was moving the rock up the hill. 

But here at the outset of 2020, I find myself unable or unwilling to make a push to capitalize on that momentum. In the past, my ambivalence about continuing to push forward with writing has usually been values-based. I've questioned whether putting so much effort into a project I'm not likely to succeed at, one where even if I do "succeed," I'm not likely to have much tangible positive impact on the world, wasn't terribly self-indulgent. I don't worry about that now. It is self-indulgent, but I'm at a point in my life where I realize how much we all need indulgences if we're going to be able to convince ourselves to keep stumbling through life. 

The issue is that I'm just at the crux of both my professional and parenting life. At work, I've never felt more pressure to get everything right. That requires a lot of my time, not just at work, but at home. When I finished my annual commentary on the Best American Short Stories collection several weeks ago, I wanted to continue right on with the O.Henry Anthology, because I feel like all these close readings of the best American short fiction has been the most important factor in improving my own writing outcomes over the last two years. But I just couldn't justify the time when what I really need to do with my limited spare time is comb Korean news, improving both my language skills and my awareness of what's going on. 

Meanwhile, although I don't want to invade my son's privacy by putting all his business out here, I will say that his performance in school over the last few years has gotten to a point where it now requires my almost constant intervention. Making sure he's ready for adulthood in a few years is now practically a second full-time job for me. So between my actual full-time job, my de facto second full-time job, my desire to focus on improving my professional skill as a translator, and the need to at least be present enough as a husband that my marriage doesn't disappear, I'm about tapped out. 

I know, I know, we're not as busy as we think we are. There's always time. I've usually been the chief cheerleader saying those very things. All I can say is that right now, I feel tapped out. Something's got to give, and for right now, that thing is writing. That's unfortunate for me, because I've finally felt like I was getting somewhere. But I think it's the right thing to do. 

It is an inconvenient but unmistakable truth. 2020 is going to be a year of going backwards, at least with writing. Hopefully, that going backwards with writing will allow me to move forward in my life enough that when I come back to writing, I have fewer distractions overall and will make up the lost ground quickly. But if I don't pay attention to some other things right now, then all the success in the world won't matter, because I won't respect myself for the choices I made to make it happen.

I'm not saying I won't write at all in 2020. There is a tiny bit of room to squeeze things in, although it will likely involve cutting back my already cut-back time with a group of friends I enjoy spending time with even further. But even with those sacrifices, writing this year is just not going to be what the last few years were. I'm still going to try to do the occasional short story analysis; I just won't do the entirety of O.Henry or Pushcart. 

I neither believe fully in "follow your dreams wherever they lead" nor in keeping my feet on the ground to the exclusion of all dreams. It's better to stay in flux between the two poles, adapting as needed to the situation before you.

Wherever you are in your dream chasing, I hope 2020 brings some progress to you. Thanks for reading and making my catalog of dream-chasing part of your life. 

The process of deciding what to publish never seems less legitimate than when I'm in charge of it

For the last few weeks, I've been part of a couple of processes to help pick the winners in writing contests. One was Sixfold's writing contest, which I've written about already and in which I only played a small role. (A very, very small role, since the winners were stories I didn't like.) But I have a much bigger role in the Washington Writers' Publishing House fiction contest. The deadline to enter was November 15th.

The publishing house is a co-op. We run a poetry contest and a fiction contest every year. Anyone within 75 miles of D.C. is eligible to enter. So it's aimed at giving a boost to local writers. And it has. A few of the past winners, like Melanie Hatter and Dave Ebenbach, have gone on to pretty big things after winning our contest. The way it's supposed to work is that after you win, you come give of your time to the publishing house for at least two years afterwards. This is my third year after my own win. I'm now in charge of running the fiction contest. That doesn't mean I have sole responsibility for picking the winner, but I am the one getting everyone else together to make the decision, and so I have a lot of influence over the eventual winner.

We got the most entries this year since I've been part of judging it. I've really put a lot of effort into trying to pick the best entry, but no matter what I do, I can't get past the feeling that what we're doing just isn't good enough. I always felt this way during my year I spent as an editor for the Baltimore Review, as well.

One reason our method for picking what to publish seems so inadequate has to do with the review/analysis I've been doing for the past few years on the Best American Short Stories or other anthologies. One of the important things I've learned from doing this is how often my impression of a story ends up being profoundly different after a second reading than it was after a first. That probably sounds a little bit obvious. Everyone knows a story is different the second time through. But I've been really surprised just how different the second reading sometimes leaves matters. Many stories I didn't like after one read became my favorites the second time through.

So really, the minimum I ought to do for the entries is to give them each two reads. But it's also impossible. I don't have time to read them all twice. Nobody helping to make the decision does. The fact is we don't read most entries all the way through once. The process is something like this: I read roughly the first 25 pages of each entry. I pick the five to seven most promising out of that. Everyone else is welcome to do the same. I offer my list to everyone else. Those with time to read through everything and make recommendations send out their lists. The people with less time just read through our recommended best lists. So only two or three people are deciding what the whole board of five or six even narrow in on. Our of the five to seven I picked as the most promising, I then read those all the way through once. Unless I don't, because sometimes about halfway through a reading, I just know it's not going to be a winner and I move on.

I've always consoled myself with this sampling approach by saying that if I don't want to keep reading something after 25 pages, no potential reader we're trying to market to would, either. But I don't know how satisfying that really is, given how profoundly I've changed my opinion after giving something a deeper reading than I otherwise might have. Even if I didn't love it immediately, if we market the book well, the reader is going to give it the benefit of the doubt and get past the beginning to place where she loves it like we did.

Beyond just the basic philosophical question of fairness, there's an emotional aspect to the process. I get rejected over a hundred times a year, and one of the biggest questions I always have is how that decision was made. Was it a really skilled editor whose opinion I would respect? If so, did he hate it completely, or was it just a shade shy of making it? Or was it some grad student just looking for credit for working on the school's lit mag? Did the person or people who voted down on it give it serious consideration, or were they just trying to clear out the queue, so they latched onto something unimportant and used that a reason to make a quick no-vote and move on? Every hint of laziness I see in myself makes me wonder how many other decision makers allow themselves an equal or greater latitude.

I wonder if this isn't having an impact on content in American literature. Some people have made the criticism that a lot of American literature, especially that coming from writing program graduates, all sound the same. I don't agree that it all sounds the same, but sometimes I do wonder if I'm not just reading a variety of ways to say something similar. The political viewpoints of most stories I read in good journals now is pretty much similar to everything else. I don't mean that as a dog whistle, like it would be if someone wrote that in Quilette. I'm not asking for more stories written with traditional, nationalist political viewpoints. But I wouldn't mind some heterogeneity within the side of the political spectrum I did I identify with.  It's not just themes; a lot of the subject matter is becoming very familiar. I wonder if writers aren't learning to hit the things that overworked editors have shown will respond to. I know the stories I've written that got published tend to fit this mold more than the ones that haven't, although some of the ones I've written that haven't are quite likely better. The more stories with certain characteristics get published, the more they lead to other work doing something similar.

Maybe that's too alarmist. I really don't know. I only have my own very small experience as a writer, editor, and reader to go off of. But even if the editorial processes out there aren't actively killing American literature, I think it's almost a given that there is great work getting missed, and it's our fault--the fault of those of us who, at any level, play gatekeeper without living up to the responsibility.

At the very least, if you're a writer I've rejected in my life, just know I didn't take any joy in it, and I haven't yet become calloused about doing it. I hate every rejection I give, and I know exactly what you feel when you get one.

Yes, it's normal for a literary journal to ghost on you after they accept your work

Long ago, this used to be a blog about writing fiction and the travails thereof. It's been more of a blog dedicated to analyzing and reviewing short stories for about the last year. In part, that's because it's been good for me as a writer. Forcing myself to pay close enough attention to what some of the year's mostly highly regarded short fiction is doing, enough that I can write about it without making a fool of myself, has really helped me develop as a writer of fiction myself.

Proof of this came about a month ago, when I got notice that a journal I really like wanted to publish a story of mine. It's not the New Yorker, but it's a solid journal. I was actually surprised they picked me, because I kind of thought they were too cool for me. The great thing about it was that they wanted to publish a longer story of mine. It's very hard to get longer fiction published, so the fact they were willing to publish my story must have meant they really found it appealing.

The acceptance letter mentioned that I should sign the contract attached. That's pretty normal stuff, except there was no contract attached. I sent an email profusely thanking them for believing in my story and explaining that there had not been any contract attached, so could they please send one. I got no response for a week, so I emailed again. Two days later, I got an email that said, "Here you go," along with the attachment.

That was a little curt, but it was what I wanted, so I signed it and sent it back, along with the other things they asked for, like a photo and a bio. I later realized that one of the attachments I'd sent them was the wrong one, so I sent another email explaining everything and including the right one.

I didn't get any response on that. Two weeks later, someone responded in Submittable, the online website where a lot of journals handle the business of accepting submissions for stories. That person said "Sorry!" and attached the contract again, seemingly unaware that I'd already gotten it and responded through email. Whoever answered the email for the journal obviously hadn't seen my response, or hadn't forwarded it to the person who answered in Submittable.

So I attached everything again in Submittable, then sent an email just asking to be sure they'd gotten everything, explaining what seemed to be redundancies in replies I'd gotten from them. I asked to get a reply just so I knew they had what they needed. I've not heard anything in another two weeks since.

If you are a new writer who just got accepted for the first time or is hoping to get accepted for the first time soon, I want you to know how normal this is. I've now had eight stories accepted for publication. Six of them were like this. So if you struggle and struggle to get that first acceptance, and as soon as you acknowledge their acceptance you stop hearing from them, that's normal. If you end up freaking out and worrying that they forgot about you, or came to their senses and decided they don't want to publish you, that's normal, too. If you don't hear from them for seven months and then finally find out your story was published three weeks ago, that is also normal.

The people who run these journals are not getting paid. They're squeezing in time between life and work and their own writing to put your work out. They don't usually find time to hold your hand and make sure you know everything is going to be alright. But if they said they'll publish your story, they'll publish it eventually.

It was hard getting this far, I know. That doesn't mean the next steps are really any easier. But hopefully, if you at least know that it's normal for the next steps not to be any easier, that'll make it easier to deal with how it's not any easier?