Hoping I know the difference between a skeptic and an asshole: a personal reaction to Molly Cooney's "Transition: The Renaming of Hope"

Note: I first wrote this more than four years ago. Since then, I've been too afraid to publish it, partly because I thought it might invoke an angry response and partly because I wasn't sure I knew what I was talking about. By now, I think I'm reasonably sure nobody cares what I write enough to get angry about it, and while I'm still not sure I really know what I'm talking about, it seems that there is enough uncertainty, even among liberals, about some points advanced by pro-trans rights groups that it might be worth this effort to explain, even imperfectly, what some of those doubts are. The NYT's decision recently to publish an op-ed questioning gender-affirming care made me decide to go back in and dust this off. I may be wrong about everything, but at least this might serve as an expression of what the doubts of a thoughtful liberal might be. For those advocating trans rights, it might help them to refine their message to address these kinds of doubts. 

I've left most of the anachronisms below in place. Where I thought it necessary, I've added notes to make it clear that the statement was written years ago. For some reason, when I wrote this, I cited a bunch of articles from Medium as statements of what trans advocates claim. I've read better articles since, but I'll leave what I have in place. I feel like I should say that the reason I've revived this oft-abandoned project isn't because of the furor over Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, who I realize is not a trans woman. Imane is an example of many things, including how the public struggles to see differences between one issue that makes it uncomfortable and another, and also how TwitterX is poison, but she isn't a trans woman. It was mostly the NYT article, as well as another article I can't find now about how Democrats are split on trans issues, that made me think it might be worth putting this out.

I still feel the same empathy for Cooney's partner I did when I wrote this piece. I want a world where they can be safe and pursue happiness. That's more what I remember four years later than the questions I wrote about below. 

Here's the piece..

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When I blogged my way through the 2019 Pushcart Anthology last year, I only looked at the fiction. It's the only thing I can claim enough skill in to critique with some authority, so I passed over everything else. But my blogging pal Karen Carlson wrote about one of the non-fiction pieces from Pushcart in a way that intrigued me. I went in and read it, and was glad I did. I then wrote about it, sat on what I wrote for over a year, and am putting it out now in spite of strong doubts about the wisdom of publishing this. ((Note from present day Jake: I must have added that last sentence in 2021, a year after I originally wrote this, when I was considering publishing it belatedly before deciding not to. Obviously, I've been unsure about publishing this since the minute I wrote it.)) 

You see, I have a confession. I'm a bad liberal. I'm secretly not orthodox with some of the things all liberals are supposed to believe. I used to be; there was a time when most of the things you'd expect a liberal to believe were also things I believed. But the "T" in LGBTQIA+ has been a stumbling block for me. I mostly keep it to myself, because skepticism on certain points is just not something the people I hang around are expected to express. Curt Buckley wrote a piece on how skeptics of mainstream conclusions by the medical community about trans-gendered people are often just the same old bigotry masquerading as healthy skepticism. I'll try to be as acutely aware of Buckley's criticism as I can and to keep the line between skeptic and asshole clear.

I'd have continued keeping quiet about my reservations if not for two things. One is how moved I was by the piece that appeared in Puschart. Called "Transition: The Renaming of Hope," it is Molly Cooney's description of what it's like living with a partner who is about to transition from biological female to male. Her partner, Anne, is already taking testosterone, or "T" as Cooney calls it throughout the article. What makes Cooney's story so compelling is that there isn't a trace of sentimentalism, politicking, or whitewashing of the experience. It's uncomfortable. Cooney has profound misgivings about it. Although she loves her partner and wants what's best for her, her partner's transition poses challenges to Cooney's own identity. (I would ordinarily call Anne "him" to fit his identity, but Cooney is fluid about the pronouns she uses for Anne, mostly using "her" to speak of the person she has known so far, so I will do the same. "She/her" is the person Anne has been, and "he/him" is the person she will become, although I realize trans-advocates will say Anne has always been a man.)

I found myself genuinely pulling for this family. Cooney's story is almost magical in its ability to make me feel what her family is like. Not only is she a good writer, but she seems like an absolute gem of a spouse, because of how well she understands Anne. It was possible, in a way I've never experienced before, to understand the psyche of a person considering sex reassignment surgery, as well as the people around them.

The second reason is the current fuss about comments J.K. Rowling has made. ((Note from current Jake: Who knows which iteration of Rowling comments I was thinking of when I wrote that? There have been so many. God, I hate TwitterX.)) I'm not posting this  now to agree with Rowling. I simply want to say that there are some people like me, people who are generally on the same side of the political spectrum as trans-advocates, but still have questions. I believe trans-advocates should work to answer these questions without just trotting out "transphobia" as an attack. Before this is a political issue, it's an intellectual issue, and I'd like to be able to discuss it neutrally, outside the political implications, before making up my mind on how I'd like to align myself with those fighting for trans rights.

I felt such respect for the family in Cooney's essay, I've decided to make my long-held doubts public. When you respect someone, you're honest with them, the way Cooney was honest in her story. Before I launch into this, I want to reiterate that what motivated me to do this was how moved I was by what Cooney wrote.

I'm not any kind of expert on this subject. It's off-brand for me, you might say, to even talk about it. But maybe that's why it's worth thinking about what people like me might be thinking. I'm a reasonably intelligent, reasonably well educated non-specialist who has to make up his mind on an issue where much of the evidence is technical beyond his ken. I'm someone who's done a reasonable amount of research on this and who just can't get himself to come around to the view people in my normal political camp seem to want me to arrive at.

The doubts

Part One: Some history, both personal and cultural 

Back in the late 90s and early aughts, as an undergraduate and then graduate student in the humanities, I thought I understood the relationship between sex and gender. Sex was something nobody had control over. You got one or the other at birth. Yes, there were some exceptions, some people born with disorders of sex development, where the chromosomes said one thing, but the gonads said another. But at most, that was not quite 1% of people. For most of the world, sex was, I thought, a zero or a one. 

Gender, or the outward expression of sex-based characteristics, was once believed to be tied infallibly to sex. Men were "supposed" to hunt and try to have sex with women and fight. Women were "supposed" to be nurturing and supportive and knit. But we now know better: gender is not completely biological. It is a cultural construct. Men don't behave "like men" just because of testosterone and a Y chromosome. We're taught how to act like men. And what can be taught can be untaught, what can be learned can be unlearned. 

"Man" and "woman" referred to sex, as did "male" and "female." The terms "masculine" and "feminine" referred to gender. To quote Toril Moi, "It has long been an established practice among most feminists to use "feminine" (and "masculine") to represent social constructs (patterns of sexuality and behaviour imposed by cultural and social norms), and to reserve "female" and "male" for the purely biological aspects of sexual difference. Thus "feminine" represents nurture and "female" nature in this usage. "Femininity" is a cultural construct: one isn't born a woman, one becomes one, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it. Seen in this perspective, patriarchal oppression consists of imposing certain social standards of femininity on all biological women, in order precisely to make use believe that the chosen standards for "femininity" are natural."  

According to how I saw it back in grad school, challenging the cultural expression of man/woman and its necessary link to masculine/feminine--a process known as queering gender--was the project of those committed to re-thinking gender and society. It seemed to me back then that one of the most important projects of gender studies was to take the Venn diagram of what constituted male and female behavior, make both circles much larger, and then make the intersection between them so unpredictable and weird it would need the same math used in quantum calculations to figure out. Or, as Moi put it, to "disentangle this confusion (of femininity and femaleness)." I was on board with that. By that point, I'd experienced two versions of male culture out of control: high school football and the Marine Corps. Redefining what being a man and a woman meant seemed like a needed social project. 

A bit of an aside

Since I was in graduate school in the early 2000s, there has been some work in biology that questions whether the "purely biological" part of the sex/gender distinction is as clear as it seemed. That is to say, even "man" and "woman" aren't as simple as we once thought. Julia Serano, a transwoman biologist, has written a few articles and a book in which she tries to dismantle the idea that biological sex is as clear as we think it is. I don't have time to get into this fascinating idea. Serano is writing within a political environment in which some feminists do not accept transwomen as real women--the so-called "TERFs." Her arguments are often directed at those feminists. I will only say here that while Serano has some valid points, I think she makes too much of exceptions in nature and tries to use those to prove points in too general a sense. Sex might be more complicated than we thought, and nature always has surprises for us, but for now, I think these arguments lead more to a refinement of the definition of sex and not a revolutionary upturn. Arguments against Serano are here and here. ((Note from current Jake: Sorry I used Medium so much here. I'm sure you can find easier-to-access articles that will say the same things.)) 

Part Two: My doubts, as succinctly as I can put them

The first problem I have with the discourse from pro-trans advocates is that they seem to muddle sex and gender as much as their advocates do. Although when experts are explicitly making a difference between transsexual and transgender people, they more or less uphold the sex/gender distinction correctly, it is also very common for advocates and critics alike to call both simply "trans," which leads to all kinds of confusion. (I've often used "trans" in the same way in this essay, when I'm talking about the public face of trans rights.) This confusion leaks into almost everything anyone says, to where I can't even tell whether I agree or disagree with a statement. I believe the correct distinction is that transsexuals are those who have had sex reassignment surgery, while transgendered people are a large umbrella of those who challenge traditional notions of gender. Calling both "trans" muddies the waters greatly, and even when keeping a distinction, I'm not entirely sure that people consistently differentiate between biological and cultural concepts. So one huge problem I have is that the language all over is so imprecise, I don't even know what statement I'm being asked to agree or disagree with. 

As I understand it, transsexuals, those who have undergone sex reassignment surgery, are a subset of transgendered people, those who behave counter to cultural gender expectations for their given sex. 

Second, to take Cooney's description of Anne, is that Anne isn't really interested in queering gender. She's a rather gender normative man trapped in a woman's body. Her anguish comes about because her outward presentation of self to society doesn't match how she feels inside. She wants to change her voice, she wants to change her biceps. She spends a lot of time learning the "layers and layers of how to re-gender" herself: "It's not just new clothes and a new name. Not just wide stance and strong shoulders, nor just taking up space and talking loudly. For many transmen it's about how a guy props the door with his foot, that imperceptible difference in the kick of leg and tilt of hip." 

Anne isn't queer at all. She's not gender non-conforming. She's very gender conforming, just not to the social gender that's paired with her current biological sex. She's happy to accept gender normative standards, but not the ones that would be easier for her to pull off without drawing attention. She is, in a sense, transsexual but not transgender, as impossible as that sounds. If she were only a biological man, there would be no disagreement for her between how society expects her to act and how she feels.

This makes me wonder: do we need more men who take up space and talk loudly? More men who prop the door a certain way with their feet? Isn't this reinforcing traditional gender performance among men, albeit in a different package? Or is the project of queering gender more in need of biological women like Anne whose gender performance doesn't match what we expect? 

Cooney, a lesbian who had to fight to be seen, faces a loss with Anne's change. When she is seen with someone who passes for a man, she will no longer be seen as queer. Her identity, gained at great cost, will be taken from her. Anne's gain is Cooney's loss, although Cooney loves Anne enough that she is willing to support her.

Their decision how to balance their own gains and losses is personal, and I'm not here to question it. At the end of reading, I wished them only the best. But socially, I wonder if the eagerness to pass as a man by doing everything society expects a man to do and look like isn't undoing the project of queering gender. 

Ideally, it seems to me that society would accept that Anne's internal landscape aligns more with what we consider "masculine" than with "feminine," and that sometimes psychological masculinity can come in unexpected physical packages. Sometimes, the "masculine"--which is not a real thing, but something we culturally create--will have breasts and a vagina. Insisting on the importance of linking sex to gender seems like it's treating gender like it is a real thing. Anne seems to be saying, "I feel masculine, so naturally, I must need a male body to go with that." 

A biologist like Serano might suggest I'm making a body/mind dualism fallacy, because I think a masculine mind can exist in a female body, while Serano would say no, if someone is psychologically a man, he should also physically be one, since the mind is part of the body. I don't find that particularly compelling. If a body can demonstrate hermaphroditic qualities in two organs, such as body with both a penis and a vagina, why couldn't it also manifest a hermaphroditism that includes the brain as one of those organs? 

So my second misgiving is whether using medical remedies to make sex and gender match isn't an undoing of the whole project of queering gender. If everyone did this, there would be no gender rebels.

Third, it seems like a lot of Anne's concerns have to do with how she is perceived by random people in society, people she doesn't even know. She is happy when she is perceived as a man and called "sir," and then upset when someone hears her voice and stammers through an apology. She avoids going out in public a lot because of how people might view her. She hates being stared at. "She won't hold hands in public or walk by a group of men at night because no matter how much the queer community and academia discuss gender spectrum, the average American wants the binary boxes on forms to make sense and be absolute reality." (This sentence seems to me to be another muddling of sex and gender. When forms ask male or female, they want biological sex, not gender identity. This kind of thing happens all the time.) 

I'm sympathetic to Anne concerns for her own personal welfare. I hope everyone is. I especially felt for Anne going to the bathroom in public, where she lives her life "one safe pee at a time." 

It would be absurd for me to wish Anne would be braver, when I'm not half as brave as she is now. But I feel like Anne is taking T and considering surgery just to avoid dealing with the blowback from people she has no reason to care about. Her current spouse likes the way Anne is now, is ambivalent about the change. Cooney is willing to support Anne, because she knows how nerve-wracking it is for Anne to present herself authentically in accord with her self-identity in public. (Cooney, meanwhile, chides herself a bit too harshly for retreating into her privilege as an easily distinguishable woman.) But it's going to be hard on Cooney. She concludes her story with the words, "This is not what I signed on for." 

Cooney asserts that taking T or getting surgery do not change what Anne is. Those things "just let other people recognize her intentions when she walks down the street." 

I feel very torn about this. On the one hand, I genuinely sympathize with Anne. I hate going to public bathrooms now, and I have a beard and some lingering traces of biceps. I can't imagine what it's like for her. And nobody wants to feel unsafe. It's hard enough to go to a park for a walk and feel safe if you're an ugly bald guy. I'm sure it's a constant struggle for Anne. 

But doesn't this mean she's doing all this for other people? Just to get them to quit hassling her by making them more comfortable with how they read her? Wouldn't a more optimum state of society--not that it's Anne's responsibility to achieve this--be greater understanding that people like Anne exist and are entitled to space? All this altering of her body seems like a lot to require of Anne just to keep the peace in society. Her safety and freedom to move around unhassled shouldn't require her to have a beard and remove her breasts. 

Fourth, the subject that is most likely to be taken for bigotry. The surgery. The second I read something about Anne having "her hips shaved straight," I nearly quit reading. (One of the non-gender-conforming things about me is that I am squeamish. I also don't like snakes or spiders or rodents. Oh, and I have no interest in cars.)

Andrea Long-Chu wrote a thought-provoking article last year ((now many years ago--current Jake)) as she looked forward to her sex reassignment surgery. She wrote that she realized it was quite possible her new vagina wouldn't make her happy, but that this wasn't the point. "Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term. Desire and happiness are independent agents.” She's right. There must be some reason I keep writing, and it sure as hell isn't happiness.
 

She argued that the medical code of "first do no harm" actually turned doctors into gatekeepers of who should get surgery. Therefore, happiness shouldn't be the criterion for being able to get the surgery:

  

As long as transgender medicine retains the alleviation of pain as its benchmark of success, it will reserve for itself, with a dictator’s benevolence, the right to withhold care from those who want it.
But I also believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.

That's a fascinating idea. It makes transsexual surgeries into something more like plastic surgery, something that doesn't require a justification beyond wanting it. If we take Anne as an example, the comparison to plastic surgery holds up fairly well. Anne wants surgery for many of the same reasons people who get plastic surgery want it: increased confidence and less social stigma. Those aren't frivolous goals, especially if you are thinking of plastic surgery less in terms of movie star nose jobs and more like burn victims getting restorative work. 

But society has justifiably mixed feelings about plastic surgery. Is it self-affirming or self-hating? A little of both? Feminists have criticized plastic surgery and the way unrealistic expectations about beauty for women have caused women to fork out money and endure pain to meet those standards. The practice is sometimes viewed by feminists as self-mutilation. 

Transsexuals see it as the opposite: self-revelation, a bringing forth of who they truly are. But I can't get past how much it must hurt. Yes, there's also the instinctive wince when I think of removing a penis, the thing many of the "pseudo-critics" Buckley talked about make a big deal out of. But beyond the shock factor, I just think surgery sounds terrible. At the very least, it has all the attendant risks of infection and pain cycles all surgeries involve.

If sex reassignment surgery resembles plastic surgery in some ways, then there seems to me to be a risk of the plastic surgery treadmill: always wanting just one more thing that will make you feel good enough. I can assure Anne, as a man who never, ever will be mistaken for anything other than what I am, that just passing won't be enough. There will always be something else you'll wish you had to make you feel more like a man. I wish I were taller. I wish I were more muscular. I wish I had a tougher sounding voice. I really wish I hadn't been born on the bottom end of average in the all-important organ size, and I really, really wish that organ hadn't started shrinking with age. I get that happiness shouldn't be the standard, and if someone is determined to get the surgery, I would stop trying to convince them otherwise. But I think it's important to be clear about how elusive contentment is no matter what body you're in. 

I'm not here to decide for others whether surgery is worse or living with present reality is worse. I will support anyone I know who makes the decision to get surgery. Once someone has crossed that line, it's stupid to question it, and from then on, the only sane thing to do is offer support for the person adapting to the new identity and new life. But I also don't want to gloss over questions about it. Without getting into the very contentious issue of how many people get the surgery and end up regretting it, because, as Long-Chu wrote, that's maybe not the point, I do think it's valid to raise similar objections that feminists raise to plastic surgery for people considering sex reassignment surgery. Yes, of course, do whatever you believe you must do to live a fulfilled life. If a woman knows what plastic surgery is and gets a giant boob job because she damn well wants to, more power to her. But at least consider that the problem isn't your body, it's how people look at your body. If society viewed a slender woman with breasts and a high voice wearing men's clothes as another embodiment of masculinity, there wouldn't be as acute a need to have a beard and biceps to match. 

Where there is actual disagreement

I think there is general agreement that trans people should not face violence. Even most conservatives agree with this. There is also general agreement that trans people should not face "discrimination," although I think there is a good deal of disagreement about what that means. Most people probably agree a trans person shouldn't be kept from a job, but there are things trans advocates want and claim would prevent discrimination that many find problematic. These include being able to use the public bathroom of their choice, allowing trans women to play women's sports, and forcing parents to provide gender-affirming care for their children under the age of eighteen. 

I'm at different places on some of these issues. The bathroom issue seems like the best argument, although it's going to take a long time for many cash-strapped organizations to refit everything to allow for single occupancy bathrooms. Nobody likes public bathrooms, although I doubt it's possible to put in 10,000 single-occupancy bathrooms at a football stadium, and I'm likely to bear the awkwardness of a public men's room rather than wait for a single occupancy room. Hopefully, most people will feel the same, so that will leave the few single occupancy rooms open to the people who really need them. 

I'm not sure how the other issues should play out or will play out. I would only offer the advice to trans advocates that playing down the issues isn't a good strategy. When someone objects to the advantage a trans woman who went through puberty as a boy has over other women in sports, or when someone points out how drastic a step removing a sexual organ is, these people shouldn't be gaslighted or shamed for even bringing up the objection. I've seen many arguments that the trans women in sports issue isn't really an issue, or that we only object to the extreme parts of sexual reassignment surgery because we are immature little children. I don't think talking past the sale is going to win long term. 

Sloppiness in use of language doesn't help, either. I know advocates can't control every person who posts on TwitterX, but part of their advocacy should be advocacy to their own ranks to use language correctly. 

Public and private

Whatever ends up happening with these issues, trans-gendered people have the unenviable fate of living a life that can never be truly private. Their very existence is being debated in the public sphere, so everything they do, no matter how private, can be used as fodder to feed one argument or another. Cooney's honesty, which I admire so much, could be used to say, "See! Sex reassignment is bad for the loved ones of those who get it!" I'm not saying that, and I hope Cooney doesn't live to regret the openness she wrote with.  

In political discourse, there is almost always an unfortunate shrinking of the truth. You've got some policy proposal, and it's got a lot of plusses and minuses, but overall, you think it's a marginal change for the good. So you pitch the proposal to the public, only when you pitch it, you don't talk about the negatives, or you downplay them, and you oversell the potential positives. You're not doing it to be dishonest, you just realize that honesty isn't going to get the proposal passed. 

Cooney's essay is so moving because it's unfailingly personal, not political, which means she's open to talking about the negatives as well as the positives. Because of this honesty, I was open to her reality in a way I haven't been before about the stories of trans-gendered people. 

Most of the decisions trans-gendered people make ought to be private ones. Whether someone takes T (or E) or gets something added or taken off isn't my concern. But somehow, it's an issue in public discourse now. Rather than attempting to immediately jump into legal remedies, I'd like to see society try first to focus on cultural ones. 

For example, one of Anne's chief concerns is how to use the bathroom safely and without harassment.  

A few of the things she's suffered in bathrooms:

-What are you?

-Prove it. (from a pack of hellish six-graders when Anne was in second grade)

-What the hell are you doing? You're in the wrong place.

Cooney says, "I've watched women enter the bathroom, see Anne at the sink, and step back to check the sign on the door." That actually sounds quite normal. That would be my reaction if I went into the men's room and saw someone in a dress at the sink. Going into the wrong bathroom by mistake sounds like something I'd do, because I'm an idiot. 

It would be nice if society could work on a system of signifiers to alleviate these situations. Something whereby one party could indicate that yes, I realize this isn't what you're used to, but this isn't a threat to you, and the other one could signal back, "Okay, carry on, then."

It would be nice if we had a language for Anne's experience. If we did, and she still wanted to live life as transsexual, not just transgendered, that would be fine. At least she could be sure that's what she wanted for herself, not wonder if she had been driven to the choice because it's so difficult living in society as something other than a zero or a one that she has to pick the one that will cause her the least trouble.  

The Olympics is a world too much for me

Mrs. Heretic and I had plans for today, but after she watched the opening ceremonies yesterday of the 2024 Paris Olympics, she wanted to cancel our plans so she could watch. She's a sucker for three-minute documentaries of personal stories that crescendo toward an emotional climax. The swimmer whose dad died in a car crash because he was exhausted from taking his Olympian to early practice. The boxer whose aunt stepped in when everything fell apart. The volleyball player whose miscarriage nearly ended her career. The basketball player from Ivory Coast who just loves America so much. Mrs. Heretic's not the only one who loves this stuff. Melissa Kirsch wrote this morning in the Times about her love for picking an event and getting up to speed quickly to learn the what and the who and the so what. She admitted to being a "total sucker for a hyperemotional documentary featurette on that gymnast whose family sacrificed everything for her Olympic dreams." 

I understand this feeling, but for many Olympics now, I've passed on it. There are so many events and so many athletes, and each athlete has a story worth hearing. We tend to only get to hear about those who stand a chance of medaling. Part of the story-building is to pick an athlete, give the audience a reason to care, and then give them an event with stakes. The easiest stakes are a chance at a medal. Even if I watched every possible second of coverage, I would miss so many stories. And think of all the international stories I can't even access because I don't have that nation's coverage, and I couldn't speak the language even if I did. 

But what if I somehow could get the story of every athlete competing? How could I possibly do emotional justice to each of them? If the point of getting their stories before they compete is to appreciate that there's more at stake than just who wins, could I ever appreciate what's at stake enough? It's too many stories, and many of those stories end up pitting one person to root for against another. How to decide?

It's been years now since I rooted, I mean really rooted, for a team in sports. Not being able to love one side and hate the other robs me of the joy a lot of people feel in being fans, because it really is kind of fun to hate someone. But at some point, maybe during one of those "hyperemotional documentary featurettes" before a Super Bowl, I stopped being able to do it. Everyone--or maybe nearly everyone--is worth rooting for, and the universe doesn't have enough happy results to give out for all of them. 

The narrator of Elizabeth McCracken's The Hero of This Book speculates, "Maybe it's necessary to hate categories of people, because it's too much to assume that everyone has a soul." When I try to watch the Olympics, especially the opening ceremony with its flood of people and countries I'll lie and tell Mrs. Heretic I've heard of, I'm overcome with an acute version of sonder, the realization that everyone else has an interior life as rich as my own. It is too much to take. So much hope, so much striving, so few medals. I'll catch the highlights after the fact.   

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. 

Why this Super Bowl stings a bit

I'm from northeast Ohio and grew up rooting for the Browns. When I moved to Maryland near Baltimore in 2004, I didn't really embrace the Ravens, because, as anyone who knows their football history is aware of, when the Browns closed up shop in Cleveland in 1995, they moved to Baltimore. Then, using the players and organization they took with them, they promptly won a Super Bowl in 2001, the same Super Bowl that had eluded the Browns and continues to elude them to this day. 

When I watch football now, I try very hard not to root for teams. I want to enjoy the game with perfect equanimity, appreciating greatness wherever it shows. To help me achieve this emotional detachment, if I find myself thinking I might root for one team during a game, I immediately place a bet for the other team to win. This usually enables me to find some level of calm.

During the AFC Championship game a few weeks ago, though, I was not able to keep calm. Even when I placed a bet on the Chiefs, I couldn't keep from rooting for the Ravens. No, it did not have to do with Taylor Swift hatred, although I do wonder why the universe thinks it necessary to heap so much good fortune on one person. It was because I was hoping a victory by the Ravens would put to rest a sneakily racist attitude still living among some fans.

For a very long time, there were no Black quarterbacks. Open and undisguised racism was a big part of it. Coaches didn't think Black players were smart enough to be quarterbacks. They thought they were athletic enough to be running backs or wide receivers or linemen, but not quarterbacks. Last year's Super Bowl, when two Black quarterbacks faced off against each other, was a huge moment for the game. But there is still sneakily racist discourse about Black quarterbacks, especially ones who are also athletic. Among fans I speak to or read, I continue to see and hear what I take to be coded racist language, particularly when it comes to the Ravens' quarterback, Lamar Jackson. This language will sound something like this:

A: Mobile quarterbacks can win some games, but they'll never win a Super Bowl.

B: Wasn't John Elway pretty mobile? And Steve Young? 

A: Yeah, but they were different. They were pass-first and then they ran when they had to.

B: Young played a long time. Elway played a long time. They both had a lot of years when they didn't win a Super Bowl. Won't Jackson likely eventually get one, too?

A: No, because he's just not that good. 

B: Not good how? His teams put up tons of points.

A: But not in the playoffs.

B: Isn't it just hard to win playoff games against good teams?

A: But the greats do it, and he's not that great. He can run, but Super Bowl quarterbacks stand in the pocket and make throws in crunch time. 

When I hear this kind of bullshit from white fans, I feel like they're offering me a shibboleth, because they think that as a white person, I might want to join them in their coded horseshit. It makes me angry that anyone thinks I want to be a part of their shenanigans. 

Unlike Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, last year's winning Super Bowl quarterback, who is part white, Jackson does not give a great interview. He is not especially handsome or dynamic or magnetic. He's just a great football player. Vaguely racist fans, in their illogical worldview, don't see Mahomes as a violation of their rule that athletic, Black quarterbacks can't also be smart and efficient throwing the ball in the pocket. Jackson would have been.

Jackson has had some great years, but never much playoff success. This year was his best year, and it had a lot to do with having an offensive coordinator who understood how to use him as a weapon. I think that often, when athletic quarterbacks have struggled, it's been because so few coordinators understand how to use them. 

The Ravens had a great chance. They were the best team in the league all year, they had home-field advantage, and they were relatively healthy. They just picked a lousy time to play their worst game of the year. 

I'm not a football expert, but I think you can look at a few reasons why they lost. The Chiefs do have a very good defense, and their defensive coordinator came up with some clever tricks to keep the Ravens off-balance. The Ravens also probably didn't have a great game plan. A week after the Chiefs gave up a ton of running yard to the Bills, the Ravens, who were the best running team in the league, didn't really run the ball much. There was also some bad luck, like a fumble right at the goal line. 

The Ravens also probably suffered from the wrong mindset, playing not to lose rather than to win. That's the fault of everyone, not just Jackson. Jackson didn't play a great game. Brady, Manning, Mahomes, and the other greats have a lot of playoff wins to their name when they also didn't play great, but they played well enough to win. Jackson very nearly did that, gutting out a tough win under tough circumstances. Football is cruel. It's why I try not to root for teams. 

I did root in that game, just because I wanted a very stupid racist trope to get another kick in the pants. It'll have to wait until next year, though. I'm sure the NFL is thrilled to have a Taylor Swift extravaganza for its big night, and I'm sure ratings will be through the roof. The Ravens will be kicking themselves, although they shouldn't be. Football teams make adjustments throughout the year. They find weaknesses in other teams and shore up their own. The Chiefs benefitted from a bad spell in the middle of the season when other teams showed them where they were weak. They fixed the problem just in time to make a good run in the playoffs. The Ravens, unfortunately, didn't have anyone to show them where they were weak until that AFC Championship Game. 

I can't imagine how athletes pick themselves up emotionally from losses like that, where the job in front of them now is to go play another entire season well enough to get back where they were and redeem themselves. It must seem so daunting. But I hope they do it. Just, you know, not enough that I'm going to root for them. 

Have I been a low-key CNF guy all along?

Despair has its advantages. I know I've said a dozen times in the last ten years that I was giving up writing fiction, but this current funk feels more permanent, in proportion to the acuteness of the despair. At the very least, I needed a break, so for the time being, I've moved on from reading contemporary literary fiction. Not knowing what to read instead, I've been kind of choosing things at random. One recent book I read was the 2023 Best American Essays collection, edited by Vivian Gornick. It says "essays," but I think the book is filled with what might be more accurately called "creative non-fiction." Some of the entries are essays, in the sense that they're sustained discourse or argument about a subject or theme. But many are more short memoir.

Whether they were essay or memoir, I found myself much more engaged and interested in the anthology than I have been in perhaps any volume of Best American Short Stories. I only found myself not generally enthralled with two of the entries. Maybe this is simply because it's new to me. People who spend a lot of time with one type of literature--like, say, the short stories that show up in literary magazines--tend to get a little fastidious. When "Cat Person" became a big sensation, the strongest backlash against it was from the literary fiction community, for whom it was just one story among many, and not the best example. Ordinary readers seemed to love it, or at least hate it in a way where they were interested in it. So maybe I just don't know enough about what contemporary CNF looks like to find the faults in this collection. 

I've had some exposure to CNF, of course, but never read one essay after another the way I did for the book. It's strange to say, but I found reading non-fiction, which you'd think of as dryer and more like work than reading stories, to be far less taxing than reading fiction. Reading it was closer to pleasure than I've felt in a long time. More than this being a result of my lack of exposure to CNF, I think I might have been discovering, this late in the game, that I've really got more of a CNF mind than a fictional one. 

I don't mind the occasional slant-wise telling of the truth, but maybe at heart, I'm kind of a pragmatic guy who wants you to just give it to me plain. Even in reading fiction all these years, I think the greatest pleasure I've gotten in it has been when I've felt I was able to take a work of fiction and then re-cast it into an essay analyzing the fiction in plain language. I've valued the slant truth in no small part for the opportunity it's given me to try to straighten it back out. 

Even when writing my own fiction, I think I've tended to try to write the kinds of stories that lend themselves to the very kind of analysis I like to do. That contrasts with how a lot of fiction writers say they write. They tend to be more like method actors, who try to treat their characters like real people and then become them. I always found this way of talking about one's characters, like what they did "surprised" you, to be a little annoying and artificial. There was an episode of "Only Murders in the Building" this most recent season in which Matthew Broderick plays himself, only the version of himself is so obsessed with getting to the core of his character, it eventually drives his director, Oliver, to fire him. That's what a lot of fiction writers sound like to me. 

I've toyed with trying CNF over the years, but one major hurdle has stopped me. I still don't really understand the line between CNF and, say, a very good editorial. Google's first offered answer to the question seems to me more or less in the right ballpark. It suggests that compared to traditional essays, CNF is more likely to emphasize scene, character development, narrative, and subjectivity. Concerning subjectivity, it suggests that: "In traditional nonfiction, the writer keeps a distance from the subject. But in creative nonfiction, the writer’s perspective, emotions, and insights can be part of the story. This is particularly true of personal essays, which are often written from a first-person point of view."

Okay, so that would explain why sometimes, I've read CNF and not realized it wasn't a short story until the end. To judge by the 2023 anthology, some CNF is nothing but a personal story without any real reflection on how it might fit into a larger theme in the world. "Any Kind of Leaving" by Jillian Barnett would be one example. Some begin as memoir but then transition into thoughts on how the personal fits into the political. For example, "Care Credit" by Angelique Stevens begins with the author's own struggles with poverty, with her poor dental health as the leading symbol of that poverty, then occasionally moves into thoughts about American health care in general. Still other entries were very like traditional essay, with only small amounts of narrative or personal experience thrown in. "Gender: A Melee" by Laura Kipnis could have appeared in Mother Jones or, if it was feeling particularly frisky that day, The Atlantic, and not seemed out of place. "Life and Story" by Sigrid Nunez is more "essay about the literature on why writers write with occasional personal information" than it is grounded in the personal with occasional references to the world. "An Archaeological Inquest" by Phillip Lopate begins with a story of someone giving him an old literary review, but the essay is entirely an analysis of the old review and an assessment of how literary culture has since changed. 

Other than the literary analysis I do on this blog, I think a lot of what I write on here could be considered CNF. But if so, it leans toward the kind of CNF where it's "essay with occasional personal bits" rather than the other kind, and I think the other kind is a lot more prevalent and likely to be published among journals that publish CNF. I think editors are unlikely to want much of what I write. One of the essays in the anthology this year was "Dreamers Awaken" by Scott Spencer, a memoir-short about a baby boomer who was once asked to play John Henry in blackface for a school concert. It's a great read, but at the end, it kind of intentionally avoids drawing conclusions about its meaning in the larger context of society. He is standing with a black school official he tried to apologize to, with her seeming to refuse to understand the meaning of his apology. "We were in our own little impromptu pageant, folktales from the future, and we were waiting for the invisible proctor to tell us in a whisper, or perhaps with some urgency, what to say next." It's perfect for the story, but I tend to write stuff that's more like "Here's how to solve racism" and then I use a few personal experiences to make my point. That seems likely to get the editor's "not for us" generic rejection letter. 

I started this blog as a way to work through the frustrations of trying to figure out writing, but also, since I was sure I would figure them out, to be a record in the future of how I had done so. It would be there to encourage others struggling along the same path. See how much trouble Jake had? But he got through it, and so will you. Now that I've despaired of ever really succeeding, I've often thought of just making this blog my whole writing project. 

Of course, that presents me with a problem of presentation. It seems like a successful blog (if such things still exist in a world with TikTok) would need to have content more or less centered on a coherent, central theme. Writing about literary fiction in some sense gave me such a theme. Readers might tolerate an occasional digression into "Here's how to solve racism," but only if I'm normally sticking to one kind of topic. "Jake's brilliant thoughts on sundry things" can't be the main draw of the blog. Not if I want people to read it, which I do.

I guess I could change this to a blog that writes about CNF. I could write a lot of analysis of CNF, the same as I've done for fiction, and then occasionally mix it up with my own CNF. But CNF, I think, doesn't really lend itself to the kind of analysis I've been doing for fiction. Fiction isn't making an argument in a straightforward way. It needs analysis in order for ordinary human brains to see more in them than the surface story. But CNF is sort of already analyzed. Especially in the more essay-like forms of CNF, what it has to say, it has already said in more or less plain terms. I could write personal responses to CNF pieces, but for the most part, there wouldn't be a lot to break down. 

Ceasing to write altogether isn't an option for me. Responding to the world with words is like breathing. Despair will stop me from submitting stories to the journals who've rejected me a million times, but it won't keep me from writing. Not for good. As many doubts as I have about being as good as I wish I were, I also feel pretty certain I'm a better writer than many people who make a living doing it, so I feel like I deserve some sort of platform. Or if not deserve, at least it's not an abomination. 

Whatever form my writing takes from here, I'm glad I chose to spend some time with CNF, however I've felt in the past about the uncertainty of what it is. I felt things reading I haven't felt in a long time, and in the end, I realized I still have a lot more I want to say myself. 

If my New Year's resolution was to remain ambivalent about writing, I'm nailing it

For most of my life, when I've considered the ubiquitous question writers get asked about why they write, I've always thought of it as something of an after-the-fact justification of what I was already doing. I wrote all the time, starting almost as soon as I became a serious reader as a teenager. So answering the question was something of a rearguard action, an attempt to justify what I was already doing. I was never going to come up with an answer that made me say, "Oh, you know what? That's a bad reason for writing. I should stop doing it." I couldn't help but write, so seeking to answer a question about why I was doing it was more of a philosophical curiosity than a matter of practical urgency. It wasn't like considering the question of whether I should take a particular job or marry somebody. It was more like finding myself naked in bed with a beautiful woman and for some reason taking a second to ponder the mystery of human sexuality and why we enjoy it so much. There was no doubt about what I was going to do; I was only indulging in a brief reverie before diving in. 

The question now, though, is totally different. After having spent most of my available free time over the last ten years focused as much as time would allow either on writing fiction or writing for this blog, I find myself unwilling to sit down and transfer thoughts into words. I still have the same urge as always, but inevitably, before I put my butt on the back-friendly yoga ball to begin writing, I am waylaid by wondering, "What's the point?"

Most writers will say one reason they write is because they can't stop themselves. I always felt that way, too. So where I am now is like waking up and finding I don't like sex or chocolate anymore. Or maybe it's like still liking chocolate but the last 32 times I've eaten it, it's given me explosive diarrhea, so now I'm reluctant to eat it again. 

I don't like refraining from writing. I don't feel like myself. But there are also some pretty strong reasons why I can't get myself into my seat to write. They're not as strong as explosive diarrhea, maybe, but they're strong enough I don't know if I'll be able to get over them.

1. Maybe I'm not that good

When somebody asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she said, "Because I'm good at it." I don't draw or paint precisely because what I create is ugly, and it gives me no pleasure to look at what I've made when I'm done. With writing, though, there are at least some occasions where I will re-read something I've written and feel joy reading it, the same kind of joy I would feel reading something somebody else had written. 

But for almost three years now, I've just been unable to get anything published. Part of that is on me. For all that time, I've only been sending in work to top-tier journals. After I won New Letters' Robert Day Fiction Contest in 2020, followed soon after by publication in The Bellevue Literary Review, I felt like I had drawn pretty close to my goal of writing fiction good enough to be published in top tier journals. It's not that I'm a journal snob. I was always gratified and grateful when any journal, no matter how small, accepted my work. But I want to be read. When I was sending out to every journal on Earth, it was partly about trying to figure out if I was in the right ballpark. After twenty or so of those acceptances, I had the feedback I needed. If I want to be read, it doesn't do any good to be published in a smaller journal. 

Since 2020, I've written five short stories that I think are better than anything I wrote before. None has broken into a top journal. I've still had plenty of encouraging rejections, including from The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Agni, One Story, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Colorado Review. Some have given me positive feedback more than once. 

Maybe I ought to keep plugging away, feeling like I'm close and I just need to bide my time and wait to get lucky, but I feel now like "almost good enough for a top-tier journal" is my limit. I can't write better than what I've done in the last three years, and it's not good enough. I understand that sometimes, it's a matter of luck. Every journal gets tons of great stories and can only publish a few, and they're looking for a blend of perspectives, so I might just not fit that particular edition. But if I were as good as I want to be, I'd be impossible to reject. I'm not, and I don't think I ever will be.

When somebody tells me I should keep going with writing because I'm almost there, I always think of this gambler's fallacy meme my son showed me.

2. For a variety of reasons, I don't think it's realistic I will get better

I might never have been talented enough. I'm sure there's a certain neural makeup to a great writer that's partly there when they're born, and that also has to be nurtured a certain way early on. It's possible I was doomed from birth, or doomed from early childhood because I missed certain developmental processes necessary to building the right neural network for a creative writer. 

But even if that's not true, even if I still had a chance in adulthood, I don't think I have a chance now. It's true that if you work at something, you tend to get better. I've definitely improved greatly since taking writing seriously in my early 40s. But I'm in my early 50s now, and I feel myself slipping cognitively in a general sense. It's maybe not serious yet--I forget a word here and there while speaking more than I used to, I find long hours at work less easy to endure--but it's enough that I'm probably not really building the new connections in my brain necessary to improve creatively. It's like where I am at the gym now. I'm not really out there to be the strongest I've ever been. I'm just trying to slow down decline. 

Even if I were younger, I've always had a stumbling block to developing as a writer, which is that I can't read prodigiously. I'm a good reader, but I can't read for long stretches most of the time. I get too caught up in my own thoughts about what I'm reading, and I have to take breaks to walk around and think about what I've just read. I've always been this way. It's always been a bit of an embarrassment for me around literary friends, who talk about reading a hundred books a year or more. I do read, of course. I don't do it efficiently, and so I don't read as widely as many serious readers do, but I try to make up for it by reading well when I do read. If I have to take a test, I'm capable of focusing for hours at a time, but I can't maintain that every day.  

Reading well if not much is fine for much of the kind of analysis I do on this blog, but I think you have to read both deeply and broadly to improve as a writer.  A would-be great writer has to fill their mind all the time with the best writing. I can't do that, and even if I could, I'm probably too old for it to have the impact it would have on a younger mind. 

3. I can't get away from the world

I recently read Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" in The Sewanee Review, in which she ponders the "why write" question at great length. It's a great summary of the many explanations people have given to this question, along with many of the doubts a writer faces if she has any sense. Many are the same doubts I've expressed over the years, such as the question of how to justify writing about unreal things in a world with so many real problems. 

One problem Nunez focuses on is how much concentration writing takes. All that concentration and focus and wrangling means time not spent with those around you. It means time not spent fixing the storm door or edging the lawn. It means time not spent on your day job, the one that pays the bills. 

Nunez recalls how her mentor, Susan Sontag, encouraged her to let writing be the central focus of her life:

"While it seemed everyone else wanted to know how I intended to earn a living, or when I was going to settle down, Sontag was talking about something else. Put the writing first, she said. Teach if you must, but don't feel that you have to become affiliated with an institution. Don't give up your independence. Forget the safety of tenure. Forget safety, period. Forget everything but the work."

Living in financial uncertainty while devoted only to the work has been a popular choice for writers, perhaps second only to having enough of a fortune, through heredity or marriage, you don't have to think about survival at all. There's nobility to it, the same way there is nobility in those who choose penury and celibacy in the service of God. I was planning at one point on that path, but I fell in love and had a child, and at that point, I realized I HAD to care about safety. 

Almost twenty years later, now with two kids, both of whom are struggling to figure out their own path to financial safety, the demands of the world are as great on me as ever. It has an effect on my writing. Even when I try to conserve some energy for writing, the effort and time I put into my job robs me of those same resources I need for arduous creative work. It fills my head with the wrong kind of energy.

Of course, other writers have managed to succeed while working for a living, but I think most succeeded at a younger age than I am now. I have writer friends who work and raise kids and write, mostly at teacher or editor jobs that don't pay as well as my job does, which means they have extra financial concerns I don't. But the thing is that none of those friends are doing any better at succeeding--based on my definition of the term--than I am. That's in spite of the fact that their teacher/editor jobs give them a better network to publicize their work with than I have. Writing is hard to do well even if you mortgage everything to focus on it, and anyone who's trying to both raise a family and cut open their spiritual veins to bleed onto the page is going to have an even harder time of it.

In my case, because my day job I've ended up in could be thought to be important in a cold and calculated "real world" sort of way, I often wonder if the morally right choice isn't to shutter writing altogether and focus on my day job. There's a good chance that an improvement in my ability to do my job could have more of a positive impact on the world than anything I'll write at home. The only reason I've continued to write is because my own mental health couldn't stand not doing it. I wouldn't have been able to do my day job at all if I didn't write, I reasoned, because I'd have killed myself or ended up in a loony bin. Sometimes, though, I think that my indulging of my writing habit is just my own selfishness or ego. 

4. I'm exactly the wrong level of educated as a critic now

Since fiction writing wasn't working out how I'd hoped in the near term, I felt like I'd found a nice niche writing analysis of literary fiction on this blog. This was mostly of short story anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and, if I had time and energy for it, Pushcart or O. Henry as well. It felt useful to me, because I thought that as a veteran of graduate-level studies in literature, I could be something of a bridge to ordinary people looking to investigate literary fiction. I've certainly been grateful for podcasts from philosophy Ph.D.s or other experts who seek to open up their disciplines to curious outsiders. I hoped to do the same for literature. 

I realized I wasn't quite a full expert. I didn't go on for a Ph.D. myself, and there are gaps in my understanding of literary theory as well as the history of literature and literary criticism. Still, since as one of my favorite professors as an undergrad said, you can never go wrong with a sensitive close reading, I felt like performing my close readings for all would help them to do their own. 

I was happy with my approach of close reading with occasional supplements from theory or literary history until last year. The mistake I made was trying to take criticism more seriously. I'd decided that since I was unlikely to ever make the breakthrough as a fiction writer I hoped to make, I should focus instead on doing the best job of writing the blog I could. I tried to go back and fill in gaps in theory and history.

All I succeeded in doing was to become more aware of how great a gap I have between the knowledge I actually have and what I'd like to have. To fill that gap, I'd have to quit my job and spend years pursuing the expertise I lack. All so I could write a blog that maybe a few hundred people occasionally look at. If I wasn't going to abandon my life for fiction, I certainly wasn't going to do it for writing about fiction. 

So I've ended up in a place where I can't go back to just doing close readings, and I'm nowhere near being able to write what I'd like to be able to write, so I don't want to write anything. My shoot-from-the-hip close readings no longer seem to be enough, and what I'd like to do--a still-accessible but more informed flavor of criticism--is beyond me. I feel like the incarnation of Pope's a little learning being a dangerous thing, only I'm aware of how dangerous I am. 

My cycle

So that's where I am. I'm miserable not writing, because it doesn't feel like me, but I'm also miserable writing, because it feels pointless. Yes, I know that many, many writers offer the therapeutic advice that you should write for yourself and whether it gets published or wins awards or earns praise isn't the point. But I do not want to write just to amuse myself. If nobody is ever going to read what I write, I don't want to write. That's not human connection, which, I think, ought to be at least part of why someone would write. 

My day job values being succinct above all other writing virtues, and they love it when you can draw a picture for something instead of making people read words, which everyone hates. So I've summarized all the above verbosity into the following flow chart:

Looking for life after literary fiction

Can one Marie Kondo one's reading life? Decide to leave unread that which does not bring one joy? It seems obvious that one could, although since my late teen years, I've made a lot of my reading decisions based at least in part on what I thought I should read. In fact, I probably weighed should over want to most of the time. It comes with making literature your major, I guess. You fall into a habit of thinking that if you're not reading something on an assigned list, you'll pay for it in the end. 

Since I took up writing seriously ten years ago, I've probably gravitated toward literary fiction at least in part because I thought it was what I should read. It wasn't the entire reason, though. There were at least two other reasons. First and by far the larger of the two reasons is that I read seeking answers to life's big questions, and I thought I'd find that more in literary fiction than in, say, books about sexy cowboy werewolves. I mean, I'm sure Renee Rose and Vanessa Vale have a lot of great thoughts about why there is something rather than nothing and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, but perhaps it's fair to say that these thoughts don't quite make it into their fiction. I wanted fiction that met my expectations of substance. So in a very real sense, literary fiction is what I want to read. The second reason is because I felt like my own writing was probably more like literary fiction than anything else, and I wanted to learn from others to improve my own work. 

After ten years of it, though, I've been a little disappointed in literary fiction's ability to come through in either category. On the one hand, I can count on one hand the novels and short stories I've read in the last ten years that I found deeply transformational in terms of how I view my place in the universe. Meanwhile, although I've definitely improved as a writer and now accomplished things that are pretty good for an amateur, I'm stuck and unlikely to get unstuck. My ceiling seems to be to occasionally get a good response from the top tier journals but never quite make it in. Since I do not wish to only be a consumer of fiction but a producer as well, I've found my participation in a scene I can't break into very frustrating. Frustrating enough that I will drop my annual critical project in the middle because a story rubbed me the wrong way and I wasn't quite able to explain why. 

But it's not like I'm going to quit reading altogether. At times over the last ten years, I've wondered whether I really am a lit fic writer (or primarily a lit fic reader). I love a well-made sentence, or a voice that sticks with you for days after you read it, but there were times I found myself wishing I could read a story once in a while where you could summarize the plot in a few sentences. Or where I could even tell what the plot was the first time through reading. 

So after putting down this year's Best American Short Stories, the first thing I picked up was an anthology of science fiction short stories. There wasn't an obvious equivalent to BASS in sci-fi, but "The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023," edited by R.F. Kuang, had "American" in it, so I picked that. 

It's different, all right

The first story in the anthology was first published in Conjunctions, which I know as a publisher of lit fic, so I was wondering if I'd even made a change. This story, "Readings in the Slantwise Sciences" by Sofia Samatar, could have been in BASS. Well, kind of. If could have been in BASS if the guest editor were really into hippie fantasy. But in general, it was still what I would characterize as being a somewhat language-centric story. 

After that, though, there started to be a real divergence from lit fic. One thing that surprised me was the prevalence of fantasy. I guess the name of the book did have fantasy in it, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was sort of guessing the mix would be about 17 sci-fi to 3 fantasy. Some of the stories were a little bit tough to classify as either, but I believe the anthology more or less alternated between sci-fi and fantasy, with some of the fantasy entries being horror.

I did not care for most of the fantasy, and I found myself wishing the publishing industry did not find it necessary to package sci-fi and fantasy together. I don't find they really have that much to do with each other or scratch a similar itch, and rather than making each other strong by joining forces, I found that the combination was in danger of causing their mutually assured destruction. I'm not going to go into depth about why I disliked most of the fantasy entries, because it's not my thing and that really is all there is to it. I find few things less magical than magic. "Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" by Theodora Goss was an exception, but for the most part, I was much more interested in the sci-fi stories.

One of the difficulties in writing science fiction is how to explain how your world is different from the reader's world (and often how your world got to its current state from the reader's world) without boring the reader with exposition. 

This is an especially perplexing problem for a sci-fi short story, which has very little space in which to build an alternate world. Consider "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills, one of two stories in the collection reflecting concerns in the current, real world about bodily autonomy in the wake of the overturn of Roe v Wade. The world of this story has a whole slew of new controls on nubile and especially pregnant women to introduce, so how does it do it without a lame screen scroll type of information dump?

Guest editor R.F. Kuang, echoing advice she herself has received, recommends dealing with the problem by writing "not from the point of view of someone encountering a world for the first time, but of someone who has lived in this world all their life...What do they notice? What is new to them? What is so natural to them that it hardly warrants comment? What are the bizarre pronouncements that only they could make?" 

Some of the stories in the BASFF anthology pull this off better than others. "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" goes in the complete other direction. It reads like a mockumentary, and at least half of the narrative is exposition, the kind that would be given to the viewer of a non-fiction documentary. I found the effect a little bit dull, and this was one of the stories I struggled the most to get through. Other stories pulled off Kuang's advice much better. "Termination Stories for the Cyber Dystopia" by Isabel J. Kim, "Pre-Simulation Consultation" by Kim Fu, and "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente were the three best stories in the collection. "Termination" in particular was extremely adept at getting the reader to understand its world without breaking from the narrative to explain it. 

Committing to the bit

Huang expressed her love in her introduction for stories that "commit" to whatever storytelling choices they make. This love spills over for her into "camp, silliness, and everything stylized." This includes Moulin Rouge, which I also love, but also the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, which I detest. She loves ""genres that lean fully into what they are," stories that "take themselves completely seriously."  She is tired of "leather-clad superheroes winking to declare, 'Don't worry--I'm not taking this too seriously." She is wary of irony, which she feels often substitutes for wit. 

Compare this to literary fiction. If literary fiction had a motto, it might be an adaptation of what Harold Bloom wrote about poetry in his introduction to the 1997 Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" anthology. He said that "all bad poetry is unfailingly sincere." I think this could well be the motto of a lot of literary fiction as well. It might believe that all bad fiction is unfailingly sincere. 

So we have two poles here, lit fic preferring cool detachment over sincerity, and Kuang's vision fo alternate world fiction as charmingly naive and self-serious. Since I've been reading literary fiction for a long time, I've probably come to identify a little bit with the idea that I should have some level of detachment from my own work, that I need to be its master and, no matter how emotionally I identify with its subject matter, that I should make decisions about the story with an objective eye.

There were times while reading BASFF that I could, in fact, have lived with a little less "commitment"  and a little bit more attention to language, form, and style, the very things I've been thinking literary fiction overemphasized at times. I'm not going to name stories here, but a few used words wrong or had a style that was so "sincere," so untainted by discipline and art, it became jarringly unpleasant.

However, on the whole, I found it a welcome reprieve from literary fiction. I liked stories where plot was at the center. I liked stories that were quixotically taking on universe-sized questions rather than soberly putting a small portion of existence under the microscope. While my literary fiction reading might have occasionally made me too snooty for some parts of the anthology, I also found myself wishing that many literary fiction stories could allow themselves the openness, silliness, or lack of concern for propriety in the stories I was reading. 

I suppose it should be no surprise that my preferred style might be somewhere between high art and low. I need enough plot and "commitment" to be engaged, but also enough skill and control to be entranced. I don't want so much earnestness there is no thought of form, but I don't want form to take over so much there is no possibility of earnestness trumping form, leaving some parts technically imperfect but emotionally resonant. 

Politically, I'm too conservative to be a liberal and too liberal to be a conservative, so why shouldn't I be in a no-man's land aesthetically in writing as well? In any event, it was enjoyable to do something different, so I'll probably continue with "different" for a while.