On Ideal Readers and the Big Why

The poet Charles Wright once told me that he, after lots of the why-do-I-do-this’ing we writers are prone to, found an answer. Or at least, his answer. He gave a poetry reading and at the end of it a nun came forward and showed him a locket. It held a copy of his poem “October.” Because, she told him, she wanted to die with that poem on her body.

            And, he said, that was it. He’d found his ideal reader. And whatever publishing biz came along after it—rejections, acceptances, getting prizes, not getting prizes—sunk before this woman and her locket.

            I write essays, poems, fiction, and books. Do they sell well? Well enough for me to be happy, but not any publisher’s idea of stellar. Do I make money? Hmmm, no. I’ve gotten several very small book advances and two decent ones. Considering the time spent on a book, even the decent ones come to pennies per hour, if that. The truth is that even when there’s the decent advance, I travel for my books, do research, buy books, turn down other paying work. I’ve probably lost money on every one.  If I did something like drive for Uber, I’d make money and get the daily company of other people. Rather than my computer screen, ridiculous piles of paper, and a very bored kitty.

            I found my ideal reader at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference, which is a strange place to find anything soul-nourishing. I forget which city it was in. This was pre-covid, during the years when AWP was enormous—think as many as fifteen thousand people. And intimidating. People not on panels wondered why they weren’t on panels, people on panels wondered why they weren’t giving readings, people giving readings wondered why they weren’t keynoting. That kind of thing. I always felt those who felt good about themselves at AWP probably were spoiled as children, though that may just be my own pique.

            Then, while I did the thing I enjoyed doing, which is staffing the Bellingham Review table, I met that ideal reader. I don’t want to reveal too much of his story. I’ll just leave it at this: he told me he had conquered an addiction one summer, and part of what got him through it was reading one of my books over and over again.

            Whatever in my book helped him was a smidge of me and a heap of goodwill from the universe, for both of us. But I’d had the experience Charles had. I met my ideal reader, and I really haven’t gone too far into the weeds of “why” since then.

            When you sit at a table at a conference like AWP, you basically stand there grinning while humanity rushes by, hoping someone will want to stop and talk. It occurs to me now that this is pretty much what it means to be a writer—you stand around bashfully, hoping someone wants to extend that conversation you threw out into the void with your words. And if you do this long enough, I believe, you will also find your ideal reader.

Editing: On Caring, Paying, and Cuban Cigars

One of most depressing things I’ve seen on social media lately are posts saying that if literary journals can’t pay, they shouldn’t publish. That not paying is some kind of exploitation. But for my journal there is no choice involved. If my amazing Bellingham Review could only publish when paying authors, we either would give silly amounts of payment—one pumpkin spice latte, anyone?—or we’d pay more and quickly shut down.

I think this idea comes from a sense that journals are more or less some version of Poetry magazine, with a multimillion dollar endowment—or at least a healthy one—but still only small honoraria for authors. Well, no. My journal is required to self-fund with no fundraising support or ability to fundraise, since the people whose job it is to fundraise for us simply refuse to do it (thanks, tenure, for the ability to say that!) We survive on Submittable fees, mostly from our contests. Our annual budget is just enough to scrimpingly, page-countingly, print.

Our Managing Editor gets a stipend that equals a teaching assistant teaching one course. I get one course release, which should represent ten weeks of steady work. Instead I work twelve months a year, often, when we’re in production, the entire day, every day, for weeks. My hardworking and dedicated student readers and editors get a few credits each.

This is offering some real talk, not complaining. I have guest-edited journals from Drunken Boat to Brevity, and editing has been one of the delights of my life. If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t do it. When I see authors I’ve published early in their careers go on to win awards, publish books, become a force in the world, the joy is great. When I get work from seasoned writers that offers a new glimpse into their aesthetics and a new spin on their voices, that’s great too.

Which brings me to point two. When I took over the editorship of the Bellingham Review, one of my resolutions was that, since we cannot pay, we would support. From our perspective, our authors make us who we are. Being family is an overused trope, but if you think of being family as having a bunch of people behind you who are unflagging and ongoing in their concern for you, that’s us. Or who we try to be. We follow our authors. We blast their good news, we review their books, we interview them, we showcase them in Contributor Spotlights and in our newsletter. We care.

It is common, and I do it, to consider publication a one-and-done. The journal gets your nice poem, story, essay, hybrid work, and then it appears, and you stick it on your cv, or in front of your nearest and dearest, or whatever. But you shouldn’t stop there. You should message this journal with your news. You should send your book galleys and your award announcements. If they don’t care, they can ignore it. But I think most journals do want to know, and if it’s us, we’ll do everything we can to bring your work attention.

So . . . two messages here. One, please try to understand that your work may be landing into the inboxes of just a couple of tremendously overworked people who are doing this work of literary publishing out of love. And who see far, far more great writing than they can publish, or that they can even respond to with the letters you deserve.

Second, if you do connect with a literary journal, don’t think of it as just a chance to scan a TOC when your work comes out and stick it on Instagram. Think of it as a relationship. We all have too few of those in the literary world, don’t we?

Once, a while back, one of our authors sent us Cuban cigars in a box that had some kind of a cool cover (smuggled, I assume). It was wild. We editors got this big packet that smelt of (delicious) tobacco and opened it up with wonder. We didn’t smoke the cigars because one of us, uh, me, gets really sick. But we stared at them for a long time, sniffed them because they smelled so good, and just totally dug that this person cared enough about us to share some illicit cigars. So stay in touch. Know that just a few caring readers are working very hard but mostly want to work harder for you.

Platform, Which May Be Something You Stand On or a Quick Fall Into the Depths

Recently, a delightful person asked me if I have author platform. If you haven’t encountered the term, platform refers to public awareness of, and the potential guessable audience for, a writer. Platform matters because it’s common now for publishers to insist on seeing evidence of platform before signing. I give a lot of publishing talks and “What is platform and how do I get it” has become the most common question I hear.

My immediate response to the question of whether I have platform is, not too much, probably. I write for the Huffington Post, Ms., the New York Times, The Hill and other places that many people see. But if you look up articles on building author platform—and their name is Legion, for they are many—what I’ve got in that direction is small beer. Small as in like the cups you get when you order a craft beer flight. The checklist for platform generally includes multiple publications in large media, with a sense of expertise on particular subjects. For the media, I generally write in some way about neurodiversity and my call to rethink psychiatric practice. Lately I wrote on bipolarity and Britney Spears. This is the check on my list.

But the rest of author platform is: very widely followed blog and social media; e-newsletter; regular speaking engagements; maybe running a podcast; doing radio. One article on platform mentioned enthusiastically that it would be great to be Jon Stewart . . . which it totally would, except not for those reasons.

Let’s see, hours in a day, meet author platform. I hope you get along, but you probably won’t.  There’s always rolling out new content to keep those followers following. Constant pitching. It’s true you can hire publicists to do some of this work, but it’s costly and before you can, you’d likely need to have had the book success platform can give you.

So here’s my honest talk: I once had a book of mine featured in a publication that had more than 30,000,000 readers. It was an article pulled partially from the book, addressing its subject, and a little image of my adorable book cover sat at the bottom of the page.

And that book sold terribly. I don’t know why. I got many many emails, letters, and even a couple of phone calls from people who loved that article. They just didn’t buy the book. It flummoxed—and deeply annoyed—my editors, who sent their annoyance my way pretty quickly. Real talk is that platform makes great sales much more likely, but it’s no guarantee. And for a neurodiverse person like me, doing constant mega-events flashing my Jon Stewart vibe is a nonstarter.

So maybe the most useful thing I can suggest is this: pick what really matters to you from the platform checklist—it may be nothing—and commit to it, but mostly because it will nourish you. When I pitch articles, I pitch articles about subjects I want others to consider, or reconsider. Learn how to write a good pitch letter (I’m happy to do a pitch letter post if anyone out there is interested) and think about what you’re passionate about, if this sounds right for you. Do a fun blog, if that’s your thing. Or do everything on the checklist, because you want to. And then find your balance. Breathe.