Lately, I’ve been re-reading Thank You For Not Reading by Dubravka Ugrešić. The writer was introduced to me last year by someone who perhaps would have become my agent, but I’ll never know now—they left that world before I had anything substantial to show them. Regardless, the collection came to me at a good time, in the way that the chaos magick of knowledge (as I like to call it) often works for me: snaking through the mind’s subconscious, appearing obliquely in conversation or in texts that arrive without warning. It’s a feeling I live for, and unlike any other high I’ve experienced. Its fleetingness makes it all the more mysterious. It’s impossible to pre-empt. Impossible to fake. You can’t reach for it like a pill or a bag of drugs, and it’s certainly not found as easily as sex. When the mind obsesses about something for far longer than it should, a strange door opens.
I don’t like to couch events in mystical terms. My rational (westernised) mind can’t take it. I think, especially as someone who’s spent more or less my whole life to date faithless and without spiritual anchors—not even astrology (sorry)—the unexplained feels too ghoulish. But I’m also embarrassingly uneducated in science, so this could be something easily clarified by a scholar of the brain.
Back to the book; Thank You For Not Reading is Ugrešić’s experimental collection of fiction and essays, each one threaded through a biting critique of the publishing industry. In “Book Proposal”, she deadpans, “What is a book proposal? A summary of the book, a short synopsis. What is a successful book proposal? One that gets the editor to read the manuscript. What is a really successful book proposal? One that gets the editor to buy the book before it has even been written.” Like Ugrešić, “I can sort of understand the hook business, but I just can’t imagine my readership in advance.” Who makes art with the end result in mind? We’re not exactly embarking on a five-year plan towards a piece of real estate here.
In “The Aura of Glamour”, Ugrešić observes, “Despite the fact that “everyone can do it,” art has, quite paradoxically, retained its aura of exclusivity. The field of art creates among other things the illusion that, if we end up there, we can stay forever.” It’s romantic to think that we can possibly evade the machinations of this sick society, but the longer I take writing seriously the more I come up against the business. Around three years after I first started selling my writing for money, a poet told me it was imperative that I learn to separate the business from the craft—at the time, it didn’t make much sense to me (i.e., what’s the difference?), but I held on to it.
This advice comes back to me now with new significance. The fact that art-making exists within the marketplace is antithetical to the very thing itself, and I wish I was rich or safety-netted enough to say, fuck money, fuck capitalism, smash the state and all its apparatus. I mean, I do say those things, but while we’re at it we can’t deny capital’s existence either, because to do so would be to commit the annoyances of the bourgeoisie, they who refuse to acknowledge that systems exist, because to recognise them is to recognise that the systems are working in service of them. It’s reminiscent of what Barthes writes in Mythologies: “Bourgeois ideology can therefore spread over everything and in doing so lose its name without risk: no one here will throw this name of bourgeois back at it.” You know, it’s like when the moneyed express discomfort at mentioning the cost of things. Both the grant and the residency netted me $30,000 (including a $4000/month studio for free in 2022). I treated myself to a $500 massage gun and a $150 pair of furry house slippers, plus, naturally, some nice alcohol ($100) and a new stack of books ($200++). My boyfriend and I finally adopted a cat ($137.50 each, and around $200 for extras). My notebook, which I wrote the draft of this newsletter on, cost $2. Money grows on trees.
I can’t get over it. This is probably something that accompanies the ordeal that constitutes ageing, as you see friends you used to muck around with reveal their trust funds, inheritances and the like. But never have I been so blindingly accosted by financial privilege as much as I have cavorting with Writers and their ilk. I’ve written about this before; class differences can be invisible until they are made so visible it’s impossible to unsee or bear. And you can say, look, if we are all Working then it’s almost logical to believe that we are all working-class. Are we really that similar? I barely subscribe to the same cultural referents, don’t entertain the ever-fluctuating, toxic tides of respectability. Every working-class writer I’ve met (and it is here I have to say they are few and far between) have agreed that it’s mostly about playing catch-up; seven years since I began I’m still learning the language of this world, the way people seem to all consume the same things and communicate in weird, roundabout ways. I never want to get used to this, although resisting can sometimes feel like a stressful enterprise. Sure, writing is labour, it’s Work and it’s Craft and it can be a Job, and the fact of it being tied to elite institutions does not mean that we cannot believe in two things at once. It could simply be that art is not “work”, because work is not “life”. Establish a fucking UBI already.
As part of the Creators Fund grant, I asked for an additional $2000 so that I could pay to consult a book mentor, someone who is simultaneously an editor and who knows how the publishing industry works. It’s funny, and a testament to the insular nature of book publishing: even though I’ve been reading since I could read, as well as an editor of book reviews now, I know jackshit about the processes behind publishing a book. I only recently learned what a ‘colophon’ is. What the fuck is a ‘comp title’? Bitch I’ll kill you.
All that aside, this book mentor turned out to be Camha Pham, whom I had worked with previously on an essay, ‘Lingua Franca’, that was published in the Portside Review earlier this year. A fierce and keen advocate for writers and editors of colour (she is a co-founder of the First Nations and People of Colour (FNPOC) Publishing Network, as well as the author of a trenchant essay, “Where Are All The Editors of Colour?”), Camha’s gentle yet critical editing style took that piece to the next level; it heartened me that she understood where I was coming from, both ideologically and stylistically. Perhaps I’m finicky, or too niche, or have high standards when it comes to my work, but these editorial moments are rare—I can count on one hand the editors whom I’ve worked with who have made me feel like they care. Another indictment of the over-stretched and underfunded industry perhaps, but I wonder if it is possible to do both; that is, edit with integrity and give a shit. The editors I’ve met exemplify it. They are probably also very burnt out.
These relationships are fascinating to think about, especially as they can be likened to one with a therapist, or a casual date. You’re discussing roadblocks, you’re hoping for a vague sense of approval, you’re allowing yourself to be vulnerable in order to bring out the ideal dynamic. Sometimes you realise it’s not working, and you have to accept it and move on. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier newsletter, these can feel akin to an obligatory social situation like work or school where one is expected to maintain a measure of decorum while exuding a sense of familiarity, a balance I’m bad at striking.
But Camha settled my nerves immediately, particularly as I expressed my uncertainty around navigating the book publishing world and its various schisms. She asked about my processes, and seemed amused by the exacting standards I create for myself, all of which I had never discussed at length before. At our first meeting, she asked me to define “success”, at least in terms of the book: “Will you consider the book successful if it sells lots of copies? Or are you more interested in it being critically-acclaimed?”
“Honestly? Neither. I consider the book to be a success if readers tell me that it makes them feel comforted, that I’ve articulated something they’ve been thinking about but was previously unable to pin down,” I responded. It sounds naïve, but as a reader, I’ve always used that as a yardstick—it’s about finding comfort in the writing, those authors who express inalienable truths in an artful way, while being aware of the many contradictions that swirl around us, whether that’s in ourselves or the world. But I realise that to define success in this way is to acknowledge that the conflict between the business and the craft is—at least for me—irreconciliable, and that I’ll just have to write the damn book and see what follows.
“No one actually knows what they’re doing—people sort of make up decisions as they go along,” she said when I expressed my apprehensions around the book business. Apart from helping me figure out and write up a book proposal, she is also offering me feedback on two WIPs, which will go into the proposal as part of my pitch to publishers and agents.
As I mentioned to an acquaintance, this process feels like putting together an LP after releasing singles forever. I’ll tell you the rest in another newsletter in the next fortnight because I think this is getting too long.
While you’re still reading…
I published two essays earlier this month. In case you think I’m some prolific pen-pusher, no—I worked on these over the year, both of which were commissioned in April. One paid me $250 and the other $2000. The former was much harder to write than the latter, but was a fun process that felt conclusive, and the latter was written quickly, after having ruminated on its central theme for the past two years, yet is the beginning of what I’m sure is a much bigger idea. Told ya, making art in the marketplace is fucking weird.
Read them here:
House Style Lifestyle, Or: Same. Same. Same. Same. Same. Same.