Currently Listening to: Myth by Beach House
Recently, I stumbled into a conversation that rototilled the garden of my dreams. A person I’d never met before said they’d spoken to an editor at one of the big five publishing houses. “Publishing is no longer a mediocracy”, he said, “it’s become far less of a craft, and more of a business”. Shimmy me back to the claustrophobic world of BookTok and his words bleed true. It wasn’t so much that this information poisoned the soil, but that their birth, charitable as it was, reshaped the landscape.
I’m not good at video-editing, or shelling out flashy content. I understand how and why extroverts seem to run society. Sometimes, it’s simply all about who can speak the loudest. Never mind what’s being said. I come across influencer-turned-authors all the time — to the point where I’ve started to block them. Yes, cringe, block them.
It’s not so much that I despise their success, but that I mourn the constant dismissal of quiet voices, the prevention/delay of the most intriguing narratives one could hope to find. I don’t want to read what a person, who’s job is to sell me things, has to say, they’ve already told me. I heard it in their videos and the group of influencer friends who then, responded to the original video to help promote the book.
Trading authenticity for reach tends to result in shallow concepts. Just look at every recent romance book that’s come out. Based on the cover alone, they look like sequels - all flat illustrations, reminiscent of corporate PowerPoints. Then, you read the back synopsis and its a repeat of the book just beside it. Gag me.
So, what happens when you and your peers are nowhere near this selection of authors? Or worse, that there still are places for quiet writers, but their gatekept to Hell by a tied tongue and hidden, crossed fingers.
Seriously. What happens?
I’m breaking the 4th wall here and asking you.
Did you hear the record scratch?
Did the camera guy say cut?
He didn’t? Jesus. Okay, well — Cut.
What now?
Nothing? You’ve got nothing for me? Really?
Fine. No, I’m not — no. I’m not mad. A little disappointed. I am. What? You want me to lie to you? Listen — enough of this bit. Carry on.
It reminds me all too much of Daulphin Island, being young and malleable. The sky was asleep above T and I, mirroring the flat black of the tarred road beneath our feet. We were walking through the neighborhood of houses on stilts, trying to pick the one we liked the most. Beneath the light of the moon, the white sand on the beach glowed. We could occasionally see movement out in the distance, realizing, too late, that the shifting terrain was just a colony of invisible crabs.
“That one, right there,” He’d said, pointing over my head.
My eyes flicked to the white house, a sun-bleach insect. A nightmarish beast. And through the picture window that faced both T and I, I saw a dining room that I pleaded to having seen before. T ignored me. Meanwhile, I kept staring — eyeing the blocky 80’s-esque painting hanging on the wall through the glass. Visions of my elementary school flashed before me. Books and brick rooms. Brown ashtrays and white shoes.
I couldn’t bring a name to the feeling beyond the commonality of deja vu, the old living in the new, that sort of thing.
That’s what all this feels like, anyway. Like, I’m being reminded of an answer I’ve received before. Capitalism kills art. History repeats. New doors open at the turn of another’s lock. I know all these things, I think I just expected more from the industry that saved me.
Richard Siken talked about his approach to writing in an interview back in 2018. I seem to talk about him a lot, huh? Give me a decade and then, one more, and my ability to untangle the importance of his work to me might emerge. What he said, though, was that he asks himself if he needs to say what is being said, if this is something only he can say. What an absolute real thing. What a gunshot of fresh air, a bullet of breath in my lungs.
I remember being in college and saying, “I think it matters if what you have to say is important”, and my professor immediately asking if I was liberal. I just think art, real art, holds value. It is the act of someone really showing you something that can’t be spoken — or maybe it can, just not in this realm. Somewhere bigger, with loose arms and a tilted voice. When its understood, though — God, does it hit like a passionate right hook; jaw, clicked shut. teeth, loose in their gums. I’m dizzy on the come down, spitting blood, enamored.
I’ll give if you give.
Spare the lookalikes and hand me the truth.
I spend a lot of time wondering how many oeuvres we will never get to know about because the artists were quiet and got run over by the world, making in bits of down time between their grueling jobs in factories or restaurants, or even more sad - imagining creating the things they wanted to create because their lives didn’t even leave them with enough energy to try.
I think we fight this by microfinancing each other.
I love that I work at a small independent bookstore full of books like the ones you want to write, to read. Books put out by small presses by queer, neurodivergent weirdos making strange shit.
It’s what keeps me going. Knowing that there are people who care that we exist. I watch people come in and they’ll ask me what I think they should read, and to some of them I’ll hand the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, or Come Thou Tortoise, or The Convictions of Leonard McKinley. To others searching for poetry I’ll put ‘Love is a Place but You Can’t Live There’s in their hands.
When a writer comes in and tells me, softly, that they are writing something after I’ve set the space for them to open like a dark rose at midnight…I listen. I ask them to tell me when they’ve finished. I offer to read their favourite paragraphs.
Here, it’s easy to forget that there are people who love books, helping the people who write them, by believing in them. By buying them at small readings. By ordering copies from their odd imprints, their small presses.
We have always been here at the fringes.
I love that this is the way. That the mainstream exists, and the streams that break their own ground do too.
I can’t wait to read your book, no matter how it arrives on my bedside table. By carrier pigeon or penguin.
Thank you for writing, and for being riled up.