All of us run against it sooner or later. That wall. As children, we hear “NO! You can’t climb that tree, you might fall and get hurt.” As adults, when we ask for money or love and are given a stone. For me as a writer, the NO that seems to set a limit to all my hopes comes in response to an idea, a manuscript—or, in this case, a proposal.
Yesterday my agent told me, “I can’t sell it. Nobody wants to read about privileged white men.” This is my proposal about my youngest son. It’s called Two Silver Cups.
Of course privileged white men are written about, those books are published, and they turn up on The New York Times Best Seller list—that ancient organ of misinformation—every Sunday. I haven’t counted but I expect the number of books written and published every month by white men (well, maybe not privileged—but certainly lucky in terms of education, income and status) still outnumber the books written, published and read by white women—as these men’s books always have and maybe always will.
Even worse than her NO was that she thought I wrote this memoir to make her feel sorry for me.
Nobody writes anything of value in order to provoke pity. The harshest of personal stories are all written to evoke curiosity, wonder, maybe awe—but not pity.
So where do I go from here? I promised myself not to spend three years writing a book nobody wants to read; my historical novel, Captive—told by an early nineteenth century white woman, although her story is about the Shawnee—is languishing somewhere; my agent has passed it along to another agent, hardly a promising move.
First of all, I’m rejoicing in the fact that we have an alternative form of publishing—literary small presses, literary magazines and their competitions. Yes, entering one of these competitions generally costs money (although there are a few that don’t charge) but the small sums support these quarterlies. And yes, at these small presses we have editors who love the written word—and they are not run by New Yorkers who, according to an old cartoon, don’t believe there is anything in this country between the Hudson River and the California Coast. These editors, like the big dogs in New York, are trying to make up for past neglect by publishing work by the many marginalized writers whose time, briefly, has come. The energy to right an ancient injustice is likely to run out when the word goes around that nobody wants to read these books, either. I’m grateful that their time has come; it is long overdue. But since all publishing in the Big World is based on profit, this attempt will probably be brief.
So let us all praise God for the small presses, their valiant editors—now sometimes women—the valiant literary journals, their editors likewise—and even for the multitude of women’s voices I hear on National Public Radio every morning.
We sweat, swear and cry—but we go on.
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