What's Going On With My Career?

I am privileged enough to be in constant communication with my treasured friends Jamie Hood and Harron Walker about the pleasures and pains of writing, revising, pitching, PR, and publishing. But since Jamie and Harron are both releasing (excellent) books this year—Trauma Plot and Aggregated Discontent— I wanted to dialogue in a more formal and lasting fashion than our usual disappearing voice messages. This exchange began at the start of March and concluded by month’s end. We are pretty candid throughout and even share our book advance details, so nosey folks, read on!

Charlotte: Good morning, women. My dear, dear women. This is perhaps a bracing place to start but let’s get right to it: how are you each feeling about your writing careers in this moment, and why? 

Harron: Hello, women! And hello, dear reader. You’re kind of like the fourth lady of this conversation.

Anyway, how am I feeling about my writing career… My first thought is that I wish it were 2015 so I could just quote that one Cher tweet and everyone would think I was smart and cool and very high-low. My second thought is that if it were 2015 I’d have a much better sense of how to answer this question because the media ecosystem, digital or otherwise, would be so much more legible to me. We’ve talked about this a lot, Charlotte, but there’s this bizarre dissonance I feel as my impending publication date looms ever closer. When you have a book people talk to you about your book like it’s this big, huge, life-changing event—which it is, on some level, even if it flops. But then in tandem with that book and all those outside projections, I have barely any editorial contacts left in the media industry, the younger editors who’ve taken their place have no idea who I am and aren’t familiar with my body of work, a lot of the outlets I used to write for have either shut down or become sad husks of themselves at the behest of venture capitalists, and my rate can vary wildly from a quarter to a dollar a word, sometimes at the same outlet. Which is fine! Whatever. That’s why I have a day job—a day job where people I work for love to ask if I’m excited about my book. And I am! But there’s a lot to unpack. I probably sound like an asshole.

Put another way, I find the failing, overlapping industrial infrastructures that undergird my writing career depressing and maddening to think about. That said, I’m very excited about where I’m at on a creative level. I’ve nearly finished a short story collection that I’ve been writing, on and off, since before the pandemic, and I’ve also started work on an essay that could be book-length, possibly my nonfiction follow-up to Aggregated Discontent. There’s also Veronica Place, my unhinged Melrose Place-Desperate Housewives pastiche that’s about halfway finished. It’s exciting to be pulled in so many creative directions at once and to find myself filled with so much inspiration that it feels like it’s competing with itself for my attention. The only problem therein is that I don’t have the time and bandwidth to work on all these projects as quickly as I’d like, which, in remembering past bouts of writer’s block, is a problem I’m grateful to have.

Jamie: Good evening women. I’m writing to you from a beautiful farmhouse upstate, which is to say I’m feeling far sunnier about my “literary” “career” than when I’m entrenched in the city’s chaos. Anytime I’m upstate I feel like the well-sweatered, well-heeled, soon-to-be-well-sexed heroine of a Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers film. Trauma Plot publishes in two weeks, and reception so far has been admiring and shockingly non-invasive, which has been a relief. 

I’m cautiously optimistic about my future in book writing: I’m taking notes toward a new non-fiction project, and have an old poetry manuscript I want to rework. I’ve also been simmering a novel, and this very weekend wrote a large chunk of a short story, which surfaced in me seemingly fully-formed on Metro North last night. On the freelance front I’m wary. There are editors I’ll always work with, but, frankly, the money’s bad almost everywhere and the opportunities continue to attenuate. I’m never confident a magazine will go on running, so counting on any of them usually seems a fool’s dream.

Things have been wildly busy, though, which lulls me into a notion that they’ll go on being busy. I’m still better known as a cold bartender and hot slut, which is fine, but I hope people are starting to recognize the writing I’ve done as a memoirist and critic. I’ve created a solid body of work in the last five years, and would love to go easier on myself after the book comes out, but I’m a Taurus with a Cap rising, so I’m a workhorse regardless of desire. Now it’s your turn, Charlotte!!!

Charlotte: When my book tour ended in October, I felt like my career had coasted to a close. And it was actually sort of wonderful, like a lid fitting down on a box, or the sloughing off of an old skin.

On a practical level, An Honest Woman did not make anything happen for me. It created no new opportunities, it spawned no new income. I still get incredibly sweet messages about it from readers and other writers, and that means so much. But since its immediate release, the book has not absorbed me further in any way. And the attendant sense of a finish let me recapture my much younger self’s sense of creative possibility, which I thought might be lost forever. It’s very God closed one door and opened 82 windows and I’m spinning around in the fresh air, arms out, like a tampon commercial. I have so many ideas, so many notebooks going, multiple works in progress. I can write whatever I want. It’s crazy!

It’s interesting to me that the three of us are in such fertile, inspired states though the freelance situation—and the likelihood of actually making a living through writing books—is not encouraging. Do you feel like you can point to recent circumstances that helped your writing open up for you? Is it the inevitable result of finishing a book, having a bit of a fallow period, and then rising up refreshed? Do you think the untenable nature of freelancing itself has given us permission to think about our writing differently, less as content-creation or news-pegged essays, more as a spontaneous, self-directed outpouring that doesn’t need to be pitchable? 

Jamie: For me, the fallow period is indispensable. I admire but don’t really Get writers who produce work in seeming perpetuity. I’m a bit more prolific than I might otherwise be because when I’m disenchanted with or enervated by one form, I just hop to another (i.e., if I’m fed up with writing about my life–as I was after my first book–I can turn to criticism). Fiction feels like really tillable ground for all three of us at present, and does look like one of God’s windows opening. I wasn’t able to write for six months after finishing my manuscript last year, and it didn’t help that I felt utterly annihilated by a breakup, but lately I’m falling in love again, and I write A LOT when I’m falling in love. Something about the intensity of deepening intimacy, I guess; it breaks my world open to all manners of energy. The early pleasures of romance are a kind of possession. I need to be thrown off kilter to embark on new projects that feel radical to me. 

To answer your more logistical question, the creeping eradication of freelance options does make me more prone to consider alternative pathways for publishing. The newsletter form made many things feasible that otherwise wouldn’t have been. Sure, maybe a place like The Paris Review would look at and not spit on my pre-op diary, but it’s nice to have somewhere to share work that feels meaningful without being beholden to the market. I don’t always want to tailor a piece to fit what an editor who hasn’t had a non-editorial job in 15 years thinks is intelligible to an audience. We, too, build readerships on our own singular merits. Sure, some people only read The New Yorker, but some people also read the three of us no matter where we publish. We have our own audiences that follow us anyplace we go.

Charlotte, I’m glad you feel more at peace with the long tail of An Honest Woman. I’m not looking forward to the post-release comedown. Truthfully, I’m barely enjoying the pre-release mania! Something I love about our chat is that we think of ourselves as working writers. Art after all is labor, and we three do other things to make ends meet. We aren’t trust fund babies, we don’t have cushy staff jobs, there are no guarantees. We write because it makes meaning in our lives, and we’re interested in giving back through this labor to one another, to others. Is that fair? Or maybe one of you might talk about what being a “working writer” means to you?

Harron: I think that’s a fair way of putting it, Jamie. As for your question, please don’t yell at me, call me “a bitch,” and dump a bucket of shit on my head while I stroll through the stradone, but I’d like to tweak your question just a hair and describe what being a working writer has meant for me. By having a day job—working in production for a furniture company’s e-commerce photo shoots, to keep it somewhat vague—I have been able for the past three years to only write what I want when I choose to write it. I don’t feel beholden to pitch or take on assignments because I feel pressured to. With nearly everything I write these days, it’s because I genuinely want to write it, or because the money’s good enough that I can motivate myself to do it. 

As someone who began her media career writing aggregated news blogs and timely hot takes in pursuit of various traffic goals or to meet my posts-per-day quota, it feels great to no longer feel beholden to such external pressure to produce. Now, I merely feel beholden to the internal pressure to do so! I don’t know that I’ve talked about this much, but I think part of what’s driving me to finish my trio of projects as soon as possible is that I’m scared that the release of my book in May might throw a wrench in my creative impulses and dissuade me from writing anything for a while. Also, I know this might be “cringe” to some, but the reactionary backlash overtaking the U.S. has definitely been driving me forward, as well. It just feels unwise to waste time right now, as a writer or anything else.

On a way more micro level, to apply a more Harronian lens, I unexpectedly had Monday through Wednesday off this week and used that time to plow through a short story I’ve been meaning to rewrite for years. So that, too, is definitely a motivating factor for me as a writer: having less work and thus more time to write (has anyone thought of this). I hope that something my book does for me, to call back to Charlotte’s thoughts about what An Honest Woman did/didn’t do for her, is somehow allow me to leave my day job and devote more of my time to writing books—or screenplays or podcast series scripts. Any kind of physical media, anything really that feels more permanent, more reliably preserved and preservable than the websites I used to write for (whither Fusion dot net, etc.). I’ve never done a residency—I should probably get better at applying for those—but I’d love to live my life like it’s a 24/7 residency, writing whatever I’m drawn to whenever the hell I’d like. How would you both like to imagine your lives as writers in the future? What would that look like, however idealistic?

Charlotte: Jamie, I always appreciate your use of the phrase “working writer.” There’s simultaneously a dignity and a humility to it. It makes writing feel vocational, like an action that can be skilled and practiced but without the pretension of “craft.”  And it makes “writer” sound like a role that will still exist and have purpose and value after the fall of capitalism, which—I think it will! Ariana Reines’s Wave of Blood has a beautiful insight about how poetry outlasts almost everything else human beings do or make.

Harron, how I hope to write in the future is: independent of financial consideration. The true ideal is probably a chunk of money that basically covers my family’s necessities into old age, wherever that comes from—whither the estranged, beneficent dead relative—and the more modest dream is simply to generate a reliable, adequate income through the type of writing I’m drawn toward without regard for the market.

Sadly, these dreams feel almost equally ambitious and outrageous. With each day that passes, I want to spend less, not make more. But even very modest sums, 20 or 30k a year, take a remarkable amount of effort to generate with writing, especially if you’re someone who’s constantly shooting herself in the foot by refusing to work for outlets with the most heinous political agendas aka the ones that pay the most. I can’t imagine generating a true living wage without freelancing and pitching aggressively, which is pure hell. In that mode, there’s no time for other writing. And there’s no time for your brain to breathe! A huge book advance feels like the only way, and I don’t think I’ll ever have one of those. 

I keep wondering if I should just go to veterinary school so I can have a source of income that feels less precarious. I can’t imagine not writing regardless of a so-called day job because, as you said, Jamie, it makes meaning in my life and it feels like my most direct and honest way of contributing to human life, the way in which I was made to best participate. It’s been a relief to accept and allow this, to tell myself that writing isn’t something I have to quit because it can’t justify its performance like, say, life-saving medical care does. Do you know what I mean? 

Harron: No. I think that’s weird. You should feel bad for thinking it.

Actually, you shouldn’t (to paraphrase Alecia “Pink” Moore at the GLAAD Awards when she fake came out for some reason). I think that makes total sense, and I totally get what you mean. I like to imagine someone reading my work in a library years from now, learning something about how people lived at this time through reading my work, whether fiction or nonfiction. I talked about this in my in-conversation piece with Jamie for the Poetry Project Newsletter but I think of Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble and the details therein about how people in the East Village managed communal care in confronting the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s, e.g. the bit about AZT alarms that Jonathan Larson allegedly (“””””””allegedly””””””) lifted for Rent’s “AZT break” scene. (Read Stagestruck!) Or about how a couple years ago, I was reading Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, in which the characters talk about abortion by name. That was published, albeit anonymously, in 1929, but around the same time I was reading it I was watching the second season of And Just Like That, in which the characters in one scene discuss abortion without ever actually saying the word. Both works tell us so much about the times in which they were made! It’s just so wild and upending to realize that abortion might be, in some ways, more taboo now than it was a hundred years ago. Anyway, I hope my work does something like that for future readers. I would really love that.

But back to something else you said, Charlotte; I hope I didn’t go too off-topic. I think you would be an excellent vet, or really any sort of animal care professional. You have such a wonder and care and respect for life of all kinds! In the past, I considered getting licensed to do hair removal, either laser or electrolysis, since I know firsthand that there’s always a demand. I haven’t taken any steps towards that, though. I’ve been applying for jobs, mostly writing related, for the past few years, and the job market is just so bad. I hate how the lack of responses I’ve gotten for jobs I’m over-qualified for has made me feel like I actually have no marketable skills after flopping my way out of media. Maybe I don’t have any though… Women, do I have any marketable skills? I’m just kidding! Slash, actually I’m not….

Jamie: Harron, you have no marketable skills, PERIOD. Actually you do … let me just dig around in my brain for them … please hold … 

Charlotte, like you, I’m less interested in amassing wealth / waste and more interested in writing as though “untouched by financial considerations.” I agree that—barring an unexpected inheritance—an enormous advance feels like the easiest path to this headspace and working style, but (forgive me) I don’t know that any of us are Enormous Advance girlies. Who gets those these days? Sally Rooney and, like, Castle of Shits and Pisses series authors I guess. Maybe Emma Cline? She got a huge one for The Guest, right? Maybe one of us could have an Emma Cline career, that doesn’t seem totally impossible to me. 

It’s funny: I got a pretty good advance for Trauma Plot but didn’t take any time off to write it. I bartended through the entire process, but I have a real scarcity mindset, economically speaking. I think because I grew up relatively poor, I’m never convinced of my next meal. I didn’t want to be the person who blew her advance and flailed around until the next one, assuming a next one ever comes. As far as taking jobs and not taking jobs goes, I also only write what I want to write, which is partly why I continue bartending even though I fucking hate it and it’s slowly killing me. I don’t have to be the sort of writer who accepts every commission or who is constantly in the pitching process. I don’t like pitching and basically don’t do it. I’ll go to an editor and say, “I want to write about XYZ author/text,” but beyond this, I don’t pitch in the usual way. I’m terrible at it and find it basically ridiculous. Either you respect my body of work or you don’t; either you trust my skill as a critic or you don’t. I’m not going to pre-write half an essay to be given the go ahead to write an essay that will look nothing like the pre-write. I don’t have time and we don’t get paid enough. 

All of this to say, I want to write books until I die and know I will. The question is whether I’ll make a living that way, and there just aren’t any guarantees coming. Who knows? Maybe A.I. slop actually will supplant everyone in the literary sector but I know our art will continue having value, even if for no one but the three of us. I’m my first audience; you two are after that; then there’s everyone else. I’d love to continue reaching everyone else and supporting myself in that endeavor but I’m at peace with the knowledge that my writing matters regardless. Charlotte, I like that you appreciate my emphasis on our status as “working writers,” and I feel that identification deeply in how each of us has responded to this question. Our lives will go on in whatever fashion they do, and those lives will always include writing. 

Charlotte: As we’ve discussed extensively, it’s confusing and degrading when an editor seeks you out and then turns down every idea you suggest, or else green lights a piece only in order to scrub out your viewpoint and voice from the final product. Just use ChatGPT if that’s what you’re after! I know some of these decisions are being made by editors above them but it feels so awful, it makes me never want to write again. Then I have to remind myself that freelancing is not writing, it’s a separate thing. And I want to take this opportunity to stress that a good editor is gold. I yearn to have my work edited by someone I respect and trust, and sometimes it is!

I wonder what it feels like to be Emma Cline, or anyone who has a big name and major money from their writing. I imagine that in addition to other obvious benefits, it obviates rejection but maybe that’s wrong. I repeatedly try to tease out career envy from admiration: do I like a certain author’s work or do I just wish I had her sales/respect/cachet? I’m miserable when I don’t keep myself honest on this point, when I start sliding down the chute of “my writing isn’t good enough” when “good enough” is shorthand for “famous” or something stupid. My writing probably isn’t good enough by my own aspirations but when I fixate on feeling like I have no professional traction, I immediately also feel like I have no control and no hope.

I’d like to point this toward social media and marketing if I may. I immediately clashed with the marketing person assigned to me for An Honest Woman and refused to do most of what she asked, which I think is fairly common based on an informal survey of author friends. We talked amongst ourselves at the time about how publishers or editors can act entitled to the audience a writer has built through their own social media posts and writing, and basically presume that they, the middle men, know better how to speak to and handle this same audience we cultivated ourselves. I don’t like that. I know there are people who’ve read me since the N.B. days and it’s my position that they’ve got seniority over the publisher. How are you each navigating the pressure to make yourself into (more of) a brand in advance of your book releases? 

Jamie: Just to be sure I’m on the record as having said this: I love being edited and feel truly—and I do mean truly!—blessed to write regularly for several incredible editors. I’d name them but then they’d get too many inquiries from other annoying bitches and might be forced to make me start writing real pitches. They know who they are! And please don’t do that to moi! I enjoy freelancing, Charlotte, though I agree I don’t imagine it how I imagine My Projects (said to the tune of My Agonies). Maybe it’s easy to reckon with freelance work differently in part because, for me, it’s mostly criticism, where other things I write are more intimately anchored. I love writing about other people’s books, but it doesn’t feel as tied to ego. 

I like your distinction between meaningful admiration and professional envy–it’s a taxonomic move that feels so Classic Charlotte to me. You’re the first person I turn to when trying to suss out or articulate microscopic shifts in tone and feeling. My queen of nuance! I fall short by my own standards often, but I try not to imagine myself inhabiting the careers of others. Sure, I probably can’t write a Rooney novel, but I don’t think she could write Trauma Plot, either, and frankly, that’s perfectly fine! When I admire a writer, besides, I like feeling I can look to them and be animated by their work. 

As for social media and branding, well, yes, the pressure is surely there, but I don’t care much about it. I won’t do cheesy TikTok videos. I’m not ordering RAPE GIRL merch to sell at events, even though I love our jokes about GRAPE GIRL bucket hats and rape whistle bookmarks. If you can’t laugh, et cetera…  I barely use twitter now, but I’m certainly not transforming the space where I post about cum into a pathetic promotional ponzi scheme. It’s boring, and what’s worse–these pivots and reconsolidations DON’T WORK. I’m not so naive as to think it’s merit all the way down, or that every good book meets the audience it deserves, but it’s sad to watch someone turn themselves into a one-person PR machine and then their book sells 300 copies anyway! One of the reasons I went to a major publisher was that I hate schmoozing, but it’s true there’s a lot of expectation if you have a large social media platform. Now it feels really immaterial, though. Twitter doesn’t let you post links anymore, and the only thing that sells on Instagram is beef tallow influencer bullshit.

Harron: What you said about your advance, Jamie, has me thinking about how my own advance functioned for me. I just finished Vivian Blaxell’s book-length essay, Worthy of the Event, this morning, and—well, it does so many things at once, but one of the many things it does is mount a richly considered argument against our ability to achieve any true finality or state of perfection on this mortal coil. (In this? On this? On this.) So, anyway, I hate to disregard all I’ve learned through reading her book, but I do think that I’ll be much better poised to take full advantage of my next advance, assuming that there will be a “next advance” of equal or greater amount to the one I got for Aggregated Discontent ($150,000 before taxes and agent fees, split over four payments between 2021 and 2026; I have thus far received the first two payments, I’ll get the third when the book comes out in May, and I’ll get the fourth and final chunk of it another year after that.) 

I hadn’t been planning to sell the book when I did. My big plan for that year, other than continuing work on some short stories and a ghostwriting project that later fell through, was undergoing vaginoplasty after years of planning for it. My first advance payment allowed me to recover at home and get started on the book without having to worry about work, but since I was starting at zero with the project—or very close to it, I’d only written maybe eight or nine thousand words of the Working Girls essay—and had never before written anything close to book-length, I didn’t come close to finishing my manuscript by the time I had to worry about finding a new job. Now, I know how to write big, long, and sprawling—prefer to now, in fact—which is one of my favorite things to come out of this process, and I’d like to think that writing my first book helped me learn how to actually write a book, period. I think I could now confidently complete a manuscript in time with my advance payments, but of course that’s hypothetical. (Blaxell is surely cackling at my hubris somewhere.) I guess I’ll only be able to find out for sure once (when? if?) I sell my next book.

On the subject of branding, remember back when X was Twitter and Twitter was actually a venue for semi-meaningful discourse sometimes? Maybe seven or eight years ago, everyone was talking about how writers now had to be influencers and brand themselves accordingly. I remember finding the discussion to be very myopic—not to mention, irritatingly prone to matters of aesthetics, personal morality, and professional ethics. It often missed the point of the actual shift that was taking place: that media labor had grown increasingly destabilized as the industry shifted to that of a gig economy, in tandem with basically every other creative industry at the time. (All forms of creative labor were basically just echoing the porn industry, a decade later.)

This tangent feels increasingly unwieldy, so I’ll just say that I generally feel comfortable with how I choose to and choose not to brand and package myself and my writing. (Easy thing to say when my first experience with a proper promo cycle hasn’t even begun yet…) Not to be like “It’s called intuitive branding…” but I try and just follow my intuition and change my tactics based on whatever feels good or bad. Like, if I feel too exposed on social media or like I’m selling the public on a woman-shaped lie (“I’m a hack,” I starting telling myself. “This piece is humiliatingly bad.” “You don’t actually look like that, it’s just deception and angles,” or whatever other negative self-talk springs to mind), I’ll stop posting photos or links to my work or even stop posting at all. Or if I feel like I’ve pigeonholed myself as a writer, whether in terms of the form or the content—wait, maybe that’s why I’ve been so focused on fiction as I near the release of my nonfiction debut. Maybe it’s a form of subconscious subterfuge meant to counteract the limits of my inevitable commodification as the woman who wrote my first book and who will only ever write books that are like my first book—which, objectively speaking, is a good book. I really like this book. I swear. Please read it. But again, it’s my first book, and in writing that first book I became a better writer than the woman who’d first started work on that book. I think that’s a good thing. I hope that was coherent. I hope I feel that way after every book I write.

Women, to spin the lazy Susan with a microphone duct-taped to its center back to either of you, do you feel like you’re still the same writer who began work on your most recent books? 

Jamie: I’m so immensely proud of the work I did in Trauma Plot and also there’s a significant part of me that knew I wouldn’t write other books until after I’d finished that book and migrated beyond those stories. So it’s its own profound accomplishment and I’ve cleared space to write differently going forward. Every work changes you, I think. After I finished good girl I didn’t want to write about my life for two years, and I learned a lot about writing criticism for magazine audiences. I think I’m again approaching a place where I’d like to distance myself from my/self a bit in writing, which I can only assume is why I’m feeling animated by fiction. Completing Trauma Plot opened a lot of space in my heart on an emotional level, and I’m in love now in a different way than I’ve ever been. My life feels very expansive at present. It’s electrifying!

Charlotte: One thing I love about writing is the distance it marks between temporal versions of one’s self. I think anyone who’s written for long enough has had the experience of reading a quote and thinking “that’s good” and then being like “wait a second…I wrote that!” I love reading something I wrote and feeling impressed with the insights or style or clarity but in a non-proprietary way, as if I were impressed by someone else altogether, which I kind of am. Thich Nhat Hanh has an anecdote about someone asking him to explain a sentence in a book he’d written twenty years before, and his response is “I didn’t write that book.”

So I think the answer to your question is no, I don’t feel like the same writer. But I’m informed by her. I benefit from her choices and her experience. Louise Gluck once told a student of hers that writing "doesn't get easier” and I think that’s true. Starting with a blank page is always as inviting as it is intimidating. But I also think (good?) writers give themselves fresh challenges, if not intentionally than inevitably through changes in taste and interests. There’s an analogy here in how physical disciplines like Pilates or yoga don’t really get “easier” even if your mobility and strength increase. New poses and exercises become available to you but also your awareness becomes finer, and your aims more sophisticated. I think what gets stronger for writers is an instinct for when something is or isn’t working and over time you acquire more techniques to fix it. And a lot of that is actually development as a reader. In the back of my mind right now is the AI “art” worshippers’ conviction that process is an obstacle to creation instead of being the whole thing. Like: what if we just removed the work part? What if we just removed the effort? I think it’s quite beautiful that Louise Gluck would say writing never gets easier. It shouldn’t! Ease isn’t the point. 

I wanted to have this conversation for two reasons. One is, I love talking to you both in basically every way that talking can occur. And another is that I hoped we might share something useful or affirming for younger writers or first-time authors or even established authors who appreciate hearing other writers talk about what it’s like. (I certainly do!) To that end, Harron, I love that you shared your advance. I’m addicted to swapping financial intel, it’s the most moral form of gossip. My advance was $60,000 paid out over three installments: signing, delivery, publication. And in case anyone missed it, Tao Lin recently shared his book sales. I will do the same later this year, maybe when the paperback comes out. It’s so fun to know this stuff.

Is there anything you’d like to leave readers with as we close? Favorite advice or words of wisdom for our fellow writers? 

Harron: OK, first of all, Charlotte, you are so wise. I love what you said about “AI worshippers” mistaking process for being “an obstacle to creation instead of being the whole thing” and everything you said before that about the lifelong challenge of writing. And Jamie, I think you’re so wise, as well. You’re both so wise….and beautiful.

On that note, I’d say that one of the best things a writer can do for themselves is to invent reasons to work with other writers and artists, whether it’s lending your talents towards making propaganda with a broader collective, or you and a friend keeping each other accountable by way of a weekly writing group. (Or three women passing a Google Doc back and forth like it’s community dick.) This is making me think of a recent collaborative gallery show by the artists Agnes Walden and Creighton Baxter. One of their pieces is a line drawing of two hands with pointy claw nails, their fingers posed like something you’d see in a gilded work of art out of medieval Christendom. At the bottom is a few lines of text that read: “A tall woman wearing a double breasted suit in dark olive wool. On her feet, a bleach leather lug soled boot, sensible for city living. She is flanked by between three to seven even taller women.” I just love that so much. I just love you two so much.

Jamie: Am I the only one who didn’t share her advance? Fine. I got $100k, but I also feel like that sum deserves context: when the offer came in, I was astounded. I’d never imagined that kind of money before and it’s entirely possible I’ll never get another advance like it. I don’t want to seem ungrateful or superior about it, but it feels useful to note that, after taxes and agent fees–and the fact that the payment schedule spans 2023 through 2026–it amounts to something like $15k per year for four years. It’s $3k less than I was given through my graduate school stipend when I was doing my doctorate 15 years ago. I don’t say this to shit on the deal I got, which quite obviously transformed my life–and which countless writers are not granted!--but to acknowledge that it’s still quite challenging to plan your life around book advances. I’ve continued bartending and freelancing because you just can’t live on $15k a year. To me, these are conversations that are important to have and important to be honest in because the writing life, at least for many or most people, is not some mystical fantasy world. Writing is labor and it doesn’t occupy some strange space beyond the bounds of capital, despite what some would have you believe. 

The advice I always give is, read everything! It shocks me how little people read now, Literary Types included. Read in good faith and write for yourself first, your best reader second. There’s an epidemic of paranoia in so many arenas at present, and I think it’s contaminated art in an unsettling way. And finally, I’ll second Harron to say that working with others feels so invigorating–the three of us do it often, and I feel very collaborative with the painter (and my friend) Emilia Olsen. Last year I even wrote liner notes for a Wendy Eisenberg record! These things shake us out of our usualness, and that keeps the spirit and the inspiration alive. My final word, though, is for you two, which is just to say how much I adore you and how astonishing you both are to me. What would I ever do without you!