Barrelhouse has always tried to bridge the gap between pop culture and literature; we want authors to embrace their strange pop cultural obsessions, and we want our journal to serve as a reminder that it’s okay even for “serious readers” to care about things that aren’t generally considered serious .  Further, it’s part of our mission to show that you can tell great, meaningful, and weighty stories about anything, even if it’s about roller coasters or heavy metal screams or huffing gasoline.  We like stories, is the point, and we are fascinated by pop culture, and so our journal has always defined itself as a home for that type of writing.

So when we collectively decided to launch Barrelhouse Books, we knew the perfect way to start was with an anthology of our greatest hits: all the best essays we’ve published, plus a handful of new pieces to pave the way for the future.  We’re working now to select the final pieces to be included in this collection, which will be published in early 2013 and, with any luck, will be available for sale at AWP Boston.

If you’re a writer who’s been harboring a pop culture obsession but haven’t found the motivation to write about it, or if you’ve been pitching a pop-culture related essay that you can’t quite seem to place, or if you just like a challenge, please submit today.  We’ll be collecting submissions until 12/24 and deciding quickly on them.  Read the full guidelines below, and go here to submit:

• Don’t lock yourself into a specific word count, but 1,000 seems like a good minimum, and 10,000 words seems like a good max
• Simultaneous submissions are fine, because it’s the 21st Century so of course they’re fine
• Only one submission per author. If you submit more than one to this category, we won’t read either of them.
• Pop-culture related does not mean trivial. The best essays we’ve published engage with pop culture in such a way that even people who don’t share the author’s particular obsession will care. They have substance and they tell a compelling story.
• Submission fees? We don’t need no stinkin’ submission fees! Man, that would work better if it rhymed with badges.
• We were going to type more guidelines here, but that’s antithetical to how we do things. So listen, here’s the deal: you have your pop culture obsessions and we have ours: we want you to write a great essay about yours and make it so good we can’t help but publish it.

DEADLINE: December 24, 2012

This is an email I’ve been receiving a lot lately:

Your writing is really polished and there are some very good lines in here, but ultimately I just couldn’t fall in love with it. But I want you to know I’m rooting for you!

It is not a comforting email, despite the best intentions of the sender.

*  *  *

Currently, I have three stories, an essay, and a novel under review by a variety of editors and agents. There is another novel that made the rounds and, as the euphemism goes, couldn’t find a home (although the plan is that after some revisions it will be submitted to some small presses and book contests), and there are a couple more short pieces on the way out this week or next. All of which means a few things:

1. I check my email more obsessively than usual, am prone to mild panic when several hours have passed without a new notification on either my phone or my laptop, because I keep waiting for something to give. It’s been a dry spell since mid-summer, during which time my memoir has gone out of print, and I have accrued many rejections, and so there is the waiting, always. While the present is continually disappointing, the future always holds promise.
2. My penchant for myopic pessimism is only exacerbated by all the waiting, which makes me occasionally mopier and more  self-absorbed than usual.
3. Regardless of how things turn out—whether I publish one or all of those pieces— I will receive dozens of rejections over the next couple months.

*  *  *

I want to be as clear as possible: this post is not about soliciting sympathy or settling scores or calling people out. That all has nothing to do with it. The agents and editors who have been rejecting my submissions are just doing their jobs; they owe me nothing beyond simple courtesy, and they need to get on with their lives once they’ve finished reading my work.

I don’t want to overdramatize things. Rejection is part of life in general, but especially the writing life, and we all know this and have heard it a thousand times. You get used to it, mostly. But that doesn’t make it feel any better when it happens.

Still, my goal here isn’t to whine about how I’m having a hard time publishing things; so is everyone else I know, and most of them are far more talented than I am. What I want to talk about, what I’m trying to better understand, is the language of rejection.

* * *

Here’s another email I keep receiving:

Thanks so much for taking the time to send me a detailed response. This is the best rejection I’ve ever received.

I don’t send personalized rejections to everyone who submits, but about 30% of the essays I reject do get a little email from me with some specific notes on the essay the sent, and these people frequently respond with gracious emails like the one above. Invariably, what these people are grateful for is the fact that I took time to respond directly to their work and to show them, in one way or another, that I appreciated their work, even if it’s in the context of me telling them why I ultimately think the essay wasn’t good enough. It’s the acknowledgment they appreciate.

* * *

A while back, I posted my updated version of the standard Barrelhouse rejection letter, which I send to about 70% of the people who submit essays. It goes like this:

Dear [AuthorFirstName],

Thanks for letting me read [SubmissionTitle]. Lately, I’ve been submitting a lot of work myself and have found that personalized and flattering rejection notes tend to be paradoxically more discouraging and invite the sort of neurotic over-analysis that is generally not in any way healthy or productive, and so I hope you’ll accept this 100% neutral and non-encouraging (but also non-discouraging!) note as an indication that we will not be running your submission in Barrelhouse, but this choice of mine doesn’t reflect negatively on you as a person or as a writer, and is instead the result of a totally fucked up and subjective system which we all, for some reason, agree to perpetuate.

Thanks for thinking of us.

I wrote that not as a joke, not because I needed something kind of funny to post on Facebook that day, but because ever since I took this job with Barrelhouse, I’ve been grappling with the way we express our choice to reject someone’s work, and this seemed the most honest way to say it. We’re not publishing you, and it would be a terrible mistake to attach your conceptions of self worth to my opinion.

* * *

If we’re being honest, me and you, we can agree on this: a lot of the shit that gets submitted isn’t any good. That’s just a reality of the submission process. It’s the reason for the submission process. But still– there are people on the other end, waiting and hoping, and telling their spouses I have a good feeling about this one. There are people at home, checking their emails, hoping someone will respond and say, “I fell in love with this.”

* * *

So, what’s the right way to tell someone their work isn’t good enough? Is it the euphemism-soaked, everyone-gets-a-trophy keep on truckin style of bland encouragement? Is it a generic, totally impersonal response that betrays nothing beyond the bare facts (you will not be published today, and also here’s how to subscribe to our journal)? Is it something performative that is a little bit potentially mean-spirited but also engages with the text in the way we all say we want people to engage with our writing? Is it a picture of a sad puppy and a bowl of ice cream?

* * *

While I was in the midst of reading Barrelhouse submisssions last week, I received this email from an agent.

“After careful consideration, and much admiration, I’m afraid I am going to step aside. I’m just not in love with the writing quite enough to think I’d be the right agent for your work. But it is engaging, and moving, and I know you’ll find the passionate representation you deserve.”

I stopped reading submissions then because I’d lost track of my place in the world.

The agent’s email was obviously a form letter, and while I appreciate that the agent read the manuscript at all and sent the email that’s probably saved on her desktop as “nice rejection,” the end result is still the same as if she had emailed to say, “Listen, this book is fucking terrible, and I hope you never send anyone anything ever again.” So which one are you supposed to believe– the email you actually got, or the email you’ve imagined?

* * *

Think about the way most of us phrase it: I got rejected by three journals this week. Not my story was rejected. Because that’s rarely what it feels like when you care so much about the writing that it becomes a part of who you are.

* * *

Probably if I weren’t actively submitting, I wouldn’t think of it much at all. I would blithely reject and reject and reject and I would, let’s admit it, laugh at the worst submissions and share them with people so they could laugh too. But every time I have that impulse, I think of my own work, sitting there on the desk of some laughing agent; my work, being passed around a New York City office, a joke.

* * *

A lot of rejectors rely on the language of dating: I didn’t fall in love with it. Probably it’s a pretty accurate representation of their feelings: there are some books you love and some books you endure and a lot of books you casually know. How many books have you read whose pleasures were entirely fleeting, books that were objectively pretty good but never stuck with you? Why should it be a surprise to find out your own work falls into this good-but-not-good-enough category?

* * *

What does it mean to fall in love with literature? This question probably opens a bigger can of worms, which is, what does it mean to fall in love at all? This is a question I can’t answer beyond: falling in love means finding something or someone  you care about more than yourself. It takes an incredible ego to sit around by yourself for a year or two, working on a novel, and then send it blindly out into the world and ask people to love it. But that’s pretty much the only option we have, and anyway, part of writing seriously is possessing an ego that makes you believe the things you’re writing are important enough for other people to care about them.

* * *

These are a lot of quarter-formed thoughts, I admit. I don’t really have a conclusion to offer, and I’m not sure I’m the person to offer it anyway. Here’s what I keep coming back to: rejection is awful all the time, and the rejector is in a difficult position, because it is impossible to guess what the writer needs to hear at the exact moment of rejection. Maybe they’re abjectly, objectively terrible and need someone to tell them so. Maybe they’re terrible but the writing is therapeutic and they’re not hurting anybody by continually submitting weak work. Maybe they’re okay with engaging in a workmanlike career and know that one of the hazards is they will receive more rejections than acceptances. Maybe they’re talented but on the verge of quitting and need someone to acknowledge that they’re doing something wortwhile.

* * *

The first big-time publication I ever had was with Black Warrior Review in 2007. That acceptance email was a lifeline– had that essay (which turned out to be chapter two of my memoir) not been accepted, I was prepared to quit, to go work for an insurance company or something, and to spend the rest of my life telling people I used to be a writer. It was the only complete thing I’d written since leaving grad school, and it was the only thing I’d felt good enough about to share with any friends. I wouldn’t have continued writing. I wouldn’t have continued teaching because I would have been ashamed to associate with colleagues who were actively publishing. If we want to extrapolate this fully, the rejection would have resulted in the dissolution of my marriage, because I would have been so incredibly unhappy with myself that I would have sabotaged the life I’d been building with my wife.

The editors at BWR probably had a debate about my essay. They probably came very close to rejecting it, just like nine other journals had. They didn’t know, or care, that it was a make-or-break situation for me, that their email would literally change my life and make me care again. But that’s the power they had, and that’s the razor thin line between abject failure and whatever we’re going to call my current condition (upwardly mobile mediocrity?)

* * *

What makes me reject an essay? The biggest thing is a lack of urgency, the sense that an essay only exists to fulfill some vaguely defined criteria or to be checked off somebody’s list. But there are other issues too: abject humorlessness, terrible jokes, lacking self awareness, sagging language, essays contriving “happy” endings in order to duck the requisite complexity. It’s a failure to make me care on a visceral level.

***

Every time I think about this issue, it comes back to one question: why publish? Is it for the money, the glory, the ideal of sharing your thoughts with the world? Shouldn’t the work itself be enough to sustain you?

There are so many journals out there. There are terrible journals with low standards, journals who will accept eighty percent of the work submitted to them. I could send my stories and essays to those places, could even benefit from being published in those awful journals that nobody reads, because they would become another line on my CV and make me slightly more employable from a University’s perspective. But that would be pitiful and that would be sad, and that would deny my primary reason for submitting, which is the ego. Regardless of what any author says, that motivation is always there, that desire to see one’s byline printed under the header of a prestigious publication. There is a need to have people read your thoughts, and for a real publisher to validate your work. You’re putting yourself out in the world and inviting the world to love you; this is a dangerous game to play.

* * *

Sometimes i think it would be better if the form letters were more blunt : “this isn’t really good at all, and you’re never going to publish it” or, “I really like this book, but it’s not going to sell more than 400 copies no matter what we do, so, sorry.” It seems like a good idea until I think about receiving one myself.

I realize people have a lot of reasons for offering the diplomatic and soulless responses they do: they need to keep the lunatics at bay, they want to be polite, they don’t want to be dreamcrushers, they actually mean the nice things they’re saying, etc. etc.

What’s the best way to say I don’t want you? That’s the question people have been dealing with for millenia.

* * *

Probably, what most of us have to face is that we’re never going to be quite as good as we’d like to be, not nearly as good as the people we idolize and who inspire us. We’re going to be regular people who are known by only a few and we die without having produced anything on the level of Guernica or The Brothers Karamazov or whatever. We’re going to be temporary and not long after we’re dead nobody will know we ever existed.

Does that mean we shouldn’t even bother? Or does it amplify the urgency to write and publish?

* * *

Are we deluding ourselves when we try to overcome the fundamental reality of our own meaninglessness via writing? I don’t know. Probably. But I think maybe that’s the wrong question. The question, more likely, is something like this: is this thing worth doing anyway? And, inevitably the answer, time after time, is, Yes, yes, absolutely it is. Because what else is there to do?

The MFA discussion is one of the common writer arguments (another: genre fiction vs. literary fiction) that invites hysterical and irrational responses online. There is so much misinformation, so many weird conspiracy theories about how admissions work, so many jaded writer-types who lashing out at what they view as the establishment. I understand, to an extent, why it’s so hard for people to be rational about the topic; it adds another layer of maddening subjectivity to the writing life, and, increasingly, it seems to create another barrier between a writer and a potential audience. As MFA programs–and now PhD creative writing programs– proliferate, there is a growing class of “credentialed” writers who, the fear goes, are given the keys to the writing world regardless of merit.

There are real questions to be asked of MFA programs– are some of them just moneymakers exploiting the dreams of people with middling talents? Do they “standardize” writing and churn out a bunch of cookie-cutter “safe” stories that lack some fundamental soul? Are they acting as shelters for writers who can’t or won’t get by in the real world? Do they cost too much? Do they encourage nepotism by prioritizing professional connections over craft? Can you even teach creative writing anyway? (my answer: yes, of course you can. But I acknowledge it’s a debate for some)

The list goes on. You can find all the critiques pretty easily if you haven’t heard them before. For some internet people, even the term “MFA fiction” is a serious epithet reserved for the most tedious of books. And just about every debate I’ve seen online is circuitous and annoying and pointless, even if it follows a well-reasoned article.

It’s one thing to find that stuff on blogs or message boards, though. It’s another entirely when a publication like The Chronicle of Higher Education– self-described as “the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators”– runs an article like this, which is about as worthless an attack on MFAs as you’ll find anywhere.

I thought about just posting my response, but I think this one deserves the standard Fire Joe Morgan treatment, a line-by-line breakdown of this article by Henry Adams (a pseudonym)

Click through for the full response: Read the rest »

…I think I just wrote it.

I’m a little too superstitious to print it here, though, not until some hypothetical future date when that sentence maybe, hopefully, ends up published somewhere. Actually, I’m worried about even talking about it like this, and yet, it was a sentence that felt so right to me that I couldn’t help but jump out of my chair to celebrate, that I re-read it to myself twice just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things incorrectly. It made me feel more or less like this:

It reminded me, briefly, what I love about writing.

Specifically, what I love is this: the promise that in two weeks, I’ll read that sentence and probably hate it. That I’ll see some way that I can perfect it and shape it and make it a little more precise. That I might even cut the whole thing entirely because it’s not remotely as good as I’d thought, or because it adds nothing to the story.

What I love is the challenge of writing a better sentence than that, of chasing that feeling again, of wanting to twist a handful of words into something so right that it literally physically moves me out of my seat. I want to keep chasing that small, fleeting success, so that someday I can maybe write one sentence so right that it moves someone else out of their seat and sends them running out to share it with someone.

I wrote a sentence so good today that it made me want to write more. And you can’t see it, and you maybe never will see it. But it was there, for a minute, that perfect feeling of knowing what you want to do with your life and actually doing it right.

Saturday was the conference in Philly–if you associate with me in any way via social media or actual real life interactions, you’ve heard more than enough about it, so I’ll let Susan’s recap handle that part– and it was a hectic, informative, energizing day. I didn’t have a chance to sit in on any of the panels, besides, obviously, the one I ran with Paul Lisicky and Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, so I received most of the insights and lessons secondhand.

But I did have the privilege of hearing Stewart O’Nan’s keynote address. And that’s the thing that has stuck with me since then.

I’m a bad audience member at readings, have a hard time focusing, and I expected to be even worse during Stewart’s speech, since I was worried about a half-dozen conference issues. But he was an incredibly engaging speaker who kept hammering at one central theme: a writer needs to be writing.

Okay, maybe that’s too obvious for you. But maybe not, maybe you’ve done a lot of talking about writing, or occasionally produced a short story, then rested on it for a few months. Maybe you’re like me, and you sometimes write dozens of pages in a week, then forget to write anything for two weeks. Maybe you make constant excuses to avoid doing the work even when you have the gift of a summer vacation in which someone like Joyce Carol Oates would probably write three novels.

I knew that it’s essential to do the work, but I needed to hear it again. I needed to hear him say, If you want to write, you need to do it right now. How much time do you think you have? I needed to hear his answers to relentless audience questions that all sounded like this:

But how are you supposed to write if you have kids?
or Didn’t you do most of your writing before you got married?
or How am I supposed to write if I have friends or a job?
or What do you do to find the time?

At first, I rolled my eyes at the questions, I scoffed and I thought These people ought to stop making excuses. They ought to stop whining. If you’re going to do it, you just go ahead and do it. The questioners, I thought, were looking for an out. They wanted permission to back off of their work, wanted him to say, Oh, okay I didn’t realize you had kids, why don’t you just take the next twenty years off and get back to it then.

But the problem is, I heard myself in their questions. I heard myself complaining that conference planning made it impossible to write, and that grading papers infringed on my time, and that I’d love to be halfway through another book right now but I’ve just been so busy with having to stain the deck and clean the house and watch movies and check email and whatever else I do all day long.

Stewart could have hemmed and hawed and forgiven them for their hectic lives and absolved them of the sin of not doing the work, been a genial guy and collected his check. But he answered them directly. He said you have to steal the time. Whatever it is, whenever it is, you need to steal it. You need to neglect other things, other people. He said maybe it’s possible to be a perfect worker and a perfect family member and also a good writer, but it didn’t seem likely. And no matter how many different ways people tried to ask that question, he insisted on his answer.

You have to steal the time.

It’s been in my head since then. On Twitter the next day, I wrote that being a writer requires a mixture of talent, empathy, and abject selfishness. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms until I typed it, but it sounded so right when I saw it. Of course you need to be selfish to write seriously. Of course it’s going to infringe on the rest of your life. To ask how to balance writing and the demands of daily life is to ask the wrong question entirely.

I know, it seems simplistic, but it was a real epiphany for me, to realize (again) that I was the obstacle to getting my work done. I’m back to working not just in mornings, but throughout the day, whenever there is a free moment. I’m producing content and pushing myself instead of finding new excuses and shelters.

My brother recently shared something with me that he’d heard elsewhere– one has to be willing to ruthlessly prioritize. Will it mean I’m a lesser worker? I hope not, I don’t think so, it hasn’t so far. Will it mean I’m a shabbier person? Yeah, maybe, probably. But will it also mean I produce more work, better work, will feel better about how I’m spending my life? No question about it.

How much time do you think you have?

The answers are the same for everybody – not enough. Less than you probably think. Which is why I’m trying to steal my time back, after having spent so much time giving it away.

Truth is, I’m too busy this week with essay grading and prepping for the C & C Conference (about which you have already heard plenty from me and I’ll spare you the sales pitch this time) to update this blog with anything substantial.

There are things I think, and there are things making me angry–always, there are those things– but I don’t have time to articulate them well, and so even though I recently committed myself to updating once per week and I also kind of hate blog posts that are apologies for not posting regularly, there is nothing else I have to offer you, and this is what you’re getting this week.

In the meantime, catch up on the podcast, or check out Johannes Lichtmann’s new blog, or figure out whether you’re one of the 47% of people Mitt Romney would like to shit on and roll down a steep hill, or spend the rest of the evening cutting people from your Facebook friend list because you actually kind of hate them, or take your dog for a walk, or read a book by someone you’ve never heard of (i.e., this one, which, no I haven’t read yet but Courtney’s a BH assistant editor and she’s very nice and very talented and so just buy it, man).

Next week will be a bounceback, even if it’s recycling old things I’ve written. Or maybe not.

A few months ago, Brian Solomon invited me to write something for the inaugural issue of the Eagles Almanac. He gave me no restrictions, beyond a rough idea of a word count, and said it was okay if I wrote something a little more reflective than you might find in a standard season preview magazine. The other guys he’d lined up, they’re superior to me with the tactical and strategic football discussion, they’re much better schooled in all the advanced stats and film study, and the only thing I really have to offer is the stuff that is happening inside my brain when I’m alone.

The almanac sold pretty well, actually, and it’s still on sale, but since it was pitched as a season preview magazine and the season started Sunday, we’re pretty much counting out future sales.  So, with Brian’s permission, I’m running my piece here. It’s half about the Eagles and half about how sad I was to turn 30, and it looks like this:

The Luxury of Feeling Okay

For most of your life, you are defined by your status as an Eagles fan. You watch every game, know every player, have internalized every rumor, are as much an insider as the beat writers because you care more about the team than they do. To them it’s a job, but to you it’s a calling.

People know you as The Eagles Guy because you’re always wearing a hooded Eagles sweatshirt and you hanging Eagles paraphernalia on your office door where others post comic strips and family photos. You own every Eagles-related accessory you can acquire, from bobbleheads to shoelaces to flags that flap patriotrically in the breeze in front of your house. You have led the Eagles to ten consecutive video game Super Bowls. You spend hundreds of hours every year researching fantasy football statistics and adjusting your rankings so that you can be sure that, say, Jabar Gaffney is actually the forty-eighth best fantasy receiver rather than the forty-seventh. You have other interests and hobbies and friends, but you get in the habit of telling people the only thing you need for your life to feel complete is an Eagles Super Bowl.

…and then you turn 30.

Which, okay, isn’t that old, but, really, it is kind of old, isn’t it? If you were a horse, you’d be dead by now. If this were the Renaissance, you’d be a village elder, making your peace with God just in case. If you’d been born on the wrong continent even today, you would have beaten the odds by surviving to thirty years old.

But, people remind you, you have the luxury of feeling okay about thirty, of believing it’s not even the halfway point, of thinking I’m only just getting started. Which, in one sense, you have to believe, because if you didn’t, then why would you have stayed in college, and then grad school, and then terrible entry-level jobs until you were twenty-six? How could you have rationalized any of that without being guided by the faith that you have plenty of time? Think about the arrogance it takes to just assume you’re going to get to live as long as you feel like living until you’ve accomplished everything you feel like accomplishing.

Because, here’s the thing: if you’re a football fan, especially if you’re an Eagles fan, you know thirty is the beginning of the end. Too often, thirty is the end.

Coaches hang around well until retirement age, but the lifespan of an athlete is uncomfortably similar to that of a Medieval serf. Players are more disposable, they disappear within a couple years, and they’re lucky to even stay in the league long enough to celebrate their thirtieth birthday.

*

Sports are theater in which age is the primary antagonist.

Imagine being twenty-seven and knowing you’ve peaked. Imagine devoting eighty percent of your life to doing one thing, and then not being allowed to do it anymore. Imagine the fans all blithely dismissing you as if you’re ancient, lazy sportswriters comparing you to Methuselah just because you remember Murphy Brown and Dan Quayle. Imagine being perpetually connected with the label elder statesman just because you remember receiving hundreds of free CDs from AOL in the mail. Imagine being a hero in the morning and an afterthought by the evening. Imagine being thirty and having to answer daily questions about your legacy, as if you’re a king abdicating his throne, as if you would even be capable of eulogizing yourself. Imagine yourself as a fan who has lived vicariously through these athletes for your entire life, and now finding yourself in a situation where you have to live vicariously through the players who are washed up, the burnouts, the wounded, the punch lines and the sad cases who held on a few years too long.

*

On birthdays, people like to ask: Do you feel older? And, usually, the answer is No, of course not, I feel exactly like I did yesterday except today everyone is paying attention to me and there’s cake. But when you’re thirty, you do feel a little older. Or maybe more accurately: you feel conscious of being older. Dates and times are arbitrary and such milestones are arbitrary and yet they still carry weight, they demand a certain level of introspection, and they require you to take stock of where you are, who you have become, if only because you need to have some answers ready for the inevitable questions from well-wishers and co-workers. Yesterday you were twenty-nine, a week ago you were twenty, and today you are thirty years old:

• At which point you have a real, adult job with real responsibilities.

• At which point, you can no longer eat food court pizza without feeling sick for the rest of the day.

• At which point, it becomes a chore to meet a friend for a happy hour beer, the end result of twelve emails and extensive schedule juggling, rather than a spur-of-the-moment decision.

• At which point you have a mortgage (or two).

• At which point you either have a child (or two) or you spend half your waking hours explaining to people with children why you don’t have a child (or two) yet.

• At which point you don’t invest your emotional well-being in football anymore, don’t allow your self-esteem to hinge on the outcome of a sporting event, cannot bring yourself to care like you used to.

*

I can’t pinpoint exactly the moment of epiphany—maybe it was while I was watching a game or maybe reading a fawning interview with an arrogant rookie in a glossy magazine—but I remember distinctly the realization that I have nothing in common with these players who I have idolized for so long. They live in a world I cannot access. They’ve had experiences I cannot understand. They are, by necessity, largely unplugged from real life and ignorant to world affairs. And they are bizarrely, almost grotesquely athletic to the extent that we may as well be classified as a different species. When I was younger, I thought I could relate to the players, felt like maybe someday I could be them. The league relies on this collective delusion, needs kids everywhere—even chubby kids, lazy kids with a negative vertical leap who would rather stay inside playing Tecmo Bowl than be outside risking sunburn or bee stings—to believe in the possibility of reaching the pinnacle. This is the point when the league can get someone hooked on their product for life. And, like countless others, I bought in because I loved watching games with my family, and besides it was nice to dream for a while.

Even after it became obvious that I would never be a great athlete—something I never verbalized, but must have intuited by the time I got to high school, when I didn’t even make the first cut on the freshman soccer team, actually fell asleep in the grass behind the goal during practice while the others played on without me—I still felt bonded to the Eagles. Still dreamed about possibly meeting them, still felt okay about rooting for strangers because I felt like I’d gotten to know them via Sundays in front of the TV and press conferences and profiles in the Inquirer, and maybe in my youthful enthusiasm I vaguely connected with them, saw an exciting rookie like Charlie Garner whistling past 49ers defenders and viewed him as analogous to my own life as an ascending student. Or maybe I was just a kid and I liked things kids like, and I wanted to spend time with my dad and my brother, and I never progressed beyond the simplistic notion that it would be cool, one day, to hang out with Andy Harmon or Seth Joyner. Never wanted much beyond the excitement that seemed inherent to football Sundays. Never tried to process what is so thrilling about waiting in line at West Chester for a half hour just to get autographs from Roy Green, David Archer, and Jeff Kemp. (Think about that—a twelve year old kid in Philly bragging to his friends that he got an autograph from Jeff Kemp, of all people, without knowing any of the context around him, the Senator father, the family’s NFL legacy, the fact that Kemp grew up in a different universe than I did, and also was overall a pretty terrible NFL quarterback).

And so we return to the realization: I don’t know anything about these guys and, truthfully, there is very little chance that I want to know more about them. The paradox here is that I actually could know the players better than ever before, can access their lives, however superficially, via Facebook and Twitter, and yet I find the idea deeply off-putting. My football obsessions used to be a specialized knowledge, but now all the information in the world is streaming toward us whether we like it or not, and it all seems like too much. Now if I’m reading the twitter feeds, I’m just one of thousands of people who know the same thing, I’m just another guy with some opinions.

Whereas my 17 year old self—or, let’s be honest, my 27 year old self—would have spent full days skimming players’ twitter feeds, searching for clues as to their whereabouts, maybe even trying to “accidentally” bump into them somewhere in the city, now I can barely bring myself to look. Really, it’s for the best that these options weren’t available when I was younger because there’s a good chance I would have burrowed myself so deeply in my Eagles lair that I would have suffocated. The thing is, I know there are perfectly reasonable people who can view these feeds in moderation and not lose themselves, but that has never been an option for me, and anyway, it seems clearer than ever that I’m better off knowing less about the players I cheer for.

What kind of conversation could I possibly have, for example, with DeSean Jackson? How long would I allow Jason Avant to quote Bible passages to me before I moved on and tested my resolve against one of Babin or Cole’s hunting stories? How many times in a row could I listen to Jamar Chaney’s story about that one time he made a tackle behind the line of scrimmage? How long until I wandered down toward the kickers, who at least are built a little more like I am, and then found out that, no, they’re actually elite athletes who have lived inside the elite athlete bubble their entire lives too, and, no, they don’t particularly care about the dumb things I care about either. How long could they tolerate me talking about a great novel by Michael Ondaatje or complaining about property taxes or explaining pedagogical issues in freshman composition classes? Our common ground is the Eagles, and yet we have completely different histories with the team, completely different motivations.

Maybe this seems obvious. But it took me a while to get there, and there is probably still a small part of me that thinks I could be friends with Sheldon Brown if we ever somehow met. Regardless, this realization is time-centric in that a) it took me such a long time to figure it out, and b) part of the gulf between me and the players is age-based, now that the Eagles have begun drafting players who were born in 1990 and soon enough they will be drafting players who were born when I was in high school, and they’ll be cutting guys who are younger than me because they are too old to perform adequately. Eventually, they will come to exist as an abstraction, something so far removed from my experience that I can’t even remember it.

*

This is what game day used to look like: there were a dozen people in my living room, there were empty bottles scattered across the coffee table, there were paper towels wadded up on the carpet to soak up spilled beer, there were numerous artery-clogging dips, there was a whole array of lucky charms and accessories, and there was actually a printed list of house rules on display so that the occasional interloper would understand that this was not just a game but an important and essential ritual that was to be respected. There was yelling, and there was profanity, sometimes a competition to see who could find the most creative way to spew obscenities at the opponents and Joe Buck. There were items hurled across the room and there were minor injuries, usually self-inflicted but sometimes incurred in fights with roommates. There was silence during plays, strategic phone calls placed between quarters, and a week full of brooding if the Eagles lost. The remainder of the day was wasted on message boards and postgame shows and talk radio.

This is what game day looked like during the Eagles’ loss to the Seahawks in 2011, the pitiful performance that both typified and effectively ended the season: there was me and there was my wife for one quarter before she went to bed, and there was a glass of water because I’m trying to adopt a healthier diet, and there were student essays to grade, and there was my cell phone for sending and receiving text messages from friends because it’s too hard to coordinate schedules with one another to actually watch games together, and there were U-haul boxes stacked in the corners because we had bought a new place and were moving in a few weeks. When Marshawn Lynch ran through the entire Eagles defense for a touchdown that was symbolic of last season’s effort—it doesn’t seem possible now, but I remember him breaking twelve tackle attempts by Kurt Coleman on a single play—I should have been outraged and there should have been destruction (stabbing a box with scissors, maybe? Putting my foot through the drywall?), but instead I laughed and I turned off the TV before the game was over. And I didn’t run to message boards or sports radio like I used to. I didn’t watch postgame shows. I went to bed, and in the morning when I woke up, I wasn’t angry or inconsolable. I was too tired and distracted by other responsibilities to worry about why the Eagles decided to use 2011 as a test case for running a flag football defense.

*

A few years ago, I published a book partly about being an Eagles fan. The second chapter was titled “Confessions of an Obsessed Football Fan,” in which I listed seven confessions. Well, here’s the eighth: I don’t care what happens to the Eagles this year.

Does this make me a bad fan? Probably it does. Probably it makes me a sellout and not a diehard and all of the things that would get me kicked out of any respectable tailgate party. Ten years ago, I would have felt like I had to do something stupid to atone for my sins against the Eagles, to re-establish my credibility. Get a tattoo, or vandalize the car of a Cowboys fan, or post a Youtube video in which I cursed Jerry Jones’ existence.

But I can’t bring myself to do it. Why should I have to defend my fandom anyway? I still root for the Eagles to win, of course, although mainly I do so because it’s more fun to see a win and I like some of the players (even though I generally found the 2011 team to be the least likable bunch of Eagles since Rich Kotite was in town). And I know a lot of my friends and family are as deeply devoted as ever, so I’d like them to enjoy it, want them to get that parade and experience the catharsis I’d been waiting on so long. Sometimes I try to will myself to feel about it the way I did before, because I feel obligated to do so—people count on me for Eagles news, I have whole years-long relationships with people built entirely on the foundation of football fandom to the extent that I know literally nothing about their personal lives. But nothing works: spending the morning researching reasons to hate the opponent, listening to the sports talk stations, getting drunk so that I might get rowdy, none of it sticks.

Some friends have undergone this same transformation; they watch the games, they would like the Eagles to win, but then they move on when the game is over, can sometimes even appreciate the skill of the opponent, admitting that the other team deserved to win. They are capable of engaging in rational human behavior in the immediate aftermath of a loss, and they can turn their focus toward their other responsibilities without having to decompress for two or three days.

Mostly, it happened because they got older. We got older. There’s no reason this has to happen exactly at thirty, although it basically did for me. It’s not even necessarily about maturity, but about having too much other stuff to do. What happens is, you get too busy to burn so much energy on the game. Or you run into real world problems and your fantasy escape either ceases to exist or becomes condensed into a smaller window. It becomes stupid (maybe even reckless) to invest so much of yourself into the game because you have other things going on and there are people depending on you to be a functional adult regardless of football outcomes. There are bosses to appease, wives or girlfriends to impress, hardwood floors to refinish, building inspections to pass, bills to pay, books to read, children to raise.

*

In my memoir, I portray myself engaging in a wide range of reprehensible fan behavior, ranging from violence to vandalism to mistreating and neglecting my wife in favor of the Eagles. I spent a year writing it and another two years promoting it, an all-consuming process at the end of which I felt like I had to make a choice: if I wanted to claim to be an intelligent, thinking person, then it was not possible to justify continuing to act the same way I had in the book. There was something fundamentally wrong with me as a person before, and with all the evidence now recorded for posterity, I had no excuse if I kept being that person. It would change from being a pathology to a consciously anti-social choice.

I don’t want to sound like I’m proselytizing, I don’t want to convert anyone or elevate myself above people who still care the way I used to. Some people manage to juggle the intense devotion with their real life duties and they rarely bleed into each other. That’s not something I’m capable of doing. If I’m all in, then it means I am allowing myself to be imprisoned by my reactions to the Eagles, allowing football to dictate the daily flow of my life, and it turns me into a worse person.

Is it maturity to acknowledge that, or is it immaturity to take so long to figure it out?

*

On sports radio, two hosts in their mid-40s are debating whether it’s a violation of some sacred man code for a player to have tweeted gossip about another player. One shouts, “he doesn’t have a right to say anything behind anybody’s back!” The other screams, “These athletes don’t understand Twitter etiquette!” The first host says: “It’s just ridiculous, his attitude, thinks he’s too good for the team! Thinks he’s bigger than the game!” The second says something about teamwork and heart and love of the game and respect and tradition and trust. There are five layers of irrelevancies to peel back in this argument before you reach the core issue, which is this: you used to care about the minutiae too, just like these guys do, just like they want you to, but you cannot do it anymore.

Time seems more valuable to you than it did ten years ago, seems harder to excuse wasting than when you were twenty, nestled safely in the cocoon of college life, when our cultural expectations gave you license to be frivolous and irresponsible. Then, it seemed like a perfectly good use of one’s days to fritter hours trying to debunk a dumb argument made by Skip Bayless or to proving to Internet Cowboys fans that, in fact, their team sucks. There are dozens of reasons (half of them related to hygiene and diet) that you could never live like you did ten years ago, and yet you still feel the need to defend yourself, still feel guilty for dropping out of your fantasy football leagues or for not having the Eagles’ schedule memorized or for sometimes feeling particularly squeamish about the fact that you’re watching grown men ruin their long-term health for your short-term entertainment. But here’s the thing: you were reasonably happy ten years ago, and you’re reasonably happy now. There is nothing else to explain, even if it feels like you need to keep explaining yourself, to your friends, to your past, to the Eagles themselves. If your feelings hadn’t evolved over the past decade, then you would have to feel badly, then you would have to justify why you’re the same person at thirty that you were at twenty, that you were at ten.

*

For the longest time, pro athletes seem like your future, and then suddenly they become your past.

My book was remaindered this week, which means that, unless someone buys a copy directly from me (or attends the Conversations & Connections conference) it will be impossible for anyone to buy a new, physical copy of Bury Me in My Jersey.  Sure, it’s still an ebook, but it’s a $14 ebook, which means it is an ebook no one will ever buy, even if Amazon promises free delivery, which, yes, is is a thing they actually feel the need to promise, and anyway it being an ebook makes it feel a lot less like a real, actual book to me, to the extent that it’s fair, I think, to say my memoir is dead.

The truth about that is, I thought I would be a lot sadder about that news. Thought it would be the kind of thing that would set me to moping around the house for days while my wife tried to cheer me up and I kept telling her nothing was wrong. I even tried to gin up some misery at the bar last night while I was at a Gigantic Sequins reading, tried muttering things like yeah my god damn book is out of print and awaiting commiserating backpats, but my heart wasn’t in it, it was a performance because when your book dies you’re supposed to mourn and people generally expect me to be curmudgeonly about such things. But there’s nothing shocking about it: after one last final bump of sales around Christmas, the numbers dwindled to almost nothing. Since January, my best month of sales was March, when 9 copies sold.

Soon after getting the news, I figured I could write a long post here eulogizing a book whose life ended too soon, but I kind of already did that back in May, and as much as I tried, I couldn’t really get anywhere. I like my memoir, and it was life-changing in a number of ways for me. But on the whole, that book lived an uneventful, unremarkable life and now that it’s gone nobody is going to notice.

The actual tangible effects on my life are:

1) Now it’s even harder to coast on the one book, now it seems more important than ever, career-wise, to actually get another book onto shelves.

2) When I go to bookstores, I won’t feel compelled to search every shelf for a copy of Bury Me, which I did everywhere I went, even in places like the Cleveland airport or a touristy shop at Niagara Falls, places that would never even consider carrying my book. But I had to check anyway, just to be sure.

3) I won’t feel compelled to stop in every Barnes & Noble in the South Jersey/Philadelphia area just to liberate my book from the ghetto of the sports section and stack it prominently on the New Non-fiction table.

Everything else is the same.

About 4000 people bought it, and maybe a couple hundred more read it in libraries or purchased it used. That’s not what I wanted, not the glorious success I anticipated back in ’08 when I was signing the contract, but it’s not bad. It’s maybe even pretty good, although, of course, that won’t stop Random House from sending me a quarterly statement to remind me that they lost money on me.

I wrote the final draft 4 years ago, it was published two years ago, and now it’s dead. If it were a person, its life would have been tragically cut short. But if it were a hamster, it would have lived a long full life. So, what the hell, let’s call it a hamster, let’s throw it in a hole in the back yard, clean out the cage and go get another one. Let’s watch it run around on the wheel a while.

Last week, Lady Gaga announced that she’s going gluten-free in order to lose weight for her upcoming tour.  The predictably self-congratulatory release says:

Gaga has decided to go on a major body blitz and cut out all gluten and wheat from her diet, which is very hard to do. She has given her people strict Instruction to advise staff at venues and restaurants about her new diet because she is taking it very seriously.

You know me (maybe, kind of): I basically don’t give a damn about the ins and outs of Lady Gaga’s life. I hate that I’ve typed her stage name three times already in this post. So why even mention her?

Because people like her (and Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian and something called Ashley Tisdale) have conspired to make me and my wife trendy for probably the first time ever.

My wife was diagnosed with celiac disease twelve years ago; at that time, we were in college and she would experience daily stomach pains, which we then attributed to mediocre dining hall food. Once she was diagnosed, I did what most people do when someone close to them is stricken with a new ailment — I became an expert on the subject. I learned to read the labels of every item I purchased, got used to asking questions at stores and even emailing PR reps for various products for an explanation of the way their foods (and especially drinks) were processed.

Partly, I did these things because I wanted to be a nice guy and all that, but also I did so out of necessity.  I needed to know what she could eat, and where, and when.

Let’s get to the point: 12 years ago, maintaining a gluten-free diet was incredibly difficult. Even a store like Whole Foods had limited options, most people had no idea what gluten was or why someone wouldn’t want to eat it (I had to include a footnote in my memoir explaining what gluten is), and very few restaurants could cater to someone with celiac disease. For a good four years, her daily lunch was three slices of lunchmeat rolled up with cheese, plus some fruit. At restaurants, she ordered food without the bread, and hoped they would get it right, or she would pick around the fried and breaded products on the plate.  She’d been gluten-free for over two years when we finally went to a restaurant where they offered her a GF substitute for a typically glutenous food (Tony’s at Disney World made her garlic bread and spaghetti & meatballs, an event so exciting that we both immediately called home just to let people know what had happened, repeated the story a dozen times, spoke in awed tones as if we’d seen a wizard).

She got by, and other people have greater hardships in life, but a lot of times, it was a major, daily obstacle having to wonder exactly what she would eat at the next meal, especially when we were traveling and didn’t have the luxury of a stocked kitchen.

Keep in mind, too, that we were living in the Philadelphia area; I’m sure people in more remote areas of the country, in less welcoming areas of the country (that is, areas that treat vegetarianism as a mental disorder, that are unwilling and/or ill-equipped to provide alternatives, that might view non-traditional orders as indicative of a variety of character flaws) found it almost impossible to maintain a GF diet at the time. The choices, I assume were either to bend the rules and deal with the discomfort, or to eat very little; I met a man this week who was diagnosed with celiac in 1986; living in Lockport, NY he was so deprived of food options that he lost 30 pounds in the first year.

So anyway, sure, it’s hard to do. Unless, of course, you don’t have to do it and plan on still indulging in occasional cookies and other treats. And sure it’s hard, unless the extent of your commitment is dispatching your cadre of assistants to restaurants to demand GF meals, or telling your personal chef that, hey, by the way, you’re going a little lighter on the gluten today. In that sense, Lady Gaga’s move equates to something less like enduring a GF diet and more like if I announced today that I’m no longer going to eat figs on Wednesdays.

For years, my wife and I joked that we just needed a high profile celebrity to be diagnosed with celiac disease, so that our lives would be easier. But we never imagined that it would actually become trendy or some kind of weight-loss fad (an aside: most GF substitutes are dramatically higher in calories than traditional bread products, so I guess I don’t fully understand the fad in the first place). Which is why, when I read a story about a celebrity going gluten-free to purify or detox or cure autism (a topic for a whole different post) or whatever, I experience a wide range of reactions.

- First, I’m annoyed, because fuck you, celebrity, for glomming onto a real disease and using it as a means to get yourself on the cover of Weight Loss Weekly or Crazy Sex Tips Quarterly or whatever magazine it is.

- Second, I’m excited, because when someone like Lady Gaga or Miley Cyrus says they’re going GF, what it means is that my wife’s life just got a lot easier, because the more celiac disease and gluten free diets enter the public consciousness, the more likely it is that restaurants and grocery stores will be sensitive to my wife’s dietary restrictions. It’s already dramatically easier than it used to be, with many restaurants at least educating their servers about gluten intolerance, if not preparing special gluten free menus. We’ve reached a point now where if we go to a pretty good restaurant (say, something above Applebee’s-level), we expect that the server will be able to tell us exactly which menu items are GF and which are not.

- Third, I’m annoyed again, because that’s generally how my emotions chart anyway, but also because now we’ve reached a point where I feel like I have to explain myself when ordering GF items, because I don’t want servers to think I’m some kind of trend-chasing moron. The same way waiters started eyerolling at people on Atkins diets, they’re now starting to do the same thing with people who are ordering gluten-free, because many people perceive my wife’s order as some kind of goofy weight loss trick rather than a medical necessity. Of course, I have no control over this perception and it shouldn’t bother me, and yet I always have this nagging urge to tell the waiter, she actually needs to eat like this, unlike that guy at the next table who thinks it’s going to help him build muscle mass.

- Fourth, and most importantly, I’m disappointed in myself because what I should have done, and now it’s almost certainly too late to do, is this: I should have monetized my expertise. I’ve spent 12 years living gluten-free by proxy, eating in different countries and different states, different times and different cuisines. At ballparks and at chain restaurants and at fine dining restaurants. I’ve cooked and baked along with my wife, and I’ve been fooled by seemingly innocuous foods (soy sauce? Rice Krispies? omelets at Ihop?). I’ve made mistakes and learned along the way, while my wife has felt badly for inconveniencing me in our quest just to find one place that doesn’t slather all their food in flour.

Between my wife’s medical background and my writing background, probably we should have been running the best damn GF blog on the Internet, probably should have published books on the topic, probably should be running informational classes for people new to the lifestyle.  But it seems to me too late. The trend is at its peak. At some point, a reality show person will discover that if they ingest chicken feet through their anus, they enjoy temporary weight loss, and then we’ll see Lady Gaga going on the chickenfoot diet. Eating gluten-free will just seem to people like another eating choice, like being vegan. And there will be some kind of decline in the industry that has sprung up to support the fad.  Some–like the excellent Gluten Free Philly blog, which we check at least a dozen times a week– will continue to thrive.  But I feel like I’ve already missed my chance to cash in.

Is it cold to say I should have cashed in on my wife’s disease? Maybe, but I don’t think so (especially not since my wife agrees with me). Really, what it is is a lesson on writing: as a writer, I should have identified that I had an area of expertise in a specific niche, and I should have been working from the start to capitalize on that expertise.

A few months ago, I saw someone on Twitter–I regret to say I don’t remember who– say this: “Attention non-fiction writers: you need to be interested in EVERYTHING.”  Great advice;  wish I’d heard it a decade ago.

Yesterday’s post was, by far, the most viewed thing that has ever appeared on this blog, which means I’ve received a lot of feedback, both directly and indirectly. Usually I write a blog post in a few hours (depending on word count) and then I receive no feedback and I move on. But thanks to so many people linking this post in a variety of place,  I’ve been thinking some more about points I overlooked, ways I may have misrepresented my own ideas, and some ideas on which I want to briefly expand.

So, some disjointed, half-formed thoughts on the issues of niceness, Twitter friendships, critical reviews, etc:

1. One of my favorite outcomes from the post is that I’ve made people self-conscious about even saying something nice about me.  Every time I see someone linking it on Facebook or Twitter, there is at least one commenter who says something like, “I want to say I liked this post, but I’m afraid Tom will think I’m being too nice.” Obviously, most of those comments are at least half-joking, but there’s also a little bit of truth there, and I can’t help taking a little pleasure in making people uncomfortable with their routines, if only for a moment.
2. Of course, that means I’m also incredibly self-conscious about my own track record on this front. When you write something so strident, you inadvertently set yourself up for charges of hypocrisy. I mean, I don’t think I’ve been guilty of dishonest praise online, but now I’ve set the bar of expectations high. And if I happen to cross that line, then it’s just too easy (and necessary) to call me on it.
3. That J. Silverman article in Slate starts with a strange sneak attack on Emma Straub, who, as far as I can tell, did nothing to warrant the attack besides having a lot of Twitter followers. I’m sure that’s part of the reason people were so vehemently opposed to Silverman’s argument, and I understand that. I should have mentioned it in my post and I didn’t.
4. Probably, this is a bad way for one to live and to write, but this is basically my process (at least for essays and blog posts): I read or see something that makes me angry, I stew over it for a few hours, I complain about it to my wife until she’s tired of hearing it, I send someone an email to complain about it and/or do so over a few beers, and then once I’ve exhausted all real life options, I sit down and write a few thousand words in a short burst (this is what led to me once writing an article in my college newspaper in which I called the administration racist and included this regrettable sentence: honestly, it’s not that hard not to get hit by a car. It was, let’s say, polarizing). In the case of essays I intend to submit, I tend to work them pretty hard after that initial burst; honing the language, cutting some of the excess, etc.  But with stuff on the blog, I just throw it up there and see what happens. I like the unfiltered sense you get from it. I like the ragged edges. I like reading essays that seem a little raw, essays that are going to be a little divisive, so sometimes the stuff on here is incomplete and/or not developed the way it should be.
5. The thing above is kind of a lie, because I edited about 4 dozen word choices and cut a handful of sentences about four hours after posting, once I realized people were actually reading this thing.
6. I think it’s good to be nice! People should be nicer, pretty much all the time. I just hate dishonest niceness. The colleague who asks about your work only so that she can interrupt you and talk about her dissertation on grasshoppers in 17th century literature. The neighbor who smalltalks you to death but then calls the borough to complain that your front steps aren’t up to code. The cousins who hate books and think your job is trivial, but insist on asking you a bunch of dumb questions about your book just so they can feel like they’ve met their social obligation.
7. What it comes down to, I guess, is that I feel like too much of my life already is wasted on hollow interactions, and I want to change that, at least a little bit.
8. I understand why people want to be cheerleaders for books. I love books. There are some really great books that will never reach even one-tenth of the audience they deserve. I just worry that the more self-congratulatory we all are, the more insular we get, the more we become like academia, which, let’s just admit it, can be a really sad place, metaphysically.
9. I don’t like being harsh on a book, necessarily. In episode 5 of Book Fight, Mike and I came down pretty hard on Mat Johnson’s book “Pym.” It was the first negative review we did on the podcast, and I spent a good month worrying about what would happen if he’d heard it. Probably what would happen is that Mat Johnson would not care at all and wouldn’t worry about our small audience turning against him, because he’s doing fine with or without us. But still I checked his Twitter feed daily, just to see if he’d said anything about us. I saw that he was a Sixers fan and wanted to respond to some of his tweets and then froze because I thought what if this guy hates me? I actually had–and this is true, I swear– two consecutive nights of dreams in which he confronted me over my critiques; in one he yelled and me and belittled me for being a shitty writer myself, and in the other he just beat me up. I want to love the books I read and I want more people to love books too. But if I’d pretended to love that book just to keep up appearances, just in case I run into M. Johnson at AWP, just in case I apply for a job at Houston some day, just in case I want him to re-tweet our episode, then I would have felt a lot worse about myself. I would have felt sick about it for weeks.
10. What makes me feel best about my work as a teacher or as a writer is when people describe it as “honest.” The other nice things people sometimes say, that’s welcome too. But that’s the goal, always, even if I sometimes struggle to get there.
11. This overall stance sometimes makes AWP particularly uncomfortable for me.
12. I have years of experience being unpopular, so it’s okay if sometimes people don’t like me.
13. But of course I want people to like me. I just am no good at getting there by faking it.