Member-only story
Publishing is Clubby and Sometimes Cruel But It Shouldn’t Be
If you’re passionate about writing, you belong at the table.
I’ve been writing for as long as I could remember. My first publication was in second grade — a haiku in which I likened my mother’s voice to thunder.
Before I was 10, I’d seen junkies overdosing in parks, bodies carried out on stretchers; cocaine on glass tables and heroin shot into abscessed arms; The Shining in a movie theater; my neighbor Sylvia, who subsisted on cans of sardines and died alone in her bathtub; and my mother’s face slammed into a wooden coffee table by a man she thought she loved, a man who, in a few months time, would be dragged out of his car by two men while everyone sat on the stoop, watching the beat-down. Inside, my mother smoked a Kent 100 down to the filter.
I had a lot of material.
From an early age, I was taught that fear and vulnerability belonged to the weak. Better to swallow your voice than to cry. Better to lock your pain away than to endure it. Better to write than to speak. So I spent much of my early childhood alone and silent, but I was writing. Paper had become the provenance of my freedom, and I wrote about all the things I had felt and seen with a calm detachment that, looking back as an adult, bordered on disturbing.
Writing became a refuge, a way in which I could make sense of what was happening around around me. Writing was also a refuge from my shy, introverted, and awkward personality. Frequently the target of high school bullies, I replaced their cruel, daily taunts with daydreams of me enacting revenge against them or crafting a version of myself where I’m surrounded by invented friends living our best lives.
Mine was a fiction where I was pretty, popular, and normal; my days were unblemished and uncomplicated and the endings happy.
In college, I abandoned short stories for internships at investment banks, and the one story I wrote and submitted to the literary review was met with an incredulous response from the editor, who asked if I actually wrote the story I submitted. He couldn’t believe that a baseball cap–wearing finance major could write like this. “You’re really good,” he said.
