What literary class ceiling? From ed. @ serious mag: Can you write about working in the fields as a lifestyle column?
I know it’s not politic to grumble about how unfairly one may get treated on account of lacking a penis. But all this hoopla over bylines’ predisposition towards phalluses reminded me of an experience I had a couple years ago.
I’d just finished my two months of working in the fields in California. My experiences ranged widely, from being treated perfectly well while doing a difficult job, to being systematically underpaid while picking produce destined for a brand sold in yuppie markets. I had thorough documentation of my work: I had check stubs and punch cards showing that I was being underpaid; I had photos showing that what I picked was going to a high-end brand; I had dozens of co-workers with the same proof and story, the difference being that they were indigenous immigrants. So I did what most writers do. I emailed some editors I knew about what I’d seen to ask if they might be interested in taking a story, ideally about my coworkers rather than myself—so as to leave some surprises for when my book is published.
As is somewhat typical for freelancers, only one editor even responded. She said she might be interested, but she waffled—it was not, after all, news that farm workers are treated poorly and underpaid, she said. (True enough, though you might try telling that to the reporters who’ve covered the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.)
Could I maybe write about my own experience a bit?
Well, we can talk about that, I said. What did you have in mind?
Maybe, she said, I could write a short column, maybe 800 words (for the nonwriters among you: that’s about 1 magazine page of pure text), about how to shop for produce grown under good conditions? Sort of a “conscious shopper” type of column? But I’d have to name the brands I worked for (i.e. reveal the most interesting bits of reporting for my book).
Hmmm, I don’t think my publisher will let me do that, I demurred, the writer’s version of It’s not you, it’s me.
Now, some of this may be because I write, as a more-monetarily-successful writer friend once told me, “about things that depress people.” (The same friend added, rather unhelpfully, ‘You should be proud of that!’) But, then, so do Ted Conover and Gabriel Thompson, both of whose work I admire, and both of whom have written in prestigious publications about depressing things.
There are plenty of reasons I could have been shunted to lifestyle that have nothing to do with gender. For one thing, I’m not as well-networked as other people might be—alas, I cannot count among my friends any assigning editors at major magazines. And as the newspaper industry has imploded, the freelance market is probably the most competitive it has been in years, so that makes it difficult, too. Writers, in general, do not have an easy time of it these days; truthfully, I was lucky that anyone got back to me at all. (And sometimes, as Timothy Noah cattily recalls in an aside towards the end of this delightful piece on Dwight Garner, editors reject very good ideas.)
There are many, many other times I’ve gotten ignored or turned down by editors. That’s the name of the game. But, really? A lifestyle piece?
One last thing: The earnest Midwesterner in me suspects that I might want to think about whether I am, perhaps, just not good enough or smart enough for my chosen career. I could work harder (though, as I type this, I’m hitting the two-week mark for consecutive 10+ hour-days.) I could hustle more (I do not, after all, Tweet or Facebook from my book page anywhere near daily). I could network more and better, though precisely how I’ll wrangle those editor interviews remains to be seen. Maybe it really is me and my (depressing) work that’s the problem, not them.
That strikes me as the undercurrent in all this talk about how women probably don’t get reviewed more because they write fewer books. They write fewer books, you see, because they get published less in journals, and they get published less in journals because they don’t try hard enough (though of course, they wouldn’t have to try so hard if their work was just a bit better)—a passing of the buck that could be extended back into infinity, to the way the kindergarten teacher kept calling on boys during storytime.
So what’s a girl to do when she simply can’t get anywhere in print because, dammit, those kindergarten teachers set her up to be a copyeditor instead of a writer? I have a small trick, of which I am slightly ashamed—though only because I am not, by nature, a braggart. (The industry term for this is a self-promoter, a trait I’ve worked hard to fake.) So I hope you’ll excuse me for this detour into self-aggrandizement. The way I make myself feel better about being told, No thank you, but would you like to write a lifestyle piece? is this: I look at my resume, particularly the part where it lists all the awards. And then I remember: It’s not me, it’s them.
