My Back Up Against the Wall (Again)
I have been here before, but I do not plan to be here again
With this push to publish Spinning Sage’s Gold, I am up against it — again. I am more of an optimist than a pessimist, but I am not a rose-colored-glasses-fool. I know that with limited resources, limited clout, the smallest crew of supporters, and our autocratic times, it will not be easy to sell my book.
Then again, I’ve been up against the wall with little choice but to fight for so long. This time 28 years ago, on my PhD graduation day at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, I learned my mother had been jealous of me, apparently for years. While I have long since moved on from that horribly bittersweet day, it isn’t exactly something I can completely get over. I deluded myself for years that the snide comments about my degree being “a second high school diploma” or the laughter about being underemployed or only making $6 an hour in 1993 were just in-the-moment kinds of meanness from the person who birthed me just after Christmas 1969. But by 4 pm this Sunday 28 years ago, I knew I had dragged my mother to Pittsburgh to ruin what should have been one of the best days of my first 27 years on the planet.
It is beyond difficult to move on from a betrayal of this magnitude. I was already burned out from finishing my dissertation and the politics of betrayal from my advisor and another member of my dissertation committee — both Black men who would’ve been happy seeing me beg in the streets and going dumpster-diving. That I managed by 1999 to have begun a draft of my first book Fear of a “Black” America and found a lit agent with a pretty good rep was not quite a miracle, but I did beat the odds of ending up in a psych ward.
With what is now Spinning Sage’s Gold, I have been up against the wall over the past few years. The monopolies that compromise traditional book publishing, the need to convince an agent that my book can sell, the racism and elitism I’ve seen at every turn, all of that was bad enough. Getting to know which of your writing peers will take the time to read and give thoughtful feedback and which ones won’t, though, was truly disheartening and eye-opening.
One is a poet I met at the Bethesda Writer’s Conference in 2009, a younger man full of confidence in his work and equally full of ageism, as I came to understand his quips about my age over the years. When I asked him to take a look back in 2019, he wrote, “Why do you always have to take the hard road with your writing?” — his complaint about the cross-genre nature of my manuscript. He passed me off to a writing friend, who then ghosted me. Several other colleagues who either offered to read or I decided to reach out to ended up ghosting me or gave me such superficial feedback that I would have been better off talking with Siri or putting the manuscript through Turnitin or Chat GPT for a response. I will not deny that the original manuscript in 2018 and 2019 needed a ton of work. Lucky for me, any number of friends and colleagues did provide me critical feedback and wonderful advice in threading the needle between the nonfictional and the allegorical.
There were others, especially my academic colleagues, who simply didn’t get it. One asked, “Why can you just write a collection of essays?” They didn’t like the allegorical, because anything that walked readers from the past and present into the future was “nonsense,” at least to them. I learned, frustratingly, there was a difference between me producing poor or mediocre writing and my academic colleagues’ elitism getting in the way of their understanding of what I was attempting to do. So I stopped asking them to read once I committed fully to the mix of essay and allegory in 2019 and 2020.
There always has seemed to be a group of folks who have preferred me as marginal, vulnerable, stressed out, and on the verge of cracking up, standing in the corners, laughing at me. Sadly, I have known folks like this most of my life. From the group of Black teenage boys who sexually assaulted me at my local playground in Mount Vernon, New York when I was six years old to a group of colleagues at American University who never saw me as more than “just an adjunct,” abuse, disappointment, and betrayal has been, well, normal. It would be a bit cliché to acknowledge that I’ve battled PTSD and depression (self-diagnosed, of course) at times for nearly a half-century. Stereotypical because I am a writer, somewhere on the Oscar Wilde-James Baldwin-Edgar Allan Poe psychological spectrum, I suppose.
The odds of selling more than a few hundred books are stacked against me like a stone fort armed with cannon in close range. Yet, I still have faith in myself, a love for telling stories, and righteous indignation enough to push off the wall and into whoever and whatever stands in my way. Because the only way off this wall is through.