Making a literary career during Trump's second term
For the first time in her life, Johanna is part of a literary clique. And, as with most literary cliques, this one centers around a journal.1
Even in its first month of publication, this journal has aroused a fair amount of comment, which Johanna finds both exciting and gratifying. And in this journal, the two pieces that have received the most attention are about masculinity in literary fiction and, more specifically, whether it's possible to accurately detail the male psyche in a contemporary literary novel.2
This is a discussion that a lot of people in the literary world find tedious. Generally, their responses fall into three categories:
a) If men feel upset about being shut out, then they should do something about it, instead of just complaining. When women were shut out, they organized and built their own institutions.3
b) If you can be deterred by the publishing industry from writing the truth, then you're not a real artist.4
c) This is a made-up problem that's not real.5
Johanna has seen versions of these objections raised many times over the past six months, and she’s always wanted to argue, but she’s never found a convincing rejoinder. As with most problems, this is one of those cases where you either get it or you don’t, and if you don’t get it, then there’s probably no convincing you.
Personally Johanna never needed to be persuaded that accurate depictions of straight men have a hard time finding purchase in the literary world, but that’s because of her own personal experience. When she was a man, she wrote a book about a straight boy, and she thought the book was a good, honest depiction of his interiority. When she turned in this book, her publisher canceled her book deal, citing (in part) the character's misogyny. Subsequently, she revised the book so that the boy was gay, and it sold on the first round of submission.
However, she recognizes that this is an experience that the vast majority of commenters on this issue haven't had. The fact is, Johanna has much more experience than almost anyone else on Substack when it comes to publishing in various genres as a representative of various sexual orientations and gender identities.
She could spend a lot of time arguing on the internet about whether gender bias against men is real...but it seems silly, because she’d often be arguing with people who don't have that much experience being agented or going on submission to big presses. And people without that experience often have these very romantic notions about what goes into selling a literary novel. They don't really know about the process of shaping yourself as a commodity for this system.
The people who understand this process generally don't talk about it, because part of being a successful literary commodity is the illusion that you are sui generis and have some unique voice that you'd never allow the system to dilute.
Like most cliques, Johanna's literary clique is somewhat permeable. You can pitch the journal, yes, but really the way to join is to just start a newsletter of your own and begin writing about booms. Eventually, if your criticism seems to evince some kind of vision and bite, you'll probably be noticed by this clique.
That’s because this literary clique is primarily characterized by a willingness to openly criticize big books, big authors, and the various organizations that have anointed those books. Yes, they do other things and review all kinds of books, but their critique of the myopia and timidity of mainstream publishing is the primary way in which this clique separates itself from other literary cliques.
But where does this ultimately lead? In terms of systemic change, probably nowhere, if we're being honest. At one point in the middle-aughts there was a blog called Foetry that started critiquing the way prizes were handed out in the poetry world.6 This blog pointed out that poetry prizes were quite often awarded to the friends and students of the judges. This became kind of a big deal, which everyone talked about. But...nothing changed. The situation continued. And that critique was much more specific than those voiced by Johanna's friends.
People who criticize Johanna’s clique are correct in saying…its demands are somewhat vague. Just an abstract demand to publish more men (and more manly men)…it’s not really actionable in any coherent way. It’s really a demand to be placated. Pick one of us, turn one of us into a star.
But so what? That’s how the culture changes in the 21st century. Every call for greater representation has worked exactly the same way. You inform the industry of some need or gap, and if you agitate enough then they go looking to fill it. Eventually somebody gets chosen as an avatar of a certain group, and they get turned into a star. Their work gets broadcast to everyone else, and perhaps, somehow, it proves to be a little bit better, and a little bit more complex, than it has to be. Maybe, somehow, it manages to speak to some concerns beyond those of the group that advocated for it, and because of that, it’s able to endure for at least a few decades past the moment of its creation.
That’s the hope, anyway.
At the same time, there's this government that's in power. And this government is disregarding the law in two major ways. First, they are shutting down any federal program that they disagree with. Second, they are threatening to withhold federal funding from any organization, state, or city that won’t kow-tow this government’s line on DEI, trans-inclusion, immigration, and other issues.
These actions are illegal. The executive branch doesn't actually have the power, under the law, to withhold funding in this manner. Congress allocates and apportions money. That's at the core of our system of government.
Everyone recognizes the essential illegality of what's happening. Mostly, people are holding their breath to see what happens. Various lawsuits are working their way through the courts. The government is complying with some court orders, but they're only pretending to comply with others.
The judges themselves are scared. They're finding reasons to throw out cases, because they're worried: what happens in the end if we order this government to do something and it simply...doesn't.
Ultimately, it'll go to the Supreme Court, and the Court will broker some kind of compromise. It's highly possible that this compromise will involve an executive that has vastly more power than has heretofore been the case.
This is a bit of a problem, because the current government is full of liars, sexual harassers, self-dealers, quacks, cheats and conspiracy theorists who are going to use that power to enrich themselves, persecute minorities, and pursue various vendettas.
On the social media platform that Johanna uses, there's been a debate raging for the last few weeks about a federal program, PEPFAR. This program was created by George W. Bush to provide HIV meds for people in Africa. It was an astonishing act of moral leadership that people like Johanna don't like to really acknowledge, because they consider George W. Bush to be a war criminal and don’t want to admit he might’ve done something good. But this program is widely credited with saving twenty-five million lives, and twenty million people in Africa currently rely on it for their medication.
This program was shut down by the current government. Many people on Substack rallied to its defense, and they were gratified when the government granted an exemption to this program from its foreign aid shutdown.
But...that exemption was a lie. In actual fact, the clinics are not open and the medication is not being distributed. It's unclear what is happening, whether this government is simply realizing it’s impossible to get the money flowing because they've destroyed the organization, USAID, that’s responsible for disbursing these funds, or whether they are simply lying and have no intention of actually sending the money.7
In any case, people on this social network, Substack, are still debating the merits of this program as if any of that matters. They don't acknowledge that this current government doesn't weigh the merits of various actions. Instead, it operates on pure power. The stock market fell because of the Mexico and Canada tariffs, so those tariffs weren't enacted. These people living with HIV in poor countries can’t affect the stock market and make the Republican donor base upset, so they don't get their medications, and as a result millions of people will likely die of HIV.
And that's how it is. Most clear-thinking people understand this, and if they’ve thrown their full support behind the current government it's because they want a world where pure power operates more nakedly, without being cloaked by principle.
Johanna has heard a lot of rhetoric about how actually the liberal order was exactly the same, the Democratic Party was exactly the same, it was the liberal elite tyrannizing everyone else.
But please, be real. It was different. And PEPFAR is a symbol of those differences. In the old world, it was possible for left and right to come together and agree on a priority and execute a program in order to help people. Now that's not possible. How can anyone develop a program in this world? Or expect anything to last? How can you cut a deal with this regime when they don't obey the law?
Johanna is tempted sometimes to reason and debate and try to convince people what's happening is bad. But...to what end? It is happening. For all the talk about how democracy is meaningless, this is a monster that was ushered in at the ballot box. And it'll continue until the next election.
Oddly enough, this new government has created opportunities for people in Johanna’s clique.
That's because over the last ten years, queer and non-white people in the literary world have been encouraged to engage in a lot of DEI activity.
Now this new government is using its illegal power to pressure universities and nonprofits to stop engaging in DEI activities. These are the kinds of activities that virtually all queer and non-white people have on their resumes.
Organizations will be wary of awarding people who might make them a target. As a result, they will tend to pick white people and straight people, because those are the only people who are free from the taint associated with DEI.
Ironically, Johanna stands a fairly good chance of benefiting from this! Because Johanna is associated with the Great Books and heavily shills for Western culture, she is now a decent pick for various kinds of fellowships and prizes. These organizations are composed of old-guard liberal staff who are simultaneously upset about Trump and worried about losing their jobs, and the staff will want to convince themselves that the organization is still inherently good, so there's a chance they'll land on Johanna as a safe pick.
In reality, the organization will have become a hostile place for people of color and trans people, but by tokenizing Johanna, they can ignore that fact.
Johanna has no idea if that'll happen. During the diversity-era, she stopped applying for fellowships and residencies, because she never got them, because although she had a diverse background, she didn't belong to the ‘diverse-writer’ clique. But this era is completely new.
Johanna has written a book about how it's great to read the classics. When this book comes out next year, perhaps it will receive a lot of positive attention…but it's also possible that the opposite will occur, and Johanna will be caricatured as someone who's attempting to cancel Western civilization or something. The problem is that this new government runs on grievance, and they need there to be educated, well-credentialed non-white people who hate Western civilization. Since those people don’t really exist in the way this government needs them to exist, it’s possible they’ll find some way to scapegoat Johanna into that role.
Johanna isn't sure. Could go either way.
The most likely thing, however, is that the book will be ignored. Nothing is more common than for a book to be ignored. You don't need to come up with any special theory to account for a particular author not breaking out, because not-breaking-out is the default state of all careers.
Some members of Johanna's clique will benefit materially from the new regime. That seems clear to her.
Moreover, Johanna also thinks it's true that her clique, and her own newsletter in particular, partake quite deeply of the same pool of grievance that led people to vote for Trump.
That's the thing she finds difficult to explain to her writer friends who are wondering how she's built a Substack audience. She writes about the Great Books, yes, but in her first year of writing about the Great Books on Substack, her subscriber growth was fairly restrained. Her explosive period of growth only occurred last summer when she started letting her grievance and anger show through in her writing. In other words, her particular product is to pair writing about the Great Books with a strong, but apolitical, critique of the contemporary American literary world.
And some people really dislike the sense of grievance that Johanna exudes. They can't quite articulate what they don’t like about her writing, because in truth they agree with most of her explicit critiques, but strongly disagree with her implicit message that the mainstream literary world is inherently bad. They can sense her belief that all this activity that people undertake at the Big Five publishing houses, at the foundations and residencies and prize-giving committees, and (to some extent) in the literary journals and English departments—it's all bad.
They ask, okay, how would you do it better?
And...Johanna isn't sure, honestly. Maybe it can't be done better. Maybe she ought to grow up.
She's learned to tone down her own cynicism. Many of her new friends really want big book deals and to be the voice of their generation. You know, they won't say that, but on some level, they'd really like it to happen to them. And Johanna has definitely seen it happen in the past for people she knows. So she knows success is not a mirage. It can actually happen.
What has ameliorated her cynicism more than anything is her desire to be a good role model for her new friends. For someone at mid-career, like Johanna, it is very productive to have a private sense of cynicism, because it stops her from internalizing all her various rejections and failures. But for someone earlier in their career, that same cynicism is quite deadening, because these earlier-career writers are still in that stage of shaping their creativity and figuring out if there's any niche for it in the market.
Johanna thinks there's a fairly good chance that this journal will succeed in creating at least one or two literary stars.
In the literary world it is quite common for literary cliques to start small journals and use those journals to ascend to positions of relative influence within the literary world. This has happened at least twice in the last few decades. Many of the editors of n+1 went on to get book deals and get jobs in the literary world. And the same happened with the editors of The Point. Something similar also happened with the circle associated with Tyrant Press, but Johanna doesn't know as much about that.
Johanna has a sense that within her literary clique there are a lot of people who would like this same thing to happen. They want to get picked. They are writing novels. They are pitching essays. They want to break out, they want to get called up into the big leagues.
There is a whole process for this. What happens is that people start to talk about you. They say oh you've got to read this person. They've really got something special. They're distinctly different from anything you've read before.
After there's enough chatter like this, you get that aura of inevitability, that aura of coolness.
Oftentimes, such figures are also people who live in New York or London and have a certain interpersonal charisma. They're somebody you can meet at a party. And when you meet them, you're like wow, I've heard so much about you.
The literary world is itself quite small. That's what gives cliques so much power. It doesn't necessarily take that much to cut through the noise and get people’s attention. And once you have it, some people understand how to capitalize on that attention in order to build some mystique. It's a whole performance.
Anyway, some people in this clique will certainly manage it. Writing ability plays some role here. Some people are better writers than others. But that's not all that matters! It's an often-unacknowledged truth that it's a lot easier to praise someone’s writing if you also like them on a personal level, and, conversely, if someone has a toxic personality then the tendency is to ignore their work.
A shockingly large portion of a person’s success in the literary world (and, as a result, their chance of making an impact on both posterity and the culture at large) depend on their ability to navigate these kinds of small-group dynamics. That's why it's impossible to predict, by reading a person’s writing, whether they will be the winner or the loser in any particular round of this game.
In a few years, the winners will take their place amidst the establishment, only to be taken down in turn when the next ‘vibe shift’ occurs. Some of the losers will grow bitter and lose their creativity. Others will age into the same protective cynicism that Johanna now exudes, and they will come in the end to be thankful that they never got to reign over this particular heap of dung.
Afterword
You know...the world seems quite hopeless to me now. In just one month, the assault on trans rights seems so comprehensive. And there's no way to beat it other than through the courts and at the ballot box. So where does that leave me? I can't do anything about it.
And that's somewhat the same situation as what's faced by the crew in Moby-Dick. They are trapped on this ship. They know something is wrong, but it seems unproductive to admit it. As a result, a lot of them are putting up a good show, pretending like it's a normal whaling ship and this is a normal whaling vessel, even though on some level they recognize it's not quite right, because Ahab never quite crosses that line that would justify outright mutiny.
So...what is there to do? Some of them commit to this hunt for the white whale, to some extent. But mostly they just go about their business and do normal whaling-voyage stuff. And that's what the book is about.
Similarly, even the people on Substack who are in favor of Trump...they are not really in favor of the way he's behaving now. They hope it'll turn out okay, but you can feel the edge of disquiet in how they talk about him. They're not true believers, because how can they be? The way he's acting doesn't necessarily inspire true belief.
And as for the rest of us...well...we're just along for the ride.
In the meantime, we've got books to write! We've got careers to nurture. I'm no better than anyone else. I just received word that my Princeton University Press book has been confirmed by the editorial board. So, yes, I have revisions that I'll need to do, but the last real barrier to publication has fallen away.
Just like I have used diversity appeals to sell books, I have also trafficked in certain kinds of grievance. I'm certain that in the coming years, I'll find other sorts of rhetorical appeals I can make in order to expand my audience without transgressing against the things that I believe to be true. To me, that's the essence of art—figuring out what you can honestly say, what you can honestly commit to.
I think I've always stayed committed to the truth, as I understand it, and this commitment has limited my own commercial appeal as an author. But I'm sure others would see my actions differently.
Honestly, I am astonished that I've managed to keep reading and writing about literature at all. The fact that, given my current state of mind, I both read Moby-Dick and produced a post about it? That is wild! Afterwards, I read Melville's Piazza Tales, and I read The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, by Washington Irving. I really enjoyed those books as well. It's been a pleasure to see that literature retains some power for me.8
The two pieces in question are “Escaping The Panopticon” by
and “Paperback Vibrators and the Pragmatic Evasions of Literary Men” by .Anne Trubek gives a good example of this kind of reaction:
I’ve been reading a lot of these pieces, for a year or so. With an open mind, and often nodding my head. But the arguments seem stuck making the same point. I’d like to see the conversation progress—using actual data, maybe (with this review, I couldn’t figure out why the books discussed were chosen, of the thousands and thousands published each year), or suggesting solutions, or building something new upon a previous discussion.
Caleb Caudell provides an example of this sort of reaction:
Imagine, if you will, that it’s not so much an institution that produces a certain type, it’s a certain type that produces an institution. A man worried about getting cancelled and who writes accordingly is already at the edge of his talent; the very threshold of what counts in the moment as potentially cancellable is at the same time a measure of his talent, or his portion of the collectively distributed total talent available in the present. A writer who can go beyond this limit does so as a matter of fate, because they’re unable to do otherwise, and then they’re either ignored, vilified or celebrated, but all that’s merely incidental.
John Pistelli’s latest post also had similar rhetoric:
The discourse is dire around here. Too much gender war. I had my last word on that last year and don’t want to revisit the subject, especially since the stakes seem to be the representation of courtship rituals in indifferently written novels, whether they are indifferently written by men or by women—and this in a moment when the courtship rituals are very, very far downstream of our era’s radical alteration in the very ontology of the human being, surely a grander subject for the ambitious writer than dating. (What is this? Gidget?) Please let me know if there are any Jane Austens or Philip Roths around the place vis-à-vis literary merit and the course of true love.
I have no citations for this, but it’s the natural rejoinder, no?
Since I wrote this post, we’ve learned more about what’s happening with the PEPFAR payments. It seems whenever Rubio tries to send out the payments, they’re manually canceled, in the computer system, by staffers associated with Elon Musk and DOGE:
Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs — such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa — would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as Congo.
In case anyone’s interested, I used AI to spell-check this post. I fed the whole post into ChatGPT and asked if there were any “glaring, obvious typos”. It gave me a list, and I fixed them manually. However, upon re-reading the text I found a bunch more typos it hadn’t found. And I’m sure you, the readers, will find even more.
I appreciate this post and your clarity and directness. Of all the criticisms of TMR, I think mine has been pretty mild (in part because I don't, currently, have a blog of my own, and also because I'm not real interested in the fight). I basically just said the same thing you're saying here, that the journal seems to be more or less based around being against the consensus and establishment, so if you read a positive review of a book somewhere mainstream, you'll find a negative take in TMR. Nothing inherently wrong with that, I mostly just find it a bit boring! I didn't even get into the career-positioning aspect of it, but like you say, that's kind of how the game works.
But the response to my comment, from an editor of the journal, was essentially "no, you're wrong, that's not what we're doing!" But it is! It's right there in the introduction post that launched the journal!
For what it's worth, I much prefer your posts that are more focused on classic literature itself, without the commentary on the publishing industry today (but maybe I'm the weird one, and I don't expect you to pivot away from what works). I think the first of your posts I read was one on Icelandic lit, and I was like "cool! I've never heard of this before and now I want to read it!"
my Princeton University Press book has been confirmed by the editorial board...Congratulations!! Looking forward to reading it.