It’s a tough time for freelancers who aren’t writing about Trump or sexual harassment (ideally both).
In her book Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, Suzy Hansen chastises the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for pushing, according to the New York Review of Books, “American writing toward the mundane and away from international concerns.”
Yesterday I received an email from an editor regarding an essay I’d submitted about becoming a travel writer in travel writing’s heyday (the 1980s). She expressed her confidence that it would “find a great home (and appear in one of the annual anthologies),” but she rejected it because, as she explained, “Our essays are usually personal memoirs about families and relationships – usually with a big dose of pain and suffering.”
And this was a magazine not in New York, the dyspepsia capital of America, but below the Mason-Dixon Line. American writing is not only geographically but also emotionally parochial.
The other day I ran into a neighbor who told me she still had to return my book. I had lent it to her months ago and forgotten all about it. A few minutes later she knocked at my door and handed me the wayward copy of The Joys of Travel, without a word about its contents. She smiled inscrutably; I couldn’t tell if she had liked it, or hated it, or never opened it. There are people who don’t realize that writers are needy creatures who crave feedback, not unlike parents, on what they’ve brought into the world.
After she had gone, I opened the book and found a cartoon from the New Yorker that I had not placed in it. It showed a man standing at a grill grilling a book. A woman appears to his left, holding two glasses of wine and asking, “How’s your book coming?”
I wondered if it was a critique or a suggestion.
Telling a food writer friend about the book I’ve been working on for the last year, I explained that it’s not an “agony memoir.” She had never heard the phrase, but she knew the phenomenon. She said that, even in her field, publishers favor “chefs who have a drug addict past or, even better, a prison record.”