The freelancer who sent me my first submission as travel editor, and subsequently became a good friend, e-mailed me the other day and said that, after more than two decades of freelance writing, she is thinking of going back to school.
Over the years she has published three books and appeared in magazines like Granta. I accepted every story she sent me, and barely changed a word in any of them. So the problem isn't with her writing; it's with the editors of magazines. And it's not a question of getting rejected, but rather of being ignored.
She listed the magazines - a mix of print and online - to which she's submitted and from which she's heard nothing. "Freelancing is getting ridiculous," she wrote.
With all the laid-off journalists, the field is a lot more crowded today, and with e-mail it's much easier to submit (and, you would think, send a reply). But is the over-population of freelancers so great that editors no longer have the time to discover talent? Has the glut of writers caused editors to shut out unfamiliar names and to give assignments only to people they know? (Even though, with Google, it's easy to find out who the unknown are.)
My friend will make a fine academic, but her new career will be a loss for readers. And it will mean that the editors have won.
This week I've been wishing I were an editor again.
In my travel writing group, Roland wrote a charming story about traveling around India, a large part of which featured the sanguine sexagenarian perched on his top bunk on a train and feeling blissfully at one with the world.
Then my friend (and former freelancer) Ericka sent me a story about looking for love - and failing to find it - in Fiji. "I have a thing for men in skirts," it began, before telling in equally arresting prose of her fruitless search for a local dancer she'd met at a travel trade show in Manhattan.
In a way, the stories were opposites - one about the joys, the other about the sorrows of travel. But they both looked at the essence rather than the practicalities of the activity. They were the kinds of stories I used to love to publish, and now there are very few places for them. Today newspaper travel sections, and the glossy travel magazines, ignore the humorous and the atmospheric in their obsession with tips and information. Their purpose is to help people when they get there, but they don't inspire anyone to go.
This week I judged nonfiction essays in an adult writing competition. I am always a little perplexed by the urge that some people have to write (even though I encourage it by teaching occasional writing workshops). Writing, like every art, is such a difficult thing to do well, and even if you succeed at that there's no guarantee that you will ever get published. Professional writers who've been at it for years live a life of constant rejection. What hope do you have against them? And why subject yourself to that? Of course, these days anyone can have his or her writing made public on the Internet; Paul Theroux's old claim that all good writing eventually finds a home has been expanded to include the mediocre and the awful.
But reading the essays I was quite moved. Not so much by the writing - which for the most part was amateurish - but by the desire that produced it. The authors were not dreaming of publication; at most, the chance to read their essays in front of an audience. But they all felt the need to salvage a memory - a beloved grandmother, a summer's day on a river, a reconciliation with a spouse - by putting it in words. It seemed, whatever the quality of the outcome, a very noble thing to do.
Tuesday I did the NPR show, joining an Oakland-based travel writer and the owner of a travel book store (ah, San Francisco). The interviewer never mentioned my essay - which was largely about literary travel writing - and the listeners who called in expressed interests in other aspects of travel and travel writing, namely the spiritual, the ethical and the female (ah, California). This last subject allowed me to state my hope that one day the Society of American Travel Writers' Lowell Thomas Awards will be renamed the Kate Simon Awards.
My little push for the literary.
Last year I wrote a long essay on travel writing - the misunderstood workings and the under-appreciated triumphs of those who practice it - which was accepted by The Wilson Quarterly.
It appeared at the beginning of January in the winter issue. I received one e-mail, from a fellow travel writer, commenting on the piece. The magazine sent me one letter which they had received about it.
This past Monday World Hum, the online travel magazine, ran the piece. It received about a dozen comments, and I got e-mails from friends I had not heard from in years. On Wednesday it was linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, which garnered more reactions. I received two e-mails from radio stations - one in San Francisco, one in Melbourne, Australia - requesting interviews. Then yesterday, The New Yorker online linked to the piece. At the moment it has received 29 comments on World Hum and may get more because - just as Gary Shandling said he would do if he ever experienced priapism for more than four hours - I'm calling everybody.
It's Seatrade week in Miami Beach, and last night I drove down for a dinner given by one of the cruise lines at the W hotel.
Valet parking was $15 so I headed into the lot across the street and paid the meter.
Inside I was seated next to the CEO. Perhaps they thought that, as a freelancer who rarely writes about cruising, I wouldn't pester him with questions all night. Or perhaps they had read my travel predictions for 2010 - "Oasis of the Seas will lose its status as the largest cruise ship in the world with the launch of Biggest Loser of the Seas" - and the CEO was planning to stomp on my toes under the table.
That didn't happen. The thing about writing these days is that so many people are doing it that in the end hardly anything gets read. But I did ask him questions, before working up to my big one: Don't you think a cruise would be enhanced by a travel writing course?
He expressed his opinion that people will take a course on anything if it's taught by an expert. He mentioned knot tying. I argued that travel writing is a particularly good fit for a cruise ship, because passengers can put into use at the next port the lessons learned of observation and interaction. He agreed but didn't ask for my card.
The dinner ended about 10:30. I took a quick spin around the pool and then headed out past the people waiting for the valet and into the parking lot, where the CEO was getting into a car two spaces from my own.