Wednesday 3/5/25
Who becomes a writer? Who should? Are there right reasons? Or: Who is really a writer?
Of course there are right reasons. Anything in this life that is worth doing, that is done for good, that is done for a greater purpose, to add value to this life, to enrich life, for others and one's self, is also an act of honorable, good faith intentions.
For writers, we might picture the child in third grade. She loves to read. Books fill her heart. She delights in stories. Savors where books take her. She uses her imagination in partnership with those books. Her imagination, with each turn of the page, becomes more alive and she writes some stories of her own. She feels excited, empowered, like she's in on some amazing secret that it's okay to tell the world about because people need this shared with them and the world has to know and deserves to know.
She has a teacher who also loves writing and books and stories and the teacher encourages the girl. When the girl is happy, she wants to read to become happier still. On a rainy autumn day, she gets a snack, snuggles up somewhere, and resumes her travels in tales with characters that are as real to her as anyone could be. Time stops. Or ceases to matter. She is herself and she is everyone.
When she's lonely, or afraid, or feeling down, she takes solace in the stories that make her less of those things. Stories that help her go back into the world more herself than she was before. That is the brilliant paradox of what writing can do, the great gift that it provides.
She keeps writing as she keeps reading. And she realizes that there's a lot to this whole writing thing--the better she gets at it, the more she realizes that there is.
Over the years, she learns that writing is more than words. It's about her heart and her soul. She gets so much from reading, and now she understands what it is that writing asks of her: Her very best. Her very essence. All of her. Everything in her. Herself more than herself so that others can better becomes themselves.
Because for everything that writing has to do with words, it may have even more to do with what's inside of you. Your soul. Your love. Your concern for people, for the world. The extent to which you are human. To write better than one did previously requires so much. Like being more human still--always growing--than one was the last time.
The girl, then the woman, has taken a journey that will span the whole of her life. She'll partake of the gift and give of the gift.
That's who you think should write. Has to write. Does so for the right reasons.
But virtually no one in publishing writes or does anything they do--edit, put out books--for any of these reasons. They don't care more writing, about stories, any more than the person who never reads. They actually care less than the person who doesn't read because that other person could read and experience manna in what they read--they just don't, the same as someone could ski and love skiing but they don't ski.
Take them to Stowe for a weekend and put them on skis out there on the mountain and that could be the best time for them. Whereas, publishing people are out on the mountain guarding their gated community. The fresh air, the immaculate powder--they couldn't give a flying fuck. If anything, they resent it.
These people that we're talking about--the people with all of the wrong reasons--do what they do because when they were coming down the birth canal, they had a job waiting for them at The New Yorker because of the blood in their veins, the family they were born into, the wealth that was like a birthright.
Or they couldn't fit in anywhere else because they were such miserable, nasty people--like say, an ugly piece of entitlement-incarnate such as Punch Hutton. And they could only be around people as miserable, nasty, and valueless as themselves, in a system they made sure was for them alone, and managed it accordingly so that there could be no interlopers. No good writing. No good people. No accountability. No competition. No truths at any costs.
Or they were petty and moronic and terrified of life, of actually experiencing anything, of fairness, of level playing fields, of competition, and this was where they could be and not have to deal with--and be measured by--any of that, with no one to object their corruption, because they'd made it so that no one else in the world cared by taking an active dead hand in killing off reading.
They were both the people up on the stage, and the people out front in the seats of their own audience. No one else came into the theater; no one else knew it existed, no one cared. The doors were locked to someone anyone who had something truly great for that stage.
Were one of them to say, "Diane Williams!" no one in the world who was not one of these people would know who was meant. And if you showed some of Diane Williams' work to someone in the world--a person who was not a part of this evil, incestuous subculture--and said, "That's masterful! Don't you think?" they'd laugh over how ridiculous it was and say, "You can't possibly be serious."
They don't have any talent, because talent might as well not exist if you don't work to develop it. They don't work. They don't try. They don't earn. They expect, as they've always expected, everything just to be handed to them.
They are usually mentally ill, they don't live in reality, and the slightest, honest statement of truth--let alone fair criticism--causes them to further lose their lose minds, if that's possible. They equate any questioning of what they're doing--anything but blind servitude and constant log-rolling and covering for them and failing to turn a blind eye to their blatant cronyism and even neglecting not to make it known when they're stealing, assaulting, harassing, and raping people--to a mob hit.
They detest readers because readers want words and stories worth reading. Readers want to be invested--the few who exist, that is, or any person who tries to read.
Their animus for readers stems from the truth that they can't provide the above. They spend their lives in denial and avoidance, and still they can't escape the knowledge that they're frauds. That they are working with nothing. That they know nothing. That they have no range, be it stylistically, intellectually, or when it comes to subject. They're not willing to face that, to get up earlier, to work at every opportunity to get better, with the humility that requires and the time and energy that takes.
To write well you must put others first. A great writer does not write for themselves. They don't write for their ego. They don't write so that a colleague in the English department can say to them, "I wish I could be in the Idaho Review like now are," never mind that such a venue sounds like a place that critiques a state's farming industry and which no one outside of the MFA program Ponzi scheme environment has ever heard of because there's no reason to know about it. And that's the key phrase--no reason to know about it.
A great writer enhances our humanness. They put us in greater touch with ourselves in our humanness, so that we may in turn realize more about its nature, its capabilities, its challenges, what it asks of us and can do for us, both within us and then out in the world--in what we can add to it, what we can do for others.
Which brings us back to Raluca Albu. She, as much as anyone, in her instability, with her manic nature, her pettiness, her incompetence, toxicity, cowardice, immaturity, self-loathing, anger, impotence, failures as a writer, an editor, a human, was responsible for me finally saying, after years and years of trying not to have it come to this with these dreadful, monstrous, people of this system, that I would make publicly known what this system really is and how it unilaterally works.
If you have been exposed on here, you can thank Raluca Albu in a way.
She was an editor at BOMB, a Brooklyn-based literary journal that is like all of these places. Publishes garbage by the right kind of person. I went to BOMB once, as I've said--rode a Greyhound from Boston to NYC just to do so--in order to meet with a now-former editor in Mónica de la Torre.
These people aren't like people you meet out in the world. There's something so profoundly off with them. She sat across from me praising the ridiculousness that is the writing of Lydia Davis. My feelings for this writing must have made themselves at least somewhat known on my face, because de la Torre halted her nonsensical, rambling panegyric to tell me that if I dared say that I didn't think Lydia Davis was amazing then I'd never be in BOMB.
These people are usually out of their minds. Their tiny minds. They have so much anger, which manifests itself in their whisper networks, all of the backstage bullshit of locking arms, locking out those not like them.
If you are like these people, you're not a good person. You're not a good writer. You don't have character. You don't have depth. You're not intelligent.
You think I'm exaggerating about how bad the writing is in BOMB? Okay--enjoy this Blake Butler masterpiece for yourself. Good God, right? Can you imagine doing anything this stupid and pointless with so much as ten seconds of your life? Here is another that is even more masterful. Click on it--seriously. Give them the click as they say.
Do you believe this shit?
I stuck at it for like fifteen years or whatever it was at BOMB. I took the abuse, the discrimination. As I did at so many of these places.
Raluca Albu was someone I hadn't approached there before, so I did. She went on about how brilliant my writing was. She quoted it in her Facebook posts. But it wasn't running, and she began to change in her tone towards me.
You know when something's up. When one of these unstable people has been talking to other unstable people. They're so pathetic, so weak, that they can't stand and think for themselves. They don't have the confidence, which in parts stems from the knowledge that they're nothing.
Why would you be confident in your abilities if you don't have any? Why would you believe in yourself if you know you're a total fraud who has always relied on the handout and the hook-up? If you were this way, who would you want to be around? Who would you wish to work with?
Exactly.
Then one day, after this having gone on for some time--realize there's no money involved here, too, and there I was offering up the masterpieces for free, with my career and track record, to boot--I said something. Mild. Again--very mild as I did to Katie Ryder at Harper's. Because I knew.
And then this unstable person lost it. It was manic time. Out came the crazy. And I bet there hasn't been a day since when she hasn't wished she couldn't go back and do that all over again.
Here is that earlier entry from these pages containing that exchange with Raluca Albu. Have a read or a refresher, as the case may be.
A friend of mine from college saw that and said, "I can't believe these people still treat you the way they do."
Yeah. But there it is. If you are not like them, they will hate you. The less like them you are--which means the greater your abilities, your knowledge, your goodness, your honor, your legitimacy--the more they will hate you, fear you, seek to hold you back, discriminate against you, and like middle school brats, get those in their little cliques to do the same, and pressure a would-be holdout into following along. Meanwhile, if one of their own is a rapist, a criminal, a plagiarist, a bully, they'll roll with it and roll the log for them.
And because these people are so weak, so devoid of courage and character and individuality, they'll go along with what the person next to them wishes. Unless they have no choice. Or else if something worse may befall them. Like being known publicly as someone who acts this way.
As I've said: This won't go the way you want it to if this is how you're going to act. You're not getting away with anything. You can do the right thing, or what's going to happen is something you don't like, that never goes away, which is all you will ultimately be known for, and what you can do about that--because it's all true, and given that you'd already put the fix in anyway--is a big fat fucking nothing.
In many instances, I took abuse and discrimination for ten, fifteen, as much as twenty years. A lot of that is documented on here.
I had sent a book called Cheer Pack: Stories to one Katie Raissan who is an editor at Grove/Atlantic, a book publisher. This book contains "Find the Edges" from Harper's and "The Last Field"--both of which I gave some background on yesterday in that post about Ann Hulbert and The Atlantic. The book is a Murderers' Row of stories. (Which instead sits here with me until a time comes when it doesn't.)
Raissan had never responded to me. I'd come along with a letter talking about what I did--and there's no one to touch my publication record, and that's with an industry against me, and no one who has ever been for me, let alone the village working on my behalf to get me and my work out there--and an amazing book.
None of this mattered--because I wasn't like her. And was grounds for resentment. Automatic-barring. The idea of writing, what was on the page, it's value, and commerce--you know, business--never entered into any of it. Totally irrelevant to a person like this--a petty-power mongerer.
As Albu was having her meltdown, I happened to look Raissan up on Twitter. I still don't know what prompted me to do that--a feeling, I guess. I knew they were friends. Raissan had never responded to me via email. We hadn't had a single exchange. I certainly wasn't like her. She is a petty, broken, incompetent, nasty child.
Albu says to her, "This Colin person wasn't nice to me, ban him, ban him, ban him at the publishing company where you are a book editor! Not that you weren't already doing so in essence, but you know, make it official, mean girl power, rah rah rah! I am a victim, woe is me!"--or words to the effect--and this other...what do you even want to call her?...goes on Twitter and blocks me.
We'd had nothing to do with each other, save her trying to get off on ignoring the amazing writer with the amazing track record and the amazing book whose stories had what someone like this would consider their own amazing publishing track records already. That's someone awful at their job, an evil, broken child--same as Albu, hence the "friendship"--with no interest in merit, writing, art, business, but just wanting to have the pettiest, most soulless, empty form of power. That's someone who is more of a bad joke than an actual person.
So what is Raluca Albu up to now? She's still the online editor at BOMB. (By the way: Don't you love the part in that email exchange from the earlier post on here where she starts talking about meetings? Can you even imagine people sitting at a table discussing the merit of this slop? Wouldn't you love to see a video of that? What could any of them possibly say? But again, it's all lies. You know what's happening. What they loathe is when they know that I know what is happening. This is always a case of blame the victim. They take no ownership for anything. And who wants to own their own lies, their own shallowness, pettiness, insanity? These people? Right...)
But someone sent me a career update for Raluca Albu and her new gig. Because BOMB doesn't pay. Again, that's what happens when you kill off readers and you have nothing that you publish that is worth reading for someone who might not read but maybe would. One place doing this doesn't make that so; but when essentially all the places do it because nothing in this system is about the quality of the writing and it's now exclusively done by people who are interchangeable with each other all go to the same schools and MFA programs and write the same way and teachings to write the same way and on and on it goes?
Every venue isn't read. Writing is turned off by the people of the world. It's not a thing they do. To find anything worth reading at present, you'd have to devote your life to looking for it, because it would be like the one real diamond buried beneath a Pacific ocean's worth of fake diamonds, with millions and millions of people also claiming authorial status, because this is fantasy, indulgence--often of one's delusions and immoral nature--without any need for accountability and an absence of authenticity, but no sweat either way, because none of it is real, none of it is about the writing. Who is going to do that? How could you if you wanted to?
This is rich. It beggars belief, except it's these people, and we know how full of it they are. How insincere. That they're not in publishing because of anything remotely resembling what I began this entry by adumbrating: That person in love with story, transformed by story, made whole by story, who wants to share that love with the world--or even just a single other person.
Hell no. Not someone like Raluca Albu, who now works in AI: In the replacement of human authors. In the effacing of humanness. Human writing. All of those things that that third grader up above loved, needed, cherished, and what that meant to who she was, who she became.
Here you go: Press release with Raluca Albu's email at the bottom.
This would be like a doctor, with that whole "Above all, do no harm" dictate, showing up at the surgery with a mallet and bashing in the patient's skull.
One could try to spin this and say, "Well, AI harvests author-generated texts to generate its texts, and here we have some plucky crusaders who want to make sure authors get paid."
That's not really what this venture is, though. It's to hasten the slide down the slope into the waiting, open mouth of AI. It's meant to be the road taken as part of complete human capitulation. The language is that of the drug dealer: "Well, AI isn't going anywhere, so here you go if you want a taste...I mean, everyone's doing it..."
You talk about selling the soul--this is literally selling the soul.
That's who typically gets into publishing. Someone like this. You couldn't be less about, if you will, what the whole point is, the magic, the real and right reasons, of writing, of stories, than you could if you are an AI merchant.
You're the villain of the piece--the human piece, which you are seeking to render as an anti-human piece--not the hero.
I haven't looked at BOMB in a bit. But I bet you're publishing some totally remarkable works, Raluca. Good for you. How about we return to you again in the next little bit for another Raluca Albu-centric installment? We can do a prose off. Something to look forward to. I'm sure you'll continue to look great. People won't be deriding you and mocking you as they see you for what you are.
Hope it was worth it to you that day, you soulless fraud. Because this isn't going to let up. You might even say it's inevitable now.