infighting in the kiddie pool
or, cowardice as ethic
Going to do something sort of dumb and talk about a recent controversy that most of you likely didn’t hear about and likely won’t hear about anywhere else besides this post. It concerns a small independent literary magazine called Hobart.
If you’re thinking to yourself: What’s Hobart? Then you really don’t need to read anything here. This controversy is dumb and so absurdly insular that I don’t even want to try to make you care.
So why write about it?
Well, as a young person, I spent years caring about this sort of thing as I worked with, published, and was published by people in this small circle of aspiring writers. Granted, I don’t personally know anyone involved here so all I can speak to is what they’re publicly saying.
Also, for full disclosure, I have submitted a piece to Hobart for publication in the past. Aaron Burch sent me a nice rejection letter. I subsequently published the essay here on Tuesday.
On September 29th, Hobart published an interview with a writer named Alex Perez and no one noticed. This, as they say, is the beginning of our trouble.
I don’t know exactly which day people eventually noticed that this had been published, but it seems to have popped up this week to dominate the online discourse of a very small group of little-known writers.
Once these people finally read the interview, the reactions were overwhelmingly negative. You can find many of them if you click right about here.
I have not read the interview. I won’t read it either. Not because it’s controversial or upsetting but because I have never read a 10,000 word interview with a writer I’ve never even heard of. To be honest, it’s unlikely I would read a 10,000 word interview with anyone, even if I was already a fan. Even if I was the person being interviewed, I probably wouldn’t read it if it was 10,000 words.
I mean, I just have things to do, ya know?
Well, after this tiny group of writers got upset enough, editors at Hobart, including the founding editor, resigned. They wrote a letter explaining their decision, but the remaining editor seems to have deleted it, which is a hilarious level of pettiness. You can read her statement here.
The mass resignation letter mostly explained how the other editors did not have authority over Elizabeth Ellen, who has a legal stake in the magazine, which means she couldn’t just be fired. They talked about how they oppose the things discussed in the interview, claimed harm, and wiped their hands of the situation.
For some reason, a few writers have publicly stated that they want their pieces removed from the website. I find this hilarious, honestly. If you can’t stand behind your work, why write it in the first place? If you’re afraid that standing next to someone who sucks will, by the transitive property, make you also suck, then trying to have your stories published in magazines is really the last thing you should be doing, since you have no control over the writers who are not you.
Also, just send an email to Elizabeth Ellen! You don’t need to quote tweet her and make sure everyone knows you’re One of the Good Ones.
Just pancake batter in the heads of some of these people.
As I said, I didn’t read the interview. I won’t read it. For this reason, I won’t comment on what is written there. But here’s where I do get very annoyed and angry.
This all just reeks of cowardice to me.
This interview was published on September 29th. The resignations happened on October 12th. For those doing math, that’s about two weeks.
If these editors are taking a principled stance against the racism and misogyny and literal harm they claim is in the interview, why are their principles so lethargic?
If this interview is such a betrayal, why didn’t they resign on September 30th?
Presumably, these editors will say that they didn’t know it was published until later.
Two things about this:
First: If Aaron Burch is the managing editor, how did he not realize that a new piece had been published for two weeks? Further, if he has an editorial stance against certain kinds of language or topics, how does he have no oversight over what’s published at his magazine?
Second: the likely reason why it took two weeks for them to resign is because almost no one reads their magazine. Including the editors—Burch too!—who determine what is and what is not published there.
I honestly find this more embarrassing than anything else. Which goes back to my disclaimer at the top of this post:
No one cares about this.
Even the people involved don’t care. Despite all the hardwork they claim to put into their role as editors, readers, and writers, they don’t even read the magazine that they work for. And if they did read it, they either didn’t find it offensive or needed other people to literally explain to them why it was offensive.
Eventually someone out there on twitter cared. I don’t know who or when because sometimes I actually do have to do my job, but I didn’t start seeing this interview burbling around until Tuesday, which was twelve full days after the publication of the interview. It picked up steam the way these things do and then the editors, likely fearing any backlash and possibly even feeling betrayed, decided to sever ties with the magazine they worked at1.
Which of the following options is better?
So few people read Hobart that it took two weeks for even the editors to realize they published something they found extremely upsetting.
or
These editors didn’t have principles with regard to what was published until they started to get the wrong kind of heat.
Neither is good, in my opinion. And maybe it’s true that this interview is going to cause people tangible harm, but then come out and say that.
Tell me that spoken or written language is literally the same thing as physical violence.
If you believe that—it’s fine if you do; I promise I won’t be mad either way—then go petition The Paris Review to take down the interviews with Faulkner and Hemingway and dozens upon dozens of others.
If the existence of this interview is so harmful that you think it has no business being published, go after the indie lit darlings who made it big by writing transgressive books, stories, and essays. Go after Roxane Gay and Blake Butler. Definitely try to get Dennis Cooper put out of print. If you’re a professor in an MFA program (most people in this circle are or aspire to be), definitely don’t teach Nabokov or Garcia Marquez or Burroughs or Joyce or Woolf or Dickens or Dostoevsky or Palahniuk or Alyssa Nutting or Joyce Carol Oates or Louise Erdrich or anyone else who has dabbled in darkness, who has upset different groups of people in various ways through their novels, stories, interviews, essays, and behavior.
But if you only care about this because someone made you pay attention to an interview you didn’t care about involving two people you didn’t care about talking about things you didn’t care about and now you feel embarrassed or even feel genuinely bad, then maybe just keep publishing work you do care about.
If you care about independent publishing, if you care about making another avenue for writers and readers to find great literature that is not and cannot be found in the massive corporate machine that publishing has become consolidated under, then how can you decide to spike the entire magazine you claim to love because it published one thing you don’t agree with?
If, like many of you have said, Hobart has meant so much to you over the years, has made you the writer you are, has given you confidence in yourself, in your voice, how can you decide that it must die now that it published one thing you’re not proud of?
Are you so fragile that you just give up because someone did something you didn’t like without asking you first?
Sadly, the reason why no one cares, including the people involved, is because small independent publishing became a steppingstone a long time ago2.
When an indie writer has a book that starts selling well, they don’t stick with that publisher. Sometimes they even take the book back from the publisher, severely hampering that small publisher’s ability to make money off their labor of love.
To be clear, I don’t blame someone for doing this. If one of my books had sold enough that a major publisher came to me with a contract, I’d sign that too.
But if you really care deep in your bones about independent publishing in the US, you should want it to thrive. For it to thrive, partnerships need to form between writers and their publishers.
Especially with authors who hit it big: if you leave the indie press that gave you a chance behind, it will die. Maybe not right away, but in a year, five, or ten, it will die. People can only do a thankless task for so many years without seeing it succeed, no matter how much they love it.
I have seen it over and over again. In the ten years I swam in the kiddie pool that was independent publishing, dozens of presses have closed. Hundreds of magazines have closed. Some have replaced them and some have even grown up enough to become sustainable on their own. But most of what indie lit was between 2005 and 2015 has disappeared leaving hundreds of books out of print and thousands of stories, poems, and essays erased from the internet.
I have seen writers with no following gradually sell thousands of copies of their new book on a small press that believed in their book. I’ve then seen those same people who spent all their time online talking about being a Literary Citizen or the Importance of Independent Publishing3 pull their book from the small press that blew them up and sell it to a major publisher4.
Again, I don’t blame them for this. The promise of money and 10x as many readers is difficult to turn down. I wouldn’t do it!
Especially because so many presses do not stand behind their work or support the authors they’re publishing5.
But that press that gave you a chance, that believed in your little novel or short story collection?
It died seven years ago.
They’ll all die. They’ll keep dying because they lose money with almost every book they publish. Even the major publishers are dying. And even when they’re doing well, they continue to squeeze the life out of their authors and editors, paying them less, offloading marketing onto the author to do their best on their own, and really only hoping that an adaptation gets made or that the book wins an award so that people will actually buy it.
And so I do get angry about this kind of dumb shit. It’s bad enough that no one else cares about the stories we devote our lives to, but it’s so much worse when the editors and publishers also don’t care6.
Will anyone miss Hobart?
Probably not.
Will Hobart reopen in January like Elizabeth Ellen claims?
Maybe.
If it does and if it stays open for six more months, no one will even remember that the editors all resigned over a way-too-long interview with a little-known writer who apparently said some offensive shit or, at the very least, some very dumb shit.
And if it stays open for years, slowly, new people who have never heard of Hobart will hear about it and begin sending their own stories and essays to be published there, where they will be read by almost no one.
Not even the people editing and publishing the stories and essays.
Of course, work is a flexible term in independent publishing since I’m assuming no one involved was paid anything for their labor. Writers definitely weren’t paid, though at least Hobart doesn’t charge for submissions like almost all of these small literary magazines that almost no one reads.
You may ask yourself: then why did you send them something to publish?
I wanted to attract readers back here. It’s why I’m submitting short fiction again, too. Getting paid for my stories is nice, as is reaching a bigger audience, but my goal is to bring them back here.
It really is that simple for me.
Most of independent publishing caters to aspiring MFA students, current MFA students, former MFA students, aspiring MFA or Literature professors, and current MFA or Literature professors. Having the publication on your CV for these people is more important than whether anyone actually buys a copy, let alone reads it. In fact, it’s a career requirement for professors. But it also severely limits the reach of these books and stories.
To put it bluntly, most people will never know that these books are getting published. Many would not be interested even if they did know these books existed. Of the people who do care, almost all of them are aspiring writers.
To put it another way: independent literature in the US does not have any fans. There are no people who only read these books. Almost every reader of one of these books has aims at having their own writing published or becoming an editor to determine which books and stories should be published.
It’s also funny to me when people in the small press world shit on self-published writers. Let me tell you: I’ve had a few books out with small presses and the people who edited my novels were, essentially, just random people.
Let me explain: there is no qualification that makes someone a publisher. They just need to decide to do it and convince someone else to send them a novel to publish. Often, the person they first publish is a friend or someone they’re a fan of. For most indie publishers, this is essentially where it also tops out. A publisher is a one-person operation who requests books from people and then determines which ones they want to publish.
My three novels got published because internet friends asked me to send them a novel. The difference between them publishing it and me publishing it myself really comes down to who got paid for the books sold.
I do often think it’s funny when their major publisher debut fails, sending them back down to the indie press world to scrabble again to get out of it. Especially when they pick up their old pose of being an Indie Lit Champion
The publisher of my third novel literally refused to reach out to magazines on my behalf.
I know for a fact, for example, that my third novel was not even read by the publisher, who requested the manuscript. It was only read by the editor and only about two months before publication when he was tasked with editing it for free.
The only person who really benefited from this situation is the guy they interviewed because this is probably the most interest his name has generated in his career. My guess is since he writes social commentary now instead of fiction, these editors just guaranteed a boost to his career and reach as a writer, whereas if they had just ignored it no one would ever have read the damn thing and been able to experience his “harm”.
I really like how you go beyond the usual cancel-culture controversy to get at the real issue, which is economic. These small publishers feel to me very much like an extension of MFA programs, not only because they’re entirely run by graduates of those programs, not only because their economic model makes no sense and relies on the support of people who can afford not to make money from their work, but also because their primary purpose is not what they say it is (producing writers and books) but rather to provide credentials.
As for all the brouhaha, it strikes me as purity culture, as you would find in fundamentalist religions. Someone becomes an outcast because they have violated a taboo, and the rest of society must shun them lest they themselves be contaminated. But at least most religions offer cleansing rituals so that the impure can rejoin the community.