Let’s talk about this cultural obsession with “quitting your day job.”

There is an attitude—propagated by those perky millennial solopreneurs who pay to insert themselves into your Instagram and Facebook feeds—that any creative person still working a day job isn’t ambitious or savvy enough to “make it.” This may be true for some folks, but certainly not for all of us. As I wrote in Day Job? I Wish!, I’ve been writing novels and various works of nonfiction for almost half my life now. Hustle? Yup, I’ve spent the past nineteen years hustling. Self promotion? Uh huh, I do that too. Sure, I could take (or create) other opportunities for a more reliable income—I could copy-write, ghostwrite, edit, coach—but all of these career-related work options will siphon my creative energy from the work I actually want to do. …

“I don’t know any jazz singers apart from you,” I tell Risa Branch as we peruse the dinner menu at Farmacy Kitchen, a pop-up vegan restaurant in SoHo. “You’re a kind of time traveler.” She may look like a 21st-century New Yorker — hair in long locs, an intricate silver ring running the length of her index finger, the chill-and-steady presence of someone who meditates every morning — but when Risa opens her mouth to sing, you get why fans would liken her to an “old-school jazz singer from the ’30s” even when she was performing electro-soul on the Vancouver indie scene five and ten years ago. Farmacy is a British company testing the New York City market (through February 2020), but the fern-colored velveteen cushions, ivied wallpaper, and dividers teeming with palm fronds are a fitting backdrop for a conversation about the greenest city either of us have ever seen. …

Last year one of my favorite librarians took on the “Newbery challenge”: reading, in order, every children’s novel that has won the John Newbery Medal since its inception in 1922. I lingered at the circulation desk, curious to hear how well the older prizewinners had aged. Juli Anna pulled a face — half pained, half embarrassed for these bygone titans of children’s literature. “Many of the books are sexist and horribly racist,” she said. “It’s probably for the best that most children aren’t reading them anymore.”

If you’re like me, the first novel that comes to mind when someone says “Newbery” is Charlotte’s Web, a book so beloved that nobody seems to remember it won an Honor and not the actual prize. (Have you read Secret of the Andes, the Newbery Medal winner of 1952? Me neither.) It’s no surprise that so much of American children’s literature (even the award winners) should reflect the regrettable values of the times in which they were written, but surely E.B. …

Thanks for your interest in joining our community!

• What we are looking for: cultural criticism (particularly literary, extra-particularly #kidlit, which inspired the name of this publication), “white learning” and vegan-oriented social justice, reflections and experiments on personal growth and creativity through a vegan lens, interviews with vegan artists, veganized heirloom recipes, and plenty more that falls under the category of “we’ll love it when we see it.”
• While we would be glad to publish your journey-to-veganism story, in order to write for us we ask that you be 100% committed to an ethical vegan lifestyle (meaning that you are all in for animal rights). …

While I was living in New York in my early 20s — still a few years before Facebook and Twitter and Meetup — I’d sometimes browse the Craigslist activity-partner listings hoping to connect with other aspiring writers. The interactions that followed essentially amounted to platonic first dates, which could feel a little awkward when meeting up with straight men. The most memorable of these was Remy, who sent me a link to another Craigslist ad he’d posted advertising a corpse under “free stuff.” Ideal for anatomical research, he wrote. Please arrange for pick-up as soon as possible. I laughed, uneasily. …

Branding for Nonconformists

It’s been more than a decade since social media became an essential part of an author’s job description, and after all this time I still feel like I’m doing it wrong — except on those days when a reader reaches out and the unavoidable time-suck momentarily feels worthwhile. Is it too late to become more proficient at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook? (And how should we define proficiency?) We know that the more you use these platforms the more the algorithms will favor your content, so is it even possible to use social media effectively without diverting much too much time away from your writing? When is attempting to cultivate a presence on a particular platform simply not a good use of your time, and when is it worth putting the effort into learning how to use it effectively? …

“I’m feeling generous today, so I’m going to give you a copy of my book,” the woman told us. “I’ll even sign it for you.”

My colleague and I squirmed on our metal folding chairs as she autographed two copies of her self-published “novel,” which was only thirty pages long. When volunteering at a book festival you just know you’ll be encountering eccentrics over the course of the day, and many of them are pleasant enough to chat with for a few minutes. Not so with this one. A variety of books written in our community workspace — fiction and nonfiction, both traditionally and self published — were arranged on the table between us, but she never once glanced at them. She didn’t ask about our writing space, our community, or our own work. …

Now that the novelists among us are beginning to think about NaNoWriMo, posts on either side of the plotting-versus-“pantsing” debate are showing up more frequently in my social media feeds. Plotters are meant to be methodical, mapping out each scene of their narrative beforehand, while pantsers — from the expression “flying by the seat of your pants” — prefer to settle in at their keyboards with only a premise and a few primary characters and…see what happens. …