Don't let the archons get you down!
I’ve been reading a lot for my mythography series, but in the meantime, a post about me becoming more radicalized vis-a-vis: writing and publishing and education:
Looking at Jamie Berrout’s tweets (@jamieberrout) about anti-presses and thinking about how sad I was the past few weeks. How disappointed in myself I’ve been this year after deciding to leave grad school. Disappointed because I have thrown myself into writing and publishing work and have not only less to show for it than I hoped I would, but I have started to stew in jealousy and ugly feelings—something that never seriously dogged my writing life before.
I don’t want to feel this way. Bitter, twisty, pathetic.
At the same time, I’ve been ramping up my involvement with the Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network. The network’s immediate goals are described in the name, but these goals are always contextualized within larger liberation struggles. The feeling of radical joy grounded in collective power is one I haven’t felt to this extent since Occupy Oakland, and it is infusing my thinking about the issues I’m writing about in this post.
I think sometimes my problem has been that I don’t go far enough. I dropped out of high school, but then I failed to stand by my choice, as I kept being drawn back, mothlike, to community college, then art school (for which I took on the traditional ton of debt), then grad school.
Family expectations, class expectations, the powerful mythology of higher ed all drew me back, despite each encounter teaching me more about how corrupt that system is, and despite how much the path of autodidacticism—which should really be called community education—had given (and still gives) me.
Education and publication are two sides of the same coin. They are run on vetting and hierarchies for the benefit of an elite few. They trade on tokenization.
I’ve been thinking a lot about publication, too. I’ve become increasingly obsessed with getting a full-length book out. If only someone publishes my book, my thought process goes, then… And after the ellipses are many subsequent thoughts, like: I can leave off being an apprentice and shift into a role as teacher and my work will become part of the conversation.
There’s a press that I’ve fantasized about. I love their books. I’ve submitted to their contest several times with different manuscripts, duly shelling out my $20 for the privilege (and I think they’re actually one of the ones that doesn’t even send you a backlist title as a consolation prize).
Meanwhile, over the past year I’ve also gotten more involved with the Operating System, which has a plan in the works to shift to more of a community publishing model. I think this kind of shift, which will hopefully happen en masse going forward, is difficult for people to make internally, because the desire to be verified, bona fide, to have the velvet rope unclipped for us (rather than rushing the gate) is SO strong, there is a bias against self-publication or anything that smacks of it.
But the alternative seems to be putting ourselves as writers, teachers, thinkers, into a position of supplication—begging for scraps from a broken system and receiving, with these scraps, a doctrine that we are at risk of internalizing, applying to ourselves, and disseminating.
One thing I’ve noticed since I left the academic track is that it is kind of lonely out here. I want to help other people get out of the institution and then for us to work together to create new models for how scholarship and creativity can happen as mutual aid.
I’m stubbornly unwilling to accept that I should make writing and teaching writing my hobbies. I think it should be possible to make a living from it. And the more that we create alternative structures undergirded by our collective power, the more resources we’ll be able to wrest from the archons of academia, mainstream publishing, and the other institutions that benefit from our disenfranchisement.