One Reason Institutional Literature Sucks Lately

It's not fun to read a permission slip.

Now that I’ve written something that got a little more attention than this newsletter normally does, it’s time to write a little inside-baseball stuff about writing, which no one will care about.

You might know what I mean by “institutional literature,” to me it’s a neat & cohesive concept, but I’ll define it: the kind of poetry, fiction, and self-consciously pretty nonfiction that gets published by the kinds of literary magazines & publishing houses that an aspiring creative writing professor would put on their CV. You might also know that basically no one is reading this stuff. I wish I could find the tweet I saw that showed some numbers on this. If you’ve ever worked (or, more likely, volunteered) for one of those kinds of literary magazines, you know that most of them get more submissions than subscriptions. More people want to write for these publications than read them.

When institutional literature was better, presses were the quickest way to distribute words at scale. If writers wanted an audience, this was their best option. This is no longer true.¹ So what exactly are people getting out of submitting their work to literary magazines & publishing houses?

Some degree of a built-in audience—although as established, not necessarily much of one. Some editing, some degree of business & marketing help. But an audience can be built & editing/business stuff can be paid for. What publishing houses & literary magazines offer writers that they can’t buy or build themselves (this is such a Last Psychiatrist point that I don’t even feel like I’m the one making it, although I don’t think he ever literally said it specifically about belles lettres²) is an external authority to take responsibility to the audience for your writing. Which means that institutional literature, right now, is written specifically by people who care more about getting an external authority to take responsibility for their writing to their audience, than they care about people reading what they write. Which obviously produces writing that optimizes for getting permission more than for being readable, which tends to suck.

I say this with extreme sympathy. I found it incredibly hard to start a blog; I waffled around about it for literally years. I am aware that this doesn’t speak well of me. I had been presented for years with, sought out for years, opportunities to let authorities take responsibility for my writing. The temptation found a little divot of human weakness in me & the habit deepened it. In writing workshops I “had to” show my classmates my writing, my grade depended on it. Submitting to literary magazines took more courage/self-responsibility, because I was unavoidably choosing to submit, but I still wasn’t standing on my own two feet. And in all that time, although I am still proud of a handful of poems I produced, I literally never finished a story. To do that, I had to take full responsibility to the audience for what I was showing them. The stories I have posted here are not satisfying to my ambitions,³ but they’re stories and they exist.

I don’t think everyone involved in the literary-academic complex has quite as much as I do of the character flaw that caused this, certainly other people at least manage to finish things. And although I’m clearly a little bitter about the whole thing right now it would be wrong for me to suggest I got nothing from all of that. But they’re writing stuff that people don’t want to read, and it’s happening because there is no point in the normal workshop/magazine/publishing house process where the thing you are doing is the state-of-the-art best option for directly engaging with the audience. The process both teaches you to get permission & selects for people who want permission, & it’s not especially enjoyable to read a permission slip.

1. Because of the internet. (Maybe this goes without saying.)

2. & I’m such an embarrassingly obsessive TLP reader-and-rereader that I think I would know

3. I feel a little silly describing these as ambitions in the first place