remind me someday to tell you the story of all the titles that did not end up getting used for this book
i really got lucky at the last second i'm not gonna lie to you
“Is at Asia House in 73 paintings through April 19. // To prosper step softly on new blades of grass.”
Hello:
My book is out! It is called Best Young Woman Job Book and you can order it here, or find out some basic stuff about it here. But if you are actually reading this there is a good chance you know at least some of that already.
I have been thinking about the past a lot, trying to match it up to the present. I have never published a book like this before. When I had the idea I was working night shifts at the closed captioning place. I was in the middle of writing a book of poetry, and sometimes I would do opinion pieces or book reviews for the newspaper. All the money I made went straight back into my rent. Two or three times a week I would wake up in the middle of the night choking on the question of the future. I was always saying to Carlo if I can just climb up like two more rungs. I had this idea that there are some people who get paid $250 to write an essay and others who get paid $1000 and if I could somehow shift myself into the latter category I’d be on the right track. $250 was how much I usually made writing about my opinions but I don’t really know where I got the second number from.
A lot of people I knew or felt like I knew were selling essay collections. It kind of felt like everyone was doing it. I thought often of the chance I’d had a few years earlier, when I had written so much about sexual assault that a big publisher had offered me the chance to write a “contemporary feminist manifesto,” and I had tried and tried for months to write the pitch they wanted. I was spending my days composing terrible SEO blog posts for minimum wage and the opportunity felt like an escape ladder dropped down into my lap from heaven. But I couldn’t do it. I tried really hard but I could not get around the fact that I didn’t really think the book they wanted me to write should even necessarily exist, and even though someone was going to write it that person shouldn’t be me. When I told them they said No hard feelings, keep in touch. I didn’t regret that decision, exactly. But I still turned it over and over in my mind like a loose coin in a coat pocket. Sometimes, on a day where I’d spent six hours closed-captioning episodes of Dr Phil and trying to keep my breathing steady, I would find myself wondering if there was something wrong with my brain, like maybe I was allergic to making a living.
The night shift was like 5pm to midnight, though no one really got mad if you came in late. Technically I was a contractor, which meant I could stop being assigned work at any time if I failed to show initiative and no one would have to tell me why. Everything had a filmy, unreal quality back then, maybe because I was not sleeping very well. The world felt linked to itself by coincidence. One day before work I was getting a burrito a couple blocks away and the burrito guy was kinda flirting with me. I’m trying to go back to school, he said. I want to change my life. When I asked him what he wanted to study he said Creative writing. I was like Oh wow that sounds really cool and then never went back. It spooked me. Too specific.
I lived with Layne in a tiny apartment with basically no heat, underneath a weed dealer who played the bongos every morning to greet the sun. Outside my window there was an aboveground subway track. In the afternoons I would sit at my desk and stare at the trains, trying to see into their windows as they sped past, and work on my poems. My worries about poetry were different from my worries about my “writing career.” I did not think I was going to make any money or climb any ladders by doing this. I was so lucky already; I had gotten a grant, I was working with a real publisher, I loved my editor. But the money had run out while I was trying to find a competent way to express my thoughts and now the whole endeavour felt kind of foolish and expensive. Every time I sat down to write I felt as though someone was wringing my guts out like a wet towel. I knew so clearly what I wanted to say but every time I tried to get it out on paper it felt so clumsy and inaccurate. I could not believe the disconnect. It was like trying to walk a straight line while falling-down drunk. I want it to feel less of a “collection of poems” and more of a mood, or a cloud, or a system, I would say to people, watching their eyes glaze over. I knew how it sounded. But it mattered to me, and felt real, and every passing minute I spent working on it I felt like I was lighting a twenty-dollar bill on fire.
Still, I finished it. I always finish if there is a deadline. And I loved the way it turned out. I felt so lucky. It had a beautiful cover. I got interviewed a couple times, I had a launch, I did some readings, some people said nice things to me about it, and all of that felt really good, and then life kept going, and that was basically it. I could not chop it up into excerpts and sell them to literary magazines because I had so successfully created a structure where each thing only really made sense as a part of the whole. The best stand-alone part was a 35-page prose poem. It was a real you just kinda have to read it situation, which for a collection of poetry is a big ask. Allergic to making a living! Years later, a poet told me that he had been on a jury for a writing prize where they had debated nominating my book for a while but ultimately decided not to, and to be honest it just felt good to hear that three people who were not my best friends or family had read the book closely enough to argue about its merits. This is the kind of publishing experience I am used to.
It is easier for me to talk about the past than the present. This new one is a memoir, not poetry, though some people have told me it feels like there’s overlap. It is about all of these things: working, and about how the drive to make something of your experience in the world intersects with the need to pay your rent and then that need gets tangled up with the desire to be recognized, to make a career out of your art. On the day it came out, Tom called me and said You are on the other side of a line now, and no matter what else happens you will have that for the rest of your life. I knew what he meant. I felt it. I was walking along the railpath after my shift at the bookstore carrying the cinnamon buns Kalpna had bought me and the bouquet of flowers Steph had given me. All around me people were walking their dogs. The sun was just starting to set, grey sky glowing its glow. I went to Layne’s and everyone was waiting there for me with balloons and wine. It was the kind of day that etches itself in your circuitry. No matter what else happens, these things are true: I wrote a book and it is the one I wanted to write, not the one anyone else wanted me to. I got paid to do it. If you live in Canada you can go into a store and buy it right now if you want. The cover is beautiful. My grandmother has a copy of it on her coffee table. I feel grateful, and happy, and proud, and those feelings are real, and that is almost all that matters.
But if I were to tell you I had no hopes or desires or expectations I would be lying. I wrote it because I was obsessed with the linked questions of money and value and art and living, and because I had all these stories that felt tied together in a knot I wanted to work out, and also because I needed to fashion my own escape ladder out of whatever I had lying around. In this way I have built myself pretty much the ultimate congratulations, you played yourself. I took so long to write this thing, making all my careful precious little decisions, that on balance I lost money. It still does not have an American publisher and maybe it never will, although I hope there’s still a chance. A while ago my agent forwarded me a rejection letter from an editor in New York. I devoured this in two sittings and was really impressed, the email said. The writing is intimate and sharp and often quite funny—but it’s also biting and painful, full of tiny but powerful jabs to the gut. (So far so good!) I shared it with a number of colleagues, and collectively we all landed in the same place: that this is a seriously talented writer with whom we enjoyed spending time on the page, but also that the memoirs we tend to have success with lean toward using personal narrative as a way into a broader issue or idea. This idea has hovered above my head like a thought bubble ever since. I made something, again, that is less of a collection and more of a system, except this time the system is my life.
Last week I did a deeply surreal and surprisingly fun press thing: CBC syndication. Have you ever heard of this? I hadn’t. Basically I sat in my office for three hours and regional radio stations around the country called me and asked the same five questions about what one host called my “zany experiences in the gig economy.” The questions came from a list compiled by a producer I had spoken to earlier in the week. When she had called me I was on my break at the bookstore, sitting in the back room with the door closed. I make $18 an hour at the bookstore, with no benefits or sick days, and it is still the best day job I have ever had. I’m in the exact same amount of debt as I was when I worked at the caption place, though the general quality of my life has changed for the better in ways I could not possibly have imagined back then. It is an interesting position to be in. Sometimes, when a customer finds out I wrote one of the books on the nonfiction table – a real-looking book, hardcover, one of the ones in a big stack – you can literally see their eyes adjusting as I go from employee to human.
The radio producer sounded incredibly busy and also like she had just run up twelve flights of stairs to get to our conversation. Behind her there was a dull roar that felt generally office-y, though I couldn’t really distinguish any of the sounds. I got the impression I was talking to the earth’s most stressed-out woman, or at least someone in the top ten. I haven’t read the book, so can you just tell me what it’s about really quick? she asked, a little out of breath. I explained the general concept. That actually sounds really interesting!, she said, and I did not know how to respond, so I said thank you.
Can I ask you a personal question? she said. Why don’t you just get a job at the CBC like the one I have? Too committed to your art?
I was honestly not expecting this. I guess so! I said. Are you offering me a job?
There was a moment of suspended silence that felt one hundred times longer than it probably actually was. It was so quiet I could suddenly make out all the different the sounds of the office behind her. There were people talking to each other, people talking on phones, a printer running, the heavy sound of typing typing typing, so much life. It was hypnotic. I had to snap myself out. I’m kidding! I said. Then we both laughed for maybe a little too long. She was so relieved I hadn’t really meant it.