Money, Merit, and the Economy of Favors: Three Proposals to Improve Class Diversity in the Literary Community
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoff
from this
condensery
—Lorine Niedecker
Class-Consciousness (Not) Required
I don’t think it’s rash to say that speaking about class often feels verboten in contemporary US literary circles. Many of us in the literary community know quite well about things like gig work, the meager pay of content mills, the adjunctification of the university with its accompanying unstable and largely benefit-less working conditions (not to mention paying for one’s own healthcare—a nightmare), or how the coastal cultural centers like NYC and LA continue to produce and publish literature without serious class consciousness in large part because only people with well-off parents can afford to live in these places while working for mediocre salaries at publishing houses or literary organizations when young. Despite these things being common knowledge, or perhaps because this common knowledge reveals how limited the resources are for people in our community (by which I mean people actively working to produce or spread literature for pay or otherwise), I’ve not found an abundance of people working to create a more class-conscious literary culture.
Perhaps the tide in the US is starting to turn a bit toward more class consciousness among writers, however. An anthology of labor-focused literature helmed by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones, called What Things Cost, was released in Spring of 2023 by the University of Kentucky Press. In the summer of 2023 the Writers Guild of America began a five-month strike to get better pay and working conditions for film and TV writers. While such culture workers may not be part of the traditional “working class” as defined in this country, they do, given all the ways their jobs have become increasingly adjunctified, automated, and precarious, share in the same struggle for working people to have their creative labor appropriately rewarded. Recent discourses around publishing as an industry, precipitated (or renewed) in part by the October 2023 publication of Dan Sinkyin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, as well as the sudden and dramatic dissolution in March 2024 of the US’s largest distributor of small press literature, Small Press Distribution, suggest that wider interest in the means of literature’s production may be increasing all across the landscape, though it remains to be seen what, if any, lasting effects these texts, events, and our responses will have on the ways we actually talk about class and literature in our day-to-day lives.
The fact is that literature focused on the working class in the United States is as old as the nation itself, with writers like Upton Sinclair, Tillie Olsen, James Baldwin, and Phillip Levine accounting for some of the better-known canon of working-class writers. Questions about who or what determines canon aside, what is also very old is the fact that text-based art by working class writers is often not recognized as literature proper. It is prone to being cast aside or genre-fied until someone stumbles upon it and recognizes its power as a kind of outsider art—usually far later than would be useful to help change the once-contemporary concerns evinced by the writer. And yet, as Amanda Arnold’s exemplary essay “The Forgotten History of American Working-Class Literature” indicates, working class literature from any time in our nation’s history often still has a feeling of immediacy, if not contemporaneousness, much like Rebecca Harding Davis’ 1861 lost-then-rediscovered novella Life in the Iron Mills did when it was republished by Feminist Press. Working class literature keeps recurring in the consciousness of readers, scholars, and writers, despite the cultural and institutional forces that resign these texts to shadow libraries. As Arnold notes, few working-class people make it into “the professoriat” or “anti-communist, pro-capitalist ideology in literary studies.”
Relegated to digital shadow libraries or not, there are writers and editors producing literature with dirt under their fingernails. There are writers like Brendan Joyce, who’ve written several books of poems that often feature topics of capital and work. Editors like Sheldon Lee Compton, who created the blogging collective Poverty House as an aptly named accessible center for writers to gain community and further culture without the hang-ups of “respectability” (scare quotes intended). There are also the journals Protean and Prolit (no relation), which “don’t ask writers and artists to work on spec,” and publish writing on “money, work, and class” respectively. These kinds of efforts in the literary community, while not dominant by any means, may be indicative of a tide of class-consciousness forming to help sustain and grow the pursuit, accessibility, and value of literature created by working-class writers among readers, writers, and publishers across the class spectrum.
If that tide is indeed turning, I want to offer three proposals here to ride the wave toward a more meaningfully class-conscious literary culture. But to be clear: I claim no particular level of objectivity and am only synthesizing information, in an essayistic manner, based upon knowledge I’ve gained out of an entanglement of education, research, and lived experience. And though I might come off as blunt at times, I am neither setting out to write some unfounded, vicious screed against the entire literary community nor am I overtly censoring or tone-policing any thoughts here; both these approaches are, in my estimation, not only the mark of an incompletely holistic, cards-on-the-table approach, but also fall into a common trap where working-class people like myself are dismissed as too slovenly, too roguish, or even too mercenary either by more powerful upper classes or by fellow working-class people who’ve fallen for divide and conquer tactics, admonishing others for not bootstrapping into the proper mental echelon as quickly as desired (and implicitly aligning oneself with Capital via its unceasing productivity edicts). And so this essay may bend toward the polemic, but it is for the sake of a greater, though perhaps paradoxical, atonal harmony between people who shape our reality with language.
One more note: I think it’s best to define working class relatively broadly here. By working class I not only mean those who live paycheck to paycheck, have little to no emergency money, may necessarily own a decent car to get to work, or even have a mortgage, but also those who might be defined elsewhere as simply poor—the people hovering at or below poverty lines, barely making rent for a one bedroom apartment while working at a place like a Jiffy Lube or Wal-Mart. Some, like the organization Resource Generation (which brings together young people with access to great amounts of wealth so to give them opportunities to redistribute it), separate working class and poor into two groups, but I think anyone who must work to survive or relies on someone who must work for basic needs is therefore working class, no matter the exact income level or form of labor. (Someone must work for anyone to prosper, as we know). If you get your basic needs from charitable efforts or public assistance or disability money, this includes you too; if your parents paid for your rent long-term as you started your career, or fronted you money for your press or journal, then there’s a higher chance you are not working class. And while class is surely defined by more than just income, money is largely what leads or doesn’t lead to most of the other conditions that define each class, conditions such as how value is placed on social networking versus family relationships, or how certain kinds of aesthetics are preferred over others. Maybe this is simplifying it all a bit, but, since I’m not pretending to be a sociologist, I think it’s a decent framework for the purposes of this essay.
Some Evidence of the Situation, Such as It Is
Hearing anecdotes about class-tinged experience is an occurrence common as dust motes (there’s an inner rhyme as proof of my writing skill), but reasonably recent hard data that explicitly considers class in the literary community in the United States is, unfortunately, scarce. (Granted, I don’t have unlimited free access to things like JSTOR, as I’m not part of a university any longer). One well-researched article, “On Poets and Prizes,” by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, published by ASAP Journal and thankfully not behind a paywall, manages to indirectly get at contemporary class barriers for writers in ways that might be helpful. The article reveals how literary prizes for poetry have historically been, intentionally or otherwise, awarded via some measure of nepotistic bias. While Spahr and Young’s research focuses on poetry produced by poets working in the academy and with the support of large institutions such as the Poetry Foundation, it is broadly symbolic enough of literature at large to confirm that class identification can bar or drive a writer’s success. Analyzing prize data from 1918 onward, Spahr and Young find that literary prizes are awarded to a small social circle of poets with advanced degrees from prestigious, expensive schools, with over half being awarded to writers from just eight schools: “Harvard, University of Iowa, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton.” Not a big shock, really, to most who have gone through the emotional and financial gauntlet that is applying to and attending MFA, or, worse, PhD programs in creative writing. Spahr and Young admit this was not surprising to them, either. What they do say they found surprising is “the narrowing, symbiotic quality of prize networks” in which “forty-one percent of prizewinning poets also serve[d] as judges [and that] most who judge do so an average of six times.” While I appreciate the amount of labor undertaken by the authors of this study and the trends its analysis brings to light, as a working-class writer all of this surprises me about as much as the fact that a rose is a rose. If I’ve learned anything about the recorded history of English literature, it is that those who dedicate most of their time to write and / or live off of activities related to their creative work are a miniscule part of any populace simply because they nearly always require, at minimum, the financial privilege to spend the time needed to make the connections (publishers, editors, agents, early readers, patrons, etc.) necessary for any significant, foundational milestones—whether in terms of financial remuneration or wide readership. Working-class writers do not have the same foundational privilege. Even if someone is a genius in terms of talent or networking, I offer this as an axiom: wealth curates experience, poverty delimits it.
What Spahr and Young see undergirding the contemporary literary landscape (at least for poets, though I’d argue for most writers working today) are “small ecologies maintained through what John Thompson in Merchants of Culture calls an ‘economy of favors’” in which poets rely on other poets, often in teacher-student relationships, to write blurbs, put together readings, run journals and presses, judge contests, and generally help each other to be read by others (mostly other writers, one assumes). In this system, which is framed by Spahr and Young as “not cronyism” but rather “mentorship” and “respecting one’s elders,” poets’ working lives are so entwined with each other’s that opportunities for monetary recompense cannot be separated from the rules of this economy of favors, which make it possible for individuals to be “legible to a hiring committee because of [a] mentor or former teacher,” or be “invited by friends to give paid readings at the college where they work.” While I agree with the assessment that the economy of favors is what makes life as a working artist possible in large part, I am not satisfied with framing the relationships within it as largely mentorship and not cronyism; ideally this is how life would work, but I’m not naïve enough to think it shakes out this way practically. I don’t think many working class writers who’ve given up writing are, either, if they started out trying to run a race only to find out they were part of a relay without a team.
And sure, most writerly relationships are likely based in friendly associations, but as with any other enterprise, duplicity is bound to occur. Becky Tuch is a good contemporary source for this. She runs the newsletter Lit Mag News and investigates instances of people behind presses and journals behaving unethically, as with a recent article that focused on the once respected press/journal PANK. Other instances of unethical behavior in the literary community abound, of course. Though perhaps overzealously enjoyed by its creator, the work of Foetry.com nonetheless usefully revealed, around the turn of the millennium, that a literary prize was awarded to a man dating the judge, the still-beloved poet Jorie Graham; additionally, this man, Peter Sacks, hadn’t even formally entered its contest while at the same time half the paid entries weren’t even read by Graham, series editor Bin Ramke, or anyone else. This situation surely helped provoke subsequent changes by presses to ensure judges cannot award a prize to someone they know well. The Contest Guidelines of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) are intended to prevent kinds of unethical conduct that Foetry revealed.
Casually biased actions of writers in power are perhaps especially probable under our increasingly unchecked forms of capitalism, which reward duplicity. I myself am arguably duplicitous by imagining I’ll be paid decently for this essay that points out how many working writers don’t have enough resources (and probably someone on Twitter will call me a grifter…). Even as we strive to be ethical, practically no one escapes the polluting particles we breathe under capitalism, no matter how one idealizes literary friendship. The fact that Spahr and Young, despite their rigorous efforts to track the nature of literary prizes and laudable investigation into ways race has shaped who wins them, never once write the word “class” in discussing the results of their study could be read as mildly duplicitous on its own. Though they later write in a follow-up article, “Who Gets to Be a Writer?” that in their “research, [they] have noticed again and again stories about educational access where race and class overlap, stories that complicate any easy narrative of recognized merit,” in which “entry to an elite institution is marked by luck, circumstance, or extreme effort on the part of a parent,” this is all a very basic, somewhat underdeveloped observation that mostly just edifies what many people know by firsthand experience already but don’t have the resources to collect data on to prove, as they are not funded well enough. From my vantage point there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of showing how things like race and gender intersect with class as much as they do with each other, especially in the literary community. What I find most essential in Spahr and Young’s landmark study of the contemporary literary landscape is that it demonstrably reveals the power of socio-professional connections in literary life, and in some ways reinforces the cliché that it really is who you know, not what you know that’s most important—meaning what matters most for making a living as a writer is less hard work on writing or teaching or editing than on expending energy upon one’s social circle, especially in professional or para-professional settings. I hear many writers wax poetic about the importance of cultivating community and, perhaps depressively, wonder: to what end, actually? Having a wide network connected to many nodes of power requires time and money. Merit is subjective. Opportunities to be recognized for merit are simply not.
The problem with this dynamic of social connection skewing one’s merit, of course, is that when you are not part of a university or large-city atmosphere, but are someone who grindingly works their way up for over ten years in service industries to become a manager of something like a Circle K gas station, as my non-degree holding younger brother did, you would not have nearly as much time, money, or access to try to make connections to be a successful writer, let alone learn the term “literary citizen,” even if you are writing in all your spare moments, as I was during my undergrad days when working at a Kohl’s and then a Kroger grocery store, scribbling lines onto blank receipt paper, as if they were IOUs to myself for some bits of a dream I had of becoming a public intellectual, one who’d write for people like my little brother, just one among the masses of angry and, frankly, cheated Americans inheriting a world that offers little to working class people but starvation wages, numbing drugs, and the choice between hard-earned health and easy destructive pleasure. And because even the poor in America are rich in much of the rest of the world, they’d better not complain—as if one’s gross amount of money determines quality of life irrespective of the country (see: free healthcare in the UK and other nations, developed or otherwise; rates of homelessness in the largest and wealthiest cities in this country; the opioid crisis in my hometown of Dayton, Montgomery County, and Ohio in general, etc.).
I wish there was more data on the people struggling to make enough money and have enough time to continue writing through all the vagaries of literary support and recognition, but I suspect it is not something even the most venerated institutions are highly interested in gathering, lest they corner themselves into fundamental change regarding the distribution of their resources—at a time when much of higher ed seems beset by financial and political crises, this seems less likely now than ever. A Pre-Covid April 2019 report by The National Endowment for the Arts titled “Artists and Other Cultural Workers: A Statistical Portrait” includes little data on class backgrounds for arts and culture workers, despite there being valuable demographic data on how many are disabled, how many are racial minorities, and how many are women and men (with notably no inclusion of gender non-conforming people). There are even numbers on how many artists served in the military. But the most class relevant information collected is that 63% of artists own a home, which the NEA says tracks with about the same rate of American home ownership overall (though this likely doesn’t mean actual, outright ownership; a Washington Post article from 2017 says only 34% of Americans have no mortgage on their home). I could try to read into the reality of what this might mean with what would amount to a math class word problem, but y’all reading this surely ain’t the audience for that. So I’ll just say this: if we rely on Resource Generation’s estimation that about 40% of the country is middle or upper class, it doesn’t intuitively follow that a huge chunk of that 63% of artists would be working-class based on either my or most definitions of the term—not even half of that 63% would be working class today, I’d wager, since in the wake of COVID, homeownership is far more difficult to achieve today than it was in 2019. The current average interest rate for a thirty-year fixed-rate home loan is just over 7%.
Where I Am Coming From
I don’t own a home or have a mortgage. I am a poet and writer from a five-child family, had two Kentucky coal mining grandfathers, and have parents without college degrees who’ve never actually owned the deed to either home they paid mortgages on due to two bankruptcies and, in large part, the housing crisis of the late 2000s. During this time my parents were borrowing from Peter at Cashland to pay off Paul at CheckSmart to keep up with a mortgage after my dad retired with a shitty pension from the state after running a loader and breathing in toxic chemicals from trash, including from burning practices, at one of our county’s waste management facilities for thirty years, but then still had to work part-time temp jobs due to age and having a lack of other skills. My mother and I cleaned a police station and courtroom in my teens, the work from which gave her a herniated disk that left her with damaged nerves, several surgeries, and a lot of medical debt. Though I am a straight white male (and was not yet disabled during my studies), with all the privileges these demographic circumstances afforded me, because of my Appalachian, hillbilly highway-taking parents and working-class background, I felt I was still a bit of an uncommon presence in the literary world when I dedicated myself to a life of language. One professor even told me that using the phrase “as working-class people” in my nonfiction-confessional writing wasn’t needed, as if I should hide the fact or that it was inconsequential, though no reason was clearly given. So although I obtained an MA in literature and MFA in creative writing (over 130k in debt, despite Pell Grants in undergrad, graduate assistantships for four of my five graduate school years and only going to state schools), I failed to learn all the dances many others were taught young for making the kind of social connections required for turning oneself into a networking pro or “literary citizen,” (a term as vague and malleable as the social rules I struggled to learn) whatever one who betrays no smell of economic despair, no need to do anything but adjunct in trade for pennies and the love of being around writers—an almost absolute necessity, it seems, for writers to be successful in the economy of favors.
The simple fact of my experience is that, on the whole, those with power in the literary community are not as invested in the well-being of people as their work, creative or otherwise, might indicate. Nor are they particularly invested the idea that, in fact, people are their work. A recent essay by former professor Lucy Biederman gets at this class gap when discussing how the students she taught at a small regional college, Heidelberg University, and the students attending the “world-famous” Oberlin college (Lena Dunham is an alumna), had never heard of the other college, though they are about an hour from each other in Ohio. She explains:
This makes me feel awful to say: the students at Oberlin were the dominant class and the students at Heidelberg were the dominated. But it’s more awful not to say it. Because, as Pierre Bourdieu writes in his still-jaw-dropping 1979 sociological study Distinction, the very source of the dominating class’s power is in its silence and its subtlety. It’s a hard, aggressive, absolutely life-determining power that exists entirely in nuance. Like, this isn’t about “choices” the students are making.
At a dinner before a reading during my MFA studies, one respected poet, who has done great, industry-changing work for a well-known, socially progressive literary institution, asked me my name, and when I tried to speak slowly, clearly, and articulately—but maybe too loudly, over the conversational din, as I was used to doing in my large, boisterous family dinners—this literary person said something like: “Brandon North? Your parents gave you a name for a real poet.” These words seem might innocuous, silly, or possibly even some friendly banter; the intonation, though, to me, was aggressive and sardonic, as if to put me in my place for trying to have my name remembered for the length of an evening, as if I was lucky just to be sitting at that table—and in fact this person said nothing to me the rest of the dinner, despite us sitting next to each other. I have become sensitive to the hidden rules of class within the literary community, and the silent language they speak.
Another time, at an offsite reading during an AWP conference, I was once chastised by a “former editor of The [State] Review” for being unaware enough to have accidentally laid out books (which I was selling for the university press where I worked in trade for tuition and a roughly $6,500 stipend) so that the covers’ written titles were presented upside down to potential buyers. I guess to her, in my insipid, irreverent mindset, probably so clear from my muddled Midwestuckian accent, I had clearly seen nothing wrong with setting the books out on the table so that the titles were readable only to me, the laborer, and so therefore surely I had none of the very middle class focus on the correct aesthetic presentation of things. Obviously, I still today think my mistake was not a big effing deal—people could see the cover and flip the book to read the title—but I get that it wasn’t ideal. My real problem was with how this person acted as if I was just the help, not a part of the “important” people (scare quotes definitely intended). She could’ve been more humane about my error, but instead she said it to me out of the side of her mouth, barely looking me in the eye. And the poet whose first book we’d just published, who the former editor had just been talking to, whose manuscript I’d discussed with the editors of the press and had suggested possible revisions for, only looked at me, saying nothing of support.
Being annoyed, I can’t remember what I said exactly, but I was probably a bit sarcastic with the former editor when she found my error, despite of course also responding affirmatively about changing the books’ direction. What else could I do? Could I explain that I’d only laid the books out a couple minutes before and hadn’t noticed? That I was tired from traveling and lugging boxes books around in the heat? That my first and only attended AWP turned out to feel mostly like a Comic-Con for writers, where some of us could only cosplay as writers while the real, respectable writers sat for panels, did readings and other prestigious, CV-padding sweet old etceteras worth scraping and fighting over?
No, I could not mention any of that to the former editor of The [State] Review, who never introduced herself to me, only mentioned her position to someone she was speaking to nearby. I couldn’t tell her how for three years I’d taken it upon myself to lift the most boxes of books for the university press I worked at in exchange for my MFA tuition and a tiny amount of money otherwise (and which surely contributed to my chronic back pain now, though it partially stems also from a deformity in my lower spine that I knew nothing of in my early life because, you guessed it, neither my parents nor I could have afforded exploratory doctors’ visits—nothing but standard, breezy physicals); nor could I tell her how most of my fellow graduate assistants seemed to shy away from manual labor as much as possible, and how it was unclear if I fell into my role as the help on my own or if I was guilty for being a white male with an assistantship and let others do white-collar things like marketing or if I was triangulated into the physical work by some kind of unspoken social geometry or if it was all or none of these things. I simply could not risk misstepping and being ostracized before my MFA was even over, so I said nothing. The economy of favors must needs include the purifying favor of chastisement, it seemed, so I said nothing.
But now five years have passed since I’ve graduated. I’ve had enough opportunities for class-based chastisement for a while. I’m only thirty-three, but I’ve become disabled by a collection of health issues, including PTSD, sleep apnea, and various sources of chronic pain, one of which stems from two separate instances of medical malpractice I had no money to pursue recompense for. Due to my health issues combined with my class background, I’ve struggled to make a living (let alone a career) out of my writing and editing skills, and I have few genuine, lasting writerly connections to go with a deep distrust of promoting myself on social media (though of course I’m there, persona-watching, mostly). Despite all I’ve said here, I’m more dedicated to being a writer than ever before, which means I want—I have—to help make the literary community healthier. I value the friendship and peerage of a few literary people of various classes and professional persuasions, and through our interactions I have learned that while no one can be a perfect champion in any pursuit, we can’t get better, either, if we don’t ask each other to try, content instead to watch for opportunities to tear each other down from a safe, self-satisfied, sniperly distance.
Finally, We Get to the Proposals
I’m asking the whole literary world to consider three ways to be more inclusive and represent differences of class. These are my three proposals. None of them expect any writers to teach working-class people how to navigate the economy of favors—instead, all focus on undermining the hegemony of the favor economy. Though I think these are all at least marginally practical, to better account for the ways class creates discrepancies between success, recognition, experience of community, and general survival for artists, they require that writers not be modest about revealing their means, whether these means are modest or not.
1. My first proposal: normalize and even institutionalize using sliding scales when requiring fees for submission opportunities, regardless of whether those proceeds help cover an organization’s operating costs, and charge an appropriate fee using an income-based model.
For tuition to a conference like Bread Loaf or when submitting to an expensive contests like the National Poetry series, requiring an image of the total wages on an individual’s previous (mostly redacted) 1040 tax return form in order to determine the fair cost of a submission seems very feasible. In this way, economically luckier artists can pay their fair share as a form of materially responsible, redistributive literary citizenship. Organizations can decide how best to tease out tax brackets or calculate fees as a percentage of income, but let’s say for now there might be three tiers for a book submission opportunity. To continue this hypothetical, let’s say that among those submitting to this opportunity is one writer makes over 100k as a tenured professor, another who makes around 40k as an content editor, and another is on a one-year fellowship that provides them around 50k. To me, it is obvious the professor should pay more and the content editor should pay the least, but what of the writer on fellowship, especially if they are coming to the end of their position very soon, though their tax return shows only that income? Should they pay more or less than the content editor? This is surely where it gets dicey, but again, if one is honest, not modest, then likely the best practice is to have them both pay in a middle bracket, as the fellowship carries a certain amount of prestige that will pay dividends in the future even if the fellow’s income might significantly drop the next year. “Ok, right,” you might be saying, “but what about the practical side? Won't this create more clerical work?” Likely so, yes, though I imagine there are or could be online applications possible to scan tax documents and filter a submitter toward the appropriate screen with a digital tool for ease of execution. (Trusting writers to self-report and submit to the right tax bracket is an option, but for this to generate more funds fairly, an objective filter works better). There still might be extra work, especially in terms of the number submissions or applications to read if people can pay less and still submit, but if tax brackets are used, then just as feasibly I think the total collection of fees should increase and in turn help fairly reward this extra work and help offset the cost of the needed labor.
Creating and maintaining an artificial scarcity of resources is not exactly in line with what we might call equity. Relatedly, while fee waivers are a great, if haphazard, practice, not that many presses or other institutions offer them, especially not explicitly based upon income (Emily Stoddard’s Poetry Bulletin newsletter has recent data on fee waivers and does work to pool money for submission fees that working writers need). Additionally, one must often email someone to symbolically beg (ok, ask) for a waiver, and in many cases there are, for one reason or another, a limited number of these free requestable waivers available, so one is forced into a scarcity situation where they must be vigilant for the chance to grab one before they’re all gone. But ultimately there must be money coming in from somewhere to support literary workers, so irrespective of possible fee waivers, implementing sliding scales and income-based fee models across the board would dramatically expand the access working class writers have to literary opportunities.
2. In judging contests, merit is of course infinitely subjective, but to further democratize the contest model and balance out the inevitability of nepotism, I propose that presses and / or journals create a shared merit system whereby writers placing as semi-finalists or finalists in contests gain a kind of “critical capital” to be accrued, recorded, and later be used to purchase a spot, automatically, into either the semi-finalist or finalist round of future contests—or even, if enough critical capital is accrued, to have a book published outright by a press participating in this system during a special, non-contest submission window. I get that this sounds wild, but hear me out.
Admittedly, this critical capital system, like any system for publishing, has potential pitfalls. For example, relying on CLMP or another organization to maintain and certify records of critical capital could make a literary organization into a sort of bank (though many already are, aren’t they? Look at the power of the financial entanglements of the Poetry Foundation). However, there could be multiple organizations, even rotating ones, that maintain this system for quality control. There is also the granular question of whether accrued critical capital should be the same for a finalist spot in a contest by a respected journal / press like Fence versus one in a contest held by a journal / press with little name recognition or one that publishes questionable content. But CLMP or the organization(s) overseeing this program could reject certain finalist credits based on a press’s ill repute. Additionally, a contest with a higher number of submissions could provide more capital per finalist award. For example, if a contest run by a publisher like Fence gets over, say, 500 submissions, but a smaller press gets under 250, then being a finalist against more competition could be rewarded with more capital since the competition was fiercer. This would require that presses and journals divulge their number of submissions to participate in this critical capital practice, but this, to me, would all be to the good (if a press won’t divulge their number of submissions, it’s a little suspicious). Sidestepping these issues, there are also ways to instantiate this system that carry low stakes. It could simply be a bare-bones honor system that presses opt in to—you just email screenshots or some proof of the announcements of your semi/finalist positions, and they bump you up to the top of the pile. Easy. Direct. Even borderline anarchic, if you like.
I am for either / both / any method of implementation because I am for anything that tries to make publishing fairer. A cliché I unabashedly try to heed, especially as it pertains to any sort of social or political change, is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I’m often paralyzed by my own idealism (this system I’ve proposed is still pretty pie in the sky!), but I try to remember that, said another way, failing better is the condition for meaningful growth.
I think a considerable level of growth in the literary community would occur with this system because it formalizes what goes on in the favor economy as it is—the selection of work one already knows has merit, from mentorship, peer recommendation, or otherwise. It also serves to stop widely recognized good writing from falling to the wayside because it didn’t win the contests it entered or because a person does not have the access or energy for making connections that lead to publication, whether by health challenges, like myself, or something else, such as living rurally. (How many people do we all know with a manuscript that has been rejected by dozens of presses but has been a semi/finalist a bunch of times?) Crucially, the reality is that if a writer is working class, the number of submissions per book or piece will usually be smaller than what middle/upper class writers can afford, giving them fewer chances and requiring more time to win the contest roulette. So perhaps most importantly, this system tangibly rewards (especially working-class) writers for paying submission fees and is a bluesy riff on the idea of paying it forward, but with a—write it!—symbolic currency. If we are all in this together, as we should be, I think this is feasible.
It is almost axiomatic that the small press and literary journal contest model are inextricably entwined with late-capitalist practices and should be further democratized. My system of critical capital for writers serves this purpose. (Getting agent representation for access to Big Five Publishers is just as entwined with capitalism, but that’s a whole other issue I’m not as equipped to speak to). No matter the disclaimers a press or journal might put up, the contest model itself offers up an illusion of equitable, meritocratic opportunity while, behind the scenes, crony-capitalist practices creep in. Despite the clearer ethical conditions of contest judging since the Foetry fallout and surely other calls for change from others, judges still sometimes select work that has been previously recommended to them by friends or co-workers, even if there is no direct relationship, which Spahr and Young have documented. Some journals and presses don’t shy away from this, with editors publishing friends or friends of friends relatively openly even through contests while taking submission fees. Hard data on the rate of manuscripts published through open contests where editors and writers had zero relationship prior to selection is understandably hard to come by (perhaps this can be a call?), but of course, literature, especially most poetry and experimental literature, is by most measures a small world, so perhaps a favor economy will always exist to some extent—after all, many presses’ origins are in writers publishing themselves and their friends because no one else would, and this is not inherently a problem when considered in isolation, without the contest model attached. No, the contest model is not always wholly negative, but my assessment is that working-class people, as I’ve defined them, do not make up the majority of contest judges and editors reading open submissions for well-reputed small presses; they are not those who haven’t mastered the social arts required to ingratiate oneself inside the power structures that make one sustainably successful from working in publishing. Things like staying up on terminology, reading certain kinds of (trending) writers or genres, and the slick behaviors that might be called (if a tad reductively) schmoozing are generally less obtainable by working class people, since excess leisure time is required to attend the kind of gatherings or to belong to the institutions or live in the cities that reward the performance of class-inflected signals of one’s worth.
For any writer looking to submit their work, connections aside, a survey of the landscape can make one feel like one is purchasing access that others are given freely. Though I’d wager most contests do indeed follow CLMP’s ethical guidelines, these guidelines, which recognize that “different contest models produce different results” and that “each model can be run ethically” are vague enough to allow a range of practices in judging contests, including ones that skirt the line between ethical and nepotistic, so that publishing work of a friend of a friend, which a judge has read previously by the by, is still seen as largely ethical—not to mention common, I’d say, partly because the literary community is in fact not only relatively small compared to other artistic communities, (Spahr and Young: “the few times we have judged something, even when the manuscripts were anonymous, we recognized many of the authors simply because we were familiar with their work”), but also—and this is crucial—because the community seems even smaller than it truly is to those with the blinders of institutional power on; this skewed size estimation is likely often perpetuated by anyone in any community with power, as they will tend to focus more on those who have a reputation similar or approximate to their own. In my view, the literary community includes everyone who writes, not just those whose writing is well-known or who can think of writing or literature as their profession. Having critical capital would help people on the margins of the literary community move less circuitously toward the center, where the rules of access could even be modulated toward a world where this weird system I’m proposing wouldn’t be needed.
3. My last proposal is more straightforward: create more fellowships, residencies, grants, and publication opportunities explicitly for working class writers. I know of literally only one that is explicitly for working class writers, and it was put on hiatus for 2022, the year I began writing this essay: the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Working Class Writers Grant. What’s more, I only know a few presses, all in the UK, that explicitly say they cater to working class readers and writers like Broken Sleep, and only a few journals, like Poetry is Currency, Prolit, or the journal Rabble Lit, which unfortunately seems on hiatus or abandoned. In the US, though we have decent folks using their own money to fund their magazines, we often have things like small presses funded by corporate family money or a collective (with a Google-proof owner or CEO) likely making a significant amount of money on submission fees from a handful of aesthetically bland, yet similarly well-designed literary journals like those under the banner of Discover New Art, LLC. But what baffles me about the lack of opportunities for working, poor, and impoverished people is that as a group, by virtue of numbers, they have the potential to be highly intersectional. After all, a future where the majority of the US population are minorities is projected to occur first in the working-class population. To ignore the underpinnings of economics in any avenue of social justice is to risk superficial solutions. So if we can maintain and continue to create opportunities for diverse, disabled, and other marginalized individuals, then imagine what would happen if we also added working class opportunities: folks marginalized by race, sex, gender, disability, appearance, etc., would have greater chances to see their work featured in more venues, since many of these people are also working class simply from lack of being cis, white, able bodied, financially privileged people. Think about publishing or criticism in particular: it’s mostly middle- to upper-class able-bodied cis white people. These fields and others would change rapidly if more working-class people simply had more access to literary spotlights. There would be enough of us to change the default picture of writers in America from middle class, urban, coastal, white, white-collared, and abled, to something more like an empty frame, one in which anyone who has written something, whether private or public, has a better chance to get their picture showcased as worthy of consideration—as worthy as their effort to communicate is.
A Chance to Think
It is funny I feel I must mention this, to literary-minded people, but here it goes, by way of a conclusion: imagination is required for change. Spahr and Young essentially state this, too, when concluding their article, by saying that an “option is to accept that this economy of favors cannot be undone without a dramatic rethinking of how poets are supported, valued, and ultimately understood to be excellent, which would require creating new metrics for evaluation.” I hope I’ve offered some steps toward new metrics and ways of supporting a broader swath of writers. I also hope I’ve sparked in you some ideas for doing so. I have strived to not come off high and mighty, but rather just a real, straight-shooting person who is, imperfectly, calling things as I see them. So if my proposals seem absurd—as I’m sure they will to someone—let’s (all) talk. And I mean honestly talk, in the full gamut of registers of language, whether demotic, formal, vatic, consultative, cryptic, etc., and without resorting to gatekeeping and dismissive attitudes. All I’d ask is to try to be concrete in your response—let’s show, not tell, the way forward to better conditions for working class writers. I say this particularly to the people who are already doing thankless work for small presses or journals. You know well what it takes to make changes from the ground up, without incentives from power structures, and I appreciate this work, not merely because it gives my proposals context for meaning, but also just on a personal level: my life would not be so buoyed without you.
No matter your circumstances or place in the literary community, I hope you won’t be afraid to speak authentically. Tell me something you think would work better so we can (all) collaborate. Tell everyone else who’ll listen, powerful or not, monied or not—even if they might think what you say is as absurd as something I’ve said here.
Perhaps the literary community needs a lot more of the absurd, even in spades, and perhaps especially in relation to economics, because, if we zoom out on the world, someone needs to dig the real graves as well as the metaphorical ones while these literary games of chance most of us are addictively trying to win continue to go on and keep the house winning. What I hope is one day the house will be more like a place where we all can also take shelter, eat a meal, and find people who willingly give up more of the excess resources they were born into—then maybe we can collectively use them to increase everyone’s chances at the games. And what if there were even a few nights of chance where everyone could start with the same amount of chips? The playing field would probably be as close to level as it is going to get.