Nonfiction at the End of the Humanities: On Sarah Mesle’s “Reasons and Feelings” and Alia Hanna Habib’s “Take It from Me”

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Sometime in 2017, I was sitting in the audience at a conference I’d helped organize on “alternative PhDs in the humanities.” The day-long event intended on thinking about what humanities study could look like if we tore down disciplinary walls, dreamed beyond the telos of the neoliberal university, and returned to a vision of collectivity, in which working in community to advance human knowledge was more important than any one individual’s academic career. 

I had successfully stifled my rage for most of it, but was reaching a boiling point. How was it possible that an entire day had passed and no one—not one person—mentioned that the vast majority of humanities PhDs couldn’t find jobs? That the majority of college teaching in this country is performed by contingent faculty, contract workers paid by their employers like Spotify doling out pennies to its artists? That all of the wondrous possibilities the speakers had been going on about required material support a.k.a. money to be accomplished; that we wouldn’t be hearing about their ideas had they not been lucky enough to land permanent work instead of scribbling their notes during shift breaks at a coffee shop? 

I quivered and reddened and ultimately failed to keep my temper in check, thrusting my hand in the air for one of those questions that are more of a comment, but in my defense, what was the point of all that dreaming if it required denying the situation we were undeniably in? I’m not telling this story to dunk on the condescending full professor in the audience who stepped in to placate me, deflecting heat from the panel at whom I had directed my ire. I’m telling it to be honest about how so many of us are made to feel by working in higher education, how we’re liable to act ugly in public when it all becomes too much.

Above everything, I appreciate Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now because it acknowledges this pain. In this alone, it has become, for me, one of the few academically-oriented, how-to-style writing guides worth buying. A few weeks ago, an editor at the University of Chicago Press told me, “I think part of the value of Mesle’s approach is its understanding that writers who pick up this book might be mourning their careers, or their idea of what their careers would look like.” And it should be understood in that context. This is to say that while the book comprises both practical approaches to writing effectively and more philosophically inclined reflections on the struggles that humanists are navigating, the overarching orientation of the book presumes its readers are experiencing big feelings about the work that they do, casting about for reasons to keep trying. 

The fact that many academics can’t find tenure-track jobs creates not only widespread feelings of grief but also motivates an increasing turn toward what we call “public-facing writing.” Of course, precarity isn’t the only reason, but Reasons and Feelings is a writing guide; first and foremost, Mesle suggests that in order to write well, we have to “reckon as honestly as we can with our own investments, so to speak, in the privatized logic of our era.” Often before we realize it, many of us have internalized the fantasy that if we can individually become famous enough (i.e., well-read enough), we can find the fulfillment and security that we imagined we might find in academia—that we can force academia itself to value us more than it currently does. More and more of us are breaking away from traditional academic writing—trying to review albums in Pitchfork, books in LARB, or to write with trade presses—in part because we both want and need to be more than this career allows us to be. We see academics on book tours and imagine that if we too can become valued by other, larger audiences, perhaps we can finally prove our own worth, even if only to ourselves. 

Yet Reasons and Feelings is far from a straightforward guide on how to do this. Insisting on nuance as well as the explicit value of capital-A Academic writing, Mesle grapples with the complex and contradictory reasons why academics remain caught between the ivory tower and the public, the research we’ve devoted our lives to and a looming sense that our industry might not exist for too much longer. 

This book about writing during the collapse of the humanities is not about abandoning our attachments to the institutional humanities. In my experience…I have often encountered the fantasy that outside academia, writing can be free and powerful and beautiful. I don’t think that’s how it works. I don’t think this fantasy serves our writing; I think it distracts from the responsibility to make academic writing itself freer and more accessible in its creations and its effects. While this book grows out of my own experience creating alternative forms for expert writing, it resists the temptation to believe that “public” addresses or journalistic, trade publication can solve all our problems.

This is a two-part move. On the one hand, Mesle defends academic writing as “a kind of utopic practice that can’t be fully contained by the worst failings of the institutions that facilitate it.” The idea here is that we can’t abandon it wholesale but must remake it if we want it to matter differently. 

On the other hand, reckoning with our fantasies about public writing can also help us clarify what we imagine we’re trying to do by turning away from explicitly academic writing. If we aren’t simply looking for an escape hatch that will more than likely send us right back where we started, there are many good reasons to experiment with different kinds of writings, as academics of many kinds, from former to current, undervalued to unraveled. Mesle explores some of these reasons in the first part of her book: “Why.” The second is “How.”

Throughout, Mesle asks questions I’ve lost sleep over and ones I didn’t think to wonder about. Because of how good and important these questions are, I was frustrated at times by a lack of clear answers or even actionable options to consider. In fairness, there often aren’t any. One of the risks Mesle takes is to reflect the messiness of our situation as humanists in both the form and content of the book itself. One result is that it becomes a project that lingers, staying with me (for my part) as a series of reflections, insights, and quandaries. This might not be what you want out of a how-to guide, but that was only part of its remit. 

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Alia Hanna Habib’s Take It from Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch provides a different, highly complementary perspective on writing trade nonfiction, one more focused on demystifying industry mechanics for authors who may be bewildered by its opacity. The chapters run through every step of the process, from pitching (or “Starting Small”) through the submission, contract, and publication phases of working with a trade press. 

Habib, literary agent for such stars as Hanif Abdurraqib, Clint Smith, and other prize-winning heavyweights, unsurprisingly spends a good portion of the book deconstructing the role that agents play for both the authors they represent and the publishers they’re negotiating with. But Habib also interviewed over seventy writers for the book, whose impressions, perspectives, and sample materials appear frequently, offering readers insight into what’s happening from multiple positions. 

Take It from Me is eminently practical: each chapter concludes with bulleted “Key Takeaways,” plus examples or testimonies from authors who have succeeded at the task in question. “If you want to find an agent and publish a book,” Habib writes early on, “you should begin by publishing shorter work. It is easier to land an agent and a book deal, if you are already published.” The following page features examples from authors who successfully pitched literary journals and national magazines. “If your end goal….is to eventually land an agent and publish a nonfiction book, the first piece of advice I always give is to aggressively pursue publishing shorter work and to do so with as much upbeat imperviousness to rejection as your heart can muster.” 

In this practicality, right down to the bolded advice, Take It from Me is on the whole less about writing itself (although that’s present) than about navigating the publishing industry once you’ve got writing you’re proud of. Chapter titles include “The Book Proposal, or Don’t Be Boring”; “What is an Agent For?”; and “The Submission Process, or This Is Where It Hurts,” each of which contains advice about what publishers are and aren’t looking for, as well as reflections from authors who have already traversed such choppy waters. 

This is part of what makes it so complementary to Reasons and Feelings: where Mesle’s “Why” walks readers through all the important soul-searching that I think good writers need to grapple with, the “How” of it all tends to focus at the level of the sentence. Add Habib’s patient expositions on process, and writers have about as much insight into nonfiction publishing as I’d imagine it’s possible to have. The rest comes down to our words. 

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Academics, Mesle knows well, have been trained in a particular form of writing that is not—against conventional opinion—inherently awful to read (Mesle goes out of her way to debunk this myth, saying “In short, academic writing: I think it’s good”) but is rather effective for a purpose that ends up being different from that of most trade writing. In other words, “styles are methods,” and academic styles produce books that are best-suited to the goal of adding to our collective knowledge about what are often niche, idiosyncratic subjects. The purpose of trade writing is different, and must be approached with a different style, one in which most PhDs have had precious little instruction.

Learning to write for trade audiences is—for both Habib and Mesle—emphatically not a matter of “dumbing down” or simplifying academic language; it’s about reframing the purpose of our writing, as well as who we imagine we’re addressing. Taking her experiences with the Los Angeles Review of Books and the glory days of internet criticism as examples, Mesle writes that “trade” or “public” writing might not even involve speaking to audiences any “broader” than the academics circles we’re used to; that can be a real strength, too, because cultivating interested, niche audiences is more attainable and often more valuable, providing a sense of community and investment and meaning for both authors and readers. 

But again, even interested, niche audiences that may overlap with academic ones will be looking for something different from trade writing. Part of what we have to do to meet those expectations—part of what Mesle is asking us to work on—is to develop, “sentence by sentence, a version of yourself who can stand next to your reader on the train and say something that explains that train car, or makes the ride there more pleasurable.” This is a different task than explaining the history of existing literature on trains and how we aim to expand locomotive knowledge in a specific, rarefied manner. 

So if we’re moving “sentence by sentence,” how should we actually restructure our sentences? Here, Mesle’s advice is the best kind of annoying, providing some of that actionable utility I was looking for earlier: 

Take a draft, paste it into a new file, and press return between every sentence (literally every one, I’m sorry) so that you can see them as individual units. Have you a mix of sentence lengths? Are some sentences short and direct? How deep into the sentence must a reader wade before they come to the resting point of a verb? 

I love this for its bracing simplicity. Indeed, most of Mesle’s tips for writing differently “aren’t hard to explain…I described the qualities that mark what many, pejoratively, call ‘academic style’ in chapter 3, and it only took one paragraph.” Writing beyond this style means, in part, identifying these features and working around them: “Avoid the passive voice. Choose more descriptive verbs than ‘to be.’ Avoid pileups of prepositional phrases or complex modifying phrases.” Here’s another big one: “Clarify your focus by putting your key noun in the subject position.” Nouns? Mesle will later ask, invoking the incredulity she imagines greets this banal advice. Yes, is her answer: nouns. 

This comes to a head in chapter eleven, “The Subject of the Sentence.” Here again, Mesle gives straightforward advice that has been, at least for me, surprisingly difficult to work through: “Put the noun that is your sentence’s topic in the sentence’s subject position. Or I could put it this way: Make the subject the subject. That’s it; that’s the advice.” To show us what she means, Mesle lists a bunch of draft sentences, different possible versions of the same idea that she worked through on the way to the version we first read. By showing her work in this way, Mesle proves that even a tip so direct can uncork a flood of nuanced possibilities for authors. First of all, who or what is the subject of the sentence? Clarifying matters for yourself on that kind of word-to-word level is openly philosophical and painstakingly technical at once, the work of becoming a writer.   

If this kind of close-to-the-page direction is what you’re after, there’s less of it to be found in Take It from Me. But what you’ll find instead is equally valuable: a path to publishing that anyone can follow, regardless of your training or history—and the book addresses many of the wayward routes we might take on the way to writing. For academics like me, learning more about what it takes to successfully “sell” a book in an industry that treats them as commodities may have you running back to those academic presses where what matters most in a book is its big idea, rather than its capacity to sell a ton of copies. Yet no matter how it makes you feel to learn more about the vicissitudes of trade publishing, you’ll come away with clarity about your goals and priorities. In other words, even if you get freaked out by bidding wars and contracts and publicity events, Habib’s account of these processes will help you figure out what kind of writer you want to be.

And that matters, I suppose, insofar as I’m presuming a little bit that you’re having an identity crisis. That part of the reason you’re interested in these books is not because you necessarily need advice about how to write but because you’ve found yourself in a place where you’re not sure what to do with your writing, what kind of career or path you might be capable of piecing together in this blistered landscape, what kind of writer you might yet be. If that describes you to any degree—and especially if you’re one of many writers with an ambivalent relationship to academia (caught somewhere between what I’ll call love and what I’ll call trauma)—I’d recommend reading both these books in tandem. They will make you feel, at minimum, less alone in your ambivalence. 

Maybe you’ll come up for air somewhere in the middle, unconvinced about the viability of a trade book but deeply motivated to pitch n+1 or the Boston Review or any of the endangered but superlative journalistic outlets that make homes for that rare and vital writing that captures urgency with insight, narrative with research. Maybe you’ll discover that you aspire to pitch your poetry all over the place while working on your dissertation, or else that the dissertation will absolutely be the last academic document that you produce in this lifetime. 

No matter where you come out, my sense is that reading these books together will clarify matters, even if slowly; that processing them individually and then together will be an ongoing project that might recede and resurface on any number of long walks, through any number of conversations. Maybe what I’m saying is that knowing how you feel about all this can be the first step that matters, that these books will help you figure that out. 

Before writing this review, I referenced Reasons and Feelings in a glorified rant about the division between academic and trade writing, published in my newsletter. “Both/all publishing worlds are so fraught,” left one commenter on the post. “It just never occurred to me that we were allowed to have feelings about it.”