Portrait of the Author in the Age of Conglomeration

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“On the bad days, the days when another venerable house is neutron-bombed by the mindless conglomerate that enfolded it, or a Big Name in the Lit Biz has deserted his longtime publisher for a big fat check from Long Green and Gotrocks, or an agent has slammed the wind out of me with a punishing demand for money on a book my soul cries out to publish, on those days I decide literature is the very last thing publishing is about.” 

—Gerald Howard, as quoted by Dan Sinykin in Big Fiction

How conglomeration reshaped the publishing industry over the last six decades isn’t much in dispute, and five New York publishers—Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster—now account for more than eighty percent of all new titles published in the United States.¹ If you’re a little hazy on the details, Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, published in 2023, should clear things up. The inspiration for a flurry of magazine articles and a flashpoint for many a social media discussion, Big Fiction does an admirable job of collating the events that led to the radical reorganization of book publishing in America.  

The more difficult task, implied in Sinykin’s subtitle, is determining what impact consolidation has had on contemporary American literature. Central to Sinykin’s book, this question was taken up by The Atlantic (“The Invisible Forces Behind the Books We Read” by Josh Lambert) and The New Yorker (“How Has Big Publishing Changed American Fiction?” by Kevin Lozano), among other publications. 

What’s largely been left out of the discussion is the experience of writers marginalized by conglomeration, authors who showed up on the literary scene post-1990, the year Sinykin cites as having witnessed conglomeration’s Iwo Jima moment. I propose myself as a good case study since I happen to fit the profile to the proverbial T. I’m the right age (my first book was being shopped around among the Big Five in 1992); I’ve been kept out of the large presses but have published half a dozen books with indie presses; a hoarder of sorts, I’ve hung on to letters of decline—Agentspeak for “rejection slips”—dating back more than three decades; and lastly, where I’ve ended up is to an alarming degree a function of those editorial swats. 

Before I get to my misadventures in publishing, I’d like to relate an anecdote I used to tell creative writing students. The protagonist is a twenty-three-year-old whose debut novel, The Romantic Egotist, though it had twice been rejected by Scribner, showed up before their editorial board a third time. With a single exception, every editor at the table once again voted it down. Max Perkins, the lone holdout, agreed it was a flawed book but pointed out that the writing showed unusual “vitality” and that its author was undeniably gifted. Moreover, he argued, a publisher’s “first allegiance is to talent.”² What a catchphrase!

Scribner went on to publish the manuscript as This Side of Paradise, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career was launched. (Max Perkins, of course, became a legend in his own right.) 

“This,” I warned my students, “will never happen again. No editor will champion your work merely because you show potential.”

Michael Korda, former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, tracks the publishing industry’s sea change in his memoir, Another Life. Before the Conglomerates took over, Korda avers, editors bought books based on their literary acumen, instincts, and experience.³ They then turned to the “business people” (quotation marks Korda’s) and said, “This is what we’ve decided to do, now how do we pay for it?” The situation has been reversed: If an editor can’t come up with a marketing strategy for a manuscript, it is returned to sender forthwith. “Instead of being at the top,” Korda laments, “those who actually published and edited the books found themselves relegated to the bottom.” 

Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House and founder of the Library of America, assures us in Book Business that editors and publishers loved their work enough to accept small profit margins and used the revenue from commercially successful—if aesthetically questionable—books to underwrite the cost of producing works of enduring literary value. After conglomeration, however, Big Five CEOs decided publishing was an industry like any other. Profit margins, they decreed, had to increase exponentially, and every book had to land in the black.  

I knew none of this in 1990. Fantastically naive, I’d quit my job as the feature writer at a daily newspaper because I felt that journalism was dulling my “edge,” homogenizing my prose, and at twenty-seven, with not a single work of published fiction to my name, decided I was going to do whatever I had to until I could make a living as a novelist.⁴ Yes, it’s all hilarious in retrospect, but I was clueless, believing that if the work had obvious literary merit, editors couldn’t say no. Esquire’s motto at the time was something like “Excellence is our only criterion”; I assumed this applied to book publishing as well (as it turns out, it didn’t even apply to Esquire).⁵ I took my cues from Rainer Maria Rilke, who exhorted the would-be author to build a life—“even into its humblest and most indifferent hour”—around writing.⁶    

In 1991 a sizable grant from the NJ Council on the Arts seemed to confirm my decision to quit the paper and become a substitute teacher at my old high school in Wanaque, New Jersey, the town in which I’d done most of my growing up. I made $48 a day. I also bartended a few nights a week in Orange, where I, my brothers, and my parents had been born. It was a commute of about twenty minutes from my apartment in Lyndhurst. A shot-and-beer place long past its heyday, Old Henry’s Inn didn’t pay all that well either. 

It was a bit embarrassing to be in the lunchroom with my former teachers, who knew that I’d been salutatorian of my high school class (not to mention voted Most Likely to Succeed), had graduated from Rutgers summa cum laude, and had an M.A. in comparative literature from Columbia. I shrugged at their questions. I parried the occasional snide remark. I quoted Rilke to the ones who showed genuine concern. 

Sure, the students treated me like a wall they couldn’t wait to deface, but I was intoxicated by the freedom to say, No, I’m not coming in today and stay home and write. I was done at 2:44—no papers to grade, no tests to design or correct, no lesson plans to hand in. Sometimes, while the kids worked on their assignment, I lost myself in a book. I’m getting paid to read, I told myself, the joke’s on them!

 In 1988 while working at the newspaper, I encountered Paul West’s The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests; I’m still looking for the top of my head. I’d never read such sustained, breathtaking prose. Nearly five hundred pages’ worth, without a single paragraph break. I reviewed it for the paper, concluding, “West’s novel must place him among the giants of contemporary literature,” an assessment that, after a second reading a decade later, I stand by. 

I sent West a tearsheet of the review, and we struck up a correspondence. When he mentioned he was teaching a graduate seminar at Penn State University, I begged him to let me sit in—never mind that I wasn’t a student there. Nor had I ever taken a creative writing course (I couldn’t shake the feeling that a class teaching me to write was a form of cheating). When he finally gave in, I got giddy merely imagining myself sitting in the same room with the author of The Place.   

I left Lyndhurst every Thursday at 6:00 a.m. and drove 224 miles west for a 10:00 class, which ended at noon. (See? It’s good to have a job you can blow off at will.) Then I hopped in my aging 280ZX and drove another 220 or so miles to Orange, where I got the bar ready to open. I never missed a class, never showed up late, and consider what I learned from Paul invaluable.⁷

My first work of serious fiction, a chapter of which I presented to the workshop, wasn’t a short story or a novella; it wasn’t even reasonable: it was an 800-page monster that sprawled across 1980s America. It also covered some of the same ground as The Place, which was what originally drew me to West’s magnum opus (opinion mine).

Big Five declines started coming in about a year after Paul’s summer seminar. Hoarding them turns out to have been unexpectedly useful, establishing a sort of fossil record of editorial attitudes and the forces prevailing in the publishing industry over a span of nearly thirty years. One of the first came from Michael Pietsch:

I was very impressed by the subtlety and loveliness of Vincent Czyz’s writing, and by his ability to bring a large cast and several distinct settings to life. But for all the author’s skill, Sun Eye Moon Eye strikes me as a very difficult novel to sell. The story unfolds at a very stately pace, and Logan [the protagonist] is a tough nut to crack. It will get good reviews, but I can’t foresee selling many copies. So I won’t be offering for Little, Brown.

Pietsch, it’s no secret, went on to acquire David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Similar declines followed. Jennifer Hershey at Bantam said, “Mr. Czyz is a wonderful stylist—his prose is rich and evocative—and I enjoyed the pages you sent. Unfortunately, I feel that while the descriptive passages were gorgeous, the story was a little too slow to develop.”

Bruce Tracy at Doubleday cited “passages of extraordinary lyrical power” and assured my agent, Mary Jo, that I had “a world of talent,” but as I’ve warned my students, about all “potential” will get you is a sympathetic look at your next book. Publishing houses rarely invest in writers; their concern is with your latest “literary project” (and the potential for a series). No one made this clearer than James Moser at Grove Atlantic, whose rejection concluded, “Vince Czyz is a writer with the potential for an important career. I’m convinced of that.” 

Michael Korda also weighed in on Sun Eye, but after tussling with Leslie Marmon Silko’s 769-page Almanac of the Dead, all he had to say was, “I’m all Indianed out.” (My protagonist is a mixed-blood Hopi.)

In Big Fiction Dan Sinykin strenuously denies that there was any “golden age” of publishing. I don’t know enough about the history of publishing to make that call, but I like to think that had publishing remained a cottage industry, Pietsch or Moser or Tracy, channeling the spirit of Max Perkins, would’ve taken the manuscript on board. Working with an editor of their caliber, I might have learned in months what it took me years to suss out by trial and error (I didn’t sign up for another creative writing class until I was forty-eight). At the very least, my next book would have benefited, making it (in my daydreams) irresistible to Big Five editors. Instead, Sun Eye Moon Eye, which I’d begun composing on an electric typewriter, would spend decades marooned in cyberspace.

Sensing a losing battle, Mary Jo diverted more time to pitching a short story collection I’d compiled. I must’ve helped out because a 1994 decline from Madeline McIntosh, Gerald Howard’s assistant at W.W. Norton & Co, was addressed to me (in those days, authors could submit to Norton without an agent):     

It’s frustrating to read stories that are as well-written as yours are and to still feel unable to take them on for publication. I’m sure you’ve heard it again and again, but it’s still true: the literary fiction market is dismal right now, and the market for short story collections even worse. I’d have to have a very clear idea of the market for these stories, and I just don’t. I recommend that you try a small or university press.

I plugged “Madeline McIntosh” into a search engine to see whether I could find out what had become of the earnest young editorial assistant. She turned out to be “one of the most powerful figures in American book publishing,” per The New York Times, summiting the C-suite at Penguin Random House in 2018.

While Norton is an employee-owned venture that’s not part of the Big Five, the above decline illustrates another effect of conglomeration: independent houses have to pay more attention to the bottom line if they want to compete.

McIntosh’s rebuff turns out to have been the second one from Norton. The first, in 1993, was sent by Carol Houck Smith, who, I’m pretty sure, didn’t actually read the collection: “Yes, it’s true that I personally am not allergic to short stories,” she wrote to Mary Jo, “but it seems that the world in general is, if I can judge by the net sales of some recent collections we have published …. So I think the best thing is to encourage you and Mr. Czyz to come back to me when he has a novel to show. It’s just too depressing to try to launch short stories now.”

Although Houck Smith was vice president of Norton at the time, she began her career at the house as a secretary, and as Sinykin makes clear in Big Fiction, she had to go mano a mano against “the old boys club” to get Norton to publish fiction of any kind. 

The Big Five, in their quest for passbook zeroes, invested heavily in genre fiction, in novels and purveyors of pulp that Norton, as well as the small presses that arose in opposition to the Conglomerates’ business model, would never touch. Writers like Harold Robbins, Danielle Steel, Robert Ludlum, and Dan Brown. Before you accuse me of elitism or snobbery, let me illustrate with an anecdote so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not part of a Hollywood satire. 

Harold Robbins wrote at least twenty-five bestselling novels and had sales of more than 750 million copies worldwide, with translations into thirty-two languages. For a time he worked with Michael Korda, who tells us that Robbins “resented every moment that he was obliged to spend at a typewriter.” Robbins “despised his readers,” Korda writes, “and despised himself for catering to them.” 

While writing one of his novels (Korda never reveals which one), Robbins finished half, buggered off to France, ran out of money, and—desperate for the balance of his advance—chained himself to his typewriter to finish it. There were just a couple of nagging details to be worked out: “The events in the second part seemed to have little or nothing to do with what had taken place in the first half of the book, and the characters had changed both their names and their appearances so completely that they appeared to be different people altogether.” 

Korda offered to align the ill-fitting manuscript halves—Robbins wouldn’t have to lay a finger on his IBM Wheelwriter 3—but Robbins declined. When Korda protested that readers would assume that egregious errors had been made, Robbins replied, “Fuck ’em.” Robbins turned out to be right. “We received,” Korda reports, “not a single letter of complaint.” The whole episode, recounted in living color, is worth reading. 

In 1994, the same year McIntosh sent her regrets, I landed another grant from the NJ Council on the Arts; the bait was a chapter from Sun Eye Moon Eye. The first grant had been awarded for a story in my collection of short fiction. Said story won what is now the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction. Full disclosure: Allan Gurganus couldn’t decide between my piece and one by Jere Hoar, so we split the prize. 

I was flown to New Orleans—all expenses paid—for a three-day celebration and put up at the five-star Windsor Court Hotel. I hung out with the likes of Allan, Robert Olen Butler, Richard Ford, and William Kittredge.      The other contest winners (for novel and novella) and I ate in the best restaurants and were treated like minor celebrities. Feted in the French Quarter and hobnobbing among the literati—how could I not think I was on my way?

Body Parts, the collection in which Jere Hoar’s winning story appeared, was published by University Press of Mississippi and chosen as a New York Times Notable Book for 1997, but my collection languished.⁸ The previous year, Dan Weaver at Faber & Faber had sent Mary Jo a sympathetic no-can-do: “Czyz had two readings up here, both good, but we both scratched our heads as to how we could reach 5,000 people ready for this kind of hot-house writing, very lyrical, experimental, Joycean. I don’t think we could do it, find that many finely tuned readers. Too bad. He’s very good. But we are looking for more mainstream nonfiction as well as upscale commercial fiction.”

 Too bad. He’s very good. Pretty witty.

Drenka Willen at Harcourt Brace dropped this on us: “We appreciated Czyz’s unconventional voice and the various themes he explores. At the same time, we were concerned that the tales were perhaps a bit too experimental, especially for an American audience.”

The aforementioned James Moser actually wanted to accept the collection. Unfortunately, Morgan Entrekin, Grove Atlantic’s publisher, had already rejected it, saying, “Vince is a talented, poetic writer. I’m afraid, however, that I just didn’t love [the book] quite enough to make an offer. My fiction list is very limited, and I have to be very careful about what I take on—and, as you know, story collections are so difficult to sell.” He told Moser—so Mary Jo told me—that he wasn’t going to publish a manuscript he’d already turned down. 

Frustrated, Mary Jo quit the business—it was too much of a business for her—while I, with nothing going on in the States, moved to Turkey, where I lived, on and off, until 2008. I continued to write, but I rarely sent out anything other than the occasional short story. 

In 2010 I handed a new agent ten short stories that added up—so I insisted—to a novel. Two years later, Melissa Danaczko, a senior editor for some division or other of Simon & Schuster, replied:

Mr. Czyz is a remarkable writer and I was immediately sucked into the world he creates on the page. It’s a strange and beautiful book that stays with you well beyond the last page. Line by line, his writing is luminous and the novel is composed of many elements to which I heartily responded: raw emotions; vivid scenes; vibrant, tragic characters that feel authentic. The opening is also bravura, albeit quite unsettling.

As a collection, the sum is definitely greater than the parts and I can see how each piece is connected. Nevertheless, the individual components take a while to find one’s footing and though this disorientation reflects a society teetering on the edge of transformation, it makes it tricky from a publication standpoint (where story collections are already extraordinarily difficult to publish). This is a challenging collection, mostly in a good way, but with this sort of writing and thematic ambition, you need a clear narrative arc to ground the reader.

This one has a sort of punchline. Only a year earlier, Jennifer Egan won a Pulitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad, a collection of stories that add up to a novel—in other words, a book without a clear narrative arc (so I’ve heard; I haven’t read it). 

There’s also a second, more personal punchline. Everything Danaczko claimed I’d accomplished is everything I set out to do with this novel—literally—including the fractured storyline (which isn’t all that different from what Quentin Tarantino did with Pulp Fiction’s scrambled chronology: it’s all there, just not in the order you expect). There’s something uniquely debilitating about realizing your vision and still coming up short.

In 1998 the fiction collection Mary Jo had failed to place was published by a startup press in New Jersey. At last! My first book! Although Voyant Publishing flatlined about six years later, the collection was reprinted in 2015 by Rain Mountain Press (New York City) and won the Eric Hoffer Award for Best in Small Press. Sales weren’t spectacular, but it was nice to see the book granted a second life.  

In 2011 I parlayed the opening chapter of Sun Eye Moon Eye into a Truman Capote Fellowship at Rutgers University, which meant that I got paid a modest amount to study for my MFA (cost of schooling included). Creative writing courses still felt like cheating, but no one would let me teach unless I could attach MFA to my name.⁹

I graduated with my three-letter degree at the age of fifty. I had a new novel in the works but decided to exhume Sun Eye. Although twenty years had passed since Pietsch had turned it down, Rilke had persuaded me that I needed to be patient—“There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing.” Ten years, twenty—what’s a decade in the grand scheme?

Since editors had been put off primarily by its length and pacing, I’d overhauled the manuscript in the ’90s, cutting hundreds of pages and restructuring the rest. I also added passages, sometimes long ones. The ultimate goal was always a better book; secondarily, a shorter book. The only way I could think of to improve the novel at this point was to cut yet more pages and polish (yet again) the sentences that remained. If the writing was good enough, I kept telling myself, editors would overlook the novel’s shortcomings. 

Another decade passed, and I began to doubt Rilke’s advice—or at least to suspect it didn’t apply to me. I woke up in the middle of the night panic-stricken that I’d wasted countless hours—spread over half a lifetime—on a manuscript that would never see print. Unable to fall back asleep, I’d go to the computer in search of more sentences to sharpen or jettison, and sleepwalk through the rest of the day. 

Early in 2023, by which time I’d whittled the manuscript down to a comparatively svelte 528 pages, I finally received an offer from Spuyten Duyvil (the email sat in my spam folder for seventeen days; I spotted it purely by accident).

I was relieved, elated, euphoric. Briefly. Publishing the novel had been the easy part. (Don’t laugh; that’s not hyperbole.) The part akin to diverting the Arno, as I’d learned from years of small-press experience, was going to be persuading reviewers to write about it, influencers to mention it, readers to buy it. And Spuyten Duyvil didn’t have a publicist—let alone a marketing department—to make the task of redirecting a river any less daunting.

While the novel was in production, I picked up a copy of Big Fiction, which had just been published. On page fifteen I came across an old acquaintance: Michael Pietsch. Pietsch had once been marketing director at Scribner, and according to Sinykin, had “little interest in midlist.” “It’s hard to make money on books that sell only 10,000 copies,” he explains. “We’re looking for writers who can break through to a larger audience.” 

This handful of sentences broke open the block of obtuseness in which I’d encased my head, and I finally understood that publishing Sun Eye hadn’t been about cutting or revising or writing a better book; it was about writing a different book. It wasn’t about literary strengths; it was about mercantile weaknesses. I now realized that for thirty years I’d had an imaginary Pietsch perched on my shoulder, and as I reworked sentences I kept (unconsciously) turning to him and asking, “How about now? Would you take it now?” The answer, of course—even if I’d gotten the book down to a flawlessly written 350 pages—was always going to be “No.” (Blame for not catching on sooner: mine). 

Back to our original question: How has conglomeration changed American literature? Well, in lots of ways, but I’ll focus on several that seem to me responsible for the most angst among authors and the most damage to fiction. At the macro level it’s pushed a lot of literary authors to the small/university presses (see note from Madeline McIntosh, supra), which means that books by these authors won’t, as a rule, get more than a smattering of reviews in barely read publications or much in the way of publicity since few indie presses have marketing departments and few reviewing bodies care what comes out of small presses. It also means sales will be even more dismal than they would’ve been at one of the Big Five. 

And when I mention small presses, I’m not talking about Milkweed or Graywolf or Coffee House, which receive cash infusions from wealthy foundations and are wildly successful by small-press standards. I’m talking about small presses founded by idealistic editors and authors who want to promote literature for literature’s sake (now you can laugh), a phalanx of Davids arrayed against five Goliaths, presses such as McPherson & Co., Two Dollar Radio, Unnamed Press, Unbound Edition Press, Dzanc Books, City Lights Books, Turner Publishing, Small Beer Press, Sarabande Books, Etruscan Press, Baobab Press, Braddock Avenue Books, Counterpath Press, Counterpoint Press, Solid Objects (not to be confused with A Strange Object), Permanent Press, FC2, Outpost 19, and Persea Books, to name a handful, as well as a plethora of university presses.

Almost without fail fiction published by these presses is passed over for prizes. All of which validates the publishing choices the Big Five make and perpetuates the myth that, with rare exceptions, all the good writing comes from them. So it’s not just the editors who guard the gates; it’s also the media.

As previously mentioned, an indie press from my little list wouldn’t publish a Harold Robbins, ever, yet reviewers and the reading public still see the Big Five as the standard-bearers of serious fiction. While it’s true that the Conglomerates also publish accomplished authors and superb books, perhaps houses investing more and more heavily in celebrity bios and genre fiction shouldn’t be seen as the sole source of first-rate writing.

My copy of Jon Fosse’s Septology was published by Transit Books, a nonprofit press that, last I heard, publishes six to eight books a year. I first encountered Fosse’s fiction in an anthology compiled by Dalkey Archive Press, one of the bigger small presses. If Fosse were an American writer, his work, which doesn’t have a single commercial page between two covers, would’ve been picked up by a university press here, an indie there, and few would’ve heard of him, least of all the Nobel Committee.

The first book I read by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, which I reviewed (favorably), was a short story collection published by Northwestern University Press. Were Tokarczuk an American author, I think it likely she wouldn’t have much of a national reputation, let alone international acclaim.

More recently, as The Guardian observes, Han Kang’s Nobel is “a reminder of the huge reach and influence of small press publishing, which takes on so much of the heavy work of introducing literature in translation to a wider audience.” Her debut novel, The Vegetarian, originally published in South Korea, “was published by the now-defunct independent Portobello Books in 2015. It won the International Booker Prize the following year.”

With one exception I’m aware of, the entire oeuvre of MacArthur Fellow Guy Davenport was published by small presses. Godine, who just reissued Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination, also published three of William Gass’s essay collections. Gass and Davenport belong on any top-ten list of American essayists; they also happen to be brilliant fiction writers. 

For what it’s worth, several of my favorite contemporary writers, including Stephanie Dickinson, Poe Ballantine, Dawn Raffel, Lance Olsen, and Tamas Dobozy, are small-press authors. 

Occasionally, an underdog from the likes of Bellevue Literary Press or McPherson & Co. wins an N.B.A. or a Pen/Faulkner or a Pulitzer against vast odds. Indeed, the story of how a McPherson author won the N.B.A. in 2010 is an echo of the Perkins-Fitzgerald story: one of the judges tirelessly championed it until he won over the rest of the panel. (McPherson & Co., incidentally, also preserves Paul West’s four essay collections as well as two of his novels.)

The benefits of conglomeration also include pushing literary authors to be more commercial or simply to quit. If Dan Sinykin is right, Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison can be counted among those who, questing for better sales, added commercial elements to their novels. Agents, too, have been forced to be more sales-oriented (or quit), and without an agent you can’t even knock on a Big Five door. These developments are all critical to American literature because if you’re altering what authors write or don’t write, what gets published and what doesn’t, you’re altering what readers read, what critics discuss and value, what we ultimately decide to keep in print and preserve as part of our culture. 

At the micro level (me and authors like me), conglomeration means I’ve rarely had a line editor and never an experienced one.¹⁰ As any writer can tell you, it’s notoriously difficult to edit your own work—it’s simply impossible to look at it objectively. Small presses can rarely afford a line editor, experienced or otherwise. While sentence glitches give critics something to sneer about and a convenient excuse to dismiss small-press authors, it’s particularly painful to the authors themselves because the work is what they’ve poured their lives into. 

Most authors who aspire to be Virginia Woolf (rather than Harold Robbins) support themselves by teaching, but here, too, the low esteem in which small presses are held can be a roadblock.¹¹ I’ve applied for any number of full-time academic jobs and haven’t gotten so much as a Zoom interview. Admittedly, there are several factors involved, but the weightiest, I think, is a requirement commonly attached to the job description: “Must have at least one book published by a nationally recognized press.” I’m not entirely clear on what they mean by “nationally recognized,” but I’m pretty sure the houses that picked up my work aren’t what they had in mind. 

Instead, I taught as an adjunct professor (token pay, no benefits, no job security). I taught English as a foreign language in Turkey. I went back to bartending. For a year I was an EPA-certified lead inspector. Now I get by as a contract editor, although I’m still sending out my CV and wistfully picturing myself in a classroom. I think back to that 224-mile drive I made to Penn State’s campus every Thursday morning in the summer of 1991 and recall how the four hours seemed to dissolve in the westward motion. The weather was always sunny somehow—at least I remember it that way—and although rust had chewed holes in the floorboards of my car, it was a 280ZX and it zipped along like one. I was young, twenty-eight, but I didn’t feel any need to shame the speed limit. I was hopped up on optimism. I was doing what I had woven into my DNA to do. Thinking back to cruising along Route 80, T-roof open, I ask myself for the thousandth time the same question: If I could go back and do it again, would I do anything differently? Yes, I’ve decided, I would, but despite all the neurons I’ve torched reimagining the past, I honestly couldn’t tell you what.

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1. According to The Big Five Publishers Statistics – WordsRated  ↩︎
2. A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, Pocket Books, New York City, 1979 ↩︎
3. I capitalize Conglomerates for the same reason I capitalize Big Five. ↩︎
4. I didn’t understand the magnitude of this strategic error until many years later. A newspaper has at least as many reporters as beats—sometimes two reporters cover a particularly eventful beat—but there’s generally only one feature writer. A much-coveted position, feature writer is impossible to land without serious clout, ability, or serious luck (I was lucky). I still miss that job. ↩︎
5. Circa 1990, I got a rejection from Esquire that went like this: “As a Jersey boy myself, I feel all the more remorseful doing what has to be done. Majority found this story to be inappropriate for Esquire. Of course I was in the minority—the majority were NY’ers. Good story and style.” Sincerely, Brandon [illegible], asst. to Will Blythe.” Inappropriate because the protagonist was from New Jersey? Whatever the case, it seems “excellence” was not the only criterion.  ↩︎
6. Our son is named after Rilke although we chose Rainier, the French version of the German Rainer. ↩︎
7. In 2001 Paul published Master Class, “a memoir of his last writing class.” I wasn’t in his last writing class, but he was kind enough to devote a chapter to me and one of my short stories. Paul was fond of surreptitiously blending in fiction with his nonfiction. Another example: I never said—nor would I have said—anything he puts in quotation marks and attributes to me; I didn’t/don’t talk that way. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that all of the dialogue was imagined—Paul was all for the colorful, never mind labels or categories or other hobgoblins of small minds.  ↩︎
8. The fact that, as Jere confided to me, renowned editor C. Michael Curtis at The Atlantic contacted him to ask whether he had any unpublished short stories he could send (Jere didn’t) corroborates The New York Times’s selection of Body Parts as one of the year’s best books.  ↩︎
9. A professor in a class I took, along with scads of undergrads, was puppyishly excited about how well her life had turned out and took every opportunity to pat herself on the back. Referencing Joseph Campbell, she exhorted us all to “follow your bliss.” My face involuntarily arranged itself into what must have been an unreceptive expression, because she looked at me and said, perhaps as one elder to another (she was actually my junior), “Isn’t that right, Vincent?” I glanced around the room. I didn’t want to discourage these teens and tweens, but at the same time I didn’t want to dissemble. I knew the phrase well (big Campbell fan) and had done my best to be true to my bliss, but the results were decidedly less than spectacular. And then, of course, there were the far more talented for whom things had not exactly worked out—the van Goghs and John Kennedy Toole’s of the world. I wanted to shout “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!” but instead stammered something noncommittal.  ↩︎
10. Editing falls into several categories. The primary job of a copy editor, for example, is to fix errors in grammar or punctuation. A line editor cuts useless sentences (or whole passages), breaks up unwieldy sentences, reworks awkward sentences, etc. Max Perkins reportedly did massive amounts of line editing on Thomas Wolfe’s manuscripts. Gary Fisketjon, who worked closely with Cormac McCarthy, is a more recent example of a (by reputation) stellar line editor. ↩︎
11. The lack of regard for small presses, by the way, is all-pervasive. The first remark everyone makes upon hearing that I have a book coming out—every person ever—is “Who’s the publisher?” Once I mention a house they’ve never heard of, I can literally watch interest drain from their face and their thoughts shift behind their eyes as they rummage around for something patronizing to say. ↩︎