If the World is Flat, Why am I on Edge?

A topflight editor transplants herself and lands a book deal

When a writer friend pointed me to a story titled Losing It in the New York Times Magazine of March 28^th, 2010, I rushed out to my living room and pulled out the magazine to read what, seemingly, was a heartwarming story of a woman in the writing world who pulled herself out of misery. 

 

In her essay, Browning lays bare her life after being laid off from House & Garden in November 2007, just a little before Thanksgiving. She writes lyrically about how she was sucked into the quicksand of dread and depression but willed her body out of the vortex of over-eating and slovenliness by discovering the joy of gardening and unearthing the meaning of the slow life in a new home.  

 

I was getting ready to shed a few tears while reading the exquisite excerpt from her memoir, Slow Love, when I decided to dig around a bit in the weedy garden that was supposedly Browning’s life following her layoff. What I dredged up made her story wilt right in my hands.

 

During the two and a half years after she was given the pink slip, Browning disposed of the first house and garden, moved into her other, second, house and garden, deftly shifted gears into the blog lane with an impressive online presence called Slow Love Life, A Conversation with Dominique Browning, and careened into the fast lane of publishing success with a book deal for Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness.

 

Browning has a three-decade resume that writers like me would kill for. She is the author of three books, has written for O magazine, Food & Wine, The New York Times Book Review, and Departures. She has also been an editor at Esquire, Texas Monthly and Newsweek and she has a column, “Personal Nature”, that is her “distinctive take on all things environmental” for the Environmental Defense Fund website.  By her standards, I should be overloading on Prozac and, simultaneously, getting sloshed on Guinness Stout with a hint of lime. May be there is something seriously wrong with me for deflecting rejection like a woman? “The folding of the magazine was ruthless,” Browning writes, recalling the shock of the closure of the magazine. “Without warning, our world collapsed.”

 

I couldn’t help reflecting, meanly, on that boomerang called karma. Did Browning ever think of how the freelance writers she assigned stories to at House & Garden might have felt when the stories they bled over were slashed without warning by executive editors like her?  The paltry kill fees aren’t even enough to cover a sandwich and a drink at a Manhattan deli. Almost daily, I see freelance writers (many of them single women) on my writers’ forum handle rejection with a proud face, uncertain where the next assignment is going to come from. They lumber on in the petering market, taking any writing project–whether it’s a ghostwriting project, a newsletter creation assignment, a copywriting job–to inch towards the monthly income they need.

 

 Did Browning care to ponder over how her sob story would hardly resonate with the stable of many thousand writers who are now out of a job, thanks to the slow demise of print journalism? Most of all, did she realize how her very brief season in her vegetable bed of rejection couldn’t even compare to the perennial tossing into the compost slush pile that freelance writers like me endure–over and over and over–from editors like her?

 

When I went back to the essay after reading Browning’s bio, I was rotting with fury. For a reason that’s wedged somewhere between a woman’s homing instinct to play mother hen to her family and her primordial need to uphold the domestic fortress, I could simply not swallow Browning’s tying her umbilical cord to her cubicle. 

“Without work, who was I?” she wonders. When she discusses unemployment and her mental state, my brain is on rototill mode. “Being unemployed is a lot like being depressed,” she writes.  

I happen to be in touch with many talented mothers who, for reasons of their own, are unemployed, yet, passionately involved in school-related and community-related activities. They are making the public school system in the United States a much better place to be, while women like Dominique Browning have been showing America how to make the home and garden pretty and nice.

 

I couldn’t glean much about her life as a mother upon reading the essay. But I do hope Browning took days off to be with her two boys, baked brownies with them, played an active part in the parent committee at their school, fretted about how they fared at school and asked them how they dealt with a mother who was intensely committed to her work at a national magazine. I bow to her ego and her rabid need to support herself all her life. But I do wonder how many employed women, especially given Browning’s legacy, will turn soggy and limp in that brief, uprooted state of unemployment.

 

Behold a topflight editor like Dominique Browning with a rolodex of topnotch contacts–which would ultimately put her transparent memoir in the pages of nothing less than the NYTimes magazine so that Atlas, her publisher, can be guaranteed whopping sales–spiral into a “whiplashing tailspin” of despair and depression? 

 

Spare me the pain. And hold that Kleenex, please.

 

 

 

Up and Over the Golden Gate

A few weeks ago, I backed out of my driveway and strayed outside my self-imposed mental and geographic boundaries. I decided to become part of a literary group called Left Coast Writers in Marin.

I had eyed this group from afar for the last decade. Every time I wanted to sign myself up, I’d hear a new (emerging) voice in my head. Year after year, the voice of protest grew louder still. And soon new voices snuck in where mine used to be.

“All the way past the Golden Gate? How can I do that?”

“And who’s going to pay that toll?” [Husband whose voice takes a toll on me]

“Remember you’re just recovering from an anxiety syndrome from driving on bridges.”[Selfish Daughter Who Wanted Mother to be Around Just Because]

“Can’t you, like, call in?” [Creative Son who thinks writers have voices, not faces]

“Yes, you must.”  [Mine squeaks its way in somehow]

“Marin? Are they kidding? Why can’t these silly writers, or whoever, come here, to Silicon Valley, where, you know, the moolah is?” [Friend who admits to flying coach always and lying on couch always]

“Monday’s SO-O-O bad for you.”  [Housekeeper who voices exactly my thoughts to keep her job]

"70 miles north? At these gas prices will these guys validate your toll, at least?" [Friend and Optimist]

“You must be dreaming.  Mondays? Your kids have a two-hour violin lesson. Remember, I can’t reschedule that.” [Teacher with schedules cast in mortar]

 By fall 2008, my head felt like it was at a wholesale produce market in India.

“$100? For that? I can get you a year’s worth of potatoes and rice with that! Look at this! Mosey on here. No, don’t go there. No value for your money! Rip-offs these people! Come here instead! But you’ve got to. I’m going to make one last offer and that’s that…”

I signed up to be part of Left Coast Writers in late November and made my way  up north at 5.30PM on the first Monday of December. A sharp drizzle made driving difficult and slow in places. But as I headed beyond the Golden Gate past Sausalito, I realized I was going for a purpose. This writing group might inspire me and take me where I wanted to go. If others could untangle themselves from domestic coils to chase a literary dream, why couldn't I?

That evening LCW hosted a talk by Jean Shinoda Bolen a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco. Bolen's books shed light on the need for spirituality in our lives. In Close to the Bone, Bolen writes "When the possibility  or reality of a major medical illness arises, when we or someone we love are to be hospitalized for observation, diagnosis or treatment, it is metaphorically like being abducted into the underworld-that subconscious or unconscious realm-where we are assailed by fears and vulnerabilities that we usually keep buried there and at a distance." I'm reading it right now.  I wish I'd known about Bolen's work sooner. I wish I'd sought to buy it when I faced such challenges in my life a few years ago. 

Yesterday, I crossed the bridge again in anticipation of meeting this welcoming clique for the next session. On this February evening, I caught a cheeky flash of peach, pink and orange just as the sun turned in for the night.  Niloufar Talebi, a young Iranian American and an award-winning translator, recited poetry from Belonging, an eclectic anthology of recent poetry by Iranians living around the world.  Talebi read selections in Farsi and, in turn, in English.  

As she exploded from one emotive piece into another, I remembered what writer Isabel Allende had said, very simply, in the same venue when asked why she continued to write in Spanish even though she was so fluent and expressive in English. "English? How can you make love in English?"  

By performing also in Farsi – a language which packs  in gun powder, red roses, saffron, dynamite and wine – Talebi took philistines like me behind the veil and into that human mind replete with landmines and infinite possibilities. 

Rejection Day and Night Spa: Menu of Treatments

For years I’d led the double life, slogging as a cubicle slave by day, writing software for a huge company and devouring the Writer’s Market by night. My colleagues told me I needed to be in the writing world. They saved my emails. Even I could tell I was more gifted in the comments and documentation section than in the coding section. 

But the programming job had its perks. The money was steady. And there was always something or someone to look forward to. Tall M wore his shorts so high that he’d never have got them wet in the throes of Katrina. Gold chain and Rolex sporting J – who’d mastered terms like ‘value-add’, ‘prototype’ and ‘revenue factor’ - couldn’t explain a project to himself or his bosses. Brilliant T was paid the highest in our group, yet he bought all his T-shirts at Goodwill. Tight-bottomed, thong-wearing S strutted her hips and sashayed her way rapidly to the top. Silent W worked hard from 9-5 (often behind closed doors) filling out medical insurance forms, paying her bills and catching up on romance novels. 

You can see why it was hard to leave my colorful, soulless job. But I knew my heart lay elsewhere. When I jumped at a voluntary retirement package, I had no clue that my new writing career would have to be constructed and nurtured on a quicksand of rejection letters from magazines and newspapers. 

The first time I got a rejection in the mail I was apoplectic. 

I called my husband - who was in a conference with bosses and customers - howling as if someone had died in the house.

“Sorry to hear that,” he said, in his very-meeting voice. “I can’t talk now.” He wasn’t getting it. Our essay had been rejected. 

“Remember how you and I almost died on that plane back for Australia?Woman’s Day says it’s thrilled to know we’re still alive but sorry to inform me that my essay doesn’t fit their needs,” I blubbered, between sniffles. 

In response my husband mumbled something that guaranteed he got no conjugal dinner or conjugal anything for days. 

Spurned by a publication. 

Trashed by a husband. 

I banged the phone and wailed like a banshee. 

That was then.

Over the last eight years, I’ve amassed a slush-pile (a favorite editorial term for unsolicited pitches and manuscripts from writers) of electronic and hard copy rejections. I have now named a line of spa therapies based on the categories of rejection treatment I continue to receive - and embrace with that certain panache.

THE BLACK-HOLE TREATMENT 

The cheapest of them all, the Black Hole is also the most popular. 

I send out my fabulous pitch or series of story ideas to a publication that I have studied cover to cover. I have analyzed even the font sizes on the cover. I’ve memorized the layout, the ad pages, the content, the readership, checked and rechecked the editor’s names, read a year’s worth of the magazines, attached the best clips from my portfolio, printed out the perfect cover letter in HP Premium paper, located the stamp with a theme the editor is supposed to adore. 

Then I wait. 

My Writer’s Market guide gives me an idea of how long to wait. “Responds in 6 weeks.” 

So I wait it out. 6 weeks. 6 months. A year.

Nothing. 

Nada. 

Zip.

In the time I’ve waited for a response from a thousand publications, I’ve fossilized by the mailbox. The twin towers have burned. Tsunamis have changed geographies. Wars have been waged. Mr. Trump has lost money and won it back again. 

And Moi? I haven’t even begun my apprenticeship yet.

THE CERTIFIED HOT-COLD NO(te): 

This treatment whacks you in the face exactly once. 

I barely press send on my Yahoo! screen. Simultaneously, a response slams into my inbox. Does this editor’s main job description include the following: stare at the screen, refresh the inbox every second, shoot out a pre-written rejection letter, and not waste time on formalities? 

The note says: “No, thanks. We’ll pass.” 

No warm fuzzy ‘Dear So-n-so’. There’s no time for manners or massage here, see?

Sometimes, there’s a final icy-cold layer:
“Sorry, we’re selective.”


AcutePUNCTURE EMAIL THERAPY 

I call this one the black widow therapy. It licks before it pricks. It mates before it kills.

The editor sends me a long email back about the things she loves in my writing. But wait for the fangs. She doesn’t need it right now. ‘Try again later.’

Here are some pearls from my coveted collection.

‘I love your writing style, but it isn't quite right for us.’ 

‘Your essay was moving and I hope you’ll remember to send us more. But I’m sorry but your essay doesn’t fit our needs.’ 

(Your needs? What about my needs, huh?)

And here’s the classic automatically generated reply, sent to me after I send reminders over several months: ‘Our inventory is full at the moment so we aren’t taking any more essays at least for a year or two.’ 

THE BRAZILIAN BIKINI WAX-ELOQUENT TORTURE:

If you’ve ever been on the table for this Brazilian torture, you’ll know what I mean. Bend over backwards. Spread yourself thin. Shear yourself like a lamb in Auckland to make your editor like your work. 

You go off and execute on a given set of requirements and turn in the piece. In return, your piece is about to be pockmarked and jaundiced with editorial jabs.You SHALL put up with all the jostling with a smile even as your writing loses all form and shape and any resemblance to you, its creator. 

Months later, the editor will roll in the punches. She will wax eloquent before she tweezes you clean.

“There’s good news and bad news,” she’ll drone - after you’ve sent in the story for which you worked a 100 hours and interviewed a dozen people (who are now bombing you with emails about when the story will run). 

“Sorry,” she snaps, if you demur at the prospect of having to take home a sorry ‘kill’ (settlement) fee instead of the total amount. “The editor-in-chief canned it because it doesn’t work with the publication's new attitude.” 

THE ROLLING ROLFING MASSAGE: 

This one begins with a pat on your back from your editor. 
You turn in your work. You get paid. You’re glowing. But not too fast. 

Just wait until later into your relationship, when your work isn’t being published for some mysterious reason. Perhaps it was smarter not to be paid. Now your story is locked in contract and is languishing in a bin of unpublished slush. It will likely never see the light of day. 

It's exactly like one of those body treatments that's supposed to make you feel better. You're not sure at the end of it as to how you really ought to feel.

THE "10" ZEN TREATMENT:

In this deluxe line of treatment, you know you are in the best hands from the very first time you get in touch with your editorial therapist. In this relationship you get to discover, again, why you chose to write in the first place. 

I've discovered that every time I turn in a story for publication, I lose a part of my soul. But I've also realized that every time my story is published - true to how I envisioned and wrote it – it nourishes my soul.