Publishing is Brutal & Elitist. But It Shouldn’t Be
If you live to write, you deserve to be in the room.
I’ve been writing for as long as I could remember. My first publication was in second grade — a haiku in which I likened my mother’s voice to thunder.
Before I was 10, I’d seen junkies overdosing in parks, bodies carried out on stretchers; cocaine on glass tables and heroin shot into abscessed arms; The Shining in a movie theater; my neighbor Sylvia, who subsisted on cans of sardines and died alone in her bathtub; and my mother’s face slammed into a wooden coffee table by a man she thought she loved, a man who, in a few months time, would be dragged out of his car by two men while everyone sat on the stoop, watching the beat-down. Inside, my mother smoked a Kent 100 down to the filter.
I had a lot of material.
From an early age, I was taught that fear and vulnerability belonged to the weak. Better to swallow your voice than to cry. Better to lock your pain away than to endure it. Better to write than to speak. So I spent much of my early childhood alone and silent, but I was writing. Paper had become the provenance of my freedom, and I wrote about all the things I had felt and seen with a calm detachment that, looking back as an adult, bordered on disturbing.
