Please Stop With “Support Your Local Writer.”
I’m not a charity case. I’m a skilled professional, I work hard, and what I produce has value. And because I write nonfiction about subjects from the area where I live — central Alabama and the Black Belt — my work has significance, even a special significance in my community.
I chose to become a writer when I was in my late teens. Twenty-eight years ago, I graduated from high school with a strong GPA and high test scores, then I earned a bachelor’s degree in English from a four-year university. About twenty years ago, I got my first small writing gigs and began using what I’d learned. Today, I’ve been a full-time professional in the writing and editing field for nineteen years. I’m not only good at what I do, I make intrinsically worthwhile contributions to my community and to the broader culture at large by researching and writing about previously neglected and untold stories. Writing is not something I fell into, but a vocation that, I believe, allows me to employ my skill-set to participate in society.
And that’s why it hurts my heart — as a writer and as a person — when I see the slogan “Support Your Local Writer.” That slogan, as pithy as it may come off and as well-intentioned as it may be, implies that consumers in my community should allot some of their precious time and hard-earned money to “support” me.
No! I don’t want people to “support” me. I want people, especially ones in my community, to value me. I want them to buy my books or read my blog or come to my readings because what I produce is good and meaningful. I want for people to recognize my contributions to our collective life and deem them worthy of that precious time and hard-earned money. I want people to see a book or article about a subject I’m covering and say, “I should probably know more about this.” And when they’re finished, say, “I’m glad I read that.”
Instead, the slogan “Support Your Local Writer” implies something completely different. The slogan’s subtext says that I’m off doing as I please, living my best life, tickling my own fancy, and that I expect to receive the money it takes to live from kind-hearted people willing to see that I’m taken care of. There is also, in that phrase, the underlying sentiment that I don’t produce anything of value, nothing that anyone would spend money on at least. After all, when you do ever see “Support Your Local Dentist”?
But this does go for artists, brewers, lots of careers that contribute to the common culture. “Support your local artist,” or “Support your local brewery.” I’d tell anybody: don’t buy locally produce artwork unless you really do want it on your walls, and don’t drink locally produced beer because it’s made near your house— buy either because it’s good. (By the same token, if it’s not good, don’t buy it!) Part of this charity-case attitude is what keeps bad and mediocre local writers and artists and brewers in business — the notion that: the community should “support” them because they’re doing it nearby.
Works of local interest may have a narrow audience, but they should have an audience, and that audience should expect relevance and quality. In the early 2000s, I wrote a 30,000-word biographical sketch of a local artist whose career in our mutual hometown had spanned more than five decades. Hailed by some as an undiscovered genius, he had sold thousands of paintings between the 1950s and 2000s, yet no substantive work about him had ever been produced. That book eventually became a handsome coffee-table book that contained his personal story and vivid color plates. More recently, I spent years researching and writing an 80,000-word exploration of a 1975 police-shooting where an unarmed black man was killed by a white officer. Though the case had been largely forgotten, the nature of the episode — a black man killed by a white police officer — meant that it had an audience. However, because two of my most successful books have been on subjects from my hometown, I’ve found myself branded a “local writer,” that breed of hanger-on that requires “support.” No, once again. These two books and other works that I’ve produced stand as the only ones on their subjects, and whether it’s a retrospective of an old painter’s career or an investigative work about an unresolved social-justice controversy, they’re subjects that have relevance. And because I’m a skilled professional, they also have quality. And value. And significance.
We don’t need “Support Your Local Writer” campaigns. We need for people to understand the relevance of the work and to recognize the quality of the work, and then — then! — arguments for our value won’t be necessary.
