Everything wrong with publishing (and I'm sure you women who've interacted with him aren't big fans either): The plasticized, soulless, conniving, talent-bereft, post-human smudge that is Joel Whitney

Tuesday 5/20/25

Speaking of The Atlantic, as we did the other day, we'll now return to it in a different, oblique manner, but it figures all the same.

If you're a woman in publishing--and I say in publishing, because these people rarely range beyond their subculture--you've maybe not had the best of experiences with one Joel Whitney. He's typical of white men in publishing in terms of what he thinks is fine for him to do in what I'll call a non-publishing arena and one as old as humans themselves.

But I'm going to share my own experiences with the Brooklyn-based (as is so often the case with these case, making the incest even easier) Whitney, which speaks to the kind of person he is, and the kind of person you're usually dealing with here, with the amazing disclaimer of at best.

Whitney was the founder of the website Guernica. It's one of the seeming thousands of such places that publishes bad fiction, nonfiction no one needs, and doesn't pay. Simply another outpost in said subculture.

I've published thousands of things in my life. Just about everywhere. On everything. As the expert on so many things and with the fiction that no one can touch. I began publishing en masse in 2004.

From the start, there was no one on my side, and, instead, people actively against me because of my mind and abilities and legitimacy, and more and more and more of them as I went along, published more, did things others in publishing would never do and, worst of all to them, proved myself to be something they couldn't even imagine being.

Arms were locked, all circles were closed. One person said to another--behind the scenes, of course--"I don't like him, and I want you to lock him out where you are," and that's enough for these people. That's how they operate. That's what happened, for instance, with Katie Raissian at Grove/Atlantic. Raluca Albu at BOMB, who has since sold herself to AI, said a version of the above to her, and thus it went.

If I did something like, say, have a nonfiction piece in the VQR on Bram Stoker, get interviewed on NPR (by the way: every time I was on NPR, I picked the sound and the cues and wrote what they said for them but we can get into NPR later), publish a feature on the Beatles in The Atlantic (and I'm sure you have no doubt that I didn't "just fall into" as my thesis advisor I was talking about the other day--whose name was William Youngren, by the way--did, and that I had to overcome years and years of discrimination, clannishness, and incompetence), and sell a short story like "First Responder" to the VQR, all at the same time--as in, the same week--then life became harder for me, because the envy and animus of these people went up, and they would then try--as they do now--to make sure I got nothing else if they could help it. Any reader of these pages can see why a journal--a public record--like this, with entries like this, became necessary.

But sure: Talk about those Pushcart nominations, because that means something.

Success--which I know not to be actual success, because no one really sees any of this from this world or reads these venues, and it's getting to readers that is all I care about--but which constitutes success in the eyes of these people, has always made things much more difficult for me after.

If I publish two op-eds on in major newspapers on the same day as I did for the latest time recently, you can bet your life a hundred people can't wait to be able to turn me away and shit down my throat.

I have approached just about everyone there is in my time. For many years, I sent work and pitches to Joel Whitney at Guernica. A few caveats. A troll might wish to say, "Why would you send work to a place that publishes bad work?" Answer: There is basically just bad work. So what then? Exactly. I can't exactly look at anyone's work, can I, and say, "Oh, this is of a similar quality, that would be a good outlet." I'm not these other writers who are all congealed together.

Secondly: They don't pay, so why send? Each day of my life, I either write a masterpiece or put work towards the completion of one. There isn't any drop-off. I'm not someone about whom one can say, "That's the amazing one but that other wasn't so amazing!" I write anywhere from 5000 to 8000 words every day of my life. I'm a different kind of person, with a different kind of mind, a different kind of artist.

So, if I have 600 available short stories, and one were to run for free, that's obviously far less than ideal and even further removed from what the work, in terms of its quality and utility, merits, that's not the same as if I was one of these people, for whom the drafting of 200 shitty words often takes a year, at which point they hop on social media, bust out the hashtags, and say, "Working on a story again #writinglife #shortshorts #literarylife" followed by 500 non-individuals who are exactly like them from within this subculture of broken, hateful, petty people, hitting that like button because, that's right, that other person isn't just achievable for them, they already are that other person, and is consequently no threat whatsoever to their pathetic little egos and won't boost their insecurities and neuroses and that rightfully deserved imposter syndrome. Won't stop you from getting a Guggenheim, though, if you have the right connections and thus the right standing in the subculture of broken, hateful, petty freaks.

Thirdly: There is the principle of the thing. If you're discriminating against me because you're a talentless, envious bigot, I'll push the issue. I'll keep sending. I'll probably be as polite and professional as can be in doing so over long periods of time. What I was really doing, in effect--and I do this intentionally now--was stacking the evidence for when you are publicly exposed as what you are.

Then, it's very simple. I take the horrible work you publish--and sometimes that you also personally wrote, because we've done both with the likes of Carolyn Kuebler as the editor of New England Review and a writer herself, as but one example--and I put that next to the work I offered you, or sometimes wrote within the last five minutes.

And everyone can see the gap. The yawning gulf. You can't even quantify the degree of separation in terms of quality. And it's right there, looking back at all of us. Remember those prose offs not too long back with George Saunders--Guggenheim winner, MacArthur genius grant recipient, Booker Prize winner--and his fiction in The New Yorker and The Atlantic?

Gun to the head of one of these people, and whether they live or not is dependent on them saying the truth, there isn't any of them who are going to say that Saunders is better than Fleming. "Yep, I'll take that Saunders story at the start of the prose off over the Fleming one. We're going to Bermuda next month, and I definitely want to be alive so as not to miss my trip. Right. "Final answer!"

Or how about Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius grant recipient Junot Diaz and his story in The New Yorker versus that one of mine? Remember that?

Or Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park and his story in The Baffler, thanks to Brooklyn literary poster boy (read: mega-tosser) J.W. McCormack.

Or how about Pulitzer winner, Guggenheim winner, and MacArthur genius grant winner Yiyun Li in both The Yale Review headed up by prime example system person Meghan O'Rourke and Zoetrope and her awful writing contrasted with those Fleming stories?

Or how about Pulitzer winner, Guggenheim winner, and MacArthur winner--how can anyone think that this shit is given out because of anything to do with the work?--and his fiction in both The New Yorker and Granta--Motorollah!--pitted against that Fleming fiction?

It's impossible to mount a case that the work by those people is not inferior. Their work is absurdly bad. Hate me as much as you want, and strain and strain and strain and try to find a way to say that that work is better. Cannot be done. And everyone here knows it. Which is a huge part of the problem. For me. Because then it's about getting revenge--which is this weird form of preemptive revenge, because I've done nothing to anybody--that I am able to do what I can do, and they cannot.

Revenge takes all forms. The whispers, the backroom middle school bullshit of "I hate him, I want you to hate him too!" and "Pay us $3 to form reject your work" and "Not quite right for us" which simultaneously says that unreadable nonsense they just published by their brother-in-law or writer who shares their agent is.

What they count on is darkness. Apathy. Silence. That no one would ever know, because who would reveal any of this? It behooves the people of publishing not to have people read. To be so buried as a clan, as a sinecure--which they call an industry--in the margins that no one knows the truth about them, how they operate, how bad all of the work is, why things really happen, why what gets awarded gets awarded, why The Washington Post is saying what they did about that book, why The New York Times has that book on its "Summer Must Reads" list, etc.

That's the code of the system: Shhhhhh.

That code operates under this idea that in actuality is meant to double as a passive aggressive threat scaring any decent person into silence if they want to get anywhere: It's such a small community, and if you disparage--which really means, tell any degree of the truth--you're locked out.

People are sheep. Which means, everyone will accede to this. They don't think, they're not individuals, they don't know, they don't parse, they don't have real experience. They go along. Especially the kind of person who is going to try to be involved in publishing. That's not a leader of humans. That's not someone who is brave and honorable and is on some quest to the good. That's not an artist with work that must be brought to bear upon the world. Who will do everything in their power to impact readers, humans, human souls. Who are brave. You think these people are brave? You think anyone is more cowardly on balance? And ours is a world of cowards as it is.

But you know what? Being better than these people locks you out regardless. And all of this is going down anyway; it's over, basically; it's meaningless in the world because these people have helped to make it meaningless. Remember the other day when I asked if it was really a suicide mission if everyone was going down anyway? I was talking about this.

My way isn't the way of these people regardless. I don't know what my way is yet, or if there even will be a way for me; but it's not through these ways.

They won't let anyone pass but someone who is like them and on their level. Never above it. And never anyone legit. They'd only let them pass if they felt like they had no choice. You have to take the choice away. The choice to be an evil bigot. Because otherwise, they're going to scratch that itch all the way through their skin and down to the marrow in their bones. That's what an Emily Stokes, for example, at The Paris Review is all about. They'll scratch that itch until they turn into dust. And slap out fiction that has no more life in it than dust.

The system has operated this way for so long, that it's now comprised entirely of people like each other who are all on the same level. Everyone else would have been forced out, have given up and moved on to other fields and thus never developed fully, or wouldn't exist at all in the first place, because if you're going to be in publishing, this is the track you're on from the start. It's the person you have to conform to being.

You have to write poorly and lifelessly according to the dictates of the system and so that there can be things like MFA programs where other bad writers can tell student bad writers how to be bad writers like they are bad writers, and almost always be a shitty person. You can't teach anyone to write work full of life. You need a recipe. Something very reducible. Followable. "Fiction should have this, this, and this."

The bad writer passes on the modes of their formulaic lifelessness to the MFA student who in turn becomes the teacher, makes up part of the staff of a literary journal, gets a gig at The Paris Review, maybe ends up at Harper's or The New Yorker, or is just someone like, say, our old friend Evelyn Somers Rogers at The Missouri Review, doing the same thing at the same place that publishes the same bad work for the bulk of their life; in her case, blaming her husband's lack of earning on her lack of achievements as a writer in an email to me, and locking me out for twenty years because she'd known me since I was in college, and all she saw from me was publication after publication after publication and work so far beyond her own.

What I'll often do is share the publication track record of the person that the bigot has put forward. Usually, this will be very limited. And each publication will be the result of a hook up. Often, that place will want me to pay them money in order to submit my work that is infinitely better, with the track record no one can rival, and no crimes, no rapes, no trading sex for publication, no sexual harassment, theft, plagiarism, criminality, which we find all over the backs of the proverbial baseball cards of these people, which is not a problem for most of them with each other. It only becomes a problem when it impacts them directly. But morals? Ha. Fuck morality. These people couldn't be more immoral or less concerned about things like the most basic forms of decency or even just non-evil.

Of course, I can also show that all of the people in that venue didn't pay any money to submit their work. I mean, really? How stupid do you have to be to think I don't know exactly what's going on? Can you even be that stupid even if you are these people? (As I'm writing this, I have two outlets in mind--a literary journal and a publisher, a branch of the latter of which I've done business, for lack of a better term--that I have known for a long time are going to be the subjects of in-depth entries in these pages, and I'm fighting the urge to reference them here, but I don't want to dilute the effect of what happens when it does happen).

Back to Joel Whitney. Years and years and years of writing this guy. Here's a story, here's a pitch, here's a full essay, a culture piece. Etc. I have it all, I try it all. I know what you're doing, and then, as I said, it's the principle. I'm not letting you get away with it.

He doesn't respond. Then, I had that aforementioned feature on the Beatles--their 1963 BBC recordings--in the June 2013 issue of The Atlantic. Guess who then writes me on Facebook Messenger? That's right, our guy, Joel Whitney, this classless, gross ass worm, because he wanted me to hook him up with The Atlantic. Here is our exchange from May 31, 2013. Remember: I'd be sending this person both full pieces, stories, and pitches for years when he was at Guernica, which he founded, and nothing.

Joel Whitney: Maybe I could pick your brain about freelancing sometime.

Fleming: Ha. I don't know what use I'd be. I'm poor and have to work like twenty hours a day. I've only been ignored by like fifty editors after that Beatles thing came out. They don't care. It's an unpleasant road, freelancing. To say the least. But fire away. And have a good weekend.

Whitney: Ah well even that is good info. I would still have questions. Did the Atlantic pay for that piece? I heard web-only pieces they don't always pay for. Or was it in print? It reads great. I love annus mirabilis pieces when they're this good.

Fleming: Of course, you should have read that fiction or not turned down everything I sent or pitched for like six years. Ha. But yes, they paid (it's from the June print issue; they just put it up on the web, too). Or they will. Sometimes I'm owed money for a long time. Rolling Stone has owed me since January, MOJO since February 2012. Atlantic web pays a lot less. Like 20 times less. Anyway. Good luck with it.

Whitney: I've been trying to put a penalty for payments that take longer than 60 days into the contract. With some success. Not always but some...

Note how amiable I was. I knew what he was doing. I knew that he was scum. But I was trying to play the game. Plus, I am kind. I'm not just nice--that's not a lot. Kindness is different. Above all, I'm kind. And I detest confrontation. You think I want to be spending the time and energy I've spent this morning--having started at three in the morning--on the likes of this? I'm writing this entry as I write a music feature. Going from one to the other. Or do you think I'd rather just write the great work that is better than all of the other work out there and have what ought to happen as a result of that and the utility of that work simply happen? Write and then move on to the next. Write, move on to the next, write, move on to the next.

I was also at a different point in my development as a human. I was not a Zulu warrior at the time. I was reeling. Things are harder now, for a host of reasons--including all of that I've written and published in the dozen years since this exchange--that are gone into in depth in this singular journal. But I am a different animal now.

Reading this again I was reminded of my behavior with Mark Peyser of Newsweek from that time he and them tried to steal from me, which was documented in full in these pages recently. It was like I was apologizing to--and trying to make nice with--my abuser.

I was just trying to work. To publish. To move forward. I was complicit--to a small degree, but a degree nonetheless--in what these people were doing, by taking it like I took it. But taking them to these pages was no impulsive move. It was the only choice I was left with after decades of nothing but this and worse.

That's how these people like it. Whether it's David Remnick or Joel Whitney. They want to be abusive and have you still kiss the ring and service them. There is nothing special about them. They're morons. They don't have some great talent, or any talent. We use the word evil, but we have to. These are evil, self-serving, loathsome, manipulative, petty, discriminatory people.

I'm sure you noticed, too, that when I mentioned--in a very good-natured way--how I'd been treated by Joel Whitney when I'd sent him things--all of which, of course, was as good as this piece he's claiming to like so much, though I'm sure you also noticed both how insincere his words resonated on that score because he was just going through the conversational motions as someone who wanted something for himself, and how he managed to get in a left-handed compliment, too, by saying it was a type of piece, you know, not special enough to be its own thing--he ignored that completely and went right back to talking about himself.

Indoor scarf guy, of course.