Getting going, a letter, and a sidebar about Susan Morrison of The New Yorker

Friday 8/1/25

I've had a tough time getting going lately. I'm not writing enough. There's so much to do and it feels like there is so little point to any of given how everything stands and it's hard to start or jump back in. It'll pass and I'll be ripping it again, but that's how it's been.

I've also spent a month now revising a 1500 word story that I thought was done a couple years ago.

Pretending that this was a world of merit in which the best things did the best, and people were better and read and cared about who they were, this would be an important story holding an important place and fulfilling an important role in an important book.

As it is, it's difficult not to feel like it will just sit here with me unknown until I die, and then sit with no one. But I try not to let such thoughts stop me, just as I try to think or believe--call it what you will--that a 180 is possible, and if that's so, I'm going to want to have the work and have it done right.

I'm a little frustrated with myself because I return to this story afresh on a morning, thinking, "Okay, let's read it back again, perhaps we're good to go," and then find myself making six changes on the first page.

I'm just doing something so different. Writing in such a different way. Building very different kinds of things. It's not merely writing, or maybe even writing at all. It's something totally different.

I'm not frustrated as in, "You won't get this right." It's impatience. Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense, because it's not like I can do anything with the story. Even if nearly everyone knocked on my door pleading for it, it would pain my heart to consign such a work to an outlet where four people would see it, because no one is reading any of these places and don't fool yourself that anyone is reading any of them, because they're not. Not out in the world.

My work isn't for five Brooklyn dilettante writers who got MFAs at Iowa and wake up at ten thirty and dine out on the trust fund who are catty and envious and reliant on quid pro quo and cronyism and their preferred brand of incest for anything. I've had plenty of stories in those venues they pretend to read. It's meaningless. You're not paid and there are no readers. It's just to say you were in AGNI or TriQuarterly. And what on earth does that mean or is going to do for you? That is, if you have amazing work for the world.

You can do it if you have the option. Doesn't preclude other things for that work. Like what? If you were going gangbusters later you couldn't take "Fitty" and do what you wanted with it or have it run where lots of people would see it because it'd been in the fall 2025 issue of The Such and Such Review? They'd get a court injunction? Obviously not.

Most of these people just want to be able to say they were in one of those places. It's such a low ceiling for them, but the low ceiling befits their work, which is itself meaningless. They're insecure about their lack of ability--as they should be--and they're delusional, so they're able to make this mental "go" of conflating that "Yes" with quality, and as we've seen time and time again, that's a laugh, and that's not why anything is selected.

I was reading about this guy who decided to pretend he was Black and trans, and his bio had the they/them pronouns and a reference to like the Nigerian diaspora. He wrote the shittiest poems that he could--on purpose, as part of his experiment--and what do you think happened between his cover letter with the buzz words and the horrible writing?

He published nearly fifty of those poems in these venues and they won awards.

Is that the least surprising thing ever? That's exactly what you'd expect, right? If you've been paying attention here as to how this all really works.

I have so much material that stories could go in such places, and it's not like I couldn't do what is best for them later on if things ever changed. But I want to deal with so little of any of that nonsense. I send the story, there's the inevitable bigotry, and up that person goes on here? We do the prose offs. Everyone can see and knows what is happening. There's no mystery. These days, when I send something, it's often for the legal purposes. So I can do the exposing.

But when you have something for millions of people, and for the world, and the betterment of the world, and the entertainment of people in the world, you don't look at it the same as some shitty sycophant writer who trades a favor to get a story in The Iowa Review and then finds an excuse to go into her fellow professor's office in the English department and brag about the story placement. That's everyone else, but that's not me, and it's really not this work.

There's this guy who feasts on favor trading. The idea and necessity of it courses through his blood. He bragged to me in an email about it once. He's just filthy. Back in fall 2023, knowing that he could appear in these pages, he lied to me, gave me this song and dance about being full up and I should check back in the coming summer.

That's the prevarication technique. Someone like this will say something like that, to make you go away, because you're not one of their odious cronies. You have the work, not the bullshit. The goods, not the nonsense. They always prefer the nonsense. All of the ancillary crap. The hope is you'll forget and he won't have to hear from you again, and he also won't be called out in public. Meanwhile, he's accepting some MFA shit sight unseen because of whose name is atop the email.

I didn't get back in touch last summer, because dealing with these people makes me all but vomit. I should be better at it, because I have to knuckle down and do what must be done, and it doesn't help me to sit things out, even if they're going to go poorly and predictably so.

Because that's not guaranteed, for one thing. Even though it virtually is. You have to let it play out, though, which means you have to try and keep at least some of your mind open until what you expect to happen has officially happened.

Have I been wrong in the past? Very minor-ly. And in those cases, there were no especially dire warning signs--and no bad history--beyond some radio silence.

Then there's also this record. Which is important and will have had a huge role if the aforementioned about-face occurs and I have the opportunities I deserve and am where I deserve to be. And it isn't like I'm not acting in good faith. Here's the great work. It's the right fit. Nice doing business with you. See you down the road.

But if someone is up to no good, which will be blatant, and easily provable, I'm not going to protect their secret. That's not how change happens. You only bury yourself when you accept discrimination. And again: It's so easy to prove. Look at all of the examples in these pages.

Well, I didn't send anything last summer. It's not like you can ever creditably say I bother you or am pushy, as the mentally unstable Raluca Albu did that time, which, of course, was about other things rather than anything I did wrong. I am always professional. Further, I don't want to interact with anyone more than is necessary.

I'm so loath to do so, that I've put this off for more than a year now. That's hardly me being up in anyone's face. But here we are, approaching the end of another summer, and I should do something. I have most of the letter written to this guy. I know what he's going to do, because I know what he's up to and what he's all about. Do you think I'm writing the letter as if it were later going to be entered into a trial? Yes, of course I am.

Because, again, I know this guy for what he is and what he's doing. I also know how absurdly better this story I'm going to send is than any story he's ever published. I'd done some nonfiction there, once, like twenty years ago, and it was a nightmare. The editor I worked with at the time was incompetent. It was embarrassing for me.

Usually, whatever I write runs as is. No changes. And this guy was just making the piece worse and worse, like he was trying to take it down to his level. He was so out of his depth. Both in terms of the writing and having a clue about the subject. He was like some drunk driver gunning this way and that over the piece, just wild and oblivious, but probably thinking he could win the Indianapolis 500 if someone waved him to the starting line.

This was early-ish in my career, and I'd already been disabused of a number of things. I knew that the people in this world were worse than the people in the rest of the world, as bad as those people are. For instance, until I interacted with Susan Morrison at The New Yorker, I didn't think anyone could be that much of an entitled, rude, loathsome, vituperative sociopath, like it was their divine right to shit down your throat and then for you to find a way to thank them and to also be able to figure out when to do so because depending on the evil caprices of someone like this, being off by so much as a minute could be the cause in their diseased brain to have at you again, yell at you, bully you, try to demean you. I'd never known anyone like that, and I'd known plenty of bad people. Then I knew lots more like that in publishing. But I think she's always stood apart for me.

So this new letter will have a paragraph from the story in the body of it, in order that this guy won't be able to claim he had no idea whatsoever how good the story was, on account that he didn't open the attachment. He won't be able to help but see it, and you need see only a little of anything I write to know what's what. That's what happens, though, when the Word document isn't opened. These people all assume that everyone is on their level, because they're all on the same level. There's no separation. Slop is slop. MFA machined fiction is MFA machined fiction. They don't allow that someone could be something totally different than anyone has ever been.

And that's me. And it's very obvious from a paragraph of the work. They also think--this is honestly how they're wired--that if you were that good, you'd be the most famous. That's how simple they are. It'd be the opposite until you found a way to get past people like this, or would never give you a fair chance and are always looking to stop and suppress you because you are not achievable to them because you are legitimately this thing that they are not and there's no denying that.

I'll stack some recent links in this letter, which are dazzling. This guy published this here? And that here? Short amount of time. And they'll all be masterful pieces on totally disparate subjects in high-profile outlets. As I do this, I'll already have examples in mind of stories recently published by this guy that blow. I'll know how the people got those stories in there. Their relationship to this guy.

Then I'll hit send on the email--I may even write the blog exposing this guy first, so that when he does what he almost certainly will do, I can put that up instantaneously--and wait. If he's not up to no good, that's cool. Glad you can use the story. I'll take the small check. The story can come out whenever. I'm in no hurry. Then later I'll pitch something for a nonfiction piece.

Almost all I ever want to do with anyone is move forward. Don't need to like a person, don't need to respect them. Don't need to think about them. Certainly don't need to be their friend. It's not about any of that to me. It's about doing the best work, not being discriminated against, and moving forward. Win for me, win for you. Win-win.

But how would you feel doing all of the work I just described when you pretty much already know what the deal is? And this person I just described is better than most here? Would you be able to find the energy and the time to do the things listed above? How would you handle it emotionally? Let's say you had the best thing ever written and you knew it. How would you handle all of this when you then looked at the shittiest fiction about some ponce from Yale who studied writing and that "fictional" character is just douchebag who wrote the story who has their "in" with this editor?

You're not going to be bailed out (and subsequently lifted up in what you do) by the public saying, "This writing sucks, where's the good writing!" and changes necessarily getting made as a result, because these people killed off reading and anyone caring about this activity they don't do and the choices at hand, the quality control, for lack of a better term, of an industry that is meant to provide a service; that is, "Here are some great books to entertain and enrich you."

The years and years and years of this system and this system functioning as it does resulted in there 1. Being nothing worth reading 2. No one capable of producing anything worth reading and 3. Said system effectively becoming sealed off from the world at large and the public. It's just a playground for the people of the system, sanctioned by the system, who have to be like the members of that system.

The ostensible demo for this journal skews older. The story I have for them has a reference to Walter Cronkite, and it's woven conversationally and naturally like someone who was there, and I wasn't. It's the perfect story for this venue. Which doesn't mean it's an old person story. Nothing I do is just one thing. Or for one kind of person or group.