Garrison Keillor's When Everyone's A Writer, No One Is

I admire the energy and insistence and irreverence of young people. I have a teenage daughter who has literary aspirations and who remains continually baffled by me and my circle of writer friends who wait-outrageously long waits-for some entity, usually a white, male gatekeeper, to validate our writing by publishing it in traditional formats likes books, print magazines, etc.


I love young people because if you listen to them, to their take on the world you inevitably question yourself and your motives and ways of operating. My daughter often raises the point, to me, who, without pretense and ego, am I honestly trying to touch, to commune with, through my writing ? Follow your answer to its source, she says, and cut out that old fuddy-duddy middleman. She does.


My daughter very much identifies with her West African roots. She was born in Cote d’Ivoire and her writing reflects the energy of Africa. There is no woe is me in her work. Her work is celebratory and confrontational. She doesn’t wait to see who likes or gets her work. She creates her own beautifully handmade books and distributes them, free of charge, to African hair-braiding shops, the Liberian-operated water-ice stands, and to my students from Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Togo, Benin, Liberia, Ghana who, now in their new homes, have yet to hear celebratory words about Africa.


A few weeks ago, before she left for a summer program, we went to get water-ice from one of the places she had distributed her poetry books. One of the women, a Liberian, who works there, came out from behind the counter and gave my daughter the biggest and longest bear-hug and said she so enjoyed her poetry. She even shared it with her children. After we returned to our car, my daughter said, without vanity and with confidence, that she had a connection with her audience that was real and growing and she achieved this significant feat without the approval of someone who probably would never get where’s she’s coming from.


I share all of this as an introduction to this piece by Garrison Keillor, which appeared in the Baltimore Sun. What do you think?

When Everyone Is A Writer, No One Is
By Garrison Keillor


In New York the other night, I ran into my daughter’s favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, whose “Magic Tree House” books I’ve read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of President Barack Obama. Bang bang bang, one heavyweight after another. Erica Jong, Jeffrey Toobin, Judy Blume. It was a rooftop party in Tribeca that I got invited to via a well-connected pal, wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do.


I grew up on the windswept plains with my nose in a book, so I am awestruck in the presence of book people, even though I have written a couple books myself. These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think, but I admire the elite. I’m not one of them — I’m a deadline writer, my car has 150,000 miles on it — but I’m sorry about their downfall. And this book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.


Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it’s all free, and you read freely, you’re not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you’re like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.


And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a website. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.


Back in the day, we became writers through the laying on of hands. Some teacher who we worshipped touched our shoulder, and this benediction saw us through a hundred defeats. And then an editor smiled on us and wrote us a check, and our babies got shoes. But in the New Era, writers will be self-anointed. No passing of the torch. Just sit down and write the book. And The New York Times, the great brand name of publishing, whose imprimatur you covet for your book (“brilliantly lyrical, edgy, suffused with light” — NY Times) will vanish (Poof!). And editors will vanish.


The upside of self-publishing is that you can write whatever you wish, utter freedom, and that also is the downside. You can write whatever you wish, and everyone in the world can exercise their right to read the first three sentences and delete the rest.


Self-publishing will destroy the aura of martyrdom that writers have enjoyed for centuries. Tortured geniuses, rejected by publishers, etc., etc. If you publish yourself, this doesn’t work anymore, alas.


Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.


Garrison Keillor’s column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun.


Source:
When everyone’s a writer, no one is
In a world where everything’s free on the web, what will happen to publishing
Garrison Keillor
Baltimore Sun May 25, 2010