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I had so many WOC writers come up to me in tears after this panel and I know there are so many more out there who cannot possibly afford or take time away for a conference like this, so I just want to recap a few things...
1) when we talk about race in publishing, we talk about today, and yesterday is always used to contextualize how much better it is today.
2) but what we don’t talk about is the actual toll of yesterday. I was writing for 20 years before my first novel was published. 20.
3) this was not because I was 20 years behind my white peers.
4) It was, I was told, because my work was “too Indian” and “not Indian enough”. Because America had “already had its Indian lit moment—too bad!”
It was because my characters “weren’t relatable” and because “we’ve already seen the immigrant story”.
6) I also got really bad advice from other Indian writers at the time. Don’t write about Aunties! they told me. Don’t be scared to write about white people instead, they said, like that was what the fear was really about.
7) As a result, I spent my early career entirely convinced that my interiority was simultaneously not worth exploring, overexposed, and way too cliché. My work made less and less sense to me. The rejections, no matter how I changed it, were steady.
8) After 9/11, I started writing the novel that would become The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. I wrote it from 11pm-1 a.m., while also accruing rejected short stories. I had no reason to believe anyone would ever publish it. I wrote for 10 years.
8.5) *not including the 3 years I stuck in in a drawer because my dad died and my head stopped working.
9) When we finally put that novel out, it sold at auction. That meant I was in the extremely rare position of getting to interview the possible editors who might take it on. I will *never* forget what one editor said to me:
10) “It’s too much. You’ve got an immigrant story, a political story, a love story, a ghost story, a family tragedy. We have to cut it down to the one that matters most.”
“Which matters most?”
“The immigrant story, obviously.”
“Which matters most?”
“The immigrant story, obviously.”
11) I went with another editor. I had that great luck. But I cried that night, thinking of all the writers who had come before who did not have that choice. Who had to cut all their complexity to even be published, who never had wholeness considered as a viable option.
12) This is the real cost of the past. This is what we lost.
13) Maybe you, too, were lost in that moment. I see it so often at these conferences, WOC laden with stories that have been bursting from them for years, but haven’t yet published. And yes, I am talking specifically to WOC because those are my ppl. Yesterday I told them:
14) Keep going. You are right that you did not get the same opportunities as your white peers. But your work is as urgent and vital and necessary as it ever was. And it *always* was.
15) This is not an industry of guaranteed outcomes. Work put in does not translate into acclaim nor profit. But. But. You are the only one who can imagine your work into being. You are the only one who knows what we have missed. Your voice is needed out here.
16) And editors, take note: if you are so bent on diversity, take an extra hard look for all those voices you missed in your great learning curve of whose story is worth publishing. There is enormous talent all around you, and it doesn’t always come in a 20-something body.
Okay, that’s all I got right now, before coffee. Please excuse typos and keep fucking going. Love to you & your dreams today.
Shoutout to young Mira in 1997, new to the city and not knowing shit about any of this.
(Excerpt from my latest, graphic memoir GOOD TALK.)
(Excerpt from my latest, graphic memoir GOOD TALK.)
