Rough Patch

Some reflections on the past few years of my career

When I published this essay, The Gatekeepers, in Harper’s magazine, back in December 2018, it was responsible for more than a quarter of all the traffic they experienced on the day it was a released online. It felt good. I had worked hard on it, honed an argument that I’d thought about for several months, supported it rigorously, worked with my editor to fine tune the prose. Writing. I was afforded the opportunity to see an idea through and let my work live out in the world to be discovered and rediscovered.

Of course, it was also a bit of declaration—I was no longer available to editors to serve as their black trauma interpreter. I’d tired of it, on a personal level, and soured on it as a political project. Black writers an thinkers were being called forth left and right, after the killing of Trayvon Martin, to mine their grief for white audiences that needed racism explained to them in stark terms. And where was that getting us? More black people being called, more material for the well-meaning white people’s syllabi to become more well-meaning.

I can’t say definitively that publishing The Gatekeepers essay led to fewer editors reaching out to me—it wasn’t really the case. I was still able to find receptive editors; I flaked on some when a piece wasn’t coming together; I turned some things down.

The downturn wasn’t completely externally imposed. Still, I noticed a shift in how I was being received. I wrote less newsy things, and fewer people on social media were interested in reading and sharing. I wrote fewer scathing indictments of white supremacy, and my essays gained little traction. There were exceptions, of course, because the internet is a place where you are able to find an audience for a variety of things: the Dennis Rodman profile for GQ did pretty well, and I was happy with how it turned out; I found some good success with this piece about Aaliyah and my relationship to gender expression; but I was finding it harder and harder, the more I moved away from the work that got me in the door, to find a consistent audience.

I profile I did for Men’s Health on Nick Cannon was kind of a dud; similar with a profile on Christopher Alexander for New York, which admittedly overstated the potential of New York City’s legal weed market; I wrote again for Men’s Health, about the problems faced by a community gym in Harlem, but that went nowhere; ditto the piece I did for ESPN about the jazz-opera “Champion,” based on the life of Emile Griffith.

Around this time my daughter was born. Eight months after, my mother died. It was rough going.

What I had wanted to believe was that people were drawn to my writing, and that they would be drawn to whatever I wrote because of that. I thought I would have the freedom of experimentation—particularly after my second book, which wasn’t a commercial success, managed to win the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. I became a real life award winning author. I thought that meant I was free to punch my own ticket.

But that’s the case for very few writers—the biggest superstars of the literary world. I wasn’t expecting that level of treatment, but I did think there would be opportunities for me to strut a little more, editors who would want to work with me on the strength of the success I’d had, my proven track record.

That hasn’t been the case. I’ve written less over the past few years, published even less than that, though I’ve pitched relentlessly. I’m proud of the things I have managed to get out there: this essay for The Believer, Scholar’s Mate, written in the wake of my mother’s death, stands as the best thing I’ve written to date, in my mind. I pitched it a few places before it landed there; they turned me down, but ultimately I’m happy that it got into a publication I’ve long wanted to write for and my vision for it remained intact.

What is stinging about losing my position at Hunter College is not just the loss of income, though, that’s a *huge* thing (please upgrade to a paid subscription if you can, my daughter needs more berries). When I was hired there in 2020, it was the first time that I had felt wanted not just because of what I was saying but how I said. I was hired to teach craft, to think about prose style, to help other writers find out what constitutes good writing. We didn’t shy away from discussions of content in the classroom, but it was always in conversation with how we were writing.

It felt good to be appreciated for that. When my career started, I get in the door the best way I knew how, but it was never my ambition to become a pundit who wrote the same tired things over and over again. I want to make it clear, too, that I’m not saying I now want to shy away from politics, and race, and gender, and capitalism, and the like—read the Scholar’s Mate essay, I think it shows that I still find these things important. I still have my political commitments.

What I’m saying is I’ve felt stifled creatively because there was a certain perception of who I was as a writer and thinker, that never lined up with who I saw myself to be. Isn’t that true for so many of us? Being perceived is difficult precisely because you’re not in control of what other people come to believe.

I’m at work on a new book (I’m behind, but I’m at work). I have some other work coming out soon. I hope I can write it all in such a way that people see more of me—more of the way I hope to be seen.

If not, I suppose I have to let go. I was never in control anyway.