I Placed This Ad In the Local Literary Paper, and This Is What Happened... PART ONE

Download the complete The Best of Cantaraville in PDF here

Ever hopeful, I placed this ad in Grafitti, the ONLY real live PHYSICAL alt.literary publication in town.

Had my ideal situation transpired, I wouldn’t be writing this post but happily midwife-ing a worthwhile project by a promising POC of whichever race or sex. Instead, this is what happened:

Within 48 hours of the issue with my ad hitting the freebie paper stands I got two replies. One was from a white guy named Scotty B—, who said he was “impressed by my credentials”, as if I were applying for a goddamn job from him. But when I asked him about his work, his writing, he was evasive—said that it was all in notes he needed to “organize”. He said he was fifty, out of work and couch-surfing. More out of sympathy than anything, we arranged to meet with him, buy him lunch and sound him out a little about what he felt he needed, as far as his writing. Mister Grumble and I were already at the restaurant waiting for him when he sent me the text: Nevermind I;ll do it myself [sic].

The second reply came as three emails…the 2 last being looong ones, from a guy named Jacob W—:

I am not a POC. White male cis hetero, age 69.  I grew up in Eugene and went to Edison, Roosevelt, and South.

I am revising two short stories that follow the realist tradition. (Austen, Flaubert, Baldwin, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Tobias Wolff…)

I have piles of ideas, notes, drafts for personal essays (i.e. memoir) and stories.

I haven’t a clue about the political or business side [ed.]—how one might get one’s work read.

If you think I might fit, please let me know the next step I should take. I mean if I am the kind of mentee that might interest you.

Even though he admitted to being white/male/cis, I was still interested because he made it sound like he was actually in the finishing stages of an actual work. So I asked him a few perfunctory questions (Why do you write? How long have you been writing? What do you expect to get from your writing?). Prompted thus, this man went on to email me a 2200-word reply, recounting his childhood memories, his adolescent memories, his periodontist’s work on his diseased gums, his love of modern dance. He also assured me twice that it would be so easy for him to make his way down to the Whiteaker…

In his third email he asked me to elaborate on points I already made clear in my (2005) article on self-publishing in The Best of Cantaraville, “The New Publishing Paradigm”—which he had already read. Then he asked me: What makes you think YOU can mentor?

To which I replied with yet a drearily third email:

Attached is a copy of my 2012 academic paper, A Poet from Hollywood: Love, Insanity, Stephen Gyllenhaal, and the Creative Process, where I briefly discuss my own mentor, the legendary publisher Barney Rosset. The strength and inspiration I got from being his mentee was so potent I want to pass that feeling along

[One thing I like about this new form of online communication is that you can have an article about, say, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago like any magazine, but you can also listen to the kind of music they were playing at the time. We can go into new realms of discourse… ~Barney Rosset in 2006]

“Considering that you found out we live in the Whiteaker through googling me, which brought you to my blog posting about the Crow & Cart, I wonder why you didn’t read through to the rest of the blog portion of my site, Where It Falls Apart.  If you had you would’ve read that everything I write in it—including my ad Mentees Wanted—are notes for an academic paper.

“I know you’re keen to meet [he asked me 3 times, godammit] so let’s do it and dispense with the pretense of sounding out whether you’d be a good mentee for me (or I a good mentor for you). Let’s just meet socially. I’m still holding out for that ideal local POC of talent and undirected drive who I can also meet on an equal intellectual basis.

“I would ask you one thing before we meet: Please don’t discuss my own writing, whatever you find on the net. If you actually read that posting about the Crow & Cart you’ll have read that Michael is blind and therefore unable to keep up with what I do on the computer screen, so I would take it as a courtesy that you don’t discuss with us my continuing projects that at the present he has no knowledge of. You can talk about Michael’s writing all you want though. And we’re very open to discussing our actual experiences in the world and the people we’ve known. There’s a huge chunk of this in A Poet from Hollywood.

“So—Ubon Thai at 7th/Blair, tomorrow (Saturday the 12th) at 3:00pm? A quiet, spacious, friendly, lovely place. Please confirm or suggest an alternative.”

There was no reply from Mr W— of any sort one way or another. On the 12th at 6pm back at home I texted him:

“Even though you did not confirm, in good faith we waited at Ubon Thai for you for two hours. We even had a gift for you, not a digital one, an actual physical gift*. Do not contact me again.”

*The actual physical gift was a copy of Michael’s book, Into the Woods and Back Out Again: An Inspirational Guide to Writing (and Finishing!) Your First Novel, which got some nice reviews when it came out, especially in The Writer.

So. Results so far? Two middle-aged white male respondents who didn’t think twice about grabbing for a position that really, they had no business considering in the first place.

(White Americans tend to be grabby like that. Ask any European—black, brown or white.)

But it’s the casual rudeness that gets me. To be approached and given the once over like that and then discarded like a piece of trash… Is this the usual way white people treat brown people? I would have to say yeh. In past times, yeh. In these times, yeh.

I’m not placing the ad anymore because I can’t, Graffiti editor Don Root is moving to France and I don’t blame him. Getting tired of trying to get any artistic/creative traction going in this subpar town. We might follow him.

PART TWO HERE