What If Craft Is Dead?
I’m not sure when I began noticing this, but for five years, maybe more, I haven’t been able to trust the new releases at my local bookstore as touchstones for my own writing life. The same problem has bedeviled my reading in literary magazines.
Nearly every serious journal has a sentence or two in its submission guidelines pleading with writers to actually read the publication first to see if their work is a good fit. Over a long apprenticeship I took that to heart, browsing the racks at the college library and even taking out a few subscriptions to magazines like The Missouri Review where I hoped I might someday climb.
The idea was that these journals were run by curators whose sensibilities I either shared or aspired to share, and that by studying the works they published, I could learn how to hone my own craft. The same was true of the Best American Essays series. Those volumes featured more than their share of New Yorker staffers, but they also pulled essays from Salmagundi, Boulevard, or Cimarron Review — journals with circulations in the hundreds or low thousands. Reading Best American was like watching franchise players alongside a few rookies called up from Triple A.
There was always something capricious about that structure. Best American is a thoroughly subjective anthology, governed as much by the implicit biases of Robert Atwan and other invisible staffers as by the heavy hitters who rotate in as guest editors. But there was something exciting about getting an acceptance from a small magazine, knowing that they sent each of their volumes to Atwan et al, and that everyone who shared those pages had a chance — however tiny — of getting the nod from a pro like Susan Orlean or Louis Menand.
In fact, I’ve come to think about publishing past and present as something akin to professional sports. No one would claim that the players you see on TV are the only people in the world with that level of potential. There are plenty of wildly talented kids who never get discovered, don’t have the resources to play, or just choose different paths.
But you have to play organized sports to end up in the major leagues. Unless you are a true prodigy, you’ll have to work with coaches, overcome some hardship with your team, complete a long apprenticeship to the sport before you get your call up to The Show. The game doesn’t owe you anything, and it could leave you languishing in Single A for reasons that are purely political or market driven (maybe your team has too many third basemen at every level). But generally talent asserts itself within the rules and structures of the league, and the players who make it to the top have earned their spot.
I can’t pinpoint the day or the year when my faith in traditional publishing faltered. But seeing Rabih Alameddine as the lead author in back to back volumes of the Best American Series was one flash point. In “Comforting Myths,” the Harper’s essay that Rebecca Solnit chose for the 2019 edition, Alameddine purports to wrestle with serious questions — “who gets to tell stories” and “who gets to talk” in world literature — but backs away from serious answers. “How to get out of this cycle?” he asks in the penultimate paragraph. “I don’t know. I’m a writer; answers are not my forte. Complaining certainly is.” Never mind the irony of a spread in Harper’s combined with Best American honors against claims about the dominant culture in publishing. It was the idea that writing = complaining that brought me up short. Where was craft in all this?
Alemaddine’s “How to Bartend,” which André Aciman chose for Best American Essays 2020, shows some nice braiding of personal history, cultural history, and humor. Echoes of the AIDS crisis also establish clear stakes. But there is a glibness to it that belies its seriousness. Here was a decorated writer, but I didn’t trust the voice and wasn’t finding much at the sentence level or in the overall design that I wanted to carry back into my own writing practice. And I’m not just picking on Alemaddine. This was a head-scratching pattern repeated over and over again. Was it hubris? Bias? Or another sign that the rules and structure of the game are shifting away from my own apprenticeship to the essay, from what I think of as the long arcs of the craft?
It is strange to feel, in mid-life, that the target you’ve been aiming at for years has moved, is still moving, that most of your salient reference points are now ten, twenty years old. It’s one thing to struggle with a sophomore slump, as Grady Tripp does in Wonder Boys (2001), where a mid-career author who’s lost a step needs a hungry young rookie to keep him honest. That story considers the perennial questions of envy and taste, summed up nicely by James Leer’s laughter in the “I am a writer” scene, when Quentin “Q” Morewood reveals himself to be a stuffed shirt. But the film still encourages a view that new talent can be discovered, that veterans might find a second act if they get the words right. The mark isn’t accolades, it’s art, and the true believers have all more or less kept the faith by the end.
The state of craft now seems more akin to Monk Ellison’s plight in American Fiction (2023), where the kind of books he wants to write, that he feels would be actual achievements, aren’t the sort that anyone wants to read. Only by masquerading as a conventionally Black author, even parodying the tropes now en vogue, can Monk be discovered. He simply can’t push the industry too far, not even when he proposes changing the title of his book from My Pafology to Fuck.
Ellison’s ultimate compliance with his publishers and movie producers (the joke’s on him in the end) suggests that craft is indeed dead. It’s not a literary sensibility that prevails, it’s cash. The real Ellison isn’t discovered at all.
It’s tempting to stack those two films next to each other, and the two novels that inspired them, and say, like a despairing preacher, “We’ve come a long way, baby.” But the actual books were published in closer proximity. Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys was released in 1995, and Percival Everett’s Erasure appeared in 2001. So how much has really changed?
I find myself wondering if the writing life has truly reached the crossroads I see or whether I’m projecting too much of my own mid-life ambivalence onto it. Poets & Writers is still going strong. The Association of Writers & Writing Programs is humming along. I can’t always tell if Substack creates an echo chamber for disaffected literary refugees, and if my own exodus from academe amplifies that effect, or if the buzz about trouble for writers is real. American Fiction wouldn’t have received five Oscar nominations if it missed the mark. And a simple search of “reading” at The Chronicle of Higher Education — which one might consider a reliable benchmark of the status of literature in higher ed — turns up these headlines, all from this summer.
Students who won’t read might seem like a separate problem from craft. But even scholars like Steven Greenblatt say that the quality of streaming television means they don’t read as much anymore. So I don’t think I’m making it up; we do seem at an inflection point.
When I left a tenured faculty position nearly three years ago, I planned to double down on submissions and contests, really lean into the longform writing that I’d only been able to do on the side for so many years. I’d done well enough, publishing more than 50 pieces in lit mags, and a memoir with an esteemed press. But it takes months to hone an essay for Fourth Genre or Granta. Given the increasing rate of rejections for even the most accomplished authors, it could be years before any single piece appears in public dress, not to mention hundreds in submission fees. I keep hearing the same drumbeat of budget cuts and closures, even at the more storied magazines, that drove me out of academe originally. Whether The Missouri Review will still exist in another ten years is anyone’s guess.
With so many of those traditional structures breaking down, it’s hard to know which star to fix your dream upon.
Personal branding is supposed to be the way out of all this. No gatekeepers, no curators, just the beat of your own drum. Build the right self, follow your own curiosity, and the followers will come. Let the people have their say. But the rules and structure of that game often have little to do with high-level aesthetics. It’s the half-baked and the raw, the hot and provocative take, that takes the lead. Maybe it’s that word “high” that keeps tripping me up, the sense that one can advance, rise, reach a certain height as a writer based on sentences and design alone. But that’s what I used to be looking for among the new releases, a mark to aim at, like a minor leaguer studying Shohei Ohtani’s swing. It’s as if I spent decades perfecting the art of making contact, learning how to put the ball in play and rarely strike out, only to learn that it’s all homers and Ks now. That scouts want nothing but raw speed and power, dazzling bursts for the highlight reel, not the 2,632 consecutive games that Cal Ripken, Jr. once played.
Maybe there aren’t any scouts anymore, not really. Just a buzzing confusion of writers with fading readers, like thousands of players running their own private home run derbies, hoping to draw a crowd. But if that’s true, how long before the fences disappear and it’s impossible to identify any benchmark of aesthetic accomplishment at all?
It’s possible that craft is dead, and we have killed it. So many conventions have eroded that recognizable achievements through sheer command of language may not be possible any longer, or not in a formal sense. That is how the modernists felt, but they also knew there was no use waxing nostalgic about a world that had simply ceased to be. I’m still not sure how to balance my sensibility for what good writing is with online platforms, how to feed my art rather than simply feeding the feed.
Yet I had a taste of what I’ve been missing recently while reading ’s A Walking Life (2020), Kao Kalia Yang’s Where Rivers Part (2024), and Mark Slouka’s Nobody’s Son (2017). I’m looking forward to Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red (forthcoming). The current title on my nightstand is ’s Fall Back Down When I Die (2020), and it’s kindling fresh creative fires. These are all works that ran the publishing gauntlet within the last seven years.
So I end with more questions than answers. And an invitation: Where do you go to spark your own creativity? What are you reading that restores your faith in discerning writers, discerning readers, and in craft as an enduring principle in your writing practice?
Maybe you can help me restore my faith in the truism that life is short but art is long, blessedly long.
writes .
I suspect that the ‘artisan writing’ you aspire to has simply become drowned in the marketing of author-as-consumer product…MFA programs also have created a massive oversupply of writers with artisan standards out of all correlation with any absolute growth in this kind of reader. It’s analogous to academia itself. Oversupply of folks with extremely high standards…but declining demand for them. A society predicated on radical, aspirational autonomy easily mismatches artistic supply with demand for art. The question to ask is: is it not better to have emotional impact on more people than to maximize artisan quality? My answer eventually became yes…broader impact is more satisfying…
Great piece Josh. This captures so much of my thought process - this feeling that something is really going wrong with the industry and that what the industry regards as quality is very different from what you or I would regard as quality.