This week, Kurt Milberger1 is joining us at Georgia Writers as our latest Writer-in-Residence! His new monthly column, Publicare, will explore how publishing shapes our lives as writers. Below you will find a description of his column and his first entry.
PUBLICARE: The Latin “publicare,” meaning to “make public,” provides the root of our English verb “publish.” Midway between Latin and contemporary English, “to publish” also meant “to people, to populate, to multiply, to breed,” hence our notion that publishing creates publics: communities bound together by shared revelations, understandings, values, and practices. Influenced by Makoto Fujimura’s notion of “culture care,” Kurt Milberger considers moments in publishing’s history and present that demonstrate the power of “publicare” and how acts of publishing shape our lives as writers and beyond.
To be honest, I’ve never fully understood the enthusiasm for publishing. Sure, there are those who strike it rich, who win fame and glory with a well-received novel or a revelatory memoir, but tens of thousands of books appear every year to little more fanfare than the faint flicker of a screen as the announcement tweet rolls away into the vacuum of the infinite scroll. And that’s to say nothing of the innumerable poems, columns, short stories, thinkpieces, and other “content” waiting to succumb to the hackers who will eventually coopt the domains of the little magazines that once gave them life. Publishing is a filthy, muckraking business that demands the writer’s soul and offers very little in return. For some that return amounts to a modest financial reward, notability, perhaps, and the aura of published author with which to impress friends and colleagues at cocktail parties and faculty functions. For others, though, the return can be far worse.
Truly, although I’ve been writing all my life, I’ve always agreed with Emily Dickinson on the impetus to publish: “Publication—is the auction of the mind of Man,” she wrote in a book she bound and hid until her death. And yet, as writers, we feel this urge to publish, and we encourage each other to submit to the whims of the publishing industry—however large, small, or avant-garde. There is something in the writing mind that longs for the validation publication provides: the assurance that the work is complete, that it has taken a settled form, and that it is ready for consumption and, if we’re so bold, for posterity. I feel all this, and yet, I have promised Garrard and the lovely Georgia Writers community a column about publishing, and I’m daily engaged in educating others in its ways. Despite my skepticism, I want to believe in the idealistic dreams of publishing: that it offers each of us a voice, that it brings us together, that it can save our lives and improve our worlds. I want to believe these things because I know them to be true. But I also know my experience to be limited, privileged, and propelled most calculatingly and largely without purpose (or end).
No. Publishing really does make things happen. Terrifying and marvelous things. Consider the political cartoonist whose caricature provokes the wrath of a rogue gunman; the vast mansion belonging to the young woman who wrote the world’s greatest Twilight fanfiction. The assassination of Rushdie’s translators, and the recent attempt on him. Publishing changes the world. And people suffer and die just to do it. They brave expulsion from their families, exile from their countries, national mockery, assassination, and worse, simply to stand up and exclaim, “I exist.” Or, “This is wrong.” Or, “Our world could be better and more beautiful than it is.” The real power of publishing is not a spark, a flare, or a fluke; it is not the bestselling memoir by the third bachelor ejected from Love Island; it is not the next volume of Game of Thrones; it is rather the antique clay vase falling from the grip of Ai WeiWei, the primal yell of Leila Djabli from the walls of her Barberousse cell, the fierce entreating of Dr. King. To really publish is to reveal the truth without fear, and the truth is still a dangerous thing.
Perhaps we don’t pay enough reverence to publishing. I can confidently say I have never met a group more flippant about the real power of publishing than academics, who talk endlessly about the subject, who press it upon each other, who pump their cvs full of publications believing they will open that next adjunct postdoc assistant associate door to bigger grants and more stable funding and health insurance. But no number of drab publications in the International Journal of Control can really extinguish the publication flame around which we all gather like moths, looking for understanding, looking for advancement, looking for love. In this column, I intend to find out what happens when we really consider the power of publishing; and to ask, if we must publish, how can we publish a generative culture, which Makoto Fujimura explains “can inspire us to work within a vision for a culture that is expressed in centuries and millennia rather than quarters, seasons, or fashions,” the kind of thinking that plants “a seed of invigoration into the ecosystem of culture [which becomes] an environment in which people and creativity thrive.” An environment, I must add, more free of clutter, consumption, and waste (and certainly less glutted with vigorous bullshit). But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
I intend to use this column to explore the power of publishing to do good and evil in the world; to look closely at what publishing might have done, while looking unflinchingly at the demonstrable evil and havoc it has caused. My cause is to give solace to those who would rather not publish and pause to those who would rush to add pages to our ever-expanding public record so that it might take on a more beautiful character. To tend a garden of publishing history full of blossoms and nectars, of poisons and thorns. Along the way, I plan to think about the real costs of publishing: in material, in psyche, in society, and in life; and I hope to celebrate any victories we find. I hope you’ll join me for this investigation, and that the results will not be a bore. If you’ve had an experience of publishing, I would love to hear your story, and I can’t wait publish more.
Kurt Milberger teaches publishing and professional writing at Kennesaw State University. He’s worked for several academic journals, and he studies literature, as well as editorial history, theory, and practice. After recently relocating his book collection to Georgia, he longs to no longer delight in books as material objects, but he has too great a fondness for the art of bookmaking.
Publicare
I liked your article.
When I was new to writing and publishing, all I could think about was getting published, published, published. That was what was going to validate me. And I capitalized on every publication through my social media, blah, blah, blah. But your MFA programs do push to get publication credits.
I joined this 100 Rejections in 365 Days FB page, and we all would celebrate our rejections, which was kind of fun. But the idea behind the group was to play a number's game and about 6 months into it, I realized it isn't a number's game. Nowadays, publishers reach out to me. I think publication is more about how your content fits with the publication. I don't just hit send a million times, because it's a waste of my time and the publishers.
But it's not only about publishing; for me it's about being heard and expressing a part of myself. I encourage writers to keep a couple of stories just for themselves. I have two stories I've been "working" on for about 20 years. I don't ever send them out. They're just mine. But it's enjoyable to go back and rewrite every year and make the story better and better...for me. No one else.
Who knows? Maybe I will hit send on those one day.
Have a good weekend!
Dawn Major
www.dawnmajor.com
Great article. Thank you for sharing.