That Desire to Run Away
and pitch opportunities, of course
Hi, writer friends,
I started this newsletter because at the start of the pandemic, it felt really hard to write. And wow. I never imagined that it would just keep getting harder. Are you feeling that? I’m feeling that. But I hope you’re still searching for the words and finding ways to make it work.
Earlier this week I sent out some tips on how to find any editor’s email. And in case you missed it, I offered my help on pitches, too. If you’re looking for feedback or advice on where to pitch a story, send your pitch my way.
But first! Have you subscribed? Please subscribe if you’d like pitch assistance, and to keep receiving One More Question each week!
(I’ll be offline for the next couple of days, so if you email me about pitch help, it might be Monday before I get back to you.)
Now let’s get to it. Today we have:
Some thoughts on when it’s not your time to tell the story
Recommendations of the week
Opportunities and editors who want your pitches
That Desire to Run Away
I’ve been thinking about escapism a lot lately. It’s my go-to coping mechanism, whenever things don’t feel quite right. When I’m sad or scared or frustrated, I want change. I want out. I go run in the woods for hours to deal with a heartbreak. I take a three-month road trip when I’m dissatisfied with work.
Writing is an escape, too. It gives me an excuse to go away—sometimes physically, for a story, other times mentally, through a story.
These past two weeks, like so many of us, I’ve been immersed in the heartache and anger that have flared up across the U.S. in response to the murder of George Floyd. In between Googling action items and grappling with the many ways I’ve ignored the anti-Blackness around me for most of my life, I’ve been perusing Craigslist for camper vans and making plans to hit the road.
Shit feels bad. I want out.
The other day I wrote a phone number on my forearm in thick black sharpie. It was the number of an organization that would bail me out of jail if I were arrested at the protest I attended in Portland, Oregon. The next morning, I scrubbed it off in the shower. All it took was a couple swipes of my hot pink loofa for the white suds to mix with black ink; the evidence of the night slipped right off my skin and disappeared down the drain.
This is my life as a white person: However consumed I may find myself in the news and however dedicated I may claim to be in the work to address white supremacy and fight for equality, I can wash it away when I get home from the protest. I can run away when I want to. I can always opt out.
No wonder travel and adventure writing is so overwhelming white. Those stories are about escape. How privileged I am to be able to just run away from all of this.
I was bundled up with inadequate winter layers the first time someone told me, “This is not your story to tell.”
We were sitting in a big dome tent in North Dakota, a brutal storm whistling just outside. The canvas tent shuddered. There were about 50 of us gathered for a workshop—mostly white people who had traveled there to join the Standing Rock protests, and we were listening to a Black man talk about decolonization. (I think this was the first time I’d ever heard that word.)
The story of what was happening at Standing Rock wasn’t his story to tell either. But he was well-versed in the dangers of white people stealing time and space. He told us not to do that here. Don’t take photos. Don’t write about this on your blog. Don’t ask elders to tell you about their lives. They’re fighting and they’re tired and you shouldn’t bother them with your sudden desire to understand generations of trauma that lurk behind this moment you suddenly showed up for.
And to be honest, that made me kind of angry. I bought a plane ticket and rented a car and borrowed a 4-season tent to join the water protectors at Standing Rock. I wanted to fight the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and I wanted to write about it so more people would join the fight. That’s what I do. That’s how I help. I write.
And shouldn’t people know what’s going on here? How hard Indigenous people were fighting to keep their land and their water from being poisoned, yet again? The public needed to know of the atrocities of police dogs and rubber bullets being deployed on unarmed, kneeling protesters. If I couldn’t write about it, what good was I?
But he was right. I wouldn’t really understand what I was writing about if I had tried. It was all so much more complicated than I knew. But enough time has passed that I can write about the lessons I learned there. I can offer a perspective that won’t stand in for someone else’s. And I found my way to help in the donation tent, where I handed out winter layers and propane.
Now we are in one of those moments, where for many of us, this is not our story to tell. This is our time to learn. And as writers, that can be a scary thing.
It makes me want to run away. It makes me want to go find something that feels familiar.
I was listening to The Ezra Klein Show with Ta-Nehisi Coates yesterday, and heard one of those lines that I needed to hear a few times over.
Coastes said:
“I’ve always said my objective as a writer is not merely to write in such a way that people read it and they say, ‘Yeah I think that’s correct.’ It’s to write in such a way that people are haunted—that they go to bed thinking about it, that they wake up thinking about, they tell their spouses about it, they tell their children and their friends about it and they grab them by the arm and say, ‘You have to read this.’”
It made me think of how I’m always searching for the little details of a moment that will transport someone to where I’m at, to make some kind of recognition click in their mind so where I’m at connects to where they’re at.
But to really haunt a reader, like Coates does so effectively in just about everything he writes, you need an awareness of the bigger picture. Not just the details. You have to zoom out, be patient, soak it in.
I can’t tell you whether or not you should write about the protests and the reckoning occurring across the U.S. right now. We need people to report on the news and write about what’s happening out there. And we definitely need Black perspectives on all of this. If you are a Black writer, then just about every editor wants to hear from you right now. And maybe that feels just as bad as no one wanting to hear from you—this sudden call to Black writers to help diversify very white publications when they’ve been leaving your stories out of the big picture for so long. The blind spots are suddenly so glaring.
But I can tell you that I am trying to keep my feet on the ground and see the bigger picture. I am a white writer, and I will never know this moment or the depth of these issues in their entirety. But I’m trying to learn and understand more of it. I’m reading the stories of Black writers who have been experiencing racism and oppression for generations. And part of that means understanding that I do play a role in all of this—that I am part of the problem. And wow, that is uncomfortable. But here we are, and it’s my time to sit with that.
I still want to run away.
But I’m determined to stay engaged with the discomfort of all of this—resisting the urge to escape it all, resisting the urge to run away from my complicity. I hope that doing so will make me a better person. I hope it will make me a better writer, too.
Reads of the Week
“I lied for years about what I read because I thought I had to have read these books to write my own. I thought I needed permission from white ghosts.” How to Write the Story of Your Life (Gay Magazine)
“The past beat us bloody, the present is beating us black and blue then blaming us for the bruises, and the future will either thank us for finally breaking the cycle of trauma or bury even the most basic facts about what happened in unmarked graves.” Whose Grief? Our Grief (GQ)
Opportunities and Editors Who Want Your Pitches
Do you want to be the A to My Q’s?
I’m looking for more writers to participate in Q&A’s for One More Question. If you have a book release, or an article you recently published, or anything writing-related that you want to talk about, I’d love to share your insight with readers of One More Question and also offer this space to promote your work. And I would like to prioritize BIPOC voices, because that has been a glaring blind spot in this newsletter, too.
Britany.robinson@gmail.com.
That’s all for today, friends. Take care of yourselves.
Britany