Being a lover of literature has always been a melancholic, bittersweet affair

On publishing, the future of Substack, God, writing, the true self, & Ursula K. Le Guin

As I bid adieu to 2025 and try to feel like a grown-up learning ice-skating for the first time on the shining glittering liminal rink that is 2026, there are few things of which I feel certain.

One big one, however: loving literature is plain tough. It’s always been tough, I suppose, being a cerebral person, feeling alien even when not alienated per se. Thinking differently, loving strangely, on and on. I saw in these last weeks so many year-end wraps, new year predictions, all sorts of scares, dares, nightmares.

Specific to publishing, the consensus seems to be both that it’s doing better than ever (self-publishing is no longer “shameful”! Positive win!) and that it’s in dire straits (we all knew publishers were just glorified gamblers right, come on, was this truly news for anyone?). One thing I noticed: none of these…shall we say…editorials, seemed to talk about lit mags. A lot of them, though, did have opinions about Substack. And what Substack publishing means for writers, gatekeepers, editors, and so on. Some of these opinions were less than rosy:

I gave an official statement of sorts to Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg. Here it is in full:

What I mostly sense here is the gatekeeper’s anxiety. Gatekeeping has its functions, of course, but this concern that editors/agents/publishers are framing as being for the writer is likely faux-concern. Take for example the magazine editor worried about half-baked ideas going out for free, ideas they would have apparently “paid for.” This assumes a world where editors see raw potential and develop it. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Magazines don’t have the mandate for that kind of mentorship. No one is sitting around going “ah this is the next Joan Didion if only I could help them fix their mixed metaphors and concretize their obscure pop culture references and add a bit more Americanah.”

Chalk that up too many writers or too few venues/overworked editors, whatever. The thing about people in traditonal publishing is that they’re married to traditions, so anything that challenges the status quo destabilizes them. I imagine some agents and editors are afraid that they might become irrelevant as more and more people continue to find an audience. Substack lets people do that while potentially getting paid. The alternative isn’t “that writer gets properly developed by gatekeepers,” it’s “that writer never gets any feedback or develops an audience at all and ends up doing odd jobs without any health benefits.”

And then, almost more egregious is that distraction line. How hilariously paternalistic. Some people’s Substacks are their next book. Some people’s newsletters are how they connect to readers. Some people use it as a workshop space. The idea that there’s one correct path (write book → get agent → get editor → get published → repeat) and everything else is “distraction” serves institutions, not writers. The most interesting thing perhaps is that much of the same people who are saying this kind of stuff to unpublished writers are saying the exact opposite to trad-published ones: get on Substack, dance on Tiktok, put pre-order links all over your online creative spaces — it’s obscene.

And I say all this as a writer who desires to “traditionally” publish a book. I do agree that not every writer needs to be on Substack (or any social media for that matter). But an intellectually and artistically free society necessitates the ability to choose without feeling belittled or cornered.

That the kind of editors, agents, publicists New York Magazine might anonymously interview for these clipped hot-takes would think that Substack is, decidedly, *bad for you wittle writers*…well…again…this isn’t a plot-twist, my dear Watson (sorry not sorry but we’ve been delightfully drowning in Sherlock Holmes this holiday season). And of course, let me be kind and say that these are snippets. Certainly if one spoke in confidence, there’d also be nuance, understanding, acknowledgement of the specific as opposed to judgement of the general?

Thing is, bring yourself face to face, heart to heart, with any individual person or their creation and you’ll quickly see that nothing can truly be boxed in. We are not copies of copies of copies as the so-called art and literature produced by AI. We are, inconceivably, utterly, hopelessly unique despite being borne of the irreproducible self-replicating mechanism that is…humanity and civilization.

How is that possible? I’ll leave that to the scientists and theologians. For me, the realization has been thus: so what if Substack will be set on fire or sink to the bowels of Enshittification? So what if the rate of reading declines grows yet steeper and by the end of 2026 no one, not a soul, not you nor me nor anyone, is truly reading anything, merely scanning and scrolling? So fucking what, I say, if the words upon words we write throughout this year and years past, reach no one but the space just beyond our lips, hanging there in an abysmally illiterate universe?

What’s the alternative? Don’t write? Don’t think? Don’t try and uplift other writers and thinkers? Don’t try and create new ways to reach outwards in the darkness? Don’t do what it is that you can’t live without doing?

I suppose. But this is true insomuch as you might think death to be alternative to living. And those of us who’ve felt aflame with life at some point or another will be able to uproariously yawp that no, indeed, death of the body is not the perfect opposite of life, but rather death of the soul. And what do we say to killing that deepest, most beguiling, truest part of us that goes on in this world despite it all?

Not today. Or, in other words: fuck that.

It is in that mood, then, that both Karan Kapoor (my we’ve-been-reincarnated-together-for-a-hundred-years husband) and I are deciding to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” that might be portended by all the doomsdaying that goes on here, there, everywhere.

Practically speaking, we’re juggling several projects. Our poetry magazine, ONLY POEMS, is 2.5 years old and growing more beautifully than we could have ever hoped for. I wonder if anyone ever predicated that in circa 2023. That over 50,000 people would fall in love with a poetry magazine started by two grad students while their toddler slept. No, probably not.

I say this not to gloat in anyway. I’ve laid my heart at the same altar as Leonard Cohen’s music and can earnestly say when I sing along in my broken voice to “If It Be Your Will”, I feel the truth of universe singing with me.

Rather, I say this to prove a little point. None of your creative ideas need to be the ones that “everyone’s” talking about and predicting, and trend-charting and so on and so forth. Do the thing you can’t help but do. That, in and of itself, is success.

Besides OP, we’ve also launched Strange Pilgrims, a literary magazine for prose seeking to publish the most “real, surreal, & brutally beautiful writing.” This one went viral on Substack and we received over 7000 submissions in our first ever call. It’ll be interesting to see how that momentum continues and how, inevitably, things stabilize and what beautiful strange stuff emerges from that.

Other than this, on a more personal level, we are writing, if you’ll believe it or not. Beyond Substack, beyond editorials, opinions, and so on, we are at work on first books. Karan’s just gotten an awesome book deal for his debut poetry collection and I’ll share more about this in the coming weeks (perhaps get him to come out of his shyness and share the process of it himself!).

As for me, I’m still writing that horror-magic realist novel. Writing short stories that blend fantasy and meta-modernism and the mundane with a bit of sci-fi. Writing poems about being the only person after the end of the world left alive.

A confession, so often this year I’ve pulled myself from trying to even indulge in thoughts of “gaming the system.” Let me be frank, with the level of publishing research and insider insight I have right now (which isn’t as much as say a Big 5 editor or top agent would but is quite a bit more than someone not so entrenched in this space as me would), do I think I could vomit up a cozy-romantasy with the just the right selling-points and land some kind of solid deal?

I bloody well think so.

Do I want to do that?

Oh, sigh, don’t we all want to sometimes betray our souls and be positively beleaguered with tons of fuck-you-money?

I’d say so.

Have I (or, let’s face it, Karan) pulled myself away from that ridiculous precipice and come back to the page, the blank page, the blinking page, my page, my words, myself, every single time?

Damn right.

My friends, you are the best person out there for the job. And the job is, quite simply, to be yourself. Be more and more of who you truly are ever more and more as the months and years pass. And by the end of this ride, we will have found the truest self.

I’ll leave us with these words of a literary master I adore, Ursula K. Le Guin from A Wizard of Earthsea:

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”

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