When the walls close in but do not crush

St. Jerome Writing by Caravaggio

I’ve spent 15 years fighting against a system that does not want me in it. 11 years ago, I settled on “freelancer” as a job because media does not have any interest in or space for me. Maybe it’s that they don’t want someone like me in this space or maybe it’s something about me personally; I don’t know. Either way, in addition to the grind of writing and thinking and creating, I also get to grind to even be able to write and think and create at all. It’s actually a struggle for survival because I would literally die if I couldn’t get out what I have inside me. So grinding everywhere, always, as a “freelancer” — someone who does not have a job and must constantly search for people to take me on for a new article.

Last week, I quit my column at The Maple. Formerly Passage, I was announced as being one of, or maybe its first columnist when it launched. I had been writing something that looked like a column for many years and that thing had gone from rabble to the National Observer to the Washington Post and then, at the start of 2020, over to The Maple. I liked it there. I didn’t have to explain certain Canadian things as I did for the Washington Post. I outgrew rabble (and then tried to help unionize the staff which, you know, is a buzzkiller for management). I lost my National Observer column to being lied to about how they only wanted columns on climate change, and then they hired a Liberal who writes Liberal tripe so, well, that’s life in Canada!

But after three years with The Maple, it’s been enough. I was more and more having columns rejected, more and more feeling like it was just another in a very short list of places I could pitch to that will, on the balance of probabilities, reject me. Some of those pieces ended up on Substack. I know that if I were a man, things would have worked out differently. Progressive or not, men in media never get it regardless of how much they think they might. You can read what would have been my 70th piece here, rejected for not being compelling enough:

Anyway. I’d like to say enough of that; time to move on but I feel trapped. The walls are closing in on me. There are so few places to write for in Canada that I have nearly nowhere else to go. Maclean’s has scaled so far back that everything I’ve pitched to them in about 2 years has netted a polite rejection. The Globe has rejected everything I’ve pitched since l’Affaire Humboldt in 2018. The Walrus, Chatelaine — I get polite replies. Try again! which, of course, I will.

Pitch pitch pitch pitch pitch. I don’t think that I was once asked to write something for Passage; it’s always been my job to convince someone that my ideas are good enough to warrant their time and like $200. (I have been asked to write for The Maple — the news side of what is now the same publication — which is always a relief). Pitch pitch pitch. You tell us your ideas. You tell me what you want to write and I’ll either send you a single word email with “ok” or a five-word email with “I’ll pass on this one.” Pitch pitch pitch, bleed out your ideas, beg for someone who you’ve never met to agree to give you a chance. They have the job so they have all the power and the only tool in my arsenl is to pitch again. Pitch once more. It’s one thing when that happens with The Walrus who owes me nothing, but when it’s your column? It’s time to go.

But these walls that close in. Rather than crushing me, they will stop and leave me just enough room for me to just do this. My own thing, here on Substack right now but before on other platforms. No editors. No distribution. No publications who can promote anything for me. No audiences that go beyond my own personal network. No accountability, really. It’s great but it isn’t great. It’s not death but it’s its own workplace hazard.

And while Substack has been great, it feels also like another of a long list of examples of failure. Most days, I chalk that failure up to the mainstream media. Other days, I absorb the failure as my own personal failing.

All of this is to say — thanks for reading and don’t expect to see my stuff any longer at The Maple. Maybe I failed to be more flexible. You can judge the quality of the piece above yourself.

It’s lonely out here in this little room. This loneliness pushes people out of media entirely and it keeps the ones who do have jobs in line. No one dare stick their neck out or else face a layoff and the possibility of the future floating in an isolated, marginalized abyss.

We writers bleed for very little in this fake country. We writers give it all away hoping for something to come of that last offering. And nothing does ever come. So we do it again. Chiselling here and there and finding new things to mine and if we’re lucky, the mine is full of the things that are only in our heads but if we’re unlucky, the mine cuts into our bodies and we take from which we probably should not take. But who is to stop us when the most commercializable pieces of ourselves are also our most valuable to us?