Writers like to talk about hard work. They like to tell stories of long odds and longer hours, leaf piles of drafts and rejection slips, and thank-God-at-last breakthroughs.  

What they don’t like to talk about is the wind at their backs. The privileges or advantages that helped them along the way. But in a recent article in Salon, Ann Bauer came clean about her advantages, mostly because she felt a sense of responsibility to tell younger writers the whole story of literary success. “We do an enormous ‘let them eat cake’ disservice to our community” she writes, “when we obfuscate the circumstances that help us write, publish, and in some way, succeed.”

Bauer ends the piece with a challenge to other writers. “Okay, there’s mine,” she says about her story of privilege. “Now show me yours.”

It’s a challenge with potential. If enough of us do it, something might happen. If enough of us acknowledge the relationship between privilege and publishing, we might have a chance at changing that relationship. 

I’ll engage with this challenge in two takes. Take one is just below. Everything that follows is true, and is also a lie, unless you read it with take two. 

 

Privilege Bio, Take One

Bryan Furuness is a white, male, American citizen who grew up speaking English. This bio could stop here, because these facts alone make him astronomically more privileged that 99% of other earthlings ever.

His childhood was marked by stability and leisure. No divorces, financial crises, major dramas or traumas. His mother was a teacher and his father was a guidance counselor. They weren’t rich, but they weren’t poor, either. No one put any pressure on Bryan to get a job, so he spent his summers sleeping late and playing sand volleyball and eating Little Caesars.

College wasn’t a question; it was a given. His parents paid the tuition, as well as room and board. When he declared that he wanted to be an English major, his parents weren’t exactly enthused—What are you going to do with that?—but they didn’t fight him, either.  

Years later, in his thirties, he finally figured out what he wanted to do with it: Go to grad school. While studying fiction writing in a low-residency program, he kept his job as an insurance salesman. It was the kind of job where you had to work very hard for a few years to build up a client base, but after that you could pretty much put it on cruise control. Most days, he’d put in three or four focused hours of insurance work before turning to his own writing and reading.

He didn’t like selling insurance, though—or maybe he didn’t like thinking of himself as an insurance salesman—so he quit the agency shortly after getting his degree. At that point, he was teaching part-time as an adjunct, and his goal was to land a full-time teaching job, which is rare and very hard to get. An adjunct’s salary is lean pickings, but they made it because his wife got a job as a professor and provided insurance. Also, his parents gave them a van.

Within a year of leaving the insurance world, he landed a full-time teaching position at the same university where his wife worked (Some might say the only reason he got that job was because of her.).

He doesn’t make a lot of money, but he lives in Indianapolis, which is so cheap. He has two boys, both healthy and (relatively) easy kids. Not a special need or chronic ailment between them. As a professor, he pretty much makes his own schedule. If he wants to go home after his 1:00 class, put on sweatpants and read comics the rest of the day, nobody’s gonna stop him.

His wife is supportive. As in, she’s the main breadwinner. As in, she is happy to take the boys so he can go to readings, conferences, to the coffee shop on Saturday mornings to write, etc.

From this perspective, it’s difficult to imagine how his life could have been easier. If the world of writing and publishing were a 100 meter race, his starting blocks would be at the 75 meter mark, plus he’d have a jetpack. No wonder he published a novel. The real wonder might be how, with all these advantages, he has not produced more and better work in forty charmed years.

Privilege Bio, Take 2

All of this is true, and all of this is a lie, unless you also read “Take 1” above.

Bryan Furuness was born in East Chicago, Indiana, a blue collar community in the heart of the heart of the country. His parents were schoolteachers. His friends’ parents were welders, contractors, small business owners, classroom aides, foremen. As a boy, he wanted to be a writer, but he can’t recall admitting that to anyone. Maybe because he was afraid they would screw up their face, like Who do you think you are?

After high school, he went to a state university. Sometime during his sophomore year, he attended a call-out meeting for a travel abroad program. The group was going to Australia. Freaking Australia! At first he was excited, but in the end he lost heart. Didn’t even submit an application. Why? He couldn’t see himself in a travel-abroad program. He thought: That’s for rich kids. Not for people like me.

That was a total failure of imagination. But you might say that his imagination— his concept of who he was and what he was capable of—had been shaped by where he’d come from. His community, his people, his socio-economic group.

In college he was an English major. He didn’t know what he was “going to do with that,” as his concerned family members put it, but here’s the truly astounding thing: He didn’t consider grad school. Not because he was dying to get into the work force or anything. It just didn’t occur to him as a real option. That’s not for people like me.

Skip ahead a few years. Bryan has just started a commission-only sales job, which needs to go well because now his wife is working on her Ph.D., and he’s the breadwinner. Now there’s one baby at home, and another on the way. If he doesn’t sell, they don’t eat. If he doesn’t sell, they lose everything.

So of course that’s when he decides to go to grad school.

He enrolls in a low-residency program so he can keep his job as he studies and writes. For the next several years, he goes to the conference room of his office building at five in the morning, praying that his boss won’t come in early and talk to him about sales shit. At night, he and his wife both study in the walk-in closet of the baby’s room, taking turns patting the cranky baby who has yet another ear infection. The next baby’s ears are fine (thank God!) but he turns out to be a noise machine who has no interest in sleep (oh God!).  

Those years, what a feverish blur. When Bryan and his wife look back on that time, they don’t remember much. Only that nobody slept. Every month there was something in the house or the car that broke, and some bill that didn’t get paid. But they scrimped and saved and Bryan sold enough to keep them (mostly) afloat, and they limped through grad school and infancy. “Writing isn’t an indulgence,” says Richard Bausch. “Indulgences are what you give up to do it.” To which Bryan would say: Fucking-A right, Richard.

Bryan still lives in Indiana, about a thousand light years away from the publishing houses and networking circles of New York. He and his wife both teach at a college they love, though the pay is modest and their student loan bills come to about $800 a month. And that’s on a payment plan that is extended past the point when normal people retire.

At work, his title is “instructor,” which means that he is full-time but not tenure-stream. On one hand, he likes being an instructor, because it means he doesn’t have to serve on eighteen billion committees like the tenure people do. He’s free to focus on writing and teaching. On the other hand, he recognizes that “instructor” means teaching more classes for less pay, less respect from tenured colleagues, and much less job security.

He has to wonder at his reasons for not applying for tenure-stream jobs: Is it because that’s not for people like him?

In many practical ways, his life is easier now than it has been in years. But it’s also so busy, so demanding. At night he still studies and reads and works, just no longer in a walk-in closet. He still gets up before six to write. It took nearly ten years of this approach (and around fourteen drafts) to produce his first novel.   

Basically, he’s taken a blue collar approach to the writing life. He scraps, he hustles. He isn’t the most talented writer, but he can grind it out with anyone. If you tot up his working hours—writing, reading, editing, and teaching—it comes out to well over sixty hours a week. And he still can’t keep his inbox empty.

A part of him knows this is not sustainable. Honestly, the last two years have been a slow burn-out. But he doesn’t know what will happen when he can no longer carry this load. The grind is what he knows. What little success he has experienced in the literary world—and let the reader be assured: It is very little—he has clawed out of stone. He has paid in promissory notes, rejection slips, and closet hours.