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THE RECKLESS WRITER
Publishing Has Been an Exercise in Censorship for the Last 50 Years
If you’ve been denied a platform it’s because you’re speaking more truth than the privileged can handle
My editor started in with his nonsense again and I wasn’t having any of it.
“I’m not changing it,” I said. “My words are right.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because the universe told me. I’ve spent my whole life listening. On this I am certain. You need to leave well enough alone.”
My editor recoiled because he knew better than to get between a real writer and his muse. I wouldn’t have said this to him had he been a real editor, but editor was only his title. In truth, he was a businessman. He had money so he’d bought a publication.
Bought, not built, big difference.
The thing about having money is that it doesn’t require any talent. He had none, that’s why he needed me. We’d entered into a gentleman’s agreement. He’d pay me, and I’d provide words people actually wanted to read.
That was all well and good. But now he was trying to mess it up with dumb opinions I didn’t need.
“Stay in your lane,” I said. “Your contribution is cash, nothing more. If your opinions were in demand, I never would have gotten through the door.”
You have to talk to rich, entitled people like this every now and then, but the problem is that most writers don’t. Most writers can’t. But I was living abroad at the time, and this job was just a hobby of mine. There wasn’t anyone in the whole country who could write in English as well as I could, and even the entitled expats knew it.
They knew it.
They didn’t want to admit it because privilege recoils from the truth, but they knew it and they knew they needed me because they wanted some legitimacy.
Publications require poetry. Poetry requires truth. I wasn’t a poet then, but I was better than them. I am not a poet yet, but I’m getting close.
What I’ve found is that people with money tend to be dead inside. They look back on their lives…
