In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I met up with Dave Bry, who, as his subtitle suggests, “grapples with a lifetime of regret, one incident at a time,” in Public Apology—which is, he explains, more than a collection of his columns of the same name at The Awl. Contractually, it had to be 60% all-new material, and that requirement helped him make the transition from a collection of anecdotes where Bry presents himself as the butt of a joke to a life story of substance and consequence.

(Bry cheerfully cops to the “gimmick”-y nature of some of the columns—the notion that the apology is simply the device that enables him to write about a given subject—but here’s the thing: It’s okay to use the tools that are at hand! You’ll also hear about how Bry’s editor, Choire Sicha, recognized the potential book lurking in the column long before Bry himself did…)

Listen to Life Stories #31: Dave Bry (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

A Curious Man is the story of Robert Ripley, a cartoonist who became not just one of 20th-century America’s most successful media personalities, but actually shaped the nation’s popular speech—the Ripley who made “Believe It or Not!” a catch phrase. Neal Thompson tells us what led him to tell that story—and he’s got a detail of special relevance to this blog. “Beatrice was the name of Ripley’s wife, a beautiful Zeigfeld Follies dancer,” he reports. “Their volatile three-year marriage ended in divorce, but they stayed in touch the rest of their lives. Hoping that’ll be the same for me and you, Beatrice.”

I’ve always been fascinated by the origins of books—mine and others, and especially nonfiction. Over the years, I’ve spend a lot of time meeting with and interviewing other authors, and I always have to ask: Why devote two, three, five years of your life to this person? Why thisstory? Now I get to challenge myself with the same question: Why invest half a decade in researching and writing the life of Robert Ripley?

For me, committing a chunk of my life to a particular life story requires two qualities: a come-from-behind arc, and an aspiration toward excellence. In most cases, my ideas ferment for years before they feel ready to be uncorked. In the case of Ripley, though, it was uncorked love at first site.

Unlike my previous books, I can pinpoint the exact day this story became my inspiration-slash-obsession: August 24, 2007. That’s the day I read a New York Times article about a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum opening in Times Square. The story included a brief description of Ripley the man, and something clicked. “Oh yeah,” I thought. “There was a real guy named Ripley. I wonder what he was like?” Six years later, I’m still wondering, which is a good sign—I never got bored of this guy.

Among other tidbits, my first frenzied internet search that day in 2007 turned up the following: Though shy and bucktoothed, Ripley became a renowned ladies man who had multiple girlfriends living with him at once—an actual harem; he was earning half a million dollars a year at the low-point of the Depression, living in a mansion on a private island, where he’d host massive Hefneresque parties; as a radio pioneer, he broadcast shows from underwater, midair, inside Carlsbad Caverns, and from the bottom of the Grand Canyon—the last an event that helped launch Barry Goldwater’s political career; he traveled to scores of countries, covering more than 100,000 miles in 1933-34 alone, but never drove a car; he was the model for Bugs Bunny’s nemesis, Elmer Fudd. Even Ripley’s death and final resting place had an eccentric twist: he died during the taping of his 13th TV show—an episode featuring the burial song, “Taps”—and he’s buried at Odd Fellows Cemetery, just blocks from his childhood home in Santa Rosa, California.

The other inspiration was realizing that Ripley’s story—which had never been fully told before—was the ultimate underdog tale. I’ve always been drawn to underdogs, and most of the real-life characters in my books had some sort of underdog quality. Alan Shepard (profiled in Light This Candle) was a skinny kid, a rebel, and a trouble maker, who was almost kicked out of the Navy but went on to become America’s first spaceman. The southern moonshiners in Driving with the Devil were poor and undereducated but found their bliss behind the wheel of a Ford V-8. The football players in Hurricane Season recovered from the devastation of Katrina to bring their school and their team to a state championship.

Having grown up with a sister who had a disability (Down syndrome), I’ve always appreciated those who overcome some hardship or setback, who challenge themselves and accomplish something remarkable. Even better is a character who, despite his or her setbacks, strives to live a large, over-the-top life, to push themself to a physical or emotional extreme in order to achieve the unachievable. I’m awed by the people I write about (just as I was awed by my sister), and my books are all efforts to share that awe.
I’ve been awed by Ripley every day since that six-years-ago discovery. In fact, seeing A Curious Man in print is in some ways a relief. When I first latched onto Ripley’s story that day, I felt as if I’d discovered a hidden treasure, some forgotten slice of Americana. Over the years, I’ve battled nerves and paranoia, imagining another writer coming across the same Times story and having the same “holy s**t” realization.

Now, I can only hope that readers enjoy the wild ride of Ripley’s rambling life and over-the-top lifestyle. I also hope they’ll experience the same unexpected sense that I developed, which is that Ripley’s influence is all around us, sixty-plus years after his death. As one early reviewer put it, “The world Ripley created is the world in which we now live.”

Fred Waitzkin’s debut novel, The Dream Merchant, “tells the story of a gifted salesman who can sell anything to anyone,” as he described it when he sent his guest essay along. I say “debut novel,” but Waitzkin’s been writing for years; even if you didn’t read his memoir about raising a chess prodigy, Searching for Bobby Fischer, you might’ve seen the movie—and that’s just one of his books. So why, after all this time, a novel? “It’s a layered question,” he wrote, “and for a semi-coherent answer I should start at the beginning.” (Afterwards, if you want to learn more about Waitzkin’s writing process, he spoke at length to Scientific American blogger Scott Barry Kaufman.)

When I was a 13-year-old boy growing up on Long Island, I dreamed of being a salesman like my dad. I worshipped him and wanted to follow in his footsteps selling fluorescent lighting fixtures for new office buildings. He was a great salesman—he landed a lot of big orders, and like my protagonist, he was not restrained by ethics or fear of hell. And I loved his chutzpah. I learned from Abe Waitzkin the language and ecstasy of the big deal, and ultimately I learned from him the tragedy of a salesman.

My mother, an abstract painter, hated the idea of her son being a salesman. She was always reading me poems and stories. When I was 12 or 13, she gave me Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. By then I was already an ardent fisherman and Hemingway’s tale of heroic loss and longing written in short rhythmic sentences burrowed itself into my being. On the pages of my earliest short stories Mother would edit my prose with passionate (India ink) suggestions that looked like de Kooning abstractions. Mother would introduce lush metaphors that I had never imagined were in this world. Also, when I was a teenager, she introduced me to jazz and took me into Manhattan for drumming lessons. To this day I still pound out rhythms on the skins. But more to the point, I’ve refined the Afro-Cuban rhythms of my youth, and they are all through my prose. I write tapping my foot.

My parents disliked each other for as far back as I can remember. They were divorced when I was 16, but this dichotomy between my dad who was a meat and potatoes guy, brilliant but darkly pragmatic, and my mother, who thrived in fantasy and was dedicated to art, created a polarity that has guided my aesthetic life to this day.

In my twenties, I spent years working on short fiction and trying to write novels. Back then I believed that for a writer, the novel was the heavyweight champion of literature. I didn’t take journalism seriously. I thought that journalists were hacks. But I struggled mightily in my early attempts to write fiction. It was a gloomy time in my life and my stories were dark, like my mother’s paintings, and not much happened in them. I struggled to get the words out and very few of my stories were published.

In my thirties, I started writing feature journalism for many of the big magazines: Esquire, New York, The New York Times Magazine. All of a sudden I had a mandate to write about real events, real people that did exciting things in the world. I found it liberating to move away from my angst, although when people asked what I was doing I half-slurred the word “journalist.” In this new field I actually earned money from writing. But I applied lessons that I had learned as a short story writer. Even though it was non-fiction, I wanted my stories to have a creative arc. I always wrote in the first person, which was somewhat unusual back then. I put my point of view right in, used irony, hyperbole, slang, whatever felt right, and for whatever reason, my editors often put up with it.

While working for the magazines I learned how to research a story. I learned to get at the core of a plot. But, most importantly, I was learning the importance of “story” in stories and how to write them in lean affecting prose. In a way, I suppose you could say I was learning to “sell” a story—my dad’s side of my writing life. Though it might sound crass, a great novelist is by definition a cracker-jack salesman—he wants his reader to buy what he is selling. What I didn’t understand in those years was that journalism is great training ground for a novelist.

During and following my journalism years, I wrote three memoirs, including Searching for Bobby Fischer. Each of these books required research and the management of a great deal of “story.” And the last of them, The Last Marlin, took liberties in both style and structure, as if it were a novel—in fact I was tempted to call it a novel. You see, my movement from non-fiction to fiction was not abrupt at all; it was something I was learning how to do all the while. I had wanted to write a novel as a young man, but I wasn’t ready.

When I began The Dream Merchant 12 years ago, many of the basics were already in my core. Like my dad, my protagonist is a super-salesman who crossed lines to close deals. Unlike Abe Waitzkin, who was sickly for his entire life, Jim is a physical powerhouse. He is a lusty man who needs beautiful women for energy and inspiration as well as sex. He is charismatic and charming but also unstoppable in business—a killer.

What would happen to such a man when doors suddenly begin closing in his face? What would he do when everything he’d built, a family and business empire, is suddenly taken from him? What would he be willing to do get it back and more? And how would the most radical and violent change of life imaginable change his character? Those were some questions I wanted to explore in my novel.

In 1984, I read an article in Time describing illegal gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon. Chiseled into the deep jungle there were camps called garimpos—and more of them were cropping up all the time. They were in fact, tiny lawless kingdoms cut off from civilization by impenetrable terrain, marauding bandits looking to steal gold, and vicious jaguars.

Virtually the only way out of these enclaves was by small plane. Each of the camps had a landing strip and a small barracks for a militia of gunmen who were employed to defend the gold operation from bandits. There was also a dining hall and a brothel with beautiful young working girls. The mining itself was done by garimpierros, who dug in mud pits around the camp searching for nuggets and gold dust. They slept at night beneath the trees and some were attacked and eaten by jaguars.

The men did this work in the hope of bringing a fortune back to their families in the city. But this rarely happened. At the end of a month of filthy, exhausting work a miner would wander into the garimpo lured by the sounds of romantic music crooning into the rainforest broadcast from big speakers. He would feel entranced by the music, the smell of good food but most of all by the beauty of the young women. He would spend all of his gold on one night of desire and wander back into the jungle the following morning to begin digging anew. It was a Sisyphean enterprise and the only ones who made substantial money were the owner of the garimpo and the working girls.

At some level, I percolated about the Amazon for years while I was writing my three memoirs. Eventually I travelled there with my son Josh. We spent nearly a month in the jungle south of Manaus, sleeping in hammocks beneath the trees, or hardly sleeping for worry about hunting jaguars and snakes that might crawl into our hammocks. We swam in the rivers even with knowledge of piranhas and a tiny fish called a candiru that can swim up a man’s urethra and become lodged there with spiked fins. We visited abandoned gold mining camps and witnessed the rare beauty of the rainforest—the utter intoxication of the place.

When I began writing The Dream Merchant, I was aiming to put Jim into the Amazon as the leader of an illegal mining camp. This was my home run idea—to turn Willy Loman loose in Kurtz’s world. I wanted to give my Jim a new and much darker palette and see where it would lead him and me. What would happen to this engaging charismatic selling man in a world where instant wealth, violence, and greed were the predominant language? How would this world change him? Could he survive it? Could he return to the prior life and continue as if he’d never lived in the jungle oblivious to mores and morality?

But even in the 1980s, while I was still writing feature magazine journalism and working on Searching for Bobby Fischer, I was already musing about the idea of a salesman attempting to refashion himself in the jungle—I was preparing myself to write The Dream Merchant.

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I had a reunion of sorts with Beverly Donofrio to discuss her third memoir, Astonished. When we met a little over a decade ago, I interviewed her about another memoir, Looking for Mary, which discussed the start of her devotion to the Virgin Mary. This time around, Beverly decided she wanted to enter into a monastic retreat—she had already begun the search for a suitable spiritual community when she became the victim of a serial rapist in the small Mexican city where she lived. So, as we discuss, that rape was not the impetus for her retreat, but it profoundly informed the experience.

We talk about how her time in various monasteries brought about a new understanding of her relationship with Jesus, which has taken on vivid dimensions, and about how she decided to approach the act of spiritual withdrawal:

“When I was going off to the monasteries, I made a promise to myself that I would not be taking notes. I would not be taking notes thinking I’m going to write about this. I knew, since I’m a memoirist, I most likely would, but I did not want to compromise the experience. I wanted it really to truly be just about me being close to God, whatever that meant… It’s kind of like the difference between going on a vacation without a camera and going on a vacation with a camera. I can’t help but write, so I would take notes now and then, but I didn’t really start writing about this… for two and a half, almost three years.”

If you enjoyed the previous Life Stories with former nun Mary Johnson, I think you’ll find my conversation with Beverly equally fascinating. (And if you haven’t heard that other episode yet, I encourage you to check it out!)

Listen to Life Stories #30: Mary Johnson (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I meet Mary Johnson, who spent nearly two decades in Mother Teresa’s Missionary of Charity, which she writes about in An Unquenchable Thirst. We talk about the urge to help the poor that drew her to a nun’s life, and whether or not the Missionary gave her the best opportunity to do that; we also discuss the warnings young Mary received against forming “particular friendships” with her fellow sisters, and how those instructions sailed right over her head, leaving her open to be seduced by a manipulative nun later in her career. (I ended up referring to her time with the Missionary as a “career” because I couldn’t think of a better word to describe it…) And we talk about why she decided to leave the order, and what she’s been up to in the years since, including her work as the director of the A Room of Her Own Foundation.

I observed that Johnson had left the order shortly after Christopher Hitchens had published his critique of Mother Teresa and her works, The Missionary Position, and that while she made many of the same points about Mother’s limitations as a social reformer, she also brought a more personal perspective to the subject. She agreed:

“He was right that Mother Teresa took money from anybody—from the Duvaliers, from Castro… She took money from Charles Keating and refused to give to back to the people whom he had cheated to get that large, substantial sum that he donated. Christopher Hitchens had all those facts right, but I don’t think he really understood Mother Teresa’s motivations. He called her a hypocrite, and I don’t think she was. I think she really firmly believed in what she was doing, she was trying her best. She did have limited understanding. She was born in 1910 in Albania; there were a lot of things that she really didn’t grasp. But I never found anything in her that was hypocritical.

And what was interesting to me about Hitchens was that in 2007—so, ten years after Mother Teresa’s death—he read the letters that she had written to her spiritual directors very early on, letters in which she talks about her doubts, about her soul feeling tormented. Hitchens publicly revised his opinion about Mother Teresa, in that he took back the hypocrite word and said, basically, he thought she was a true believer and she was trying her best and she was… manipulated by the Vatican, was the way he worded it, and I think that was very accurate.”

Listen to Life Stories #29: Mary Johnson (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I talk with Domenica Ruta about With or Without You, in which she describes being raised by a single mom who gave her her first OxyContin pill when she was ten years old, and the full blossoming of her alcoholism in her twenties. We talk about recovery, and the differences between writing drunk and writing sober, and how she found out what her mom—with whom she hasn’t spoken in seven years—thinks of the memoir through the New York Times.

During the conversation, I also made a reference to “the James Frey thing,” which is to say writing a memoir about addiction and recovery in the wake of the A Million Little Pieces controversy, and how enough time has passed that this maybe isn’t as much of an issue as it was in 2006 and immediately after. Ruta had a wonderful response:

“I think for better or for worse, and I think it’s a little of both, he has opened a door for memoirists to really explore what it means to have memory and to retell a story and to do that with craft. Part of the experience of recovery is trying to parse out what of my life is valid, what is invalid? What of my life is an emotional projection, what is real?

“I actually owe a debt, a great debt to James Frey for starting that conversation, as painful as it probably was for him—and I can only imagine—he started a really interesting conversation that I at least was engaged in in my head while I was writing this, which is, you know, when I get to points that I don’t remember clearly, how about I just dive head first into that uncertainty? How about I highlight the gaps in my memory? … I point out the moments when craft is taking over, when I paint something a certain color in the writing of the memoir, because I don’t exactly remember what color it was, but this is the color it needs to be in this truth. I don’t know how he wrote, how people wrote memoirs before that door was opened, so I’m really grateful for that.

Listen to Life Stories #28:: Domenica Ruta (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

Many of the stories in Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s What You Are Now Enjoying, like “Dear John,” unfold with a dreamlike logic; even a story like “My Husband’s House,” which seems relatively grounded, has a hallucinatory quality to it—we wander through in a bit of a daze, much like her protagonists. Yet the “surreal slant” in her fiction “has been somewhat of a mystery for me,” she told an interviewer; maybe, as she theorized, it has something to do with her midwestern routes: “There is magic and mystery there. Something like heat lightning, I guess. Or crouching beneath a utility sink in the basement while a tornado roars by like a train. There is a sense of the unexpected creeping up out of the familiar and the ordinary and the mundane. I think I try to encapsulate that same aesthetic in my own work.” And, as you’ll see, when she finds examples of that aesthetic in other people’s stories, it stays with her.

New Yorkers will be able to see for themselves when Gerkensmeyer comes to read at Pen Parentis on April 9, 2013.

In a red river: a small child drowning, tugged below the surface by a swift current—a piggish man in pursuit.

On a train: a mother righting her baby daughter in her seat after she’s toppled over—a white-haired stranger with a cigar hovering above them, grinning.

In a restaurant in Moscow: a starving boy pulled in from the street and offered oysters—the salty, slimy crunch when he bites into the shell.

It’s the images that haunt me most. The red water and the piggish man in Flannery O’Connor’s “The River;” the toppled-over baby in Shirley Jackson’s “The Witch;” the moldy crunch of teeth against oyster shell in Anton Chekhov’s “Oysters.” And when I come back to these stories years later and come face-to-face with the exact, horrible context of each of them once again, the bigger picture is haunting, too, of course.

In “The River,” a little boy who has sudden, skewed ideas about religion drowns as he tries desperately to baptize himself. In “The Witch,” a stranger on a train tells a young boy a horribly inappropriate story about how he also had a little baby sister and he strangled her and chopped her up into pieces. In “Oysters,” a starving boy with a sick father is pulled off of the streets of Moscow and into a fancy restaurant, where he is offered oysters as a joke.) But that’s the whole story, something I usually forget relatively soon after I’ve set a book down. It’s the images I carry with me. It’s the images, I think, that push me to write my own stories.

A few years ago, I was relieved to come across an article in The New York Times Book Review called “The Plot Escapes Me.” The writer James Collins asks, “Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?” I read that sentence and thought: Okay. Good. I’m not alone.

He goes on to tackle the neuroscience of reading—how the transient pleasure of the experience is taken over by a kind of “mental radiation.” When we read a good story, new pathways are created in our brains. Even the stuff we’ve long forgotten is still there, tucked deep within the folds of our subconscious, each drawer sliding open when we need it.

The novelist Paul Scott argues that a novel is a “sequence of images.” In good fiction, “the images come first,” and then it is up to the writer to make a shape and a sense out of them. Charles Baxter (via Gerard Manley Hopkins) talks about the power of the “widowed image,” that vision that sticks with the reader even when everything else from a story has faded. And so I breathe a deep sigh of relief to know that my forgetfulness when it comes to reading fiction is not a fault that I must hide and deny. As long as I’m haunted by at least a single, piercing image after I’ve set the book down, then both the writer and myself, the reader, have done something right. All of the stories I’ve read are with me still, swirling around and colliding within my subconscious in a mad collage of images—red rivers, toppled-over-babies, salty oyster shells, a little green bicycle, a watery potato soup, burned hands bandaged in bright white, the sting of chlorine.. As I write this, I remember the context for some of those images, but not all of them.

My four-year-old and I have started reading chapter books at bedtime. The pictures are starting to disappear from his books. In order to see the things in the stories, he has to use his imagination. While reading to him, sometimes I glance at him and watch as a single image sinks in and settles behind his eyes. Sometimes he looks a bit anxious as he listens, as if he’s worried that this incredible thing will eventually slip away. Maybe soon I’ll tell him not to worry, that all of those pictures will stay with him forever. I’ll explain it all as best I can—the neuroscience of forgetting and of never letting go.

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I chat with Emily Rapp about The Still Point of the Turning World, an account of parenting a son diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease at nine months. Rapp talks about how the diagnosis for this rare degenerative disorder came as a complete shock—she’d actually been tested to determine if she was a carrier and had been all but cleared—and the solace she got from other parents facing the same situation. She also describes how writing about life with Ronan as they were living it helped not just to bring her back from the edge of despair, but showed her the possibility of living without holding herself back.

Rapp cites former Life Stories guest Cheryl Strayed and the emotional support she offered in our conversation—I also noted, as I was preparing this audio for uploading, that another former guest, Sarah Manguso, had written a thoughtful review of Rapp’s memoir for the New York Times, describing it as “a brilliant study of the wages of mortal love.”

Listen to Life Stories #27: Emily Rapp (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series of interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I talk with Ashok Rajamani about The Day My Brain Exploded, his account of recovering from an AVM, or arteriovenous malformation—a cluster of veins and arteries that formed in his brain in the womb that burst one afternoon in the spring of 2000. Among other topics, we discuss just why the AVM burst when it did, Ashok’s father’s curious reaction to his hospitalization, the callousness of the doctor who performed the surgery that saved his life, and the full extent of his injuries—including what it’s like to have to rediscover your sexual orientation.

We also talk about Ashok’s decision to tell his story in order to raise awareness about the range of traumatic brain injuries—including cases like his where the extent of his condition is not immediately apparent—and how, although he’s only met one other person in “real life” who was also recovering from an AVM, he’s gotten in touch with many others, along with other brain injury victims, through the Internet. He’s also compiled a list of brain injury resources which he hosts on his website.

If you enjoyed the previous Life Stories episode with Susannah Cahalan about the autoimmune disorder that affected her brain, you’ll want to give this episode a listen—and if you haven’t heard that episode yet, then you should listen to it after you hear Ashok’s story.

Listen to Life Stories #26: Ashok Rajamani (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

Over the next few days, it’s felt like everybody’s had a response to this incident. Another digital editor at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal, sympathizes with Thayer—having been a struggling freelance writer himself—but argues that, right now, the best business model online media’s been able to come up with is one that puts writers at serious disadvantage. “In most cases, even great reported stories will fizzle, not spark,” Madrigal writes, speaking specifically of the traffic those stories generate and the extent to which they sell ads. “They will bring in 1,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 visitors. You’d need thousands of these to make a big site go.” And who can afford to pay for, and publish, thousands of those stories?

“Even a small blog, with one person at the helm, is going to need, say, 100-150 posts a month,” he continues. I think this is debatable, but it’s definitely a model that’s out there for a certain type of news/issue-oriented blog, so let’s go with it. Next, I’m going to toss some numbers out here, rather than the specific numbers he uses: Let’s say a 250-word blog post is worth $40-50, and go up to $100-150 for a longer (500-600 words) piece, of which you’ll run one a day, and we’ll assume 20 publishing days to a typical month. If you relied strictly on freelancers, this could put your monthly editorial budget anywhere between $5200 and $9500—although since you’d be likely to set aside at least one-third of the blogs to be produced in-house, let’s say $3500 to $6300 a month. Can you guarantee your advertisers $6300 worth of visibility each month? And keep in mind: I’m just talking about pieces that are no longer than a typical magazine sidebar or, at most, a one-page article—we haven’t even come close to the longform journalism of which Thayer’s article would have been an example.

Madrigal explains the shortcomings with this model well, and as the conversation gets around to “well, what if we didn’t pay some of the writers?” he offers some justifications, including exposure—later in the week, in a separate Atlantic post, Ta-Nehisi Coates admitted upfront he’d accepted exposure in lieu of cash for his earliest appearances at that blog, and he was upfront about why it worked for him: “I could not convince editors that what I was curious about was worth writing about. Every day I would watch ideas die in my head… What the internet offered was the chance to let all of those ideas compete in the arena, and live and die on the merits. And [The Atlantic] was offering a bigger arena.”

As I was sitting here thinking about how to frame my take on this, I realized that within the last week I’d actually written two short essays, each in the neighborhood of 500 words, and given them to the publishers of a book I’d edited (Bedroom Roulette) to be published on other websites in order to promote the book’s release. So, yeah, here I am, smack dab in the “will write for expsoure” camp—although neither of the sites for which I wrote was ad-supported, a point that comes into play in just a bit.

I’ve actually worried about this a lot from the perspective of somebody who publishes unpaid contributions from “guest authors” in Beatrice on a regular basis and does earn some revenue (though nowhere near a self-sustaining amount) from advertising. As someone who does not envision himself writing for corporate media for free—and I’m thinking specifically of sites like The Huffington Post that have gotten rich off of content the majority of which they didn’t have to pay for—I’ve grappled with the legitimacy of turning around and asking people if they’d be willing to write up to 700 words for Beatrice for free. (One of the reasons I’ve pinned hope on monetizing Beatrice in recent years, in fact, has been the desire to bring in enough to return to those contributors and offer a retroactive fee, or to apply that fee to a donation to a literary non-profit, and then to pay contributors moving forward. Already, though, again going by a $100 rule of thumb, that tab would run over $25,000, which can make me feel like I’m just daydreaming.)

I spoke to my friend John Scalzi about this last week, because he’s someone who has very forcefully argued against writing without getting paid while running a series of unpaid “guest posts” called “The Big Idea” at his blog, Whatever, and I wanted to get his thinking on the issue. He noted that Whatever isn’t a commercial blog, and not running any third-party ads at all, which mitigates the concern that he’s raking it in off Big Idea writers without getting paid—and he also observes that such essays, appearing around the time the contributor’s latest books are being released, have become “a natural part of the publicity cycle, in which authors make themselves available to promote their books and that work is seen as having a direct benefit in terms of sales and awareness of that specific book.”

(In his Atlantic post, Coates noted that when you see a group of authors/experts/scholars engaged in a “roundtable discussion” online, it’s quite likely that they aren’t getting paid for their participation, either—just as they aren’t typically paid to appear on television news programs to be interviewed. This can also be “a natural part of the publicity cycle,” although it’s not always about promoting a specific release.)

Scalzi makes two other points I think are significant in this context: “Rather than seek out people to write for the site, I let people know slots are available if they want them,” he told me. “Which is to say they make an affirmative decision that it’s worth their time and energy rather than me trying to convince them.” If nobody’s coming forward to write Big Idea pieces, he doesn’t actively solicit contributors—he just lets the series go into quiet hiatus until writers start checking in again.

Furthermore, he observed, “I also think people generally believe that I am letting them borrow my audience to talk about their book, rather than using them writing about their book to build my audience.” He didn’t start posting “Big Idea” pieces until well after Whatever had become a prominent blog with a strong core audience. “This seems like it could be a trivial distinction, but I don’t think it is when all is said and done,” he said, and I think that’s absolutely right—and I also believe that one of the reasons Scalzi and I have both been successful at building audiences (though he much more than I) is that, in addition to our own strongly formed perspectives, we’ve been willing to share other perspectives that capture our attention with readers, not in a bid to boost traffic, but just because we find them interesting and we hope someone else might, too.

But a writer with a personal blog letting other writers “borrow my audience” is a very different thing than a corporate media website letting other writers “borrow their audience” and then collecting revenue off what those writers contribute. And, of course, I can’t strictly speaking call Beatrice a personal blog. So, as I say, I continue to grapple with these questions as the editor and publisher of Beatrice, and in the meantime I’m grateful for every writer who does choose to share something here with readers.

As a writer, though, I don’t know what the “answer” is to the bigger question at stake—I know that I’m making an effort to focus on professional situations that adequately reward me for the skills and experience I bring to the table, and I encourage any other writer to do the same. But the choices I’m making along the way may be different than the ones you make, and the “reward” isn’t always about money… although, at some point, if writing is going to be more than just a hobby, it has to be.