Hey Write and Seekers!
A week ago, I attended the American Sociological Association (ASA) conference in Downtown LA. Normally, this is the conference where sociologists present their current research to an audience of their peers (unless your presentation is scheduled at 8am in which case they might present to no one). This is also the time when job market candidates try to, ever so subtly (or not), flutter their feathers in front of sociology departments who are hiring new faculty in the fall. For most of the times I’ve attended ASA, this has been the case for me, and let me tell you—that shit is exhausting.
I am happy to report, friends, that I did neither of those things at this year’s conference. I wasn’t presenting research, and I wasn’t putting myself out there for jobs. I was there 100% socially—to see friends from grad school and elsewhere who came from all parts of the country to my beloved home city.
And oh yeah, I was there because my book Brown and Gay in LA would be on display for the first time. And I won an award. Exciting!
Over the course of four days, I must have spoken to like a hundred people, and something funny happened. Or more aptly, didn’t happen. No one talked to me about sociology. Almost everyone I spoke with wanted to talk about creative writing—namely, my creative nonfiction writing journey. A pleasant surprise!
The last time I was at the ASA, in 2019 in New York, literally no one asked me about creative writing. I mean, this makes sense because in 2019, I had exactly 0 bylines. Somehow, three years and a handful of published essays later, sociologists from grad student to full professor were talking to me like I had some secret manual on how to pivot to public writing.
Spoiler alert: There is no manual.
There are, though, a couple things I can offer that seemed to work for me. Here are couple of things I mentioned to folks at the conference:
Writing workshops: In 2017, on a whim, I applied to VONA, a writing workshop for BIPOC writers. I didn’t get in, but I got waitlisted. I thought, Oh shit, I must be doing something right. So I applied again the next year. And got waitlisted again. But as luck would have it, I got off the waitlist and got to spend a week learning the art of the essay from Kiese Laymon and my ten amazing BIPOC classmates. I was pretty ignorant about creative writing workshop culture and felt imposter syndrome pretty much the whole week, but thankfully, my teacher and classmates were both loving and rigorous. After VONA, I formed a writing group with three of my classmates, who taught me more more about prose and craft. One of the amazing writers in my group, Cynthia Greenlee, was editing a special issue for the literary magazine Gravy and offered me my first opportunity to publish my first creative nonfiction essay about Filipino American food in the South. That was the domino that got my creative nonfiction writing career started.
Writing classes: If applying to writing workshops feels daunting, consider taking a creative writing class. There are some really affordable options at Catapult, UCLA extension, Kundiman, and Shipman Agency. I’ve taken 4 classes with Catapult, and they were all magical. These are really great opportunities to practice your craft, find your voice, and grow your literary community.
The Obvious: Honestly, there’s no way around it. You gotta READ, READ, READ, and WRITE, WRITE, WRITE. You wanna write for the New Yorker and Atlantic? Then read the New Yorker and Atlantic like a MF. One summer, I set a goal to read three New Yorker articles a week, especially on topics I didn’t know (or give a) shit about. The mafia in Nordic country. Finishing school in Eastern Europe. The history of the harp. And guess what happened? I got interested in those things because the writing was on point. I thought, if someone can assemble sentences in such a way that I magically care about the fucking harp, then damn, that writer’s got skills.
Experiment: I know you care about whatever you research, but the reality is people are busy and honestly, let’s get real: no one owes you their attention. People have kids and puppies and Netflix to watch. What this means is that you gotta learn how to assemble words in a way that stops people in their tracks, so they’ll take 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days to pay attention to whatever you wrote. That takes PRACTICE! I know Twitter is cesspool of awfulness, but for me, it’s been a great place to practice the kind of sentences that’ll get folks to stop scrolling and click *like* (or better yet, click a link to some published piece I wrote). Learning how to resonate with an audience takes practice. And some of my favorite writers (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Kiese Laymon, Roxane Gay, JP Brammer) have practiced sentences with their audiences before publishing. You oughta too.
If there’s anything I came out of this sociology conference believing, it’s this: I’m happy to share whatever knowledge I have about creative writing with whomever wants it. I fuckin’ hate it when people hoard wisdom and opportunity. For me, it’s important to demystify the fuck out of all the processes that have historically been withheld from BIPOC/queer/women writers.
Pivoting to public writing is hard, I admit, but it can also be rewarding. It may not be an easy road, but trust me, you can do it.
All love,
Anthony