The Big Roundtable

It’s our birthday and we will not cry, and we do not want to, because over the past two years, thanks to your readership and support for our writers, The Big Roundtable has grown a lot:

Tales From the Great Disruption, our first book, went on sale in mid-April 2015. [Buy: Amazon | The Big Roundtable] We’re heartened by the overwhelming positive response from places like the University of California Irvine and the University of Iowa. (We’re beginning to work on our second book.)

We’ve published 40 stories from all over the world, about what it means to live and and sometimes about what it means to die, by journalists both young and old, some of whom are veterans, others of which are cubs.

Our authors have gone on to write for a number of publications you’ll recognize, including The New Yorker, Washingtonian, and The Washington Post, among others. 

Our writers like it so much they want to publish twice. We’ve published two stories by Jaime Joyce: “Burn” and “Kill Me Now,” and a number of our other writers are working on their second pieces now, including Kevin Heldman, who’s writing about East New York, Rachel Pieh Jones, who wrote “The Proper Weight of Fear” and has another underway, and Yeppi Yepoka, who wrote “The Bridge to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

We have enough stories in the works to get us into the beginning of 2016, if every piece we’re working on now comes through. Every time we publish a new piece, our senior editor, Cissi Falligant, get even more submissions. We love reading them, so keep them coming!

We’re steadily adding more subscribers to our newsletter—if you’re not subscribed, you can sign up here—and “likes” to our Facebook page and “follows” to our Twitter handle (@BRTable).

Family mysteries never let go. Abe Feller, the subject of my piece, was the source of my Hebrew name, Avraham. He was brilliant, he was an important person. He worked for the United Nations, and he killed himself by jumping out of a window sometime in the 1950s. These were the things that I knew about him when I—in the midst of my own depression—started asking questions about him. And those questions led to more questions, of course, and all of them were really just another version of the one I wanted answer which was, Why did Abe kill himself? 

If you want to explore the world by exploring the mystery of yourself, you have no choice really, but to start by listening to the hard, unanswerable questions that are in the silences you hear at home.

—Peter Birkenhead

For hopeful writers the Internet has been liberating, and not. Everyone can have a blog so everyone’s a writer, which means no one’s a Writer. Right? With so few publications, relatively, to place stories, the status of Writer is elusive to so many people whose thoughts/stories/words could contribute to the greater good, if only they had...say it with me...an audience.

So how does someone who writes become a Writer?

It takes having been published by five magazines or newspapers; no, 10 pieces published; no, 100 pieces. No, you have to make your living solely from writing. No, you have to wield influence. Arghh!

Quickly you fall into an ontological k-hole: What is a writer?* What does it mean to write? What is writing? Can I write? What’s a sentence? Was that a sentence? 

You start forgetting grammar rules: Oh, god, how, do, you, use, commas?! And spending an afternoon studying Strunk and White begins to sound like a better use of time than looking at a blank page for hours. Maybe, before you try to write, you should try reading every piece of writing by every writer you admire? Oh god, maybe all the writers who ever will be already have been, and have died. 

You could just write, sure, but to be elevated to the status of Writer? That takes…you start spinning and your gears aren’t fitting together kind of like when you slam on the gas when the car’s in neutral as you try to figure out what in the hell it means to be a Writer. Overwhelmed? Do you find yourself compelled to take up quilting? (I’ve been there.) It’d be easier to make a living “crafting” trinkets to sell on Etsy than it would be to write.

And finally, it comes to you clearly, I’ll just quit. 

Unless you draw your income from writing, there’s no logical reason to start, or continue, doing it. Writing is hard, and really, what’s the payoff? If you have no influence then you’re writing for yourself—and maybe you’re parents, if you’re not writing about how they screwed you up. Is writing for yourself, not in a diary or in a truly private place, an act of narcissism? Or futility, verging on masochism? 

And to be paid, oh that coveted status, it seems now like you have to have had a big break to even get a meeting with an editor. It’s a battle of two hard-earned steps forward and one easy step back. That, or...

You’re anointed. 

That capital W isn’t something that’s bestowed upon you. You are not suddenly Patrick Stewart the Writer. Forget the title and embrace the act: You write. You’ve heard it before, I’m sure: Nice guys don’t say they’re “nice guys.” Allow your work to speak for you and don’t claim a title that’s not yours to take. (Example: Be someone who photographs, do not claim to be a photographer.)

Insofar as the Internet makes it a lot easier to distribute information (at least to other people with access to the Internet), it’s helped to moderate the influence of big-market, big-money publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal—to their chagrin. Their biggest obstacle is clearly articulated in the Times motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.” 

For a certain demographic, yes, the Times and other big-market papers with big-market advertisers do print all the news their readers need to get through the day and to be fully-informed citizens in their own corners of the universe. But what of the people whose worlds aren’t represented by the Times’ coverage? (*Gasp*—blasphemy, I know.)

That’s where you, the writer who’s considering a career as a quilt-maker, comes in. To think of the Internet as a liberator for writers, is to think only of art’s supply-side. Yes, the artists who once would have languished without a platform now have one, and that presents challenges of what may seem not like a flooded market. But think of the reader, unrepresented by The Washington Post or The New York Times’ coverage. (No, this is not about East Coast liberal progressive media.)

The other day, the Times published a piece called “Is Self-Loathing a Requirement for Writers?” Here’s a snippet of what Anna Holmes, one of the column’s two writers, said:

The Internet, that great democratizer, only served to underscore this reality. As a onetime writer and editor for print, when I switched to digital media in 2007 I became even more conscious of the fact that the work of amateurs was often just as good, if not better, than that of their more richly compensated and ­higher-profile peers: Their arguments were often more rigorous, their ideas more original, their narratives more cohesive, their language more lucid. They were writing to be understood, not applauded. It didn’t so much matter to whom they were related, where they lived, what parties they went to or under whose boldface tutelage they labored; they were good, and anyone who was paying even a bit of attention knew it.

Suffering and self-loathing aren’t requisites for being a good writer, compassion and curiosity are. No, they aren’t mutually exclusive, but do strive to kick suffering in the butt because it just gets in the way. To write well you have to be curious, rigorous, and honest. (If you’re looking for an example of an honest writer, read David Carr’s memoir The Night of the Gun. Oof.) For every writer who’s rigorous and honest and doing right by their art, there’s someone out there who will want and need to read what that writer has to say. When you write, be kind to yourself, and be curious about the world, and don’t fear an Internet full of writers. Embrace knowing that it’s easier for the world’s population to find writers who speak to them and their needs.

— Anna Hiatt (@ahiatt), Publisher

“The successful editor is one who is constantly finding new writers, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success. The thrill of developing fresh writing makes the search worthwhile, even when the waiting and working becomes months, sometimes years, of drudgery and frequent disappointment.”

— From Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg [AbeBooks]

After beginning his career in letters as a cub reporter at The New York Times, Maxwell Perkins moved to the publishing world where he became a literary editor at the house Charles Scribner's Sons. There he made a name for himself, advocating for and working with writers like Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Under his editorial guardianship, Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby and Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises. Throughout their careers the two were loyal to Perkins and exchanged passionate letters with him about their writing and their lives, though Perkins himself was reserved about his own life.

Like Perkins, The Big Roundtable’s goal is to find new writers and to develop them: Push them to report deeper; challenge them to think about stories and why theirs needs an audience; and free them (to the best anyone can in a world of deadlines and limited time) to write without inhibition or fear.

For The Big Roundtable and its editors Perkins has been a great inspiration. Our two editors, Mike Hoyt (editor) and Cissi Falligant (senior editor), are of the same mind that a great editor helps to nurture writers and their stories from idea through publication. 

Mike Hoyt spent 27 years at the Columbia Journalism Review, ten of them as its top editor. Before that he worked at two newspapers and wrote for several magazines. He’s an adjunct professor at Columbia’s J-school, a native of Kansas City, and a reasonably serene Mets fan.

Cissi Falligant has been an editor at the Chicago Tribune’s late and lamented experiment in suburban coverage, as well as at Crain Communications. She is at work on a book about dyslexia. 

Submit your narrative nonfiction to The Big Roundtable for consideration, and you too might get the chance to work with these two lovely editors.

So you want to be a journalist, but you like things like food, shelter, and clothing? 

That’s a hard one.

You’re ready to pay your dues—really! Plans for the next two or three years unfurl crisply in your head: If you work hard enough and smart enough your internship will lead to a job which will pay you more and give you enough experience that, after no more than three years, you’ll be free to leave and to do Worthy Stories.

You’ve been warned it’ll be tough, so you steel yourself before you begin applying for jobs with titles that include “intern,” “editorial assistant,” or maybe “fellow,” if you’re feeling bold, and you vow to be back before long. 

It doesn’t take long to realize that the pay is barely enough to pay for groceries (apart from Ramen, which will raise your blood pressure and seriously malnourish you), certainly not for your own reporting trips, let alone a vacation. But you stick it out, convinced that your plan will just take a little longer than you thought it might—three to four years, not two to three. You hope for a promotion to (some variation of) assistant (web) producer/editor. 

But time passes and you don’t quit because every year you get salary bumps that keep up with inflation—enough to pay off your student loans, slowly. You tell yourself you’re saving up, but you don’t. You want to sunbathe on foreign beaches like your friends, to go to drinks, or to take a cab home instead of the subway because it’s late, and you come to like the security the nine-to-five you never wanted affords you. Another six months won’t hurt.

Four years turns into five and six, and “what you want to be doing” begins sounding like a naive dream. 

I wish I had an answer for you, a path to follow that isn’t quite so grueling—and one that doesn’t require a certain degree of privilege (financial, professional, and otherwise). Time and the Internet have changed a lot, but not a few basics about the writing profession. Consider Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both whom wrote in a style that was ahead of, or maybe out of, their own time. Or photographers who go out and shoot portfolios before anyone offers to pay them for their pictures. 

A lot of journalists who’ve gone on to publish in their own voices started by working nights and evenings, after coming home from a full day of work at a job that pays the bills. They sat down and wrote, or went out and photographed. However painful it might have been to do so, they made time for “what I want to be doing.”

Every writer has a story that he or she will tell one day. Not necessarily the memoir that will embarrass her family or the tome he’s not yet capable of pulling off, but the story that, with a little more time, he’d be able to finish right. It’s the daily to-do’s that draw out project timelines.

The magazine journalist Lael Tucker Wertenbaker wrote beautifully about the press of obligations that aren’t really in "Death of A Man,” a book about her husband's choice not to continue cancer treatment, their life together, and his inevitable death.

"I had balanced things well for a long time, but now I was allowing the parts to add up to more than a whole, the pressures to press, the worthwhile causes to take more and more time. I realized that I was weary and diffuse and neglecting all by cutting down none of what I felt to be obligations."

It’s so easy to imbue tasks big and small with false importance, and so hard to let go of what you come to believe are obligations. And it’s those obligations that make it easy to say, I’ll write a little more after I finish my errands, when I get home in six hours. Slowly it becomes easier to stand up and walk away from your desk, and soon three months turns into six, turns into a year, and then TBD.

Reject obligations that you don’t need in order to live, and embrace art. Embrace picking up the mail every other day, or forgetting to paint the kitchen for years; choose not to binge-watch X or Y show or to read the book “everyone” says you should. 

Nick Offerman—aka Ron Swanson—has a one-liner that might help: In early June 2015, Offerman, whose new movie Me and Earl and the Dying Girl had just premiered, shared with Jon Stewart how he wakens himself from time-wasting reverie...

He says, simply: "I should make more tables.” 

Go forth, writers, and make tables.

None of us at The Big Roundtable are or ever will be “the cool kid.” Which is OK, fine—no, it’s good. Because all those cool kids you remember from 90s movies, their M.O. was “no.” (As in, no to color, no to school, no, you can’t hang out with us.)

Just over two years ago, a few months before we launched, Michael Shapiro, Mike Hoyt, and I struggled over how to maintain The Big Roundtable’s spirit—a home for writers, regardless of the writer’s experience or story’s subject—while upholding the highest standard of quality for the stories we publish. We hypothesized that the difference between a story that comes alive and one that doesn’t is the difference between a writer who’s happy and one who isn’t. 

A happy writer is one who’s free to write in his or her own voice, and so we decided that, to the best of our ability, we would try to unburden our writers by committing to them and their stories, whether their pieces came to us flat, flabby, or perfect, thus alleviating the pressure to sound like someone they weren’t. In the way that there’s a New Yorker or New York Times Magazine-style story, there is not a Big Roundtable-style story. There is only narrative nonfiction. If there was a diamond in the rough, we were going to find it. And we hoped that in doing this, our writers would feel free to be happy and to just...write.

And if it weren’t just the most obvious thing, the writers did do better work and enjoyed the process more when they were free to be themselves. For that accomplishment I credit wholly Hoyt and Cissi Falligant, our editor and senior editor, respectively, who are two of the kindest souls you’ll ever meet—and who want to say “yes” to writers who are willing to commit. And as editors, well, you’ll never meet a more skilled and complementary team.

It’s easy to say no...to someone whose writing you can’t hear in your own head, who didn’t come recommended by anyone, who’s never written long, someone who writes about things you’d prefer not to read. It’s so easy to say “no” and then ask for more submissions from the ever-replenishing pool of hungry writers. By saying “yes” instead of “no,” you’re making a commitment.

But we don’t like to say “no.” We’ve been on the other side of “no” too many times ourselves. If you commit to us, we’ll commit to you.

Our latest piece, “P.I.C.U.” by Harriet Heydemann, starts with a dream:

Last night, I dreamt that a little boy crawled out of my kitchen cabinet. His thin arms and legs hung out of his denim overalls. Who are you little boy?

I bent down and looked into his yellow-gray face. Are you looking for your mommy?

You’re not allowed to ask, “Where’s your mommy?” It’s against Federal regulations on privacy. But there’s no real privacy in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. Everyone calls this place “Pick You,” spelled P-I-C-U, and you ask yourself over and over why you have been picked.

As you well know, our writers are supported by their readers. The author of “P.I.C.U.,” Harriet, will give all your donations via The Big Roundtable to the International Rett Syndrome Foundation (IRSF), in memory of her daughter, who died in 2014. (Donate at the bottom of Harriet’s story “P.I.C.U.”)

"The Bridge to Sodom and Gomorrah" by Yepoka Yeebo tells the story of the biggest slum in struggling Ghana, bounded by a burning dump and a sewage channel. Meet the hustlers, builders, prostitutes, entrepreneurs, bad boys, and dreamers who live there, illegally but cheaply, gambling that they’ll come out better than when they went in.

When Sonja Sharp and her husband Tal returned to New York three years ago they settled in Crown Height and began the search for a Jewish spiritual home – not an institution, or a denomination.