Good Readers

Who is reading your work?

I realize I just asked a confronting question. Let me explain why it is top of mind.

In these past few months, I have watched my friends fret over who is reading their work. Several people have been scared to send work into their publishers based on a lingering feeling that reviewers would not read in good faith. Several folks have avoided writing groups out of concern that those folks would rip their work apart. Others have no idea who their audience is.

All these feelings are valid. In fact, I’d wager (and I’m not a gambler really) that these folks’ fears and concerns stem from negative past experiences. To be fair, I’ve had those negative experiences too. I have had reviewers (mind you this was not anonymous) say that I don’t know how to close read. I have had writing group members completely misread my work. I have been in workshops where people spend a great deal of time flexing what they know rather than helping move the work forward. I have had editors that attempt to make my work sound more like them than like me.

Let me tell you about three of my best experiences with good readers.

Anecdote 1: I went to Community of Writers in 2017. During that week-long writing workshop in Olympic Valley, we had two rules: we could respond to the writing with compliments or observations. During that week, I learned through the observations who was my target audience and who was my ideal audience. People in my ideal audience seemed to notice details that were location or culturally or experientially specific. People in my target audience tried to make sense of those details. The others didn’t notice at all or attributed the absolute incorrect meaning to them. I also learned – through the compliments – what resonated with those audiences and how to duplicate it. The best feedback wasn’t “I like this,” but rather “the use of this metaphor is effective because it expands the image here.” That said, “I like this” was helpful.

Anecdote 2: During my time as a tenure-track professor, I was part of several Black feminist writing groups. We did not all study the same topics, but we were all invested in literature and all coming from the perspective of Black feminism. That anchor helped me understand how my colleagues could come to my work. Over time, I began to absorb disciplinary or field specific idiosyncrasies (i.e., the literary historian always wants clarity about dates and times, the person invested in spirituality wants to know about what is not material, the cultural studies scholar gets curious about the zeitgeist as part of an interpretive framework, the theorists want to know the framework, etc). Learning how to hear the others helped me understand the field better. I became, in turn, a better reader.

Anecdote 3: I spent time in workshops where you get a 1:1 with your workshop leader. These folks questioned me on the hard things. Their reading skills – as instructors of creative writing – allowed them to see (seemingly at a glance) the contradictions, tensions, presumptions, and fecund parts of my writing. I was read in both senses. I’ll never forget the reads of the work that sounded like they snatched my therapist’s notes.

In each of these anecdotes, the good readers were curated. By me. By others. We were together with a purpose. And, in each case, the rules were clear and clearly followed. Having good readers helps me sift through the terrible ones. I can more easily spot a bad-faith critique broadly and those good-faith critiques wrapped in venom. I also – and this is key – am less afraid to put my work in the world.

Here's my parting lesson: I encourage you to find and cultivate good readers deliberately. These folks are your first defense – and you might be theirs – against the pain and waste of time that comes with absorbing useless or mean-spirited feedback.

Sending you the spoons to write in these violent, exhausting, and debilitating times.