On writing, publishing, and learning how to take up space in the world
Twenty years after he published his first book, Paul Zakrzewski has some thoughts
(Note to readers: On occasion, I’ll be offering guest posts by other Substack writers. If you want to share your work, please let me know.
PS - This following post by Paul is awesome and a must read for writers. Also, he’s a kick-ass book coach.)
By Paul Zakrzewski,
It was a great year.
In 2003, within the span of a few months, I’d got married and published my first book. I did radio, press, and dozens of events at major venues around New York and the country. For someone who has wrestled with low self-esteem and the challenge of taking up space for most of my life, the rush of external validators gave me a lot to hold onto.
Just a couple of weeks before my wedding, I threw myself a book party at the Pioneer Bar on the Bowery, now long gone, where several of the anthology’s contributors, including Gary Shteyngart and the late and dearly-missed Ellen Miller, showed up. A week later, I sat in the WNYC studios with authors Nathan Englander and Aryeh Lev Stollman recording the Leonard Lopate show (also gone); at the end of that fall, I was on stage at the 92nd Street Y, talking about the state of contemporary Jewish fiction.
Better than all of these events was the simple fact of the book itself. I’d manifested one of my life’s primary goals! A paperback original—but thick thanks to its 25 stories plus front and back matter—the book fell into one’s palm with a satisfying heft.
Around my pub date I’d stalk the Barnes & Noble on Broadway and 82nd Street, close by work. That is until one lunch time when I spotted, on a table near the front, a towering stack of Lost Tribe that had magically sprouted overnight. If it had been the age of smartphone I’d have doubtlessly snapped a ton of photos and challenged myself to post on social media; but as it was I kept returning to the store over the next days and weeks, light-headed with excitement, rocking myself like a new dad.
I won’t lie.
I was in writer heaven. I was having the time of my life.
Today marks an anniversary—my first book Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, was published 20 years ago.
For years I’d come across 4x6-inch promo cards that Harper Perennial printed up for the book launch. I’d find them tucked away in a random folder or drawer or at the bottom of the boxes where I kept book-related files. Sometimes I’d repurpose one as a bookmark or a coaster.
On the front they’d run the cover art; on the back, they’d emblazoned in small caps the pub date: AUGUST 5, 2003.
When I first thought I’d try to write about this experience, I imagined something a short and helpful listicle (post-Buzzfeed, are we even using that word anymore?). Five Things that Publishing a Book Taught Me. Or: Introverted? 10 Ways You Can Put Yourself Out There.
But something messier, more honest, tugged at the edges: What Did and Did not Happen as a Result of Publishing a Book in 1,500 words or Less.
Once the buzz of publication wore off something like a chorus of expectation settled in its place. I’d figured that doing that anthology would be a quick stepping stone to bigger and better things—namely, a book of my own.
What happened instead was that I spent a couple of years having lunch with a well-known promoter and powerbroker in the Jewish book world who kept suggesting a follow-up anthology while the iron was still hot. I agreed with her, and was naturally flattered by the attention, but deep down I felt ambivalent about doing a second anthology.
And I was getting further into a topic that did feel more urgent. In the middle of the aughts my father had passed away, and in the aftermath I found myself navigating not only my loss but also our strained relationship. Where there was absence, I wanted presence.
Which led me to books and stories about men—and to figures like the poet Robert Bly, who had led something called the mythopoetic men’s movement in the 1990s. Fascinated, I pitched and sold a piece on contemporary masculinity to the Boston Globe.
An editor from Beacon Press who’d spotted the essay asked me to lunch. Would I like to expand the article into a reported book on contemporary masculinity, with an eye to the evangelical men’s movement that was then gaining steam?
Yes I would! Excited for the assignment, I conducted interviews and trekked out to men’s group at evangelical megachurches close to my then-home in northeastern Pennsylvania. (I didn’t disclose the fact of being Jewish and one time, ahead of possible heavy snow, an impromptu prayer group formed around me wishing “brother Paul” a safe journey home).
And I wrote a solid, if by no means stellar, book proposal. It was dutiful, very white, and studiously devoid of anything sexual. I knew something wasn’t right but I kept pushing through.
Eventually I came to see what was missing in all of this was my story—the wounds and resentments and insights that had propelled me toward writing about masculinity to begin with.
Likely, I would’ve kept going with that project except for an ill-fated call with my agent, who told me that “books about men are a hard sell.”
I wish I could say I pushed this aside—I had a press already interested in this project after all—but the agent’s words clung to me every time I went to the computer. Try as I might I found it hard to locate my original enthusiasm for the project. Eventually I put the proposal away, never to contact the editor again after our initial meeting.
Today I see this for what it was—an act of self-sabotage. But 15 years ago I still had a lot of inner work to do.
What I’ve come to see is some people publish earlier in life despite whatever’s going on for them upstairs. Then there are those of us, like me, who have to clear up the mental attic before it feels safe to fling open the doors.
Since then my writing has gone in different directions, mostly toward memoir and other life writing. In the intervening years I’ve written a ton, learned my craft, received an MFA, taught and coached. I’ve published some personal essays. But there’s a lot more that’s gone unpublished. As I’ve spent the past decade or longer in my own recovery work, I’ve tried to figure out what I feel comfortable sharing and what I want to hold back.
The challenge has often been to feel like I have the right to say my piece—to take up space in the world this way. To send out some more personal writing in this newsletter would be to do just that.
(One of my closest friends, a rabbi-turned-psychologist, once said the world is divided among two groups of people: the over-entitled and then the rest of us).
To be more accurate, the issue is less about the right to take up space and more about the fear of doing so. To explain why that’s so I’d have to tell you more about the many early instances of bullying, about two deeply damaged parents with their own familial and historical trauma, or the legacy of growing up with a near-constant sense of being monitored, judged, shamed, objectified, and more.
(In my mid-20s I tried writing a novel I started calling Panopticon Blues. Though fiction is not my genre and the writing itself was painful, let’s just say the metaphor of the panopticon came very easily to me).
Here’s something I wrestle with on some days: being 55 and not having published a second book yet…of not yet having claimed my space on the bookshelves. And the irony of being a book coach—a very good one, as it happens—understanding how to help others in ways I haven’t always been able to do for myself.
Things are shifting once again. A couple of months ago, I had a session with my own (terrific) book coach. I sent her dozens and dozens of pages of scenes, notes, freewrites and more. She helped me see a throughline, a single bucket for this writing. We came up with a plan.
One morning this last week I took myself to a café and simply started working on one of the prompts this coach and I came up with. It felt great to be writing again. To see how the world fell away as my concentration narrowed to the screen, to the keyboard, as the flicker of memory and the current of interpretation kicked alive inside me.
Paul - looking forward to the sequel to this post - on the success of your new writing project!
Leah, thank you so much for including this post on Esoterica. I'm flattered to be among so many compelling writers, and very grateful for your kind words!