Higher Standards
A rail against average.
I revolt against responding with "fine" or "okay" when someone asks how I am. You might guess then, that I don't indulge average reads either. Here's what I look for when I read*.
For non-fiction which includes essays, memoirs, longer form articles (the writing you would find in The Atlantic or The New Yorker) and books, I want to read someone who is an expert in their field. That doesn't have to mean formal education although it can. It can mean personal history, professional or volunteer experience. It doesn't mean you need to be at a 9-5 job doing that expert work. It does mean that you are consistently adjacent to the work on a regular basis and have experience - not just a desire- to write as an authority on the topic.
There's a reason I no longer give When Survivors Give Birth-esque talks. I'm no longer adjacent to that work so to be in good integrity with myself, I don’t talk about being an expert on trauma and birth (and pregnancy, post-partum). I also don't read self-help books by life coaches in their 20's. Or investment books by folks who inherited their wealth. When you're an expert in your field, you're a specialist. That's who I want to read, see, patronize, learn from. Someone who has taken the time to go deep, not indulge a whim. Sweets By Shayda instead of the bakery at Harris Teeter.
For fiction, it's easier. I avoid white male writers (in fact, I'm on strike from them this year) and am choosy with white female writers. There's a cultural truth about Black folks needing to work harder just to get at even some of the opportunities white folks inherently have and bank on. In my (white) experience, one way this truth shows up is that the Black authors I read are excellent 95% of the time. Like, knock your socks off outstanding. I don't need to wait 20-30 pages for the excellence to take off; it's on page one, two or three.
In fiction, it's essential that I feel some connection, an emotional charge, to the main character. Chilled is the opposite of how I want to feel, searchingly turning page after page as I did last fall in Matrix. As readers, we enter a book cold. A good book warms us up quickly whether by our strong feelings for a character or a plot line that has us hot and bothered. An average book does neither.
For both non-fiction and fiction, I want writers who have someone edit their work or are themselves a brutally honest editor with their work. Excellent work can be made average fast by a missing editor. Stephen King's early work is much more tightly edited than his later work. Did his wife's career take off too much to tackle editing King's or is this lack merely the fatal flaw that I see in way too many authors who make it big (see Brene Brown)? Namely: they have become so well-known and un-critiquable that they no longer "need" an editor looking over their words. Don’t know.
I also want to be able to tell how the author is tending to the reader. Is what they are writing self-indulgent or snarky drivel as masquerading as real intimacy or vulnerability? Someone reading closely can spot the difference. Are they throwing in incest as a plot twist or have they done their work to set up why adding in sexual violence makes sense? (see One Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley for an example of the latter.) How do the author's chosen words serve me in some way. Are they doing a decent job giving me what I'm here for or do I feel mislead as I realize it was all a dream in the end?
Finally, I want clues on how inclusive the author is. If they are a white author, is there any acknowledgement of the privilege they have and the lenses they are using? How they acknowledge their privilege or lack thereof and how that influences their work matters. Is it a memoir on marriage or is it a memoir on this cis-het white woman's marriage? There's a difference. An author worth reading will be clear about who their work is for. And if they're not, that's a clue for me we're headed to Average City.
Average is...fine. It's...okay. And my time, and yours, matters. Maybe recognizing average means we begin to have higher standards...for ourselves. Maybe we start to see that "nice" is the bare minimum. And begin to drop the "okay" book as fast as you might drop "fine" as an answer when someone asks. When we accept the average as the standard, we allow ourselves a pretty low horizon. You're worth more than that, friend.
*TLDR: who's writing and how they are writing.
What’s On My Mind:
The writing of Diane Oliver, a Black writer I had never heard of, who died a few months before her 23rd birthday in 1966. Generally, I’m not a short story fan but I’ve been hooked on Oliver since I read her in The Bitter Southerner a few months back. Head to the link above for that piece and a few of Oliver’s stories.
I was in Knoxville, TN a few weeks back. As I was looking for something to do before the wedding we were in town for, I saw that the Sunsphere, built for the 1982 World’s Fair, had recently re-opened. World’s Fair! Whatever happened to those?! This article piqued my interest and got me thinking about another way the internet has limited how we experience other cultures.
This piece by Virginia Sole-Smith includes a discussion of intermittent fasting, how to respond when kids ask about thinness, if they are thin and…the rage at having been body-shamed our entire lives as we work through owning and living in spite of diet culture. It’s excellent.
My Wondermine co-host, Larissa Parson, and I have launched a Patreon. Details and tiered levels of support (all offering the same bonuses are here). Since Ripe Time is free, this is one way to support my work. Head here for more.
What I’m Reading and Loving:
A new section dedicated to sharing the non-average books. Suggestions are always welcome. Leave a comment below with a title you love!
A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. A future world but not scary dystopian. A monk and a robot meet unexpectedly and learn from each other as they travel together off the civilization grid. Charming, short and good-hearted.
On Michael Jackson by Margo Jefferson. If you follow anything of pop culture, you’ll want to read Jefferson’s pithy, gorgeously reflective and thoughtful small book on Michael Jackson. 2006 so before Jackson died. Fascinating and hard to put down.
This is Ear Hustle by Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor. If you follow the podcast, Ear Hustle (stories from inside San Quentin), you’ll love this one. Lots of extra stories with plenty of behind-the-scenes from the most unlikely of places: prison.
I loved this a lot (as you could probably guess!). I really encourage people to put down books that don't meet their standards. And speaking of standards, I am in the middle of Brittney Cooper's Eloquent Rage and Deesha Philyaw's The Secret Lives of Church Ladies and they are both PHENOMENAL. And, well, I put down The Barbizon. Too frivolous for me right now...