In addition to craft and close friends, one of the things that’s stayed with me from graduate school has to do with a writer’s public image.
One of my professors—a fierce talent whom I loved working with for her directness, vision and knowledge, and who imparted a lot of wisdom─told me that I needed a new email address. No one will take you seriously with that email, she said. Agents and editors are not going to want to contact you at prowlinggilamonster@gmail.com. I said I appreciated her advice but I’d been doing fine with that goofy email for years. I’d published essays in literary magazines, emailed with literary agents, did internships─wasn’t that proof that one address wouldn’t inhibit my career? She didn’t budge. As part of our work together that semester, she made me read books that were published before 1950. She made me read Anna Karenina. And she made me get a different email. I was grateful for all the but the last.
I admited that my prowling Gila address sounded strange and adolescent. And yes, some people might view it as unprofessional. But one of her colleagues in the program had an equally weird address, and another professor who’d led a long, respected literary life had one that wasn’t exactly professorial either. In a sense, weren’t our email addresses, like our author websites, clothes, license plates, and passwords, just one more outlet for creative self-expression? My professor insisted I create a new address built from my name. I did that to pass the term, but I never used it. It wasn’t because I’m stubborn. It was because I had too much invested at the other address to switch. All my contacts knew to find me there. All my ongoing conversations with editors, friends and sources took place there. And long-term writing-related emails I expected to arrive over the course of years would land at that address. In our era of countless passwords and logins, social media, and pins, I didn’t have the patience to add one more account to my roster.
An unsolicited email from an excellent literary agent arrived at my goofy address recently, and it got me thinking: what does it mean to be professional as a creative writer? Obviously, creativity is about much more than crafting inventive outfits and wearing sunglasses indoors, just as being professional has more to do with your behavior than the cut of your suit. In one sense, professionalism in creative writing looks a lot like it does in accounting and project management. To me, it’s about responding to your emails in a timely fashion. It’s about turning in work on schedule, being reliable and respectful, and not overpromising and under-delivering. It’s about treating people with humanity and respect, not speaking down to people, acting honestly and reasonably, asking for help when you don’t know something and helping others if they need, and doing your homework when contacting other people or having meetings. So what about your so-called “literary identity,” your public image? Aren’t writers brands now and supposed to have what agents call a “platform”? This is where things get tricky.
While your email address or website might give strangers a sense of your interests and personality, I don’t believe they give editors and agents an idea of what kind of person you’d be to work with, or if you’re serious about your business. If agents like what they read and think it can sell, they’ll contact you. I don’t have all the answers, I’m just thinking out loud, but if part of your identity as a writer comes from the originality of your ideas and your narrative voice on the page, then part of your appeal to readers, editors and publishers─your marketability─comes from your identity. Meaning, your creativity. Narrative voice is a persona, but it overlaps with your actual personality. So if a lot of that voice stems from your weird, freaky, loud personality or your revealing, sexually charged, possibly lewd writing, then your public image stems partly from the very parts of you that you wouldn’t show in a meeting or other professional setting. In other words, what makes us unique and appealing as writers aren’t qualities that necessarily seem professional in other fields or situations: transparency, exposure, oddity, goofiness.
Writing is a creative field, so people expect us to be creative, or to at least be strange and different. What you write doesn’t determine whether you’re a professional; it determines your literary niche and identity. Many of us first-person writers write about subjects that people in other professions don’t discuss, even at home: sex, drugs, heartbreak, mistakes, abuse, arrest, fear, and divorce. When one of your greatest professional assets is your subject matter and persona, professionalism means something very different than the identity you cultivate as a writer.
At lot of good things happened to me as a writer before I got an MFA, and a lot has happened since graduating. What I can say is that working writers need to wear many hats, and our different public selves must trade off and coexist with our creative and personal selves, our selves online and at home and on the page: the administrator and the poet, the dirtball and the professor, the freak and the professional, the beer-guzzler at the barbecue and the lecturer at the podium. Protect your inner freak, and nurture your outer professional. They are ultimately the same. Surely not every writer thinks of themselves as a freak, but the frame helps me to sort things out, so I go with it.
A few years after graduation, I emailed my professor with a question, and she took the opportunity to help and to say, “I often use your prowling gila monster address as an example of what not to do so it was a thrill to see it again!!!!” That made me laugh. Somewhere some writing students used me in a practical discussion; hopefully they also recognized that even the wisest, most accomplished professors sometimes get it wrong.
I know what my professor would think of the photo of me and a ferret on my website’s homepage, and the bios that list me as both an essayist and burritoist, but that photo reflects who I am, and burritos are as much a part of my literary identity as the stories I tell in magazines and my timely email replies. Same with that ridiculous Gila monster address. I created it in my late twenties, on a whim on a lunch break at work. I needed an address to make an eBay purchase, so I took the opportunity to upgrade to Gmail from Yahoo, and from some mix of my Arizona roots, my youthful sense of self as a laboring outsider, and some book I was reading, that phrase prowling Gila monster came to mind. A decade later, I’m still stuck with it. I’m not proud of it. I wouldn’t mind a new one. But it’s accompanied me through my thirties across the continent and back, through various jobs and editorial exchanges, even my close call with a commercial book sale, and it still stands strong, as resilient in the grueling literary world as a reptile in the scorching desert heat. In one sense, even though I left my native Arizona a long time ago, I’m still a reptile at heart, thick-skinned and enduring, snatching a nibble of success here and a morsel there, hiding in the shade when I need to wait things out, and staying patient as I slither through a landscape of publishing and academia that’s more refined than I. Maybe that describes many writers. I didn’t intend my email this way, but we writers like symbols, so we dig for meaning.
Occasionally people comment: “love the email address,” and “Best address I’ve seen in ages!” I welcome the compliments. Like feedback on your writing, these comments confirm that not every reader is your audience, not every editor will get what you’re doing, and not everyone will like your personality. As long as you’re respectful and professional, that should be okay.