This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here, we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, We share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. We're really happy to be speaking with Maggie Dougherty today. Maggie is a writer and teacher. Her literary criticism, reviews, and essays have appeared in publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation. Maggie has a doctorate in English from Harvard University. She is a lecturer in the English department at Tufts. She's also a visiting lecturer at Harvard where she teaches nonfiction writing and journalism and creative writing in the Extension School. 
Maggie's first book, The Equivalence, was published in May 2020, and it was one of my favorite pandemic reads. This was one of those books where the cover design really grabbed me. The mix of photography and design and even the typewriter font, to be honest, really worked. So I'm curious, Maggie, did you get to play a part in designing or approving that cover? What a great question. Thank you, Rachel. And thank you so much for having me on. It's such a delight to talk to you about writing and academia and all of the relationships between those things. So yes, the cover. I am probably not alone in seeing the initial cover options as a writer and being a little dismayed by them. That happens sometimes. 
I mean, this is part of the process of book publication, which we can go into more later. but you know you finish a book or you think you finished a book. And then there are so many other tasks before the book actually comes out that you have to engage with and cover design is one of them. So my agent and I had seen a few early options and felt they really did not capture the spirit of the book at all. And we asked to see something else and John Gall at Knopf designed the cover. And what I really love about the cover, I mean, I love many things about it, but so we have this black and white photograph of Anne Sexton, you know, an iconic image. 
She's probably the most well-known writer in the book, so it makes a lot of sense to have her on the cover. But then there's an image of a women's liberation movement protest as well, which I was so happy to see on the cover because part of what the book is about, it's about friendship and creative collaboration, but it's also about politics and liberation and how women Things we think of as private or domestic actually have worldly significance. And then the last element of the cover that was so kind of touching and moving to me is the spine has these colors on it. If you look at the spine, it has these blue and pink colors. Those are actually pulled from a late painting by Barbara Swan, who's the painter in my book. 
She and Sexton collaborated a bunch of times on illustrated books of Sexton's poetry. So I really just love that they ended up side by side on the cover of the book. That was very cool to me. Yeah, it's perfect. So I'm going to briefly describe the book since the content is relevant to some of our conversation about writing. The Equivalence is about a group of women artists and writers who came together at the Radcliffe Institute in the early 1960s. The book describes their creative lives and artistic collaborations and how these things shaped and were shaped by the women's liberation movement. So this is a topic that I can totally imagine an academic treating in an academic way, which could also be really great. 
But that wasn't the route you took. Can you tell us about why you moved from academic kind of writing, which you'd been trained in, to this kind of nonfiction writing? Yeah. That is a great question. And I probably have a few different answers to it that range from intellectual and creative and sort of elegant answers and then kind of more pragmatic, bare bones, personal, rational answers. So maybe I'll kind of tag back to where you started with why tell this story in this way? Why use this kind of literary genre or form to tell the history and the story that I wanted to tell in that book? Yeah. You're completely right that there's another version of this project that would make a sort of scholarly intervention that would draw on existing scholarship, both in history and art history and literary history and literary studies to tell a story of these figures. 
I think the reason I went in a different direction is because what really intrigued me were the relationships among the women in my book, and then the kind of affinity ephemera of history that I think is hard to capture in any genre, but that can maybe be captured a little bit better in what we might think of as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction, which is to say basically what it felt like to be in the room at the Radcliffe Institute. What was it like to walk in, to be a woman in 1960 who maybe hadn't spoken to anyone about art or ideas since she was in a who maybe if you're, you know, the writer Tilly Olson in my book, who didn't graduate high school, had never been in an environment like that. 
What would it feel like? What would the sort of the atmosphere, the tone, the emotional caliber of these conversations? I really wanted to capture, I'm almost tempted to say the human dimension or the emotional dimension of this experience. And I think that the genre I went with this kind of Narrative history, group biography allowed me to dwell on those facts that allowed me to narrate those experiences in a different way and in a way that could maybe make readers experience it themselves, make them feel a sense of the excitement, the fear, the anxiety, the change, the turbulence of this historical moment and of this particular creative coterie. I should say that I've always been kind of interested in creative collaboration. I'm interested in coteries. 
I'm interested in community collaboration. That's sort of a political commitment for me as well. I like to think about art and writing and creative production not as something that happens in isolation by one genius, but rather in a network with an infrastructure, with forms of support that are both personal and material and interpersonal. And so that was why it felt really important for me to tell this as a story of community, as a story of interrelated lives. and an institution that also supported the kind of work that these women were interested in doing. The kind of boring, pragmatic reason for moving in this direction is that, you know, I sold this book on proposal, I think maybe the first year of after graduate school for me, or maybe it was even before I'd officially graduated. 
And by that point, I had already started writing essays and book reviews and criticism. I had drawn the attention of an agent, and I felt that at that particular moment, just in a very kind of, yeah, again, pragmatic way, moving in this direction with my writing was more promising than continuing on the academic job market and trying to find a stable academic position. I can say more about why that didn't feel like the right fit for the kind of work I wanted to do anyway. But it was just this interesting moment where I graduated. I had a temporary lectureship, one that actually had several years on it, but that also had a very firm cap. There was no way I could be in that position for longer than the years I've been allotted. 
And so I was quite aware that I needed to come up with some other way of earning money and having a career. And this other form of writing and the books that can be developed and proposed and sold in the trade marketplace just felt like sort of surprisingly a safer bet to me than trying to apply for academic jobs. So those are kind of two different ways, I guess, of thinking of why the project took the shape it did. I also love the way you describe that kind of narrative nonfiction writing as describing what it felt like to be in the room. I relate to that because in my own academic writing, I'm often trying to do that. And if I'm talking about the weather that day or what somebody felt like, I, of course, need to footnote it with some source. 
And so I'm guessing, is this a freer move for you in nonacademic writing of nonfiction? Is your sense that you might not need to footnote all of these sometimes hunches or hypotheses about how it felt in the room based on the evidence you have? How do you go about making that decision? Do you think it's easier to describe what the room felt and sounded like when you're not writing a kind of strictly academic piece? This is so interesting because a colleague and I who also teaches in the creative writing program at Harvard were just talking about this when we were talking about the genre of memoir and about reconstructed dialogue and how we should engage with that with our students. So both this colleague and I come out of the magazine world where your work gets fact-checked. 
So actually, you can't put anything into a piece of criticism or a book review that cannot be sourced. My colleague writes profiles. She can't put anything into a profile that cannot be sourced and confirmed by a second source. So everything in my book can be sourced. So if I talk about the weather that day, it is because I have this, there's this wonderful kind of archive of Boston weather. And I went and I looked it up and I saw that it was unseasonably cold or whatever. When I talk about the atmosphere in the room, that might come from an interview with one of Tilly Olson's daughters who said, you know, I walked in the room and it was electrifying. And so when I talk about the feeling of electricity in the room, that's where that comes from. 
It's completely true that the citational practices are different. I don't actually put everything in the endnotes because trade publishers don't like to have that many endnotes. I mean, it's a very kind of boring, you know, almost monetary reason that you don't have kind of the work of footnoting and endnoting. But I should also say that probably another reason the citational practices are different is because the audience is so different for a book like mine compared to an academic book, because an academic book is speaking to experts in the field, it's speaking to students, it's speaking to researchers who are participating in the same knowledge building. So they really want to know where stuff comes from because they are going to go build their own projects with those sources. 
You know, that's actually a really important thing that academic work does is create collective knowledge. My book does something a little different. You know, I don't think it's pure entertainment necessarily, but it's not speaking to readers who necessarily have their own projects with my sources and their own need to use them. So that's one kind of thing to think about in terms of the genre distinction. But you mentioned a certain kind of freedom. And I do think that's true in terms of interpretation and in terms of argumentative work. That's where I felt more freedom. Not everyone necessarily thinks about biography writing the same way. I've been teaching a course on writing biography this spring, and there's a wide range of ways of thinking about biography. 
But some biographers, Phyllis Rose is one of them, really do believe in interpretation. And they believe in putting the work and the life alongside each other and thinking about them in dialogue. And from that, extracting a claim, extracting, you know, if you read Phyllis Rose's wonderful Parallel Lives, which is a book that inspired me, she will make claims about these writers and the way they felt and the way they were. And she says in her introduction, you know, I'm working with this idea of mythologies and these mythologies come into practice both in the life and in the art world. And yes, the life may inform the art, but if anything, I suppose that the art informs the life. And you can look at the life and you can look at the art and interpret it and then work back into the life and make a claim about the person. 
And that was really liberating for me to think about criticism and biography writing in this way. And I do feel like it allowed me a certain freedom to make claims, yeah, not just about what it felt like to be in the room, but who these people were. I could look at their art and I could look at their lives and I could say, okay, based on this, I'm going to venture a claim about what these characters cared about, what they valued, what they struggled with, what they were ambivalent about. And that does feel like a kind of non-academic form of argument or interpretation. Yeah, I'm sometimes noticing the urge to write that way myself. And I, to be really concrete about this, I usually have to do the, and she likely felt, and then there'd be like maybe a footnote about that. 
the letter where this was expressed or what she later wrote in her memoir. For you, how is that the same or different? Yeah, I mean, you'll see that in narrative nonfiction writing and critical writing. You'll see those ways. I'm thinking of Robert Caro's book on Robert Moses, The Power Broker. You will see these little uses of something like the – he won't necessarily say he would have likely felt – but he'll often talk in the sort of habitual past tense or in his Johnson biography. He learned that Lyndon Johnson ran up the steps of the Capitol every day. He just learned this tidbit about him and he spent a lot of time trying to figure out why that would be. Kara is also an interpreter of people. 
And after spending time in Johnson's hometown in Texas, he had a sense of why seeing the Capitol building at sunrise would have been so enticing and so exciting and how running toward the Capitol would sort of signal Johnson's drive and ambition. And so he doesn't actually have a key source that says on June 6th at 5 a.m., Johnson ran really fast towards the Capitol building. But what he has is a really, you know, capacious and variegated and well-sourced body of knowledge about Johnson's behavior as a young politician. And so he uses the habitual past to say when someone saw Johnson or if someone saw Johnson, at 5 a.m., he would be running. And so it's still couched. It's still sort of saying, I don't have a specific instance in mind, but it's narrated in this way that I think is conclusive. 
If someone saw him at 5 a.m., he would be running towards the Capitol where the sun was rising. And it's a claim. It is a claim about what was happening. So I think I tend to move in my own work in that direction. I feel like if I know enough about If I've done enough research and I feel this way, whether I'm writing a piece of magazine criticism or a book, if I feel like I've read all the things, I've talked to the important people, I have a sense of a person's tendencies, preoccupations, obsessions, behaviors, habits. I can narrate those in a way that is, if not definitive, sort of firm and not kind of tentative in that way. And that is, as you say, maybe something that the genres I work in do allow for and also maybe expect of me. 
I think it would be strange if I were writing in the genres I work in and I said, well, you know, she likely cared about X. I think people would feel a little, well, why are you telling me this? You're supposed to know. You're supposed to be the expert. You're supposed to be explaining this person to me. And that's, again, yeah, this distinction with genre and also audience. What does an audience want from me? They want clear and firm and authoritative interpretations. So I try to give those without, of course, overstepping in terms of what I can and can't know. That makes a lot of sense. One of the people we spoke to recently, an academic who moved to trade, mentioned that in order for her to do kind of what you're describing, she ended up using many fewer quotations, that instead it was her authorial voice that was supposed to let the reader know what was said and sort of the paraphrasing of 
this was a way to communicate that kind of authorial authority that the reader of a trade press book would expect and want. Does that resonate with your own experience? Oh, that's really interesting. I mean, I guess I think – so I guess I have two answers to this question. So one, at the level of the book, when you're putting together a book, a thing – Rachel, when we spoke in advance, you'd ask me, what is something you wish you'd known about writing and publishing? And one thing I wish I'd known more about were permissions and sort of what it means to take already published work or unpublished work found in an archive and publish it in a book and what kind of, the maze of permissions that is required. 
And I mean, let's not even get started on photographs and images and the cost of those things. I had no idea going into my book project about any of that stuff. So again, I feel like I'm often, I'm trying to strike a balance between sort of more intellectual discussion of these things and the banal pragmatic discussion of these things. But one reason my book, for instance, has fewer quotations from poems than I would have liked is because I didn't get permission from some of the estates. They just didn't want to offer permission. And so then I had to go through with, you know, I have a horrifying spreadsheet that I developed while working on my book to make sure that I never quoted more than 10%. 
of anything, which is the sort of standard of fair use quotation in case law. And so I would go through any discussion of poems, any discussion of letters, essays, notes, whatever, and make sure I was never quoting more than 10% of the original document for those estates that I didn't have permission for. So this is one constraint that you have in writing these kind of books where there is There's profit at stake. I mean, not very much profit, frankly, but I think, you know, when you use material for educational purposes, pedagogical purposes, scholarly purposes, it's very clear both what you're, you know, that you're manipulating the material in a different way. You're bringing it to a different audience. Fair use is really easily applied there. 
And you're not trying to launch a campaign. career necessarily when you give a PowerPoint presentation in class. You know, you're doing it in a pedagogical way where it is true that when I'm drawing on already published or unpublished material by other writers in my own writing for my own profit making, you know, there's a lot more at stake there in terms of intellectual property and copyright. So that's one thing about quotation. The other thing that might sort of be interesting to add to this is, and I talk about this with my students in my nonfiction writing classes especially, there is a tendency, I think, for readers of narrative work to kind of skip quotation or glaze over when it comes to quotation. And so, and I've had editors tell me this at magazines too. 
I have some editors that will never let me use a block quote. I have some editors who say the quota is one block quote per piece, you know, and are pretty strict with that because there's this feeling that readers might check out or get overwhelmed or sort of lose track of what the piece is doing if there's too many other voices in the piece or there's too many voices that aren't yours. And so that's, I don't know, I'm not really sure. I would have to kind of reverse engineer or put myself in the reader's position. And yeah, I guess if I do that, I think there are some times where I see a big quotation and I think, okay, I'm skipping ahead because I want to get back to the story or I want to get back to the narrative. 
So yeah, it's partly awareness of audience I think that might make a writer in these genres tend to quote a little bit less. Since you mentioned prose, profit I guess I want to ask how is it making a living from this kind of writing a great question and one that my students are asking me a lot right now because it's the end of the academic year and they're graduating and every week I have someone else in my office saying okay give it to me straight what's it like being a writer so you know in those conversations I try to be I try to be candid both about the good and the bad in a way again going back to this question of what I wish I had known and 
I don't think I fully understood just how precarious this career path was. I think especially having a book sell pretty early in my career as a writer made me feel kind of, oh, great, this is a viable career path. A person can make a living this way. And now, I guess, you know, seven years later, eight years later from that sale, you know, I am really reckoning with how unstable and precarious it is and coming to understand the different safety nets that other people I know of in the profession have or knew to have or something. So for me, I really do need some other job on top of the writing, which has been teaching, but teaching is also kind of precarious and hard to come by these days. 
You know, in the last academic year, I taught at four different schools. I taught six different classes. Five of them were new. Five of them were new preps. You know, it was really chaotic and disorienting. And then at the same time, I had deadlines. And these are deadlines that are a little different from academic deadlines in the sense of, you know, you have six weeks, you know, 12 weeks, something like that. And you do need to get the piece in because the magazine needs to go to press. Yeah. So I bailed on a few pieces, which I'm not proud of. And I guess maybe the, the, you know, like I don't want to sort of drone on and on about like the challenges of this, but I think, um, I think I am definitely still trying to find the balance of having time to do the writing that I do and want to do and am, am, am asked to do at this point. 
You know, it's, it's there, there are these relationships there. There are these people I don't want to disappoint. Um, this is, uh, you know, a career that I am whatever living, working, working in. But at the same time, knowing that I do need to do this other work to make that financially feasible for me. And so how do I find work that isn't going to crowd out the writing? And how do I write in a way that also allows me to work other jobs? It is very much for me a work in progress. Yeah, which actually reminds me of one of the other questions we wanted to ask all writers about a writing practice that that's working for you because I'm just thinking of the schedule you're describing. 
And I mean, even with teaching actually a bit, quite a bit less than that, I, I find it really difficult to fit in meaningful writing during the semester. So now I am really curious to hear about a writing practice that's working for you now. Oh man. Another great question. Another question that I might have a sort of disappointing answer to, which is I do not have anything that would, that would resemble a practice. You know, I think for me, And I think this would be true for me, you know, even in a different, maybe a more regular, with a more regular day job that gave me more regular hours and more predictability. I think I am someone who tends to write in a kind of full immersive state. 
You know, I will read and think for weeks and weeks, and then I will usually draft pretty quickly. If I usually, if I get edits that are substantial, I'll usually just redraft from start to finish, kind of like sit down for a day and just be in it. And so... So one just hopes or I just hope that those days of immersion don't coincide with heavy teaching days or heavy teaching work days. When they do, sometimes it's just that I'm up really early or up really late or writing, kind of scribbling in between classes, a very kind of chaotic scene or situation. I should mention that my partner is really good great about, um, sort of helping me out with that. He has a son from another relationship who we co-parent. 
Um, and you know, I try to make, try to the best of my ability to make sure that when we are parenting together, that i'm available and not in a writing, you know, fugue, but sometimes i am. And he's really great by, with saying, all right, like i will, I will take care of, of the parenting stuff and you can work. And so that is, yeah, incredibly helpful. Um, and i'm really grateful for that. And I, you know, it's hard for me to imagine if we were parenting full time, how I would do this without having these, you know, pockets of time without parenting work as well. Some of our listeners might be grad students, and they might be people who are thinking, I might kind of want to go that nonfiction, nonacademic route. 
When did you know in your academic career, maybe you always knew that this was the path you were going to take? Yeah. So I got into graduate school in order to teach, which I think is maybe not the common reason for going into a PhD program. As long as I can remember, I wanted to be an English teacher. My father wanted to be an English teacher. His father wanted to be an English teacher, but they didn't really have the sort of material security to go into that. My grandfather was a postal worker, and that was not a scene. It was just seen as a dream. And so I am the lucky generation that got to realize the dream. And I went into this PhD program kind of thinking, great, you know, I love literary discussions. 
I love reading. I never wrote, I should say. I never took a creative writing class. I never aspired to be a writer. I never really thought I could be a writer. And I also knew nothing of the world of magazines and magazine criticism. I think there were some people I went to college with who were from Manhattan who were a little bit more worldly than I. was and were, you know, doing summer internships at magazines. And I just didn't even know those existed. So that whole world was just not on my radar at all. So to me, you know, it's all right. I want to teach. I like books. This is what a person does when they want to teach English and write books. 
And I should say I had a mentor in undergrad who encouraged me in that direction. I kind of came in saying I want to teach high school English. And she said, well, actually, I think, you know, if you're really, really interested in books, maybe a better path for you is teaching college English. Yeah. So that's what I got into to do. And I did very quickly realize that I had a different approach than a lot of my peers. The way I thought about it, you know, at age 22 as a first year grad student was, oh, I thought we were here to talk about books, but it seems like we're here to talk about ideas. That it seems like the books were in service of not quite theory, but these arguments that sometimes to me felt like they operated at a really high level of abstraction. 
And that it felt like the book was used to kind of enhance that argument, give evidence for that argument. But the argument almost had a standalone quality to it. It was really the product of a lot of rich and rigorous thinking and reading, not just in literature, but in a whole host of other genres and intellectual disciplines. And in scholarship, of course, I didn't even really know what scholarship was. And so it seemed like there was this conversation about literature that was happening, you know, three flights up from the book, I guess. I was not very good at it. I am, you know, someone who is much better with the concrete, with the specific, with, you know, the detail and with narrative. Narrative is always the way that I've thought. 
And, you know, that's a form of thinking that makes a lot of sense to me, storytelling. And, you know, that's something I grew up with in my household, in my community. So I was at sea is maybe the long and the short of it. I felt like I had gotten into a profession that I wasn't especially good at and that I didn't really love. And I felt sad. And I don't think this is a rare experience for an early year graduate student in English to feel like I came into this because I love reading and I love books. And I feel like I have to put that love aside. Since my early days in graduate school, there's been this revivification of love studies, I think, in a way. 
And, you know, there's been this renewed interest in what kind of scholarship we prefer. produce if we allow ourselves to love literature and we allow ourselves to talk about our effective responses to that. I still don't think that would quite have spoken to me at the time or is really what I want to do in my work. But I was here at this moment or entering literary study, scholarly study at a moment where it felt very divorced from the text. It felt very cerebral. It felt symptomatic and critical and all of those things. And I tried. I mean, I think I stuck around. I did the PhD. I wrote a dissertation. You know, I did it, but I just felt like I was always going through the motions. 
It felt like it was not something that came, not only did not come naturally to me, it didn't excite me. It didn't turn me on in any way. And then I wrote my first book review and I said, oh, okay, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This makes sense. This feels like it just comes. And I wrote a few of them, and it just felt, oh, this is just so much more the way I naturally think and care and argue about books and ideas, and even the ideas that kind of come out in books or exist alongside books, but they're very much intertwined with the books that we're talking about. So again, I didn't quite know how I was going, you know, what the magazine world was or what the trade nonfiction world was. 
This was all still very estranged me, but I just felt, well, if I can do this and it makes me really happy and it seems to be in line with what I'm already in my heart of hearts doing and thinking, then I'll just do this and see what happens. So a very kind of, I don't know, late coming to it, I suppose. I think I had my first byline at 28, which is something I do tell my anxious undergraduates when they think that they need to have Everything lined up and figured out, you know, immediately upon graduation that I didn't write anything until, yeah, my late 20s. And that was when it started. And, you know, now it is what I do. So, yeah, I guess a circuitous path in some ways to that point. 
And you mentioned earlier that you drew the attention of an agent, which sounds like a really lucky and wonderful experience. Can you explain that? Sure. Sure. You know, I actually don't think it's that unusual. So a lot of the agents I know are very hardworking and they're always looking for new writers. And what a lot of them do is they read magazines and newspapers and they look for interesting writing. And so the first piece of advice that I give to MFA students or other people I talk to who are interested in publishing nonfiction books, I say, well, have you published anything about that topic or on that theme in a newspaper or magazine? And often they say no, because I think there's this sense that like, well, the book project is its own thing or the book has to exist. 
And of course, understandably, they've been so immersed in the book project. They're not doing a ton of other writing. A lot of them haven't even written very much for newspapers or magazines or written shorter form things. They're big picture, big project thinkers, which I am not. So that's maybe of interest. Yeah. And, but, but that is the, my first piece of advice, which is that, you know, agents are combing magazines for good and interesting writing. And a lot of people I know who have gone on to write trade books have gotten attention from agents because they've published an essay and an agent has written to them and said, hey, is there a book here? Could there be a book here? This essay has gone viral. 
Like, what if we make this into a book? Or even just this, this was really interesting. I like your writing. And this was my case. Just, hey, that was a great, that was a great piece. You know, I'm, are you working on a book? Are you working on anything? Can we sit down and chat? So it was, of course, lucky in the sense of getting an agent can feel daunting. But I also do think this particular route, which is to be writing, to have your writing out there, to write shorter essays and things that you're working hard on and that feel meaningful to you. And then even if you have to query an agent, I think having those clips out there to hand over is really, really good to show that your writing has generated interest. 
You have published, you know how to take edits, you've reached readership. So that's, yeah, I think that is useful for all writers looking to move in that direction. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with the agent? What are you getting from this person in terms of feedback or guidance? Yeah. Yeah, my agent is great. And I think one of the main things that an agent does is worry about the business stuff so you don't have to. I mean, this is something that I, you know, I say to other people who are interested in agents, like, what do you look for an agent? What do you need in an agent? And I think different people probably need and want different things. 
But I would say if you have a community of readers and writers who you trust and then really what an agent can be for you is someone to think more about kind of the economic aspects of book publishing, the business aspects, all of the stuff that I think is harder for people who are not super in the business to know about or understand. But I should also say that I think one thing my agent does quite well and that an agent can be really helpful with is have a sense of the market and have a sense of general readership. One thing that can be kind of confusing, you know, there are so many markets out there. There are so many communities of readers, not to be like Stanley Fish or whatever, but there are these, you know, different communities. 
And sometimes one of them is really quite visible to you, maybe because it's the community that you are in, maybe because it's a community that you see a lot on social media. And one thing an agent can do is help you break out or help you see a bigger perspective. So, um, or maybe there's a different audience you want to reach, or maybe there's a different community of readers you're speaking to. One thing that's always surprising is a book that might feel really hot in literary New York might not actually go beyond literary New York. So the books that I often, I'm always surprised even as a critic, the books that I see nominated for prizes or bestsellers or something, I'm always like, Oh, I've never heard of these books because they're just not the books that I'm asked to review. 
They're there are these other reading communities out there. And so I think a good agent will have a sense of, okay, not just what do, you know, academics read or what do literary critics based in Brooklyn read, but they'll kind of know the broader, the broader reach of that stuff. And so my agent was quite good at understanding, you know, what stories reach what kind of audiences, what stories appeal to editors who also want to reach those audiences and, And he worked a lot with me on the proposal, which is the hardest thing, I think, for, I don't know, for me, it was a very difficult thing. I think especially as a debut writer, the proposal really needed to be super polished, super substantial. 
You know, I think if I want to finally get around to writing my second book proposal, it probably won't be 100 pages. But my first book proposal was 100 pages. You know, it was... It was serious. It was a serious thing. I spent all summer on it. And we fine tuned it because it is it's the thing that an editor reads. It's the thing that they're going to show the rest of the editorial team at the pitch meeting. You know, it's it's it's both an indication of what your book will be like and a kind of demonstration that you're capable of writing it. And it's also a kind of not quite a promise, but it's, you know, like like like so many industries, book publishing is about potential. 
I guess this is not super different from the academic job market. It's not super different from the NBA draft, you know, where you look at something and you say something or someone or a project and you say, well, this person could be really good or this book could be really good. And so the proposal is both supposed to be your idea, you know, your demonstration of what you can do, but also kind of tantalizingly open in the sense of an editor could look at it and say, oh, I could imagine this book doing this. And then the trick is when you're actually – you know, in the buying and selling moments to say, okay, does my vision for this book align with the editor's vision for this book? 
How far apart are we? Could I actually move in the direction of this editor's vision, even if it wasn't my original vision for the book? And maybe this is just another moment that I think is really distinct between trade publishing and academic publishing. And academic really does have a lot of ownership over their project, is my understanding. You know, the project is usually pretty fully developed by the time it gets to a proposal or to peer review. And the academic is really very much kind of in charge of what the argument is going to be. Trade book publishing, I think, is a lot more collaborative is maybe one word for it, where, you know, there is – and this is – I'm speaking specifically about trade nonfiction. 
Fiction, I think, is a very different story. But there may be an editor who quite rightly wants the book to look really different and thinks that the book would work much better if it looked really different from the book you proposed. Right. And then your sort of challenge as a writer is to think, okay, well, is this something that I want to do? Is this something that would be interesting? Is this something that I could come to believe in as well? Or not, you know, maybe you say, actually, I really want to do what I want to do. And even if that means that I don't get as big of a deal, or I have to go with a different press, or I don't have as many resources invested in me, that's okay, because this is the kind of book I want to write. 
So yeah, the market forces, I guess, bear so much more. on the trade nonfiction book. They're kind of there from jump, I would say. How did you understand who the audience would be for your book? Because just even when I described it, I could understand how somebody might listen to that and think it sounds very niche. But having read the book, I can now say, I feel like this does have a very wide audience. It's about relationships and female friendships and making art. But I'm curious how you... if you always could see that it had that bigness to it, or how your agent, as you were saying, helped you see this wider market? Yeah, I think that is something that my agent helped me see. 
And that's part of why the proposal was so fine-tuned, because I think what we had wanted to emphasize in the proposal were these bigger themes, these bigger themes and these, you know, What in the book industry might be called evergreen or in journalism, right, is called sort of like these evergreen qualities. So I think when I had initially thought of the book, I was thinking more about history. I was thinking about, oh, this is a specific historical moment. This is a specific intervention. And the first draft of the book was much more historical. And I showed it to my editor and she said, wait a second, why is there so much history in here? I thought this was going to be about these beautiful friendships between these incredible women. 
And I also think this has something to do kind of as a sidebar with the books that women are expected to write, the books that young women are expected to write. You know, I don't think that I could, I look sometimes at books by male peers working in the genre, and they are much more, not scholarly by any means, but much more wide ranging, much more historical, much more, let me take you on a journey into knowledge and information. I think there is more of an expectation that women writing books about women will focus more on the emotional and the personal and the narrative, which again, I don't mind. I mean, that is what I wanted to do. So that was fine. But I also think, you know, that is, that's just kind of in the air when you're looking at edits and when you're pitching books, like, who are you? 
What's your identity? What's the identity of people in your books? What kind of readers does that lend itself to? What will readers want from a book like this? And so, yeah, we really did think, Think about a wide audience for it. I think one thing that was strange, I would say, for me working on this book and thinking about audience is I have a kind of community of critics and writers that I feel quite close to. They're mostly around my age. They have similar literary tastes as I do. They write for the same publications. They have the same kind of style. And I think of them as kind of my literary community. And I don't think this book was for them. And that was a strange thing. 
It felt like for a different audience. I think this was stuff that people in my community either really knew or it didn't feel as edgy and hip and radical in some ways. And so that was something that was, I don't know, maybe challenging, maybe interesting, just writing for a kind of unknown audience, which feels quite different from when I'm writing a shorter piece or writing a magazine piece where I feel like, oh, I'm writing this for... partly for the audience of the magazine who I know at this point. If I've written for the magazine quite a bit, I have a sense of what that audience likes and needs. But I also very much feel like I'm participating in a conversation with my friends about books. 
I mean, that's what's so wonderful. If I think about the highlight of my work, I feel like there is this ongoing conversation among critics and writers about books and ideas. And it happens in magazines and it happens in these pieces. And we're all kind of talking about to each other and arguing with each other and hating each other and loving each other. And it feels really wonderful and vibrant in this way. And so then to kind of turn in a different direction and look toward an audience that I might not know as intimately, that did feel, that felt strange at moments. And I still feel a little, I think, alienated maybe from the book in a way that I don't from my other work, because it feels, well, I'm not really sure who read it. 
I'm not really sure what spoke to them about it. I mean, I get, I hear from readers all the time, which is really, really wonderful. But It's not this ongoing, long, you know, multi-year conversation that I feel like I'm a part of in some of the other work I do. I don't know if that makes sense as a distinction. Yeah, it does. And I'm thinking of your introduction, actually, to the book where you talk a bit about yourself and, you know, kind of your own path as a woman writer and sort of how that intersects a little bit with the women you were researching. And that, as the reader, that felt like – now that I'm hearing your story – about how the book felt to you as the author that felt a bit like the move to have this speak to the widest audience possible, readers who just know what it's like to come of age, to date and have relationships and work and try to make all those things work together. 
I thought your intro did a beautiful job of explaining how the book was relevant to all of that. Well, thank you. I mean, that's really nice. And I do... I mean, I do feel this way. And to go back to this question of academic, non-academic, you know, what do I come to literature for? What do I come to the story of creative lives for? You know, I would never say that this is self-help for me, this kind of reading or research. But I do have a friend who jokes, all research is me-search. And I think there's some truth to that, that, you know, I think as we are, you know, why do we think about art? Why do we look at art? Why do we 
read literature why are we interested in narrative you know i think for a lot of us there is this question of i'm thinking of the you know sheila heady title how should a person be like this is there is this question of how to be in the world and i think that the best art is exploring that question and i think it's you know and i think there is a way to go back to this this kind of methodology question if you are of the phyllis rose school where you think that life and art are really mutually informing especially you know for creative people that's someone who is a writer is living in an artful way or is living in a way that is informed by the art that I think you can go both to the art and to the life asking these questions, you know, how should a person be? 
How should a woman be? How should a friendship be? And you can, you know, turn to this material and explore those questions within it. And that does, yeah, feel like something that I wanted to do and that I, you know, try to do in so much of my work. And those are maybe slightly different questions than the ones an academic literary historian or literary scholar might ask about the work. Another question I'm realizing our listeners might have is, is your academic background a benefit for this kind of writing? And if so, you know, if our listeners are thinking about moving in that direction, is it helpful to be bringing that up, this academic background, if they want to be writing more narrative nonfiction books or journalistic pieces? 
Yeah, that's a great question. I have a few different thoughts. thoughts about it. I think one thing that I feel like I can't insist on enough is that these are, I think sometimes there is a tendency to think that one can take one's academic work and kind of, you know, the sort of controversial version of this would be kind of dumb it down and give it to a general audience that you can take what you're doing as a scholar and just kind of repackage it and make it simple and then other readers will be interested in it. My experience is that these are really just two entirely different career paths with different skills and different knowledge bases and different audiences and different production regimes and all of that. 
And so I definitely felt like I had to learn all of that when I went into it. I didn't really feel like I was doing the same thing I'd been doing as a graduate student. I was just doing it a little bit differently. I felt like I was doing something almost entirely new. That said... I do think that developing interests and research skills and writing skills in academia can be helpful. But I think they can be helpful basically in the same way that developing those things in another sphere could be helpful. I mean, one thing I'm in this mode of advice giving with undergraduates. So I'm thinking about these because they ask me sort of similar questions. You know, should I go to J school? 
Should I go to graduate school? Should I go try to get a job in a magazine? Should I go to get an MFA? Yeah. And I guess the thing that I, when I think about the writers I read, the critics I read, you know, the scholars turned, you know, public writers, if that's the best way to put it, that I read, a lot of them just have these rich areas of interest and rich life experiences that informs their work. So it's less that they got specialized training in what they did or that they kind of came up through the right path than that they went out and, got interested in things and lived, and they bring that into their work. So that could be graduate school. 
That could be academia, the site where you develop those things. But I think it could also be something else. It could be working in a nonprofit reproductive rights space and maybe become kind of an expert on what's going on with reproductive health and technology and politics and whatever. And then that's your knowledge base. That's your experience. That's maybe you've gotten really good, say, to talking about people about sensitive topics. You bring that into journalism. Let's say you pivot to journalism. You bring all of those skills into that space. So even though you don't come up through the conventional newsroom or J school path, you have all of this stuff that you really know how to do and that you really understand. And so, yeah, speaking to an audience of graduate students or scholars or something like 
Yeah, you have that. You have all this stuff. You have all this knowledge and all of these skills, and that's what you bring to writing that's different than what someone else brings. Someone else who went and did an MFA and maybe has a kind of craft approach that's different from yours. Maybe that's not what you're offering, and that's okay. I think knowing what you know and knowing what you bring to the table is generally a really good thing, and that's kind of how you might – I don't know, not package yourself, but if you're writing a pitch, you know, that's something to say. You know, I'm pitching a review of this new book about the Victorian age and I'm a 19th century literature scholar. 
I have this area of expertise. And so my review of this book would come from that perspective and that's what I would bring to it. And for some editors and magazines and publishers, that's great. That's exactly, that's super exciting to them. And for some, maybe they want a different approach. So yeah, I think there's just a lot of different pathways out there maybe. Yeah. Can I ask about whether you're working on a second book? Yeah, I am. I am just getting started on a second book. I wrote an essay last summer for the Yale Review about abortion stories. It was kind of about the cultural history of the abortion story as a public narrative, as something that is testimony but also a personal story and the kind of templates we have available for that. 
And that got me interested in more broadly and looking into sort of the cultural history of the Roe era, which is now over, you know, it is a 50 year period in American history. And, um, you know, we have really good political histories of that period. We have really good, um, legal histories of this, of this period. We have some really good, uh, reporting that's been done. Um, there's a book, uh, there's a book by the journalist Sue Hertz, who teaches at the university of New Hampshire about in the nineties, the Boston, um, and brookline abortion clinics that were just under siege by operation rescue uh every saturday it's a you know wonderful wonderful work of reporting and so but then i was sort of wondering you know i guess a theme for me is always like what are the stories we have what are the stories what do they tell us about how to be or or things like that and so in this book, I really want to look into okay well what what were the stories we were telling in narrative art and in the public sphere about abortion, you know, at the beginning of the row era? 
How did those stories change? Throughout the Roe era, where did we end up? So that's the project that I'm really just beginning at this moment, but hoping to kind of get that out into a proposal shape sooner rather than later, I guess, maybe this summer. That sounds fascinating. I'm just curious. You mentioned the kind of 100-page book proposal that you did for the first book, which was really interesting to me just because I didn't even know that was something that happened in trade press. But I wonder... Do you think you'll do something like that for the second book, or did that feel especially necessary as a first-time author? Yeah, I mean, I should call my agent and ask. But I think for a first-time author who had only really published some essays and criticism, and not in the most well-known publications, I really had to prove that I could do it. 
And so what that proposal had was a really very, very careful overview of the project, But it also had a full chapter breakdown. It had three sample chapters. It had all the other stuff that's in a proposal, you know, about the author, comp titles, marketing, all of that stuff. But I really needed to show in the sample chapters, the chapter breakdown and the overview that I was capable of writing this book. I don't know exactly. I mean, again, I should talk to my agent about what the second proposal needs to look like. But I think the fact that I have written a book, right? You know, it's out there. I didn't meet the deadline exactly, but I only asked for another six months. 
It didn't take me 12 years to write the book, right? These are the things that editors are worried about. They're worried, basically, that they're going to acquire a book and it's not going to happen. I mean, it's all betting. It's all gambling in some sense. So they're betting on you. And so part of the proposal is showing, you know, I'm a safe bet. I'm a good bet. But having a book already out there does some of that work for me. You know, I'm a safer bet because I've done it. I know how to do it. It has happened. You know, I didn't bail. That's all good. So my sense is that the proposal wouldn't have to prove that on its own to the same degree that it did when I had not published a book. 
And I'm wondering in those three sample chapters you sent for the first book proposal, did those end up being your chapters or were they really changed after? Yeah. They changed. I had started the project with kind of capsule biographies. So each chapter would be about one person, basically. And that's not quite true. There was some, there's some variety there. But I was really entering kind of, you know, let me introduce all of these characters, the sort of context in which they're coming from. Let me tell you a little bit about, you know, Boston Expressionism as a style of painting. It felt a little, yeah, more kind of discreet. There was these kind of discreet sample chapters. And then in reworking the book in general, 
drafting the book, but really in editing the book, that was the most challenging section to figure out. How do I get five people on stage or in scene without just kind of going one after another? And it did feel really crucial that the book be told as a full narrative, as like a story that's unfolding with people kind of entering when they should enter in the story. And so that changed a lot. That's the section that changed most in terms of my, you know, conception of the project from proposal stage to final product. Were there things you learned about being an author with that first book that you feel like you're really going to be bringing to just the experience of the second book coming out? 
Or as you were saying, how we be in the world, how you be as an author the second time? That's a wonderful question. I haven't... I confess that I haven't given it a lot of thought because my questions right now are like, will I have a job? Will I have health insurance? Again, back to the pragmatic. But I mean, that is a real question for me right now. I know I have a job through December. I have health insurance through December. And so I'm thinking, okay, what do I need to do? If I'm going to write a book, maybe I would want to try to sell it so I have some income for spring. And then I wouldn't try to pick up another another short term teaching job. 
Right. Like it's like these are the calculations that I have right now. And so it's less how should a person be like, how will I live kind of questions so that when I think about writing the second book, I'm really I am thinking in those kind of, you know, it's like a little collage or or I don't know, maybe a better a better metaphor. You're kind of moving pieces around and seeing how can I put enough work together together? So that I can also do the work, but also not be in sort of financial stress. So that is what really where my head is at right now. When I wrote my first book, I had this contract, this lecture contract, and I was able to drop down to part time. 
So still teach part time, half time, basically, and keep my benefits, which was amazing. I don't have that anymore. So it's just, yeah, it's a matter of thinking. How do I do this kind of strategically so that I'm working but also able to write? And thank you for reminding us, of course, that these real world concerns are kind of always part of, are usually part of the writer's life. For most people, yes. Yes, I would say so. This has been really helpful and interesting and a lot of fun. Thank you, Maggie. Oh, thank you so much. This has been great to talk about and think about. It's been really, yeah, illuminating to think about some of this stuff in a way that I don't always. 
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