Focusing Outward: Living Literary Citizenship in Community

By L. M. Poplin

July 16, 2019 

“Try to treat other people as if they possessed precious hearts and infinite souls.” -David Brooks

Writing is often assumed to be a solitary endeavor. Yet even the act of writing implies another person. Publishing, on the other hand, is never solitary, not even when independently done. And with current publishing practices requiring authors to hawk their own wares, the notion of a lone writer happily ensconced in a room full of books has been relegated into the realm of myth. A ghost of publishing’s past. Like it or not, writers are—if not by nature, at least by necessity—a communal species.

Although the concept of citizenship within a literary community is not new, I wonder if it has been properly understood. In Jane Friedman’s 2014 blog post “Are There Limits to Literary Citizenship?” and Becky Tuch’s Salon.com article from the same year, both authors define literary citizenship as a reaction to a manipulative publishing industry where “writers are being exploited under the guise of marketing activities as ‘enriching activities’” (Friedman) and “the burden to ameliorate the negative effects of these industry changes falls not upon those responsible for said changes, but upon writers” (Tuch).

Read the full article with a Literary Boston subscription.