Agents and Not Agents, The Hard Way

10 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, music, New York City, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Barbara Sizemore, Book Publishing, Claudia Menza, Failure, Fear of a "Black" America, Joe William Trotter Jr., Literary Agents, Mistakes, The Business of Writing, The Hard Way, Writing

Agents from The Matrix (1999) screenshot (cropped), August 8, 2021. (https://matrix.fandom.com)

This is the second of several posts I’ve put together about my journeys as a writer. Please laugh when and where appropriate.

“You always gotta do things the hard way, don’t you?” my one-time professor Barbara Sizemore said with some sighed frustration. It was in response to me telling her I had decided to stay at Pitt, to pursue my history doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh and possibly transfer to Carnegie Mellon to complete it. It was April 1992. We were standing in the main corridor of the third floor of Wesley Posvar Hall (née Forbes Quadrangle), I was on my way back to my grad student cubicle in the History Department. Sizemore was heading back to her office in the adjacent Africana Studies Department. If I had known this would be my last conversation with the prickly educator, her of squinty eyes and well-manicured afro, before she return to Chicago, took a position at DePaul, and passed away in 2004, I would have done more than given Sizemore a blank stare. As the tall, lanky, and sarcastic 23-year-old I was, I probably would’ve said, “Why yes, professor, I really do!”

I knew what Sizemore was really saying. It was about attending a lily-white university, where there were only four tenured Black professors out of 800 total faculty. My advisor Joe William Trotter, Jr. was one of them. Sizemore assumed that going to Ohio State or Temple to earn a doctorate in Black studies would have been my best move. But even though Sizemore was incorrect about my education decision, she was definitely correct about me taking “always doing things the hard way” paths toward so many of my goals.

Claudia Menza became my first (and so far, only) literary agent in July 1999. The idea of finding a literary agent to help me publish my first book was something I had played with as an idea for nearly a year. At least once I had begun to emerge from my state of rage, depression, and sheer burnout from my years finishing my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon and having Professor “running interference” Trotter as my advisor. I made the decision to turn my doctoral thesis into a book that would straddle the fence between the scholarly and the general. I wanted to publish what would become Fear of a “Black” America for a larger audience, to include both the academic and the personal in the same book. No one told me this was impossible. No one said this was the harder road for a first-time book author. I owned books by scholars that had mainstream imprints and labels. And many, if not most of them, had an agent helping them.

Soon after I finally found my full-time gig with the nonprofit Presidential Classroom in the DMV, I went ahead, did some research in those big, thick books on books and lit agents at Pitt’s Hillman Library, and wrote pitch letters to seven of them. Three weeks later, Menza wrote me back offering to represent me.

She started querying publishing house editors in October 2000, just as I was leaving Presidential Classroom for a higher paying nonprofit job working in social justice in DC. I was so busy with work and my New York family and with married life that I took my eye off the process. One year went by, with a few rejection letters here and there. Then 9/11 happened. I met up with Menza in New York six weeks later. I was already there to do a site visit with a social justice fellow. That’s when I learned Menza at this stage of her time as an agent predominantly represented fiction and poetry. Still, she had some high-powered authors under her belt. I remained confident in her and the mysterious process of finding an editor willing to publish me, in between bites of delicious pasta at a wonderful Italian bistro in the Village.

Two more years went by after that. I received rejections from Basic Books, Random House, Palgrave, Oxford University Press, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, among others. Some stood out because the acquiring editors met to debate the merits for my book before ultimately rejecting it. Some stood out for being two-sentence rejections. I remember Menza saying, “I don’t understand why they don’t want your book.” That was at the end of 2002. By then, even though I remained outwardly confident, I had given up on finding a mainstream commercial publisher. “Maybe I need to go learn how to write again,” I said to my partner more than once. This, just after she became pregnant with our first and only egg.

With the ugly transition between jobs within my nonprofit organization and the birth of and caring for our one and only son, I knew I didn’t have it in me to continue the process of pitch-and-reject with Menza. I was also thinking about writing a memoir, something that could explain how I got to be me. I wrote Menza in March 2004, formally cutting ties with her as my agent. “I wish it had all worked out,” she wrote back.

That July, with some encouragement from my new boss and from my significant other, I decided to look at Fear of a “Black” America one last time, but this time, to self-publish. I went and found a house that did its own reviews of manuscripts and provided adequate enough copyediting to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself. Sometime in that process, Barbara Sizemore died. I read about her death in a nicely done obituary DePaul University put out (The Washington Post obit, not so nice about her years as DC Public Schools chancellor). I imagined Sizemore looking down at me that July and August, shaking her head.

The book came out at the end of August. Somehow, despite myself, I sold over a thousand copies in 16 months, did radio and newspaper interviews and talks and signings all over the DMV. I was happy and a bit bitter, like a cup of black coffee not sugary enough for my taste buds. This book could’ve been so much more, I thought so many times in 2004 and 2005.

But none of this is Menza’s fault, or Trotter’s, or even my fault, not in any direct sense. The world of book writing is more mysterious than the cloistered world of academia, and much more mercurial, too. It’s a popularity contest cloaked in American -isms, especially individualism and elitism (which of course contains racism and misogyny, too). It puts all the effort and blame on you and me. In my case, for not having a job in academia that lined up with my expertise in writing Fear of a “Black” America. For not having a degree from an Ivy League institution, or for not having enough successful writer contacts in my genre(s) or in general. For not living in New York as a writer. Maybe even for not being light enough or good-looking enough.

And, even in the four-and-a-half years of having an agent, for not paying close enough attention to how the industry had become a set of six monopolies. All with independent presses being squeezed, to sell out, to fold, to become niches for a small group of aspiring authors. It went from being an industry where you could pitch your books directly to publishers with or without an agent to “Get outta here!” unless you do have an agent. So many agents would prefer DIY schlock or books that easily fit the tastes of elite or hokey white readers than to ever read a query from me. I’m too eclectic, too determined to write for Black folk and beat up on white ways of thinking. I received more than 130 rejections from agents for my memoir Boy @ The Window, between 2007 and 2011, including one that read, “Alas, another book on childhood abuse!”

So, is it really me making it more difficult, because I like to “do things the hard way?” Is it because I have frequently put the need to pay bills and eat over pursuing my art and craft first? Is it because my writing sucks and agents see that immediately? Is it because I don’t know what I’m doing, or because of all of the above? Well, fam, what I do know is that I need help. I don’t quite know what I need to know to navigate this strange world of finding representation. I don’t quite know what I need to know to make publishing with a reputable press work without representation. Kenny Loggins says “when you can’t give love, you give out advice.” Advice with love is preferable, and usually, specific to where I am.

Road to My Memoir, Part 2: Multiculturalism

08 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Ability Grouping, Academic Historian, Academic Writing, Afrocentricity, Barbara Sizemore, Comparative Slavery, Elaine, Humanities, Jeannie Oakes, Joyce Harrington, Keeping Track (1985), Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Pitt, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Sociology, Tracking

When I wrote about this long path to Boy @ The Window last month, I figured that it would take three posts in all to discuss the path. But the road’s shown itself to be longer — and more convoluted — than I anticipated.

So I never did write my book about being on welfare, dehumanization and welfare policy. I found a much more interesting subject to take up the following year, in the summer of ’90. I decided to take the late Barbara Sizemore’s research methods course in Black Studies that fall, to move beyond my history courses, as I’d already taken enough of them to have fulfilled my major.

I wanted to look at the re-segregation of desegregated schools through tracking or ability grouping, specifically in Mount Vernon’s public schools. The book that brought me to this topic was Jeannie Oakes’ masterpiece Keeping Track: How School Structure Inequality (1985). It had begun to turn my mind away from slavery as a long-term history project (perhaps one I would’ve pursued in doing my master’s papers or doctoral research) and toward history of education and racial inequality.

Oakes’ main argument was that school desegregation was a mixed bag of success and failure precisely because of the fact that with tracking by academic “ability,”disadvantaged Black students and advantaged White students would seldom meet in the same classrooms. That made me think of my still recent experiences with the Humanities Program in middle school and high school. After all, a school district that was three-quarters Black, Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic had a magnet program that was about sixty percent White during my six years in Humanities.

I spent that summer — when I wasn’t working — at Mount Vernon Public Library, NYU’s Bobst Library, and New York Public Library giving myself a stronger background on this topic. I met with the former MVHS Humanities coordinator Joyce Flanagan (who had become Harrington by then) about getting more specific demographic data about the program by class year and school (Pennington-Grimes ES, A.B. Davis Middle School and MVHS). Much of the data had already been destroyed, Harrington confided. The data she did give me, while informative, wasn’t enough to do even a watered down version of what Oakes did for Keeping Track (she interviewed 14,000 students and teachers in all).

I ended up doing my research project on Pittsburgh Public Schools and their International Baccalaureate programs at Schenley and Allderdice HS. It was a solid paper, an easy A compared to my comparative slavery paper for Drescher’s graduate course the semester before. But it wasn’t enough for me.

In the course of building up my knowledge on segregation, suburban schools, urban school districts, and community control, I stumbled onto books about multicultural education. I wanted to learn more, so I took a sociology course my final undergraduate semester on the sociology of race and ethnicity (there weren’t any education courses that focused on either race or multiculturalism at Pitt in ’91).

The turning point came with my friend Elaine, who knew of my interest in the topic. She was the one who had informed me of a growing controversy with New York State’s newly proposed history curriculum, one in which the ideas of multicultural education had played a key role. That work the summer before grad school, that work to understand why there was any controversy at all, led me to finding out more about cultural pluralism and its history. This then led to the role of Black intellectuals and educators in applying cultural pluralism, the differences between multiculturalism, multicultural education and Afrocentricity.

I had my dissertation topic in broad strokes before I’d taken any courses as a master’s student (not counting the comparative slavery class). But in the process of moving from re-segregation and Jeannie Oakes to multiculturalism, I’d moved from a wide-eyed student of everything that related to my life at age twenty to an aspiring academician, a historian of educational and cultural ideas.

I’d taken the first steps to bury myself in academic writing and thinking, without fully understanding why I cared about multiculturalism in the first place. It took me a decade to figure out that the lack of understanding of diversity in Humanities was part of what made it a bittersweet experience for me, an experience that drove me toward multiculturalism as a research topic. It took ten years before I realized that my pursuit of multiculturalism in Black Washington, DC was my way of dealing with my own past without any emotion. Multiculturalism took me further away from the writer (and historian) I wanted to be, even as I earned my doctorate on the topic.

“It Is Done” – 15 Years Later

21 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, race, Youth

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Academia, Barbara Lazarus, Barbara Sizemore, Betrayal, Calling, Careers, Carnegie Mellon University, Catherine Lugg, Dan Resnick, Daniel P. Resnick, Dissertation, Distrust, Education, Epiphany, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Self-Discovery, Writing

Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The next twenty-four hours will mark a decade and a half since my former dissertation advisor Joe Trotter wrote today’s title quote in a God-like-pronouncement of an email to me regarding my final content-based revisions to my doctoral thesis. With those revisions following my committee meetings in October, I was now officially Dr. Collins. I knew that. I just didn’t feel it.

Working on a book-length research project with an abusive advisor and disinterested committee members at a school as conservative and isolating as Carnegie Mellon University left me exhausted. For I never felt I could ever be all of myself there. I made myself into the scholar I hoped that I wouldn’t become. At least, the twenty-one version of me that began graduate school back in ’91 held that hope. Five years later, I felt alienated from my own purpose and calling, and was more than unsure about becoming a full-time professor and historian. Especially given the wonderful examples of scholarly inhumanity and hypocrisy that Trotter, Dan Resnick and so many others had proven themselves to be (see “You’re Not Ready” post from November ’08 and “And Now, A Plagiarism Moment” post from September ’10).

I was burned out. I felt numb, with a boiling mantle of rage underneath the surface. If Trotter had said the

Arching fountain of a Pahoehoe (like my post-PhD rage) approximately 10 m high issuing from the western end of the 0740 vents, a series of spatter cones 170 m long, south of Pu‘u Kahaualea, September 10, 2007. (USGS via Wikipedia). In public domain.

wrong thing to me at the wrong time in ’96, I probably would’ve laid him out with a right hook to the jaw. And Resnick’s lucky that I didn’t own a car, because I might’ve run him down with it.

As it was, when Trotter attempted to meet with me a few weeks later to discuss “my future,” I refused. Especially given his suggestions for job applications. One, a one-year position at a University of Nebraska branch campus. The other, a CUNY school in Queens with a proposed position that wouldn’t begin until July ’98. I told him, “You don’t get to determine my future, certainly not without me.”

What should’ve been a period of rest and repair between Thanksgiving Week ’96 and graduation day in May ’97 was hardly that at all. It took me, really and truly, six months to recover from the dissertation process, and probably close to two years to not pass by or go on Carnegie Mellon’s campus without wanting to strangle my dissertation committee with piano wire. By then, I’d moved on to the rather mundane task of figuring out how to cobble together a career that wasn’t dependent on a full-time faculty position in academia.

And over the past fifteen years, I have pieced together several careers. As a part-time college professor, as a nonprofit program officer and as a consultant. It helped to have people like the late Barbara Lazarus and my dear friend Cath Lugg in my corner in those first years after I’d finished my doctorate. It helped that I expanded my career options from merely pursuing a history professorship wherever Joe Trotter’s winds could’ve taken me.

But it helped, most of all, for me to start trusting my instincts, my own heart, again. The irony of my complete disillusionment at the end of my degree-earning journey was that it left me with the time to contemplate whom I thought I really was, what I really wanted to do in life, and how I wanted to do it.

It was far from an immediate process of epiphanies and revelation. It took me nearly six years after finishing my dissertation to see myself as a writer, cutting through twenty years of denial and abuse in the process. It took me a little longer to see myself as a writer first and foremost, with all of my other professional hats second, third, and so forth. To understand that mine was a concern far greater than multiculturalism in education. My role as a writer and educator was also about aspirations, academic pathways to success, racial and ethnic equity in education, access to and success in college.

Barbara Sizemore, 1927-2004, circa mid-1990s. (http://sesp.northwestern.edu).

Now, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t looked back to wonder what could’ve been. If I were a White male with my credentials, I’d long ago been doing what I’ve been fighting to do as a writer and educator for years. If my advisors had been someone like a Cornel West or Henry Louis Gates. Or if I had attended an Ivy League school in undergrad. Or if I’d earned a master’s degree in journalism or communications, or a doctorate in a school of education or in psychology.

The late Barbara Sizemore once warned me about earning my doctorate in history some two decades ago. “You always have to do things the hard way, don’t you?,” she said to me with disapproval when she learned of my acceptance into Pitt’s history PhD program. I should’ve said, “Yes, I do.” Because the last fifteen years have been a hard road, as all roads to enlightenment are.

Cream on the Brain

12 Sunday Dec 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Politics, race

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"A Substance of Things Hoped For", A.B. Davis Middle School, Ability Grouping, Academic Excellence, Barbara Sizemore, Carnegie Mellon University, Creme de la Creme, Culture Wars, Diversity, Fear of a "Black" America, Humanities, Identity, Jeanne Oakes, Keeping Track, Magnet Programs, Magnet Schools, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Mount Vernon public schools, Multiculturalism, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Student Engagement, Tracking, University of Pittsburgh

A Brain Floating in the Heavy Cream of Obsession with Academic Excellence, December 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

A quarter-century ago, education scholar and Ford Foundation education program director Jeanne Oakes published Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. Oakes’ groundbreaking, definitive work on the educational inequalities created or reinforced by ability grouping has led a whole generation of scholars to examine the viability of tracking in K-12 education. In a 2005 edition of her book, Oakes wrote that “through tracking, schools continue to replicate existing inequality along lines of race and social class and contribute to the intergenerational transmission of social and economic inequality.”

I picked up Oakes’ Keeping Track for the first time in ’90. By then, I already knew from experience how true her words and research were. Six years in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools via the Humanities Program had taught me all I’d need to know about the tensions between creating a class of students whose level of academic performance was par excellence while simultaneously addressing segregation and diversity in the school district. The magnet program and the district failed at one and succeeded at the other, which in turn reinforced its failure.

I worked on a paper some twenty years ago for the late Barbara Sizemore, my professor at the University of Pittsburgh my senior year (and a former superintendent of DC Public Schools) looking at how magnet school programs actually created resegregation in individual schools and Pittsburgh Public Schools because of the exclusivity that comes with tracking or ability grouping. It was an easy paper for me to do, guided in no small part by my experiences in Humanities at Davis Middle and Mount Vernon High School. Easy, but not easy to get a handle on beyond the obvious demographics of race, class and test scores.

I managed to wiggle myself into the culture wars of the early ’90s and the debate around multiculturalism and K-12 education soon after that paper. It seems obvious now that the unacknowledged diversity of Humanities was what enabled me to take sides in favor of multiculturalism. That led to my dissertation looking at the historical development of multiculturalism among Blacks in Washington, DC (“A Substance of Things Hoped For,” Carnegie Mellon University, 1997 for those who want more information), and eventually, my first book, Fear of a “Black” America from six years ago.

But it took my memoir Boy @ The Window to bring me back to square one. I realized about a year ago that I’d done nearly thirty interviews of former classmates, teachers and administrators for the manuscript. There was much more material to mine beyond their impressions of me and how to shape their descriptions of themselves — and my memories of them — into characters for Boy @ The Window. I decided to work on an academic piece that looked at the benefits and pitfalls of high-stakes schooling — not just testing — in the form of a history lesson via magnet schools, specifically my Humanities experience.

After a quick rejection, I redoubled my efforts a few months ago. I decided to look at the education psychology and sociology literature, as well as Oakes again, to see how these interviews and my experiences could be useful in our testing-obsessed times. I finally realized what had troubled me about Humanities for the past three decades. It was the reality that all involved with Humanities had taken on the e pluribus unum identity of an academic superstar (much more than just a nerd, by the way). Beyond Black or White, and ignoring the realities of poverty in our district and (at least for me) in our program, Humanities was all about sharpening our academic personas above all else.

This fueled the major success of Humanities during its existence between ’76 and ’93, which in turn would define its failures. In successfully nurturing the idea of academic excellence as identity, as evidenced by so many of us attending and graduating from college, this magnet program failed in its other major educational functions. It failed to embrace diversity, to help its students understand the diversity that was Humanities, to nurture creativity and imagination beyond A’s and college acceptances. It failed to develop the whole student, which aside from its charge to help desegregate Mount Vernon public schools, was its original mission.

Humanities failed because its teachers, administrators (including the former superintendent of schools) and many of the most vocal parents (mostly affluent and White) refused to deal with diversity seriously. Academic excellence without significant parental engagement or the humility necessary to discuss issues of race, gender, class, sexual orientation led to a severe overemphasis on calling us the “creme de la creme.” All of this would have a negative impact on our development as students, and as emerging adults.

I don’t think that it’s asking too much of parents, administrators and teachers to work together in both striving for academic excellence while building programs that embrace difference and nurture creativity and imagination, and not just an addiction to A’s. Or is it?