WHY WRITE ON SUBSTACK VERSUS GETTING AN AGENT? By Michael Mohr

Hey everyone! Before I say anything else: Please do check out my Substack writing newsletter, where I’m currently publishing my “fictional memoir” about my time during Covid living in what turned out to be a totally violent, insane section of East Harlem in Manhattan, New York City. (CLICK HERE.) *Please do consider subscribing. It will always remain free for all. I would greatly appreciate it, of course, if you’d like to become a paying member.

I come from a writing family. My mother is an author and used to write for a national magazine. My uncle is a novelist and screenwriter. Two cousins are writers—one writes for a videogame company, and the other does independent travel writing. So, you might say it’s “in my blood.” I grew up reading my mom’s prodigious library of classics as a young child, which familiarized me with twentieth-century authors such as Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’ Connor, and a plethora of others who shaped American writing in profound and unexpected ways.

An active alcoholic from age 17-27, I read and wrote but couldn’t get my shit together enough to truly cobble up a large, meaningful project. (Aka a novel.) Finally—when I hit bottom and got sober in 2010—I finished my first book, what became an autobiographical YA novel. I worked on that book endlessly and by 2011 was submitting to agents. This was a major amateur mistake. I didn’t know that then, of course. Hindsight is 20/20. I was still a nascent writer, still forming my voice and style. I hadn’t written enough words yet; hadn’t read enough books. I needed more time in the creative furnace, so to speak.

Between 2011 and 2016 I wrote several more books, pumping our prose proudly and incessantly. I also interned for a literary agent during that time, began reading voraciously, and joined my first writing workshop on 44th Street in North Oakland. (I was living in the Bay Area.) At last, in 2012, when I was just shy of thirty, I got my first short story published in a literary magazine. I actually got paid (not much) for my writing. Of course I was thrilled.

My YA novel started getting agent interest for the first time in early 2016. This was after I’d broken down and hired a former Random House-turned-freelance editor who worked with me to shape the book for eight hard but productive months. She loved the novel, and after we finished she said it was ready and that, were she still acquiring books at Random House, she’d certainly take it. It was around then that agents started responding to my query letter and sample pages. Then they started asking for the whole book. Many read it. Some read it more than once. I started getting long, personal emails from agents praising the book; the writing, the voice, the style, the characters, the plot.

And yet, in the end, no agent took the book, despite several saying they could “see it on the shelf.” A couple signaled indirectly that, it being the time of Trump, it was “problematic” that the narrator was a WSM (White Straight Male) from the upperclass. It was time for “underrepresented voices” to rise from the white ashes of bigoted Major Publishing. I understood this concept on a basic level, of course, but it didn’t change the fact that it felt unfair and censorious. In my opinion good writing is good writing, regardless of skin pigmentation, class, gender or historical differences. Punishing new white writers then, in 2016, for the “sins of the fathers” didn’t make sense to me. Still doesn’t. And it’s only gotten worse.

Like many writers I’d always wanted to be published by The Big Boys. I wanted an agent and a major publisher—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, etc. I wanted to walk into bookstores and see MY book, with an awesome cover. But I’ve been trying to get to this goal for the past 12 years…and the door seems perennially locked no matter how hard I try. The industry seems to be getting more and more Woke, more and more political and ideological, less and less interested in serious art or divergent, transgressive viewpoints. Publishing has become a monolith of Wokeism. After the Penguin-Random House anti-trust trial, where we all learned how little the vast majority of authors get paid from major houses, and given the fact that major houses rarely pay for writers’ book tours or PR, it finally dawned on me, at nearly 40 years old: Fuck it; I’ll do it myself.

And so that is precisely what I’m doing. This is why I started my Substack newsletter: Click here to read my Substack Newsletter. I figure: if agents and publishers are the old gatekeepers, and they no longer believe (for the most part) in literature and true Art, and they’re not paying writers much of anything and they aren’t supporting their PR campaigns: What reason, really, do I have to stick with that old paradigm? For a long time I was secretly critical and judgmental of “self-publishing” mainly because anyone and their grandma can do it, and there is some BAD self-published writing out there. That said: There is also some terrific writing put out directly by authors. I finally grasped that, if I wanted to write for an audience and have a shot at making decent money as a writer—which is my eternal calling and always has been—it was time to let go of the old dream of getting an agent and a major publishing contract.

So here I am. I started my Substack on August 21, 2022. I’m posting every 3-4 days. Subscribers have been joining, slowly. So far I’m not making much money but I feel strongly that this will change over time. Readers will pay for good, honest writing. And that’s always been my thing: Good, serious, honest writing. No Wokeism. No ideology. No insult to the reader or trying to make readers think a certain way. Just real, raw, gritty, true, down-to-the-core writing.

Isn’t that the whole goddamn point?

Michael Mohr

Substack: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/

Alex Perez: Writer of the Hour

A writer friend of mine recently sent me a link to an interview with author Alex Perez about his experience at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I LOVE his responses. He rails on White Wokeism, and it deserves it 100%. Here is the link to the Perez piece: https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america

Here is one of my favorite sections: “My take is the only take and the one everyone knows to be true but only admits in private: the literary world only accepts work that aligns with the progressive/woke point of view of rich coastal liberals. This is a mindset that views “whiteness” and America as inherently problematic, if not evil, and this sensibility animates every decision made by publishers/editors/agents. White people bad. Brown people good. America bad. Men bad. White women, I think, bad…unless they don a pussy hat. This explains why nearly every book is about some rich fuck from Brooklyn confronting his white guilt or some poor black girl who’s been fighting “whiteness” and “patriarchy” all her life. All this stuff is ideologically-driven horseshit propagated by some of the most artless people on the planet. We know who they are.”

Yep. Absolutely. Here’s the harsh truth: Wokeism and Art cannot coexist. Pick one. I don’t care how “evil” you think the right is. (And look: I am NO FAN of the right.) The appropriate and efficient and effective answer to conservative authoritarianism is simply NOT Wokeism. Perez’s quote nails something very satisfyingly accurate which, as he says, everyone knows but most won’t admit in public: Wokeism represents cultural fascism. Lefties love to talk about how cancel culture isn’t real and, even if it was, they say, it’s not “censorship” anyway because it’s “not from the government.”

But this is a paper-tiger argument. Sure, it’s technically not censorship to de-platform people you disagree with or who the Woke mob attacks en masse on Twitter and gets canceled…but it IS 100% censorious. Do we want that? A censorious, anti-liberal, anti-Democratic cultural environment? Of course we don’t. (Re cancellation, check out Sam Harris’s newest podcast interview [#300] with Meg Smaker: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/300-a-tale-of-cancellation.) Fascinating and terrifying.

One of my novels—an autobiographical YA—was rejected by multiple agents, after they read it multiple times and praised it, because I was/am a WSM (White Straight Male) in the Time of Trump. (They used less obvious language but the message was clear.) I DO totally support all non-white serious writers and I say WHY NOT to their work getting out there…as long as it has merit. And much of it clearly does! But if writers (or anyone else in any industry) are given book contracts simply because they’re non-white and fulfil the leftist ideology: That’s textbook racism. That means you don’t measure a writer’s worth by the power of their prose, but rather by the immutable color of their skin. The color of their skin should be irrelevant.

No, I’m not naïve enough to think we can be or should be “colorblind.” Rather I think the opposite: All human beings—black, white, brown, red, Asian, etc—have some racism in them. We all do. Be honest with yourself. You notice differences in skin tone, right? Based on your class background and the way you were raised, and your childhood geographical location, etc etc etc, you automatically make judgments about people you see. That is no big deal. It’s healthy, rational, normal. But. You have to question those underlying assumptions when they arise, because otherwise you risk getting ensnared in cliches and stereotypes which might sometimes describe some portions of some groups some of the time, but have very little to do with actual individuals of any race. We have to, as MLK famously said, judge each other by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. (I would amend that to, Judge first, then criticize that automatic judgment.)

I reject the notion that race is foundational based solely on power; that, because of historical oppression, black people, say, cannot, by definition be racist.

I remember living in a rough part of East Harlem during the first three months of the Covid lockdowns. It got crazy in my area, around 130th and 5th Ave. One day I was writing and heard a man screaming brutally at someone. I stopped what I was doing and walked across my office room to the window. Looking down—I was on a third-floor walkup—I saw a gigantic black man probably 6’2 with bristling muscles the size of my neck wearing a wifebeater and a gold chain necklace screaming his lungs out at a tiny 5’0 Chinese woman walking her baby in a stroller down 5th Avenue. She looked terrified but faced straight ahead, didn’t respond to his yelling, and kept moving as quickly as possible. Several times he said, “Go back to China, bitch! You brought the Virus here!” He pointed and screamed like a madman; spit flew out of his gaping mouth. I just shook my head. James Baldwin—the famous 20th century renowned (and often misquoted) black writer—talked in depth in “Notes of a Native Son” about the strangled, confused history of racial tension between African Americans and Asian-Americans. Black people can be racist. By saying that I give black Americans the dignity they deserve. They can be ignorant and biased and bigoted just like white people and everyone else.

I knew my “fictional memoir,” “Two Years in New York,” covering my months in East Harlem during Covid and being chased and followed and spat on my the locals would never get an agent. I’m white. So I am publishing it now on Substack: michaelmohr.substack.com.) This is 2022. Racism has been redefined so many times at this point that no one really knows what that old, tired word even means. When you look in the dictionary the “definition” is so blatantly ideological and biased it cannot be taken seriously. And that’s the sad truth about America in 2022: The nation as a whole cannot be taken seriously any longer. The cultural “narrative” has become so detached from real life, so unthreaded from non-white minority struggles, so myopic and navel-gazing and ironically all ABOUT white people (yet again) that you just have to laugh, say Fuck It, and DIY.

I for one am more than stoked, though, to read interviews by people like Alex Perez. He has guts. He tells it like it is. Young white Woke women are 98% of literary agents. If they even so much as SMELL non-ideological writing—or God forbid authentic, real, honest, raw writing that actually represents human life—they reject the manuscript so fast it’s like God took a shit on Satan. The media; mainstream institutions; literature; thinking: These are all a thing of the past; passe; so 2015. This is, again, why I joined Substack. For decades I thought I wanted to go the traditional route. But that time is over. It’s time to fight back. It’s time to lift our collective sane voices and say NO to Wokeism. It’s time to believe in Art and Truth and Honesty.

Trump said Make America Great Again (MAGA). The Left seems to say Make America Divided Again (MADA). I say: Make America Sane Again (MASA).

Michael Mohr

Read my Substack and subscribe! Maybe even pay for it!

https://michaelmohr.substack.com/

Michael Mohr’s First Blog Post Since September, 2017!

(To read my “fictional memoir” about living in East Harlem NYC during Covid check out my Substack newsletter, “Sincere American Writing” where I am publishing the book in chapters each week: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/) *You can subscribe for free but PLEASE consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5/month.

Hello everyone!! Wow. I haven’t posted a single blog post on my website since September, 2017. That’s right. Just over five years. Wild. Much has happened since then, of course. FYI: I have re-posted all of my old blog posts from 2015-2017, so check those out. I originally started the blog back in late 2013 while I was interning for a Bay Area literary agent. I started as a slush pile reader (I learned a lot!) and later got into editing. From there the blog grew. Around late 2017 I grew bored with the blog, frankly, and I started focusing more on my fiction writing and book editing. I edited Christian Picciolini’s memoirs WHITE AMERICAN YOUTH and later BREAKING HATE, both published in 2018 and 2020 respectively by Hachette Book Group. He had an MSNBC tv series for a while, also called Breaking Hate. In addition I edited Deborah Holt Larkin’s memoir, A LOVELY GIRL: THE TRAGEDY OF OLGA DUNCAN AND THE TRIAL OF ONE OF CALIFORNIA’S MOST NOTORIOUS KILLERS. As well as Gene Desrochers’ SWEET PARADISE, among many other successful books.

Also, many of my short stories were published, one of which was nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize in 2018 (“American Freaks”). I wrote several more books, several of which were read with serious interest by dozens of NYC literary agents but were ultimately turned down due to often complex reasons. (One read my literary roman-a-clef YA novel three times and sent me long emails praising it and then disappeared; another loved the book but rejected it due to me being a WSM in the Time of Trump. Yes, this is true.)

I left the Bay Area, where I was living in 2017 still. My longtime girlfriend and I split up. I kept the house and the cat. Saving up money for all of 2018—not to mention the sordid love affair with a woman I met in Mexico City, a story for another time perhaps—I moved across the country in March, 2019 to New York City. Manhattan. This was my absolute dream. I wrote, I explored, I saw live comedy and Jazz. I took the subway trains everywhere. I explored like a lurid madman, insatiable. I lived in lower East Harlem, then Hamilton Heights, then upper East Harlem, and finally Lenox Hill in the Upper East Side on 70th between First and York.

In March, 2020, as everyone on Earth knows, the global pandemic struck the west, where it’d already been decimating China. It was a terrifying time. I lived on the corner of 130th and 5th Avenue when it happened, in East Harlem. Those first three months of lockdown were the scariest of my life. I lived alone, nearly 3,000 miles from any family. I was isolated, alone, afraid. This led me to depression, anger, grief, fear and terror, yes, but it also led me to writing. This became my “fictional memoir,” TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK (click here) which I am publishing now on my Substack.

In June, 2020, I fled East Harlem for Lenox Hill. In May, 2021, my 16-year-old niece tried to kill herself. Finally, I flew back to California after eighteen months away. While there, in July, my father was diagnosed with Stage Four Melanoma. Thus began a new period of chaos. I left New York. My mother and I started caring for my sick father. It got bad. He almost died. He lived. He’s better now. I continued to write and revise and edit my “fictional memoir.” Eventually I asked writer friends to read it. They did and gave me solid feedback. I implemented the changes. All the names are changed. Many details are altered, blurred, etc, to protect real human beings. But almost 100% of this all happened “in real life,” except the parts that didn’t :)

I don’t know how often I’ll post on here. Maybe once a week. We’ll see. Maybe more at first. I have found Substack to be the best platform at the moment for serious writers who respect Art and free speech and who are sick of Woke-obsessed white female agents who reject anything that isn’t ideological and propagandized. That, in my view, is not Art. That is the Anti-Art, if anything. For more on the infestation of Wokeism on writing, read this brilliant interview with Cuban-American author Alex Perez: https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america

So if you’re interested in going along for the journey of my NYC experience, again, check out my Substack: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/. I have and will also publish different material, besides simply my memoir. Political commentary, more books down the line, all of this is to come.

As always: Thank you for reading and supporting me!

Below is the prologue of my “fictional memoir,” TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK. Click here to keep reading.

Michael Mohr

Sincere American Writing

https://michaelmohr.substack.com/

***

TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK

Prologue

Early May, 2020

Hospitals were overflowing all over the five boroughs. Queens got it the worst, then the Bronx, then Brooklyn. Manhattan not as bad but still terrible, of course. Ventilators were yanked from intubated Baby Boomers in hospitals and handed over to younger COVID patients who needed to breathe to survive. We read the stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker; we heard the tales online and from DeBlasio’s and Cuomo’s mouths. Fear whirled in the air in Harlem like helicopter blades at riots in the 1960s. There was an anxiety which glowed around the neighborhood.

I was, it was obvious, seriously depressed. I barely talked to anyone. Days went by without my even texting a single friend. I started eating and drinking horribly—tons of soda day and night leading to a bad sleep/caffeine cycle; pizza and gigantic pasta plates to suck the carbs from them like manna from heaven in a desperate attempt to feel “better.”

Most white residents seemed to have left. I wanted out of Harlem so bad but my will to take action was very low. Plus I had another three months left on my lease.

I hadn’t told my parents about the two times being chased, or about the gun holdup in the building. They’d just worry. And there was nothing they could do anyway. I felt so alone, so isolated, 3,000 miles away from everyone and everything I truly knew. It was as if I were actually in outer space, floating by myself in the vast dark emptiness, inside of this small, cramped two-bedroom apartment in East Harlem. No one knew where I was. No one would help me. The energy from young men outside had become hostile. I stared at the middle-distance when I passed them; I averted my eyes, looked away, looked down.

Every day was a struggle.

It happened one night when I least expected it. The night before I’d read an article in the Washington Post about how NYC hospitals were seeing a small but growing number of patients in their twenties and thirties who’d come in for asymptomatic COVID-related stroke. Some small percentage of them were dying. Turned out most of them had had COVID without knowing it. That was the thing about COVID—it was often, especially in younger, healthier people, asymptomatic.

This particular day was a bad one. My usual routine now was this: Get up around seven, eight AM, read, drink caffeine, try to hit at least part of an AA meeting on Zoom, eat something, feel the strong urge to write but skip it out of emotional COVID fatigue and depression, and then, around eleven or noon, take a “nap.” I was 37 years old and I’d never in my life needed to take naps during the middle of a Wednesday, say. But now I napped every day.

I passed out that day around 2pm. It was sunny and blue outside, but with a crispness which tickled me through my open dirt-stained window overlooking 5th Avenue. Everything was silent now except for sirens and police and paramedics; even the basketball courts across 130th were silent; the city had finally removed the nets and locked up the courts.

I woke up later that day confused, groggy, out of it, as if from a profoundly deep REM sleep. My phone, which I reached for on my bedside desk, proclaimed it was 5:30pm. Glancing outside I saw it was bending slowly towards dusk. COVID days were like Before Times weeks. They passed sluggishly and slowly like honey globulating down a tree. Like dripping molasses.

I decided I’d take a shower.

After ten minutes of scalding water I turned it off, got out, stood there a minute, steam rising off my naked body. I closed my eyes. I breathed deep and slow again. My heart, probably because of the heat, I thought, seemed to be beating rather fast. I toweled off.

I walked back into the kitchen. My hot heel and toes cooled against the cold black kitchen tile. I poured another glass of water and drank half of it. I walked into the second room—my writing office—and looked out the window onto 130th, north, and at the empty, desolate basketball court. A black SUV drove by pumping gangster rap.

Back in the kitchen—thinking I’d put fresh pants on—standing right in the center of the space, I suddenly stopped. My heart out of the blue started pounding. I mean really pounding, as if an angry child were inside my body and was punching as hard as he could. I’d never experienced anything like it, not even when I hopped freight trains, got in scary fist-fights, or hitchhiked across America in my twenties. This was something new and foreign to me.

Next, before I had even processed the pounding heart, a wave of frenetic heat washed through my entire body from my head down to my toes. I imagined being electrocuted might be like this. After that, my left arm started going numb. I mean completely numb, as in useless limb. Then the rest of the left side of my body started numbing. By now I was absolutely terrified. I remember thinking, I’m having a COVID-related stroke.

Still naked, frantic, the left side of my body mostly useless now, my whole body vibrating with heat and a pumping heart like a fist, the final blow was the worst: I started, for the first time in my life, truly struggling to breathe.

I couldn’t get enough air, no matter how much I tried. The oxygen to my brain dropped. A vast, hyper-intense headache was descending. I panicked. I started trying to gather my clothes so I could…do what? My impulse was to run. But where? Why? Then I thought: Hospital. I need a hospital. But the next thought was: Hospitals are dangerous right now. What if you get put on a ventilator? What about COVID? But isn’t THIS COVID? I didn’t know. I was lost. Scared. Alone. I ran to the window again in the office, looking outside. Empty streets, shiny from a light spring drizzle. Street lamps. Desolation. Nothing.

Police, I thought. Call 911. Or my downstairs Texan neighbor, Latisha. Someone! I sensed in that moment that I was going to die. It was inevitable. I was going to die at 37, 3,000 miles away from friends and family, totally isolated and alone, scared and depressed, in East Harlem of all places. I felt my eyes widen in fear. I was too young to die. Too young to leave this planet, this life. Help!

At last I looked for my cellphone; it took me ten seconds to realize it was already in my right hand. I’d been going on autopilot. Had I been talking out loud? Had I already called anyone? The breathing got much harder again. I struggled. I needed air.

I dialed my mother. She picked up. She knew something was wrong. I never called randomly, unplanned. I said, my breath locked and rugged, “Mom. I need help. Struggling to breathe. Beating heart. Left side of body is numb.”

“Jesus Michael,” she said, the fear hot in her voice. “Ok. Ok. Look. Honey. What happened. Nevermind. Can you sit down?”

“I need a hospital mom,” I said. I realized then there was a hospital up on Lenox and 137th. Eight blocks away. I could throw clothes on and sprint up there. But with my struggle to breathe?

“No!” My mom yelled into the receiver. “Hospitals are dangerous right now! Let’s see…let’s see…shit…honey, can you call your neighbor? Can you sit down?”

I heard the panic in her voice. I heard my father asking her what was going on. She briefly answered him. I heard my dad say “shit” in the background. I had my mom on speaker phone. I was still in the office. I’d managed to get an old raggedy pair of shorts on. I sat down on the little thrift-store gray couch in the corner. My heart was still beating hard; the left side of my body was still numb; my breathing was shallow and weak.

“Ok, I’m sitting,” I said.

“Good. Good. Ok. Honey. Can you just take real slow, deep breaths for me?”

I wanted to weep. “I don’t want to die mom.” Fear was paralyzing me. My brain seemed half frozen. I was groggy and confused. Time seemed to move in LSD-like waves almost. It was like crawling through psychic mud.

“You’re not going to die, Michael. Keep breathing. Slow. Deep. In…out. In…out. In…out. Okay??”

“Ok,” I said, and it sounded slow and syrupy… (CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON MY SUBSTACK. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE. EVEN BETTER, CONSIDER PAYING $5/MONTH.)