My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [7]
What’s worse is that lately I have taken a lot of time off, and I suspect George has noticed. Now, it’s hard to take off too much time at the Paris Review, where editors have been known to not report to work for up to an entire year.
“Where were you?” says George sternly upon their return.
“I had to go to Europe to find myself,” says the editor.
“Very well then,” says George. “Carry on.” Other valid excuses included skiing, finishing my novel, and working off a brutal hangover.
My excuse isn’t something I want to share with George, however. It’s called burnout, and call me paranoid, but that seems like the kind of thing you soldier through rather than confess to your boss. Admitting to your boss that you’ve lost the passion for work would be sort of like admitting to your wife that you’ve lost the passion for, well, her, would it not? (“Now, honey, don’t take this personally …”) Doesn’t seem like a good idea.
I started feeling burned out about a year ago, I think. There was no single moment when it began, no crummy experience that set it off, just a deadening feeling that what had motivated me to become an editor no longer did the trick. The most worrisome change was that at some point I noticed that I wasn’t all that interested in what we published. I didn’t care what went in the magazine. Sometimes I read it, sometimes I didn’t. If it was a story or an interview I brought in, I took it as a professional responsibility to back it as vigorously as I could through publication. But otherwise I had a hard time caring. And this is weird because like everyone else at the Review, I supposedly do what I do because I care, not for the money, which there isn’t any of. People at the Review care enough not only to accept measly little salaries but to work at tiny little desks with ten-year-old computers in the basement of George’s town house. They care enough to reject superlative, wondrous stories by the most famous authors in the world because they have a single lousy sentence or half-assed scene, or because it’s not his or her best work. They care enough to get into shouting matches over the serial comma, em dashes and whether you can begin a sentence with “And” or “But.” But now I can no longer experience outrage upon seeing a ho-hum story accepted or The Chicago Manual of Style‘s guidelines on the italicization of familiar foreign words flouted. Little things that used to make me crazy don’t anymore. This isn’t the material’s fault, incidentally: the Paris Review is famous for having introduced the work of Philip Roth and Jack Kerouac, among others, and it continues to publish the great writing of the day. Maybe the problem is that there’s no risk involved.
Risk—what would that even entail? I’m not sure I know. Not simulated risk, not managed risk, not the sort of risk you get whizzing down a zip line in Outward Bound. (Wheeee!) I’m talking about the real world, dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed. Not that literary publishing doesn’t entail risk on an individual level—you might start a new magazine and end up publishing only two issues, or you might write a book and get an embarrassing review. You might lose your job. These are obviously real and painful outcomes, and greatly to be avoided. But fear of getting fired or embarrassed doesn’t always get you out of bed in the morning (or if it does, it doesn’t do much more), and on a larger level, since publishing is a losing enterprise so much of the time and failure is almost expected (Donald Barthelme: “What an artist does, is fail.… There is no such thing as a successful artist.”), “risk” becomes a relative concept. (Possibility of failure versus the possibility of ruining one’s life, having to flee the country, etc.) Moreover, some might say that publishing is insulated, even rigged; everyone comes from the same upper-middle-class