Yesterday evening I received an email from the agent who was considering my memoir-in-progress, the one I'm calling The Vagabond's Bookshelf. In the nicest possible way she said that she and her colleagues were declining it.

The strange thing is that I feel so relieved, like a weight has slipped its chain. Her response made me realize how much I'd been worrying about this step: about moving my work into a commercial market: of dealing with invasive editorial control, and publicists, and all of those infamous mainstream publishing manipulations. My friends with agents seem so anxious, so harried: as if they are no longer in possession of their own writing soul. Of course, I'm sure this isn't true of every writer and every agent, and I'm sure also that some writers thrive on such pressure, though I don't think I would be one of them.

It seems that, for many people, success as a writer does not require exquisite literary achievement so much as the ability to fulfill a market demand, whether that demand is for predictability, or shock, or some variant of political or social capital. But please believe me: really, truly, I am not feeling pissy and taking out my grumpiness on a perceived publishing conspiracy against me. Nor am I equating my own work with "exquisite literary achievement." I have a long way to go--like, the rest of my life--before I'll be content with what I've written. I'm just telling you that not having an agent has turned out to be, on the whole, rather pleasant.

So here I am, settling back into my niche as Minor Regional Poet. It's not a bad place to be. I kind of like it.