This morning I received an acceptance letter from Solstice, which wants to publish my essay "Hated by Literature" in an upcoming issue. In other words, as of today, every single chapter in my unpublishable manuscript, The Vagabond's Bookshelf, has been contracted for individual publication. Perhaps this makes no sense to you. Well, don't ask me to explain because I can't.

Still, I'm grateful to the Solstice editors; very grateful. This has been a difficult piece to place. Its primary subject is my ambiguous relationship with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. My friend Baron has posited that liberal white journal editors don't want to risk publishing a piece that might make them look less than sympathetic to the views of such a charismatic icon. Maybe that's true; I don't know. But I haven't had any more luck with "women's issues" journals, which one might think would be interested in a piece that tries to juggle fascination with the rhetoric and the ideal with disbelief at its casual cruelty to women.

I know that a few of you read versions of this piece as I was writing it, and few others heard me read a section from the essay at the Frost Place in June, so maybe you have some thoughts on the matter. As I've mentioned before, I don't tend to fall into the goddamn-publishers-are-all-against-me mire. We all get rejection letters, but I get fewer of them many writers do; I can only be grateful for that. I do, however, consistently fall into the of-course-this-deserves-to-be-rejected-because-it's-so-stupid mire, which is just as seductive and illusory as the conspiracy-theory mud hole. So when someone suggests that my work is too politically challenging to be published, as Baron did, I sit up straight and say, "What? You must be talking about someone else. I'm the person with the stupid essay, remember?" Ah, isn't easy to fall into every bog you meet?