The Gatekeepers Strike Back

Robbie Herbst Speaks Strikingly Common Sense

Dear Republic,

Nothing quite warms the cockles of ROL’s heart as when an initial prompt keeps spiraling out and produces a range of intelligent responses — as Robbie Herbst does here, continuing the Gatekeping discussion.

-ROL

THE GATEKEEPERS STRIKE BACK

After so many breathless opinions about the ‘vanishing male writer,’ I’m pleased to report that I’ve found him. He is a 62 year old retired attorney living outside of Tampa, and he has submitted a 3000 word short story to the literary magazine I edit for. It’s written in single-spaced American Typewriter font. The protagonist — a handsome business executive — will have sex with the buxom secretary on page 4, and he will prove virile and surprisingly skilled as they do it on the mahogany desk.

If having an MFA is a badge of mediocrity to a certain Substack set, NOT having one certainly doesn’t convey any special distinction. Let’s acknowledge that most people are not good at writing. Even good writers often produce bad work. Nevertheless, many people decide to dip their toe, to see what all the fuss is about.

I’ve sat through the creative writing workshops. I waded through the slush submissions. I read college application essays hand over fist for a living. I’m here to say that the written-word is not an innate human talent. I appreciate the optimism, the can-do-spirit of the self-publishing world, the inspirational Substack notes, the ‘everyone is a writer’ manifesti. I just don’t think that these people have had to sit through any particularly anatomical descriptions of cunnilingus in a fiction 101 class.

I don’t edit for a literary magazine anymore, for reasons of both supply and demand. On the one hand, the endless stream of terrible and mediocre writing (I actually prefer the terrible to the mediocre). On the other, a limp aesthetic sensibility on the part of other editors, who would elevate technically proficient pieces that always left me with a vague feeling of dread. What is the point of literature? Is the short story even redeemable? I don’t always agree with

Philip Traylen

, but I certainly recognized the exasperated gesture of his recent essay contra short stories in general.

But only very rarely is the alternative some misunderstood genius who broke all the rules. In my experience, the stiflingly mediocre choice is more likely to be a quiet piece on a failing marriage told through the arrangement of furniture, or a retiree writing sex scenes under an alias.

Courtney Sender

’s recent piece here inveighs against literary gatekeepers while taking aim at the very top of the publishing apparatus. This makes sense given her own experience with that echelon, but as anyone who tries to publish fiction knows, there are also gatekeepers editing literary magazines, evaluating MFA applications, and populating residency programs. It’s gates all the way down, baby. I’d like to take a broader view and offer a qualified defense of these people.

What even is a gatekeeper? It’s such a loaded term, implying moats and lances and ‘who-goes-theres?’ But these people are nothing more than points of contact for cultural institutions. The gates that they are keeping belong to organizations devoted to a certain creative discipline. When a gatekeeper does the job badly (or at all), it’s easy to say to hell with the gate and the castle behind it. Everyone in that castle sucks, and I didn’t even want to go up in the tower in the first place.

“You mean this gate key?”

But the alternative isn’t a gate-less utopia, where all the geniuses get published and the audiences come running to listen. It’s a platform, run by a tech company, with a profit incentive and no artistic organizational mandate.

Let me stake my territory: I, like many people on Substack, think there is an aesthetic rot in a lot of contemporary lit. Too much of published fiction is swaddled in questions of aboutness and identity. It’s beholden to mummified craft tropes. Its self-conception is both flaccidly academic and eye-bleedingly twee. But I think much of the endless discourse on this issue misses the forest for the trees. The problem is way more than the PMC-ification of fiction: it’s more like that we’ve forgotten what fiction is for. Stories have a crucial and universal role in human civilization. What’s required is not just an aesthetic revamping, but sustained critique about what fiction can and should do.

On a societal level, bad writing is a logistical problem. Most of what people come up with is, frankly, shit, and someone or something has to locate the good stuff. This can either be a gatekeeper or an algorithm.

Any time someone voices a full-throated endorsement of Substack, the subtext is that they approve of what’s on their feeds. We don’t need editorial teams, and the proof is this

Pop Shit

essay that made me laugh. Trust me, I get it. But an algorithm can never be a replacement for a gatekeeping apparatus because its function is fundamentally different. Gatekeepers, like publishers and especially editors, have a stated commitment to quality. Yes, this can be corrupted by profit-seeking, and yes the notion of quality is contested, but this value is a prerequisite for creating any healthy literary culture. I want a revitalization of American Letters just as much as the next guy. Show me the revolutionary vanguard against midwit publishing houses and I’ll join it. But I’m not naive enough to mistake a tech platform for that. I’ve watched over the last two decades as the first generation of social media degraded from a tool of human connectivity to a parasite leeching our attention and thinking capacity. There’s no fundamental reason that this wouldn’t happen to Substack. At the very least, we should not count on it.

A healthy literary ecosystem is full of dedicated organizations — magazines and schools and associations, many of whom act as gatekeepers. Those are places for young writers to cut their teeth, to learn, to find their audience. Just because MFA tropes have gone stale doesn't mean that one can’t learn to be a better writer. Just because graduate programs are ideologically ossified doesn’t mean that the concept of a workshop is bunk. Crucially, these are spaces of organic human community that come with a certain degree of resilience. They are not subject to capricious terms of service or black box algorithms.

I hope this argument is most convincing for this particular publication, one with a gatekeeper that will determine if I pass muster. I am most optimistic about projects like the Republic of Letters, which is fostering something that thrives right now on Substack but could easily exist in a different form in the future. It’s the people themselves that make something like this valuable. Substack — which boasts one of the worst user interfaces I’ve ever seen — has no special sauce beyond network effects.

Courtney’s horror story with her first book gives me serious pause as I contemplate shopping my own manuscript around. But I only know her because her second book did get published, and it was fantastic, and I interviewed her about it for a magazine. She got through those gates eventually. There’s plenty that needs to, and will, change about the literary scene. But not all of us are going to make it, and that’s fine, actually.

Robbie Herbst is a writer and violinist in Chicago.