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Reposted by Meg Reid 🦦

Nora Reed (they/them ze/hir) @nora.zone · 15h

cry havoc and let slip the frogs of war

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 19h

You heard it first here: the It's Never My Fault Club is about to pivot to "immigrants gave us the measles."

Screenshot from South Carolina nextdoor post positing completely unsupported idea that immigrants brought measles into the country.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 21h

you ever think about how weird email is? we're all basically sending texts from our computers, often with people we know well, yet still addressing and signing them like we're writing 18th century letters

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Reposted by Meg Reid 🦦

Nick Sturm @nicksturm.bsky.social · 23h

it's wild to imagine how publishing might be different if funding priorities in the Lit Program c. 1975 had shifted from (in their own terms) a "populist" model--$ to as many as possible--to an "elitist" model that builds capacity in a select set of independent publishers to counter commercial pubs

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Nick Sturm @nicksturm.bsky.social · 1d

Yes:

Poets & Writers was getting $300k from the NEA by 1980. Well before the decline era, no literary org will ever receive anything near this.

& literature has always been an outlier in the NEA. Funding levels went up in the growth era but are dwarfed by funding levels in disciplines like music

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 23h

wow, that sad little literature line!

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

⤵️ the scary ripple effects I'm bracing myself for: the dissolution of the partnership grants to state arts orgs and regional arts orgs (RAOs). Like public media, some states get money in a budget line from their legislatures and have their own arts endowments, others don't.
bsky.app/profile/nick...

Nick Sturm @nicksturm.bsky.social · 1d

More layers:

Growth era is also defined by NEA as leader in building arts infrastructure thru establishment & expansion of nonprofit service organizations across disciplines (Theatre Communication Group, CCLM/CLMP), & in empowerment of State Arts Agencies that decentralize federal arts funding.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

I'd complained before that the South was only getting a pittance--something like $75k w/o Texas, $125k with Texas, since the only three orgs funded in this entire region were Hub City, Sarabande, and the Oxford American.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

Losing our NEA funding was a huge blow but it was interesting to see how many people were shocked we were only getting $25,000. The top tier funding for literary arts was $50,000 and the total pool was only like 1.4 million.

Nick Sturm @nicksturm.bsky.social · 2d

Adjusted for inflation, NEA funding was highest--$1.8 billion--over the four years of the first Reagan administration & has remained stagnate--about $750 million per presidential term--for the last 25 years.

Line graph visualizing the NEA budget by presidential administration from 1966 to 2024 adjusted for inflation

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

I'm not an escapist reader so my reading habits haven't changed at all (ie lots of serious sad books). But yeah, not a great environment to be pitching sad books into.

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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 2d

Whether it’s Donald Trump saying J.B. Pritzker should be in jail or Donald Trump being convicted of 36 felonies but not going to jail because the American people re-elected him as president, both sides have been linked to jail time.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

If you're interested in what we've published recently in this vein, I'd highly recommend:

YOU WANT MORE: Selected Stories of George Singleton
GOOD WOMEN: stories by Halle Hill
JUNAH AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Dan Leach

www.hubcity.org/books

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

In an age of rising fascism and tyranny-via-Medbed-meme, the truth is that fun is probably too much to ask for. Today’s literary culture is obviously more imperiled than it was when The New Republic first became a Nobel analysis outfit a decade ago. Subtle and blunt-force censorship is on the rise everywhere, and more people are spending more money than ever on technologies that claim to make art, definitely don’t make art, harvest art’s raw materials, and are ultimately invested in the project of destroying art altogether. They won’t win, but they’re damaging and extremely tiresome. Which is all to say that as much as we’d prefer to make jokes about @krasznahorguy1954, we have to acknowledge that, in the age of ChatGPT, there is almost something heroic about never shutting the fuck up about The Melancholy of Resistance. The Nobel Prize got it right, and literary life is far better for having the Nobel be a part of it, as esoteric, imperfect, and eerily Swedish as it might be

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

Also, although I have no insight into corporate Big 5 publishing, it does seem like this is probably related to why they're picking up so many fanfics and books by content creators. A risk adverse business becoming even more risk-averse.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

Ha! We're the one upside. (I should also note that you don't have to live in the South if your book is about the South.)

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

I once read a very funny novel that took place entirely over one night from the pov of a pizza delivery man and his dispatcher. I passed because it was not a perfect fit, but I think about it all the time.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

Texting with my editor about this and she just said the same: "Something that can be a welcome distraction but still have meaning."

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

If you're a writer in the South with a funny, irreverent novel, this is the time to send it to me. I would love to read something like that right now.

Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

Serious books bum us out, fun books feel like they're not addressing THE TIMES. Getting something that's both is impossible. Writers are cranking out novels to please their agents, and agents are sending them unedited, and no one is answering anyone's emails because we're really, really tired.

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Reposted by Meg Reid 🦦

Mitchell Nobis @mitchnobis.bsky.social · 1d

I totally sympathize with Meg's overall point here, but also hey lit agents, my manuscript does kinda balance fun and The Times (in the sense of lower/middle class financial crush, at least). ~62K words and basketball action... [waggles eyebrows]
bsky.app/profile/mitc...

Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

Serious books bum us out, fun books feel like they're not addressing THE TIMES. Getting something that's both is impossible. Writers are cranking out novels to please their agents, and agents are sending them unedited, and no one is answering anyone's emails because we're really, really tired.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

I'm sure corporate publishers are dealing with the host of different issues. But this is what it looks like in the small non-profit world.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

Same here. Authors that are a year late on sending us manuscripts. Increased author anxiety. And yes, waves and waves of queries that aren't right or are not done. (We got a novel from an agent recently that just....didn't end, it just stopped.)

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

I took too long to get back to this agent who's followed up ten times and so I feel bad and send an overlong email about why the book isn't working and then the agent ghosts and doesn't even reply to the email. And that used to feel bad but now it's just like...I get it.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

Serious books bum us out, fun books feel like they're not addressing THE TIMES. Getting something that's both is impossible. Writers are cranking out novels to please their agents, and agents are sending them unedited, and no one is answering anyone's emails because we're really, really tired.

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Meg Reid 🦦 @megireid.bsky.social · 1d

The clearest place the burnout from our times is showing up in my line of work is in acquisitions. Readers and editors are tired just thinking about a 400-page novel. The question does this even matter? feels more complex than ever. We need to keep making art, but the artmakers are worn out.

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Maris Kreizman @maris.bsky.social · 2d

This is so damn scary. The book claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was the one who introduced Donald and Melania. Now the CEO of Harper UK is out.

Jay Rayner @jayrayner1.bsky.social · 2d

In other news Charlie Redmayne, the long serving CEO of HC in the UK, resigned yesterday.

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