Dear readers,
To paraphrase Marianne Moore’s deceptively terse remark about poetry, fundraising: I, too, dislike it.
There’s something uncannily familiar about not wanting “you, our readers” to feel patronized at the same time that we not quite desperately seek patrons — but seek patrons nonetheless.
The uncanniness is of a piece with Bonnie Raitt’s admonishment, “Don’t patronize me,” a line from “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” It’s a heartbreaking song not despite but because it’s so rhetorically virtuosic: a last-ditch attempt to make a lover love her by lyricizing the project’s impossibility.
The Offing is a labor of love. Stipends or no, our editors work tirelessly. But that they’re not in it for the money is neither their badge of honor nor ours.
Our brilliant writers (including those of you who have not yet submitted but consider it) do us the honor of letting us publish their work because they share our vision, or we share theirs, or as Thoreau might say it, they contribute the expanse and grain of their landscape to our own.
But again: that our writers would and do accept honoraria smaller than they deserve does not mean they should have to.
Leave it to lawyers to translate “pro bono” —“for the good”— as “for free.”
Leave it to lawyers to translate “pro bono” —“for the good”— as “for free.”
Years ago, discussing The Souls of Black Folk in an undergraduate seminar, conversation turned to the following passage:
And so thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities.
At first, the seminar treated “the ideals of material prosperity” and the “lone black boy poring over a French grammar” as mutually exclusive. But then we found ourselves in the shared counterfactual daydream of a world that doesn’t make us choose one over the other at the other’s expense —
that values art not only for its own sake (the longer I do what I do, the less I understand what this expression means), and not only for what it gives back to the world, but that values art all the more because “its own sake” and “the world” aren’t separable. I’m grateful to The Offing for giving so vital and uncompromising a vision of this counterfactual.
This is our landscape. This is our land.
MDS
P.S. The Bonnie Raitt lyric goes, “I can’t make you love me, if you don’t.” Revising this letter one last time before it goes to press, it dawns on me that the line implicitly continues, “but you can’t stop me from trying.” Exactly.
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