If you’ve never published, are you still a writer?
I was going to win awards for my journalism, but life happened. I fell in love. I got married. I had a baby. Then another. Then one more.
In five years, writing morphed from full time to part time to occasional freelance gigs. My full-time job was Mother. I loved it, but I was embarrassed. I felt a critical gaze declaring me a failed feminist, and I felt judgment for not living up to some prize-winning potential. When asked what I did, in that DC way, I said I was, simply, a writer.
I could pretend that I was manifesting. But I was really just hiding from an imaginary, disapproving audience.
Then the first chick fledged. Two years later, the second. Three years after that, when my third chick readied to fly the nest, I stared down the impending 50 candles on my birthday cake. Suddenly, the existential crisis that had been molesting my contentment — telling me that I lacked ambition, that motherhood wasn’t enough, that casual freelancing was not serious, that it was too late to Do Something, Be Someone — came to a screaming climax. I saw it so clearly: Nobody had ever been watching me. The audience was a delusion.
I stopped saying I was a writer. I left the “occupation” line empty on forms. Freed from the imaginary stare of critics, I made a hard pivot to fiction, vowing to toil just for the joy of it.
Instead — plot twist! — I got a publishing contract. My menopause baby was a project I’d never planned for: Litany of Saints, a triptych of novellas about people struggling with who they think they’re supposed to be and who they really want to be.
The quiet writing life I imagined — a sweet, gentle breeze blowing on me as I wrote in obscurity to my heart’s content — wasn’t going to be possible, after all. I needed an audience. Readers. Critics. Reviewers. A literary community.
The Inner Loop was suggested for all of the above, and so I jumped in the deep end by reading an essay at my first encounter, horrified that people were looking at me and sizing me up as an interloper. Instead, I was met with encouraging strangers who were linked to me by our mutual love of writing — some were pros; others, like me, were newbies — and nobody questioned my credentials or lack thereof. I kept returning to listen to other writers, to be a part of that playground.
Audience was not something I worried about as a gig journalist. I produced, got published, got paid. I never considered how thrilling it is when someone says they read my book. It bewilders me. If a writer pens a story and no one reads it, is she still a writer? Is it still a story? Of course. But the audience brings it to life. An encouraging audience can be the catalyst for more stories. A sympathetic one is a balm validating the hours spent fiddling with words and commas and insecurity.
Recently, I had to fill in a form, and under “occupation,” I had a moment’s hesitation. If I put down “author,” would it be hubris? Part of me thought I should write “mother” to make up for the sins of my past, or to not tempt fate, or to be childishly ironic. But then I thought of my book out there in the world, with its readers, its audience, and the moment passed.
I wrote “author.”
[Editor’s note: This piece is in support of the Inner Loop’s “Author’s Corner,” a monthly campaign that spotlights a DC-area writer and their recently published work from a small to medium-sized publisher. The Inner Loop connects talented local authors to lit lovers in the community through live readings, author interviews, featured book sales at Potter’s House, and through Eat.Drink.Read., a collaboration with restaurant partners Pie Shop, Shaw’s Tavern, and Reveler’s Hour to promote the author through special events and menu and takeout inserts.]
Diana Rojas has written in everything from large daily newspapers to niche newsletters, on subjects ranging from untimely deaths and school-board meetings to housing and sustainability issues. She grew up in Connecticut and New Jersey and has lived in five different countries. Diana has tried her hand at fundraising, real estate, gardening, and child-rearing, but despite her NYU journalism degree, she never expected to write a book. Litany of Saints is her first novel. She lives, taxed and unrepresented, in Washington, DC.
