I had just heard the news that Trump’s gutting of the National Endowment for the Humanities was going to kill off a large part of the book ecosystem here in Tennessee when I got a text from a friend asking if I was going to write about it.
Humanities Tennessee's National Endowment for the Humanities grant, worth about $1.2 million annually, has been terminated
I said no. Honestly, I’m not even sure here at the beginning of this column how I’m going to write the rest of it. I am a writer who also works for a university press. This is my life. All the parts of my life that bring me joy and sustain me. Also, many of the parts of my life that make me mad or frustrate me. Writing doesn’t pay much. Neither of my brothers have college degrees, and they both make more than me. I don’t make much writing this column, but there are months when this is what puts gas in my car. I’m going to tell you a hard truth about book publishing. On average, an author makes a dollar per book sold. And you don’t see those dollars for a long time — between 12 and 18 months after the book is sold. I’m not getting rich off of my book Dynamite Nashville. I’ve not yet even gotten dinner off it.
But my life is amazing. Cool shit happens to me all the time. I get to hang out with poets. I get to compare notes with historians. I got to sit on the dais in the chapel at Fisk University, and if God laughed at how ludicrous that was, I didn’t hear it. One time, I got to go into the attic at Cheekwood to look at William Edmondson’s statues up close. I barged into the Tennessee lieutenant governor’s office once to look at a painting hanging there.
At least once a month, I’m incredulous that I just get to live this life. I always say that it feels like I’m getting away with something, that someday someone will knock on my door and tell me there’s been a mistake and I have the wrong life and I need to go back to some small town and be miserable there so that a cool person can have all this.
My family doesn’t have a great deal of generational wealth — unless old china and some pictures that my mom’s grandma painted count — and we’re not the kind of people who have ever had stocks or investments. I have a 401K that I’m supposed to retire on, but I don’t know shit about how to “manage” it. I don’t know if, after the past week, there’s anything left to manage, even if I somehow did become an investment genius. That’s depressing, but I’d kind of given up on the idea of being able to retire anyway.
But this gutting of the NEH? It feels like the knock on the door saying that I don’t deserve this life. Here it is. Because when I think about how much of the cool shit in my life happens because of the NEH — every year the Southern Festival of Books is like the Super Bowl of my profession. We gear everything toward it, trying to make sure that our books are out before it so that we can pitch our authors to attend it. We fervently hope that our books will be featured in Chapter 16, which is funded by Humanities Tennessee and is the only consistent book-review outlet still left in the state.
The ecosystem of writers and historians and museums and libraries that sustains me is being killed off. And I don’t know what to say in response.
Here’s how we could see an impact on the state and local levels
In my deepest fear, I lost all this to someone more deserving. But this is worse. There won’t be any more deserving person, because there won’t be anything left to hand them. I’ve been so worried about being found out while exploring this rich intellectual landscape, it never occurred to me that we’d be willing to destroy it in order to prevent anyone from exploring it.
How can you be a writer with no way for your audience to find you? How can you be a historian if all the libraries and archives are shuttered? How do you live with people who would vote for this?
I have no other skills. If we’re just going to shutter this whole “reading and writing” business, I’m fucked. As are so many other wildly talented and interesting people I know.
I don’t know what, if anything, will make a difference. You can’t really argue against a policy when the reason for the policy is just that the policy-maker doesn’t give a shit about the things you care about. And I don’t know how many times you can be the plucky fighter who shows up again and again against all odds in order to save what’s important before you’re exhausted.
But I guess we’re about to find out. I just can’t decide if that’s a curse or a reason to be hopeful.
