A Writer's Journey, #1

(Navigating the absurdity of 2022 writing culture)

My website:  https://www.michaelmohrwriter.com/

I’m also a developmental book editor *(I edited Christian Picciolini’s books, former-Nazi-turned-anti-hate activist: https://www.christianpicciolini.com/. His books are published by Hachette Book Group and his second book was turned into an MSNBC TV series called Breaking Hate.)

I didn’t start seriously writing until I got sober on September 24th, 2010. I was 27 years old, and broken beyond belief. I had a soul-sickness which could no longer be cured with alcohol. So I hit bottom and quit the bottle. I started going to 12-step meetings. And in a fever of intense energy I finished my first novel, which I would like to serialize here on Substack later on, after I gain some followers. I have several dozen published short stories and some nonfiction and writing how-to articles. One of my stories, “American Freaks,” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

My family has many writers in it. My mom is an author, for one. (Check out her books: Lori Windsor Mohr. Her novel is called “The Road at My Door.”) My maternal uncle is a novelist. One cousin is a video-game writer, and another is a travel writer. So you might say it’s in our DNA. As a child my mom used to read the classics out loud to me, and when we fought we’d slam our respective doors, cool down, and write each other lengthy letters which we’d slide under our doors. Then we’d make up and move on. So writing—language—has always been a part of my experience.

I was born and raised in Ojai, in Southern California, but I lived for a decade (2008-19) in the San Francisco Bay Area. That is where I got sober. In Oakland, to be particular. As a child I’d written poems and had read fantasy books like The Red Wall Series by Brian Jacques. I devoured those 600-800 page books like a sinister fiend. I’d spend whole afternoons inside, my eyes breathlessly scanning the pages. My parents urged me to go outside but I was in another realm, a whole other world; I was spiritually captivated.

That feeling never left me.

In 2008 I started writing my first book,  an autobiographical novel (my tour de force and specialty) at first called The Cannonball Complex and later changed to The Crew. It covered my experience as a wild, alcoholic, out-of-control angry punk rock teenager growing up in sunny, mountainous Ojai, rebelling against my parents, the Catholic college-prep high school I attended, and anything and everything conventional. My life became a battle, with my parents, with school, with police, with alcohol, with girls, with, mostly, myself. I barely made it out alive.

Between 2008 and 2010 I wrote slowly, a few pages here, a few there. I was drinking like a slick fish, low down by the ocean floor, anxious and angry and wounded and confused. I didn’t know which way was up. When I finally got sober, within a few months I took the 100 pages I’d pumped out and quickly got the rest down. I remember calling my writer-mother in December, 2010, saying I’d finished the novel and it was “ready.” I’ll never forget her blood-curdling laugh. I didn’t know back then what I know now: Publishing is excruciatingly hard. Even then—before the rise of Critical Race Theory (as we know it now at least), before DEI guidelines, before content moderators kicking certain members off certain platforms, before cancel-culture, before the rise of Woke ideology, etc.

Over time I learned about the process. You had to get an agent. (If you wanted to be traditionally published, that is. You could always self-publish. That never appealed to me.) Getting even the agent was incredibly hard. In 2011 and 2012 I made the terrible and dubious rookie mistake of sending out my auto-fiction novel to probably 150 agents. And of course the book wasn’t anywhere near ready for publication. I had so, so much to learn. The basic raw talent was there, but I needed help.

So in 2012 I joined a serious writer’s group led by a well-known writer on 44th Street in North Oakland. I went back to college—SFSU—to finally get my BA degree in writing after literally 11 years and seven colleges. (Alcoholism. I spent years moving multiple times within the Bay Area every year. I hitchhiked across America. I took trains across the country. I was off-the-grid. I was experiencing New York City. I was wild. It was lurid.) Just before 2013 I got my degree. After six months in the writing group I got my first short story published, Tightrope, which was taken by Alfie Dog Press and added to Audible in a story collection.

As the years went by I got more and more stories published, mostly fiction, some memoir and nonfiction how-to. I started a blog. I created a website. I volunteered for nine months for a literary agent. I began attending writers’ conferences. I wrote several more novels. (To date I have now written 13 books. Many are rough drafts. A few aren’t very good. Four are solid and ready to go and have been read by many agents.) I wrote my signature autobiographical novels but I also wrote a thriller about a guy who gets out of prison and tries to find his ex who he’s obsessed with. It’s told in four POVs.

By 2016 I had started sending The Crew out to agents again. (My girlfriend at the time read it and loved it and pushed me to try again.) This time I hired a professional editor, a woman who’d been with Penguin Random House for a decade and had recently gone freelance. She loved the book and had some good suggestions for changes. I made the changes and she said it was ready. I agreed. For the first time, I started getting agent interest. It was incredibly exciting. Requests for the first 50 pages. Requests for the entire manuscript. I had perhaps a dozen or so big NYC agents read the book in its entirely. One agent from a very big firm read the book not once, not twice but three times all the way through. We exchanged long emails. She had suggestions. Minor ones. She said she could “see the book on the shelf” and that it had a “powerful, effective voice.” But after the third read she disappeared. I followed up but never heard back. Such is often the nature of agenthood. They’re profoundly busy. They feel underwater 85% of the time. I know this; I had volunteered for one.

Then, in 2017, I connected with another agent. She read the book and loved it. But. She informed me that, with the “current climate” (read: Trump, DEI, Wokeism) she didn’t think publishers would go for a story about “a white, privileged protagonist.” She passed. It was a hard blow. After all these years, all this effort, all this struggle, my work was being tossed into the cosmic dustbin not because of my weak writing, not due to aesthetic reasons, not even because there legitimately wasn’t a market for it. It was getting rejected because I’m white.

Now. I want to be crystal clear here. I am not claiming any kind of victimhood. That’s not my angle. And I completely understand and agree with the notion that underrepresented voices need to be lifted up and historically haven’t been. (And to be clear: I am a classical liberal. I have only ever voted Democratic, both locally and nationally. I voted for Biden.) However: I also think it’s a sad state of affairs when Art is being chosen and rejected based on skin color. I have friends of all races. I have dated many different races. And some of my favorite writers are non-white: Zadie Smith; Ottessa Moshfegh; James Baldwin; Haruki Murakami; etc. Even though I disagree with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s worldview in many ways, “Between the World and Me” is an absolutely gorgeously written book, and I’ve read it half a dozen times (and taken extensive notes on his voice, style, etc). I also love Coleman Hughes; Thomas Chatterson Williams; Wilfred Reilly; John McWhorter (If you haven’t read “Woke Racism” go out and buy it immediately); etc.

My point is: We all have a story to tell. Some of us have the skill to tell our stories, and some of us don’t. We may not all agree with each other’s ideas and values, but living in a free and democratic liberal society (in theory) we do have to allow everyone to share their story if they can. I don’t see DEI and the politicization of fiction as a good thing overall. More and more, writing seems politically weaponized. You’re supposed to “pick a side.” Serious art reflects society as it is in all its juicy complexity; it doesn’t dumb everything down to a Manichean dichotomy of good versus evil and try to force you to think a certain way. That’s ideology, not fiction; not art.

I understand that publishing is still dominated by white people. But let’s face it: That has been and very much currently is changing at a very rapid pace. Again: I don’t have any issue with that point. My issue stems from feeling like there are fewer and fewer avenues for serious artists like myself, people who are more interested in the universal human experience, complexity of heart and mind, and the reflection of how real people are in the real world. I don’t have social media. (Besides Linked-In.) I don’t watch TV. I read. Voraciously. With a mean, dedicated passion. I’m usually reading several books at a time. Most recently I devoured the Isaacson Steve Jobs biography. My folks and I are reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain via Audible. I gulped down Malamud’s “God’s Grace.” I am finally plowing through Hesse’s “Steppenwolf.” (Being a Nietzsche fan I am of course delighted by it.)

In the end my goal is not to take anyone down, or to try to topple any institutions. It also isn’t to rant and rave and bitch about the vagaries of Wokeism, which I feel is mostly young white people who lack self-awareness and are succumbing, ironically, to White Savior Syndrome. My goal is to take art seriously once more. I understand what it feels like to be young and angry politically. I am almost 40 now, but when I was a teenage punker I attended protests and was friends with black-bloc anarchists. I wanted—I thought—to “tear the system down.” But my generation—in the late 90s and early 00s—was different. This was before iPhones and social media. Before the internet was everything. We actually talked to one another in person. We used house phones. And—get this—we read books. Physical, serious books. We devoured them, in fact. And we thought very deeply.

Now, in 2022, things feel different. Most people I meet—young and old—seem to simply not think when it comes to the deep, tough questions. People and institutions have fallen to cognitive/Woke capture. It’s so much easier to simply regurgitate what your friends are saying on Facebook, or what your tribe is espousing, than to sit down and actually read, deeply consider, and form your own opinions. We all exist in our little safe echo chambers of legacy media, social media, friend groups who all think alike, etc. Many of us have that anxious, uncomfortable sensation that something is deeply wrong. (This makes me think of David Foster Wallace’s ideas about Gen X neuroses.) But we’re afraid or unable to speak out.

This is why I started this Substack newsletter. I want to be who I am. I don’t want to hide behind the façade of DEI and Woke confusion. I don’t want to be afraid. AI continues to develop and expand at alarming rates. Things are always in constant flux and change. We’re more and more severed and isolated from each other. Everybody is divided into groups now. I want to bring back true art. True values. True thinking. I want to see everybody—regardless of race or gender—speak out honestly. What we’re seeing on the extremes of the right are toxic overreactions to the absurdity on the radical left. Neither is the solution to our cultural, societal woes. Instead we need freedom. Balance. Centrism. Open-mindedness, empathy, self-awareness: Not the Woke kind, where you crack those words open and they ring hollow and only reinforce your own biased ideology) but, as Dave Chapelle said: Empathy that goes both ways. Because it has to. Empathy isn’t a one-way circuit.

I would like to serialize all four of my ready-to-go books on here. But for a little while I’d like to keep writing about my life and experience as an artist. This newsletter is for the true, honest artists, the thinkers. Please subscribe!

Until next time. I leave you with a Steppenwolf quote. (We thinkers may drown in the end, but at least it’ll be exciting on the way there!)

“This: ‘Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty? Naturally, they won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”

I’ll write another post soon. Probably in a few days. By the way, my latest book is a “fictional memoir” about living in New York City (Harlem, specifically) during Covid-19.

Michael Mohr

If you’d like to read a shorter essay about my experience in Harlem during Covid, read this: https://www.litromagazine.com/usa/2021/03/78908/