Writers’

Rebellion

Publishing contracts prioritize profit margins over creative control, individual liberty, and the collective good.

I’ve heard it’s a double-edged sword. Unpublished authors might never get a chance. Success depends too much on decisions that publishers make.

Anyone who hopes to become an author faces an industry full of gatekeeping practices, mysterious contests, and endless rejections. Even people I know who have gotten published tell me “meritocracy” isn’t exactly the word for it, they just eventually broke through a system of absurd barriers.

I don’t know much about the publishing industry. As a fan of literature I’ve noticed some very concerning themes in the biographies of many artists.

As a poetry fan, Sylvia Plath’s work to me suggests that her past struggles with depression were not to blame for her death. Her work (particularly the collection Ariel) communicates important warnings about patterns of abuse.

In my opinion as an admirer, Plath suffered from her own success. She unknowingly married an abuser then found herself treated as what my high school English teacher called a “human gold-mine.” A resource to be used by a cruel husband.

Some of my favorite poets from Saint Louis, Missouri moved to Europe. Their work after relocation suggests that they might have wanted to come home but could not. (These are a fan theories.)

T.S. Elliot suddenly began publishing far less frequently once he’d lived in London for a long time. It’s strange that the guy who wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at 22 suddenly didn’t have much else to write.

The Waste-Land was a bit tricky to decipher but I think it warned about the risk of greed destroying the world a bit too vividly for his publishing agent’s liking.

Josephine Baker (born Freda) wrote poetry, most of which I haven’t yet been able to find online. France remembers her mostly as an “entertainer” and an agent of the French Resistance. Here’s a copy of one of her poems.

Her life to me suggests that she experienced extreme cruelty beginning as a child. I believe the accounts saying that she, born into poverty in East Saint Louis, was abused on account of the jealousy or lust of others.

While I commend the work that any person does in resisting an oppressive regime like the Nazis, I have to say that her biography suggests that France captured an agent for its resistance. Her French industralist husband Jean Lion claims to have “proposed” to her while flying in mid-air. Can a person decline an offer of marriage in an a private aircraft? Did she accept that offer? I am not going to include photos of how photographers posed her. Bananas do not grow in Saint Louis and I am mad at France forever.

At FaerieLand, we’re trying to build ethics into corporations.

We believe that:

Let’s work together.

Creating an ethics code is a group project. I have no idea how to write real publishing contracts or how the industry works.

Corporations control too many parts of our lives in America. I despise corporations on principle but I’ve given up on the concept of getting things done as a private citizen. Technically I have one big corporation (“FaerieLand Studios”) that I own as a New York City U.S. citizen who has no other employment contracts. I don’t want to own all of the “branches” whose domain names I bought up. I snagged a ton of cool-sounding domain names to give other people a chance to start small businesses.

This isn’t my company. It’s a placeholder so that other people have a better chance at sharing their work.