“Still finding hope in every email.” –Brent L. Kendrick (b. 1947). Author and Inbox Optimist.
Pinching. Myself. Yep. That’s what I’m doing. Pinching myself. And I’ve been doing it for days. I’m in total shock. No. Total. Disbelief. Out of the blue, with no advance warning, it appeared. In. My. Email. Inbox.
What grabbed me was this. It was right there, all quiet and unobtrusive, with all the other emails from—The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Parade, The Paris Review, NPR, WordPress, Amazon, Facebook, and the steady stream of replies to my Mary E. Wilkins Freeman research queries. I know those senders. I know what they want before I open them.
This one was different.
The sender’s name meant nothing to me. Roberthicks. Was it Robert Hicks? Was it Robber Hicks? Either way. It didn’t matter. The subject line had captured me. No. Raptured me.
Netflix Adaptation Strategy / Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina
Oh. My. God. I was not ready. Netflix Adaptation. I nearly suffered a myocardial infarction.
Netflix? My book?
I reread the subject line.
Then I read it again.
This wasn’t entirely out of nowhere. Unmasking The Humourist had found generous readers. One reviewer wrote, “Your book does something rare. It restores a lost voice to history.” Another told me, “The Humourist deserves a wider audience.”
I mustered up enough courage to read the first paragraph.
“I am reaching out from StoryReel Studios regarding a major strategic development. Our studio has recently established a partnership with Netflix aimed at evaluating and positioning standout literary works for potential streaming adaptation.”
“All right,” I thought. “So far, so good.”
I continued with the second paragraph:
“While conducting the market research, I selected Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina due to its strong visual narrative and clear cinematic potential.”
Cinematic potential!
“Of course,” I thought. “I set the book up that way and even used cinematic staging. Now, someone’s noticing it.”
My own chapters flickered past, unbidden:
● The Curtain Closes: The Humourist Exits the Page
● Turning the Pages: The Clues in Plain Sight
● Favored in High Places: Gordon’s Royal and Aristocratic Ties
● Staging Power: Gordon, Glen, and the Slow March to South Carolina
At last, I had been discovered. I continued reading the email:
“To ensure each project receives dedicated production resources and executive attention, we cap our active roster at strictly four authors per month. We are finalizing our launch group privately before opening our public intake to avoid an unmanageable volume of requests.”
My heart sank.
● Cap our active roster at strictly four authors per month.
● Four authors.
● Per month.
I had read those words before.
I had read them all.
Email after email after email promising visibility, broadcast spotlights, reviews, awards, Hollywood bestseller status, and literary fame. Each one assuming my hope would outrun my judgment.
Somehow, for a fleeting moment, I thought this one was different.
“The unexamined word is not worth using.” —Brent L. Kendrick (b. 1947). Essayist, educator, and literary scholar, whose work explores the unexpected weight of ordinary life.
“Have you ever heard that expression before?”
I thought it might be a Southern idiom, and since Gary grew up in the Midwest, I wasn’t sure he knew it.
“What expression?”
“The one I just used. Dead as a doornail.”
“I have.”
Fine. It was settled. We both knew what it meant. Finished. Used up. Worthless.
“Well, it strikes me as one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard of. What on earth is a dead doornail?”
“No idea.”
I didn’t either.
How’s them apples? There we sat, two men who appreciate language and use it with careful precision, agreeing that we knew an expression while at the same time confessing that we didn’t understand the phrase that was central to its meaning.
I don’t like feeling as dumb as a stick, so after morning coffee, I made my way to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) like a bat out of hell so that I could learn about dead doornails.
Oh, boy. I was right. I knew in a flash that I was going to have a Red Letter Day. Lands sake alive. Dead as a doornail goes all the way back to 1350:
“For but ich haue bote of mi bale … I am ded as dore-nail.” (William of Palerne, l. 628)
Don’t worry. I’ll dress it up in some modern rags so that it makes sense:
“For unless I have remedy for my sorrow, I am dead as a doornail.”
Well, that was fine and dandy, but I still didn’t know what a dead doornail was. I had to dig more. And more, I found. Did you know that in ye olden days doornails were hand-forged, heavy-duty nails, driven through wood and then clenched—the protruding end hammered flat—making them impossible to remove or reuse. Permanently fixed, permanently purposeless, they were, in every practical sense, dead.
And right after unearthing the meaning of dead doornail, I hit paydirt. I came across an entire navigation of other things I could strut around saying. If a doornail can be dead, apparently so can a lot of other things I’d never thought about:
Dead as a stone
Dead as clay
Dead as a herring
Dead as a hammer
English, it seems, has never lacked for dead things.
And then, there’s my favorite one of all. It’s music to my untrained ear:
Dead as the diplodocus
It’s hard to laugh when you’ve got one hand stuck fast to a dead doornail and the other hand being pulled even further back in time by a giant herbivorous sauropod.
I had to laugh. One dead doornail had opened the door to dozens of expressions I use every day without ever stopping to examine what they really ask of me.
The first expression that popped into my head? “Let me know if I can do anything.”I’ve said it more times than I can count.
But what exactly are we saying? At first glance, the meaning seems obvious. Yet the more I think about it, the more I realize that the phrase carries a greater obligation than we usually acknowledge.
After all, those aren’t words of sympathy. They’re words of commitment.
The moment I tell someone to let me know if I can do anything, I’ve volunteered to do something. Maybe it’s as simple as a phone call. Maybe it’s a card. Maybe it’s a casserole. Maybe it’s sitting quietly beside a friend who has just buried a spouse and doesn’t particularly want to talk.
The point is that I’ve offered. Whether the request is large or small, I’ve just volunteered a piece of myself. My words have placed me on the hook.
How often we say those words because they sound appropriate without stopping to consider what we’ve actually promised, without fully examining the obligation hidden inside the offer?
The words are easy enough to say. The casserole takes a little more effort.
Next up was the expression, “I’m so sorry.”
At first glance, it seems simple enough. We say it when someone loses a spouse, receives a frightening diagnosis, buries a parent, or watches a cherished dream collapse.
But what exactly are we saying?
Most of the time, we aren’t apologizing. We didn’t cause the death, the disease, or the disappointment.
Yet the expression carries an obligation all the same.
When I tell someone I’m sorry, I’m not merely acknowledging a fact. I’m entering, however briefly, into another person’s sorrow. I’m saying that your loss matters enough for me to stop, notice, and share a small measure of the burden.
In other words, I’m not simply expressing sympathy.
I’m promising compassion.
That’s a weightier promise than I suspect many of us realize when the words tumble so easily from our lips.
Then came two expressions that sit at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum.
“I hate you.”
Three words.
“I love you.”
Three words.
Yet each carries enough power to alter the course of a relationship, a family, perhaps even a life.
We often treat them as expressions of feeling. But they are more than that. They are declarations. Commitments. Judgments.
To tell someone “I hate you” is not merely to report an emotion. It is to wound, to distance, to diminish, to push another person away.
To tell someone “I love you” is not merely to report an emotion either. It is to assume an obligation—to care, to sacrifice, to forgive, to remain present when remaining present is difficult.
Perhaps that is why both expressions deserve more examination than they usually receive.
They are among the easiest words in the English language to say. And among the hardest to live.
Finally, I came to a phrase that millions of people have spoken for centuries:
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
I’ve heard it all my life. I’ve spoken it hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times.
But have I examined it? Have I truly considered what I’m asking?
The first part is easy enough. Most of us welcome forgiveness for our failures, shortcomings, and mistakes.
It’s the second part that gives me pause. As we forgive. Not as we intend to forgive. Not as we hope to forgive. Not as we might someday forgive.
As we forgive.
Those words transform a prayer into a promise, a request into an obligation.
And they leave me wondering how many other expressions I use with confidence, familiarity, and conviction without fully considering what they mean—or what they ask of me.
As I reflected on all of these expressions—seemingly light yet laden with responsibility and commitment—I came to a simple conclusion. Going forward, I intend to pay a little more attention to my Ps and Qs.
Not because I suddenly care more about manners. But because I have been reminded that words matter.
They always have.
Whether I am offering help, expressing sorrow, seeking forgiveness, declaring love, or reciting a prayer, I owe those words more than familiarity. I owe them thought.
After all, the unexamined life is not worth living.
Perhaps the same can be said of the unexamined word.
Writers may write alone, but essays are completed by readers. Brent L. Kendrick (b. 1947)
Today marks the halfway point of 2026, and I’m delighted to share a milestone.
During the first six months of the year, The Wired Researcher has been viewed more than 17,000 times.
When I embarked on this new chapter inventing myself, I wondered where I would find the conversations that had sustained me for so many years in the classroom. I eventually discovered that they hadn’t ended at all. They had simply moved online, where every Monday morning another essay leaves my desk and finds its way into the world.
Some essays make readers laugh. Others invite reflection. A few stir memories. Every once in a while, one seems to touch something I never anticipated.
What pleases me most isn’t that one essay did well. It’s that readers have embraced essays about humor, language, gardening, relationships, cooking, aging, memory, and the unexpected moments that make ordinary life extraordinary. That tells me you’re returning not just for a topic, but for the journey.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting, sharing, and encouraging me week after week. Writers may write alone, but essays are completed by readers.
Here’s to the essays that have already been shared—and to those still waiting patiently for Monday morning.
To you, My Dear Readers, I am grateful beyond measure.
“Never mistake the undone for the unworthy. The desk may be cluttered. The life is not.”
—Poor Brentford Lee (b. 1947. Altar ego—with an alter ego, too, of course. He ministers and he meddles. Life coach without credentials. Available for lectures, upbraidings, and unsolicited reminders of everything you’ve already accomplished.)
Sometimes we’re our own worst enemies. Maybe, all times. I know I am.
It doesn’t matter how much I get done, it’s always the undone that grabs hold of me in my waking hours and throws me into a tiff.
Just the other day—just as dawn was breaking—I sprang up in bed, asking myself:
“Where did it go? Where did it all go?”
Not my life, mind you. That’s still very much in progress.
I meant January and February—two months that often keep me snowed in on my mountaintop here in the Shenandoah Valley. And this year—once and for all—they were supposed to be the two perfect months to bring order to chaos. To organize my office.
Boxes. Amazon boxes, to be precise—a small mountain of them, stacked near the woodstove like a cardboard monument to every good intention I’ve ever had. Some are open. Some are not. All of them smile at me. That relentless Amazon smile, curved and cheerful and absolutely unbothered by my shame. I have begun to suspect they are multiplying when I’m not looking.
Desk and worktable. Buried. Buried under manila envelopes, unopened mail, a box of highlighters, a coffee mug that may or may not still contain coffee, and enough paper to reforest a modest hillside. The lamp burns bravely through the chaos like a lighthouse in a nor’easter.
Even the plants have opinions. Two magnificent specimens—sprawling dramatically across their ornate iron stands—have taken matters into their own fronds. One has sent a long, accusatory leaf directly toward my leather chair. As if pointing.
Pointing. Yes, pointing. The same way the ghost of my gray-haired grade school history teacher would point and declare with the wrath of an angry God:
“A cluttered desk is the devil’s workshop.”
And between Mrs. Snyder’s admonitions and my lament—”Where did it go? Where did it all go?”—Poor Brentford appeared as if in a vision rising up from nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.
“Where did it all go, you ask? Where did it all go? I’ll tell you exactly where it went. Pull up a chair if you can find one in that brain of yours, all cluttered now with nonsense.”
I thought I knew for sure where his harangue was headed. But for once he surprised. He did not stoop so low as to rap knuckles with any of the cliches from his repertoire of wisdom.
Not once did I hear,
“Time and tide wait for no one.”
Not once did I hear,
“Make hay while the sun shines.”
I didn’t even hear the one I was certain he would speak with calm certainty,
“Lost time is never found again.”
He didn’t recite any of those things.
Instead, he cleared his throat with great ceremony and delivered his first knuckle rap with the precision of a surgeon and the satisfaction of a man who has been waiting a very long time.
“Only handle it once.”
He let it hang there. Just those four words. Floating in the air above the Amazon boxes and the buried desk and the manila envelopes and the coffee mug of uncertain vintage.
“Your words. Well, Grace Reed’s words, if we’re being precise. Your Copyright Office colleague. The woman whose office was lean, mean, and sparse. The woman whose wisdom you borrowed, researched, published, celebrated, and then—apparently—left to ride around in the Jeep with the junk mail.”
He fixed me with a look that left no room for argument.
“Don’t bemoan where it all went. You know fully well. And you know exactly what to do.”
Then Poor Brentford’s voice softened. Just slightly. Just enough.
“Do you remember what you wrote on January 15th, 2024? You raised your Bunnahabhain to all the tarriers, the delayers, and the occasional shelver. You said, and I quote, ‘Here’s to the to-morrowers, the champions of It can wait until tomorrow, because sometimes tomorrow is just a delay away from today.'”
He smiled. For the first time.
“And do you remember Scarlett?
“She understood something you sometimes forget. Tomorrow is not surrender. Tomorrow is strategy.”
Poor Brentford gestured grandly at the Amazon boxes.
“Your Tara is a little more cardboard than hers. But the principle holds.”
He straightened his jacket.
“The office will get cleaned. One day. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the day after. Or sometime before the Amazon boxes learn to walk.”
“Scarlett managed. So will you.”
But Poor Brentford wasn’t finished. He stood there, poised to deliver his final and most devastating knuckle rap. Quietly. Almost tenderly.
“Forget the cluttered office for now. I want you to remember something you wrote, something about a young professor who stopped you in a hallway and handed you an offprint with four words inscribed on the front.”
He paused.
“This is life everlasting.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“You asked whether he was suggesting that we live on forever through what we share with others: ideas immortalized in print. You answered your own question. Here you are, nearly fifty years later, speaking his name. Professor Myerson continues to live.”
He leaned in close.
“And so will you. Through every word you have ever written. Eight books. More than a million words. Scholarship and essays that will outlast every Amazon box in that corner.”
“THAT is your life everlastin’. Now act like it.”
Just when my chair started getting uncomfortable, Poor Brentford had the nerve to tell me to shout out:
“Get behind me, Satan.”
I sprang up at once because in that command I recognized my own mother’s voice. Over and over again I had heard her rebuke the Devil whenever she faced her own pole of proverbial chaos.
Only then did I realize what Poor Brentford had done.
He had serenaded me with snippets of my own advice—counsel I had been publishing right here in this column for years.
I could hardly be offended.
I looked again at the Amazon boxes. The buried desk. The pointing plant.
“The first porch is where you find your voice. The second porch is where your voice finds others.” —Poor Brentford Lee (b. 1947. Keeper of two porches, one mountain, one dog, and an inexhaustible supply of things worth saying—none of which he has to say alone anymore, thanks to his partner, Gary.)
Dear Faithful Readers,
You’ve been here with me on the porch since—well, some of you since the very beginning, back when I built it as nothing more than a place where you could pull up a chair and talk with me about the joys, challenges, and discoveries of research. We kept right on doing that from 2012 to 2021 when I decided to make the porch a little more fun by bringing you weekly creative nonfiction essays.
I’m still at it. Nearly 750,000 words later. Yes, you read it right. Foolin’ around in bed every night with ideas and words adds up. I’m spurred on by you, my Dear Readers, whose numbers keep increasing annually! Last year, we shared more than 35,000 views right here on the porch.
But I’ve built a brand-new porch, and I want you to be the first to know about it.
Don’t worry, though. I’m not leaving The Wired Researcher porch. It will remain open virtually forever. Same Monday mornings. Same voice–mine, with Poor Brentford’s voice chiming in from time to time. We’ll both be there, waiting for you.
I just heard someone shout out:
“So, why are you building a new porch? What’s that all about?”
Well, for starters, it has better lighting, and it might just bring in more neighbors for all of us to visit and exchange ideas.
I’m counting on you to check it out. I’ve named the second porch The Kendrick Chronicles.
“Where on earth is this new porch of yours?”
Gracious me! You know that I like to take my time–slow and easy like. In a sec, I’ll give you the link so that you can check it out for yourself. And when you do, go ahead and Subscribe! From that point forward, my essays–ever goldern new one that hits the world, every Monday morning like a neighbor who always brings something worth reading and never overstays his welcome–will find their way directly to your Inbox.
You can find this new porch of mine in Substack. Here’s the link:
“What will I find when I get to this new porch of yours?”
Why, gracious me! You’ll find a comfy chair with your name on it and a handful of your favorite essays with my name on ’em:
● Redbuds of Remembrance
● Learning to Love in New Ways
● I Am Afraid
● Poor Brentford Cleans the Wax Out of His Ears
● Two, Together
● Glimpses of My Mother’s Hands
● The Ghost of Palmyra Church Road
● Truths Half-Told. Letters Half-Burned. A Legacy Waiting to Be Fully Heard.
● Carrying the Bags of Colonial America’s Humourist
And get this. If you subscribe, next week you’ll get an essay about a kitchen disaster beyond belief: “Oh, No! No Sourdough!” And the week after that, “What We Know. What We Believe.” It may be the most complete thing I’ve ever written about who I am and what I believe about what comes next.
So go on now. Pull up a chair. Same voice. Wider porch.
As this year draws to a close, I want to thank you for visiting my blog 32,727 times.
That didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen by accident.
This year, more people found their way here than ever before—slowly, steadily, and often by returning. Compared with last year, readership grew significantly, not because anything went viral, but because the writing kept meeting the right readers at the right moment.
Growth, the quiet way,
These pages have held many things:
● 18th-century satire and present-day kitchens. ● Scholarship and softness. ● Books, biscuits, dogs, devotion, memory, love.
Some posts traveled far. Others found only a handful of readers. But every one was written with care—and read with attention.
I don’t think of these as clicks.
I think of them as moments of shared presence in a distracted world.
You made this a banner year.
If you were one of the 32,725:
● thank you for reading, ● thank you for lingering, ● thank you for making this a place worth returning to.
Here’s to a year shaped by patience, curiosity, and generosity of spirit—and to whatever quiet magic comes next.
You took me by surprise again this morning. As always, when I awakened, I checked my Fitbit to see how my heart did overnight. Then I checked WordPress to see how my readers were doing.
And there you were. Another thousand views. A quiet jolt to the chart. Numbers climbing when I wasn’t looking.
You’ve been dancing higher and higher since October, when I passed 15,000 and figured I’d reached my high-water mark. I even wrote a piece of thanks back then, thinking I’d said all there was to say. But now here we are—December 11th—and this little corner of the internet has gathered 25,053 views.
I’ve done nothing different. I have no flashy headlines. I have no trending hashtags. I just keep following the same rhythm: writing essays born from memory in a home filled with love. I just keep foolin’ around with words and ideas.
So why now, after all these years?
That question hangs gently in the room with me. It’s not demanding an answer. It’s simply inviting a reflection. Maybe something shifted in the writing. Maybe it’s more expansive. Maybe it’s more lived-in. Maybe it’s a voice carrying a steadier warmth now. Maybe it’s grief that’s softened into grace. Maybe it’s love that arrived not with fanfare, but with a quiet hand stretched out in invitation. Maybe it’s all of those things. Maybe. And add to all those maybes one more. Maybe it’s readers sharing with readers.
Gary, of course, doesn’t ask to be written about. But his presence is here, between the lines, in the patience of a paragraph, the steadiness of tone, the way I’ve learned to let silence do some of the talking.
Ruby, on the other hand, insists on being written about, whether she’s nosing me away from my smartphone or curling up in solidarity as I revise for the twenty-fifth time. She is, as always, the keeper of the tempo, the mistress of the move.
So this isn’t an open letter to public stats. It’s a letter to something deeper. It’s a letter to what it means to keep writing when no one’s watching, and then to wake up and find that someone was.
My essays aren’t meant to dazzle. And I know: they don’t. They’re just small acts of holding up the light, one weekly reflection at a time. The fact that they’re being read, now more than ever, tells me something I didn’t expect: quiet honesty still finds its way.
Thank you, Sudden Surge, for reminding me that patience has its own reward, that consistency is a kind of faith, and that somewhere out there, readers are still pausing to linger with a slow essay from the mountain.
I don’t know what this upturn means, or where it leads. But I do know I’ll keep showing up with my smartphone in hand and love at my side.
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought.”
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936,). influential English essayist whose sharp wit, moral clarity, and human warmth made him one of the most quoted thinkers of his time.
My blog surprised me again this week. Back in October, I crossed 15,000 views and thought I’d reached my high-water mark for the year. Now, barely a month later, I’m staring at an even bigger number:
20,062 views—with a full month still to go.
That’s more than last year, more than the year before, and more than I ever expected from this little mountain corner of mine. Apparently, these memoir stories I write from a quiet oasis in the wilderness of Virginia keep finding their way into far-off places—and into the hands and hearts of readers I’ll never meet yet somehow feel connected to all the same.
ReasonstoBeGrateful
But 20,062 isn’t really a number. Not to me.
It’s the sum of moments someone chose to spend with my words. It’s a cup of coffee that went cold on a stranger’s table because they lingered. It’s a pause in someone’s busy day. It’s a late-night scroll where someone said, without ever typing the words, “I’ll stay a little longer.” Twenty thousand tiny gestures of yes in a world full of noise.
And the deeper truth behind that math—the part I keep circling back to—is that this milestone isn’t about reach or visibility or bragging rights. It’s about what it represents in the long arc of a life. I’ve lived enough years, and carried enough stories, to know that readers don’t show up unless something in the writing rings true. They don’t return unless the voice feels familiar, honest, worth sitting with. They certainly don’t keep climbing toward 20,000 unless the stories hold something real.
So this isn’t a celebration of views.
It’s a quiet acknowledgment that I’ve kept faith with my own voice—through reinvention, through loss, through love found unexpectedly, through the strange and luminous chapters that have made up this year. And somehow, astonishingly, readers have kept faith with me.
And yes, threaded into the margins—without ever mentioning Gary by name—is the quiet steadiness that has shaped this year in ways I’m still learning to articulate. Love doesn’t call attention to itself; it simply widens the edges of your life. It softens how you move through the world, deepens the tone of your voice, and reminds you that being read is wonderful, but being seen—fully, gently, without hurry—is something else entirely.
This year, more than any before, has reminded me that showing up with a story is an act of hope. And reading one is, too. Somewhere in that exchange—when the writing meets the reading—something human and steady is created. Something that matters.
So here I sit, on a chilly Thanksgiving week, taking in this milestone not as a trumpet blast but as a simple moment of gratitude. Gratitude for the readers who knock on my digital door day after day. Gratitude for the chance to tell the stories I’ve carried for decades. Gratitude for the ways this year has widened, softened, and surprised me—and for the quiet presence that keeps teaching me that the best stories are the ones we live, not just write.
I didn’t expect this climb to 20,062. But I’m grateful for every step, every reader, every quiet yes.
And with a month still to go, I’ll just say it now—
“The reader is the final arbiter of a text. Without the reader, the words are silent.”
—Margaret Atwood (b. 1939). Canadian poet, novelist, essayist, and critic, one of the most influential literary voices of our time.
My Dear Readers, I blinked yesterday, and suddenly my little corner of the internet tallied 12,000 views for 2025—with three months still to go!
That’s not just a number. It’s 12,000 moments of connection. 12,000 times someone out there paused long enough to read my words, nod, chuckle, roll an eye, or maybe even find a flicker of themselves in my essays.
And here’s the part that stuns me: with this pace, we’re on track to sail past last year’s phenomenal 15,000 peak—a record I once thought unrepeatable. But here we are, repeating (and then some).
The 10 You Loved the Loudest
Every essay I publish is a seed tossed into the world. Some sprout quietly. Some bloom bold and bright. Here are the ten that you watered most generously this year:
Whether you’ve been here since my first blog post nearly 13 years ago or you just stumbled across my latest musings, you’ve made this milestone possible. I don’t take your presence lightly.
So, here’s to you—my companions in this ongoing experiment of storytelling, memory-making, and meaning-finding. Let’s see how far we can climb before 2025 closes the books.
After all, the numbers matter—but the connections matter more.
“Somewhere, an editor is waiting to fall in love with what I’ve written. That’s not ego. That’s faith.”
—Brent L. Kendrick (b. 1947). Blogger, literary scholar, creative nonfiction writer (who loves to fool around in bed), and once-upon-a-time professor who splits his reinvention time between restoring lost voices of American literature and discovering new ways to live, love, laugh, and write with meaning. He’s been sighted in the mountains of Virginia. (Authorial aside to all editors: Sit up and take notice—because if you snooze, you lose. This dude’s relatively cheap, cleans up well, once got compared to Garrison Keillor by someone in Tennessee, and yes—he’ll bake sourdough and seduce the annotations, headnotes, footnotes, and endnotes into (mis)behaving.)
Stats?
Oh. Sorry. I don’t mean my vitals. Though I do check them daily. Why not? My Fitbit provides it all, right on my wrist. Heart rate. Breathing rate. Temp. Heart rate variability. Blood oxygenation. Stress. So, yeah. I check those first thing every morning when I wake up.
I meant another set of stats that matter to me.
My WordPress stats.
I like to know how many people are checking out my blog on any given day.
I like to know what countries they’re from.
I especially like to know what posts they’re reading. That info lets me know what’shot and what’snot. Every now and then, I lean in and almost let myself believe that what’shot mightjustbeme. I do. Really. I do. Especially when I see hits on my AboutMe or AboutMyBlog or ContactMe pages. Like the time one lone reader from Lithuania clicked through twelve posts in an hour—and paused on “About Me.” I remember thinking:
“This is it. This is my moment.”
I guess I figure that if someone is going to all the trouble of background snooping, they’re probably on the verge of being the genius who goes down in history as the one who discovered me, thus ensuring that I go down neither unfootnoted nor unnoted.
Me? Discovered?
Don’t scoff! Stranger things have happened, you know. I mean, I wouldn’t be the first writer catapulted into history and literary fame by an editor with deep belief and keen vision.
One writer who has just been catapulted into history comes to mind immediately.
Alexander Gordon (c. 1692-1754).
Did I just hear you gasp:
“Who’s that?”
Surely, I did not, for if you don’t know who he is, then you must not be the faithful follower I know you to be.
If you’re following me–my blog, I should add for your clarity and my protection–then you know that I recently finished a book about Alexander Gordon, the long-forgotten colonial satirist who published his literary works pseudonymously in The South-Carolina Gazette in 1753-54 under the name The Humourist, and then—like so many voices history forgets—he vanished. No one knew who he was. One scholar asked. But he didn’t bother to find out. No one else did, either. Then I came along. I had a lot of curiosity. I had a tolerance for long hours in dusty archives. Eventually, I had a hunch, and I discovered a clue.
So don’t tell me that a writer getting discovered is a myth. I just did that very thing with Alexander Gordon. Guess what else? It occurs to me that he now stands as the first American writer to be thrust by an editor into fame.
Yes. That’s true and, I’ll make that claim. Right here. Right now.
Someone just upbraided me:
“Excuse me. You’re wrong. Anne Bradstreet was the first.”
Being upbraided is something up with which I will not put.
“So ekscuuuuuuuuuuse meeeeee! You’re wrong.”
Here’s why.
I know. I know. You’re probably thinking about her one and only book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. In case you don’t know the story surrounding its 1650 publication, it goes like this. Her brother-in-law John Woodbridge spirited her manuscript off to England and published it behind her back, unbeknownst to her.
Bradstreet herself seems to back up that claim, especially in her “The Author to Her Book” offering up her well-known and oft-quoted lament:
Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain, Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view, Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).
How convenient for Bradstreet. Her posturing created a persona of Puritan modesty and aversion to recognition as compelling as the narrative of her “stolen” book of poetry—the very tale that helped catapult her into public view.
But here’s the thing. Actually, two things. First, Woodbridge was not her editor. Second, despite the storybook notion that Bradstreet considered her womanly role subordinate to the role of Puritan men, scholars maintain that it was “a propaganda campaign” launched by Bradstreet and her family. I’m thinking particularly of Charlotte Gordon’s “Humble Assertions: The True Story of Anne Bradstreet’s Publication of The Tenth Muse,” maintaining that Bradstreet was not surprised by the publication of her book and that, in fact, she was actively involved in its publication.
So there! Bradstreet does not beat Alexander Gordon when it comes to the first American writer thrust into fame by an editor.
But let me not digress from the claim that I am making. Think as long and as hard as you will about American writers between the publication of The Tenth Muse and the publication of the Humourist essays, and if you can come up with someone else who can seize the claim, reach out to me, and I’ll blog it. Better still, reach out to me, and we’ll co-blog it.
But I won’t hold my breath. The Humourist remained pseudonymous from his first November 26, 1753, essay through his final notice on April 9, 1754, known but to God. That is until I came along and solved the greatest literary mystery in perhaps all of American literature. I unmasked The Humourist and revealed him to be none other than Alexander Gordon, clerk of His Majesty’s Council in South Carolina.
Now, through my dogged determination, my literary sleuthing, and my scholarly editing, Gordon will be known forever more and throughout the world as the acclaimed author of the Humourist essays, among the liveliest and most original voices in Colonial American Literature, right up there and on par with Ben Franklin’s Silence Dogood essays.
Needless to say, there have been other American writers who were brought into public view by editors–all boasting just a smidgen of modesty, of course, comparable to mine–who knew talent when they saw it.
I’m thinking of my lady Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and my book The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Although I edited the letters, provided thorough annotations, and wrote biographical introductions to the book itself and each of its five sections, I’m not the editor who discovered her on her way to literary stardom.
Credit for that goes to someone else. Here’s the brief backstory. Freeman started her career as a children’s writer but then extended her literary efforts into the realm of adult short stories. Lippincott’s, Century, and the Atlantic rejected her “Two Old Lovers.” Then she sent it to Mary Louise Booth, editor of Harper’s Bazar, who read the story three different times during three different moods, as was her custom, and accepted it for publication in the March 31, 1883, issue. From that point forward, Freeman wrote regularly for the Harper’s Bazar and Harper’s Monthly, and, in fact, Harper & Brothers became her regular publisher.
In a way, then, it was Mary Louise Booth’s editorial acumen that escorted Freeman into the international literary acclaim she continues to enjoy even today, though in fairness to Freeman, her talent was such that it would have found its way into the spotlight in one way or another. Talent will always out.
I could go on and on with this litany of writers who were discovered by editors, sometimes against the odds. I’m tempted to say that I won’t, but on second thought, I think that I will share with you snippets of some paired writers and editors who come to mind.
I’ll start with Flannery O’Connor, so well known for her bold and unconventional Southern Gothic voice. It was Robert Giroux, an editor at Harcourt who believed in her debut novel, Wise Blood, and guided it into print—despite its eccentric style and religious overtones.
Or what about Jack Kerouac? His On the Road was originally a 120-foot scroll—raw, unfiltered, and “unpublishable.” But Viking Press editor Malcolm Cowley saw gold and helped shape it into the beat-generation classic it became.
Then we’ve got a postal worker with a cult following in underground poetry circles: Charles Bukowski. He caught the attention of John Martin at Black Sparrow Press. Martin offered him a year’s salary to quit his job and write full time. It was the start of a prolific and gritty career.
No doubt you know the minimalist voice of Raymond Carver. His works might have stayed buried had it not been for Gordon Lish at Esquire. Lish gave Carver his break, though not without some brutal edits.
Closer to me and my situation in many ways is Frank McCourt, who, as a retired teacher in his 60s, wrote Angela’s Ashes. Nan Graham at Scribner wept when she read it and championed it into publication. Oh. My. It won the Pulitzer. It sold millions. My kingdom for a Nan.
And if McCourt was close to me occupationally—educator turned writer; I, of course, am still living according to most recent news reports—then I have to mention Jeanette Walls, whose roots are close to mine since we’re both West Virginians. Her memoir The Glass Castle was going nowhere fast until editor Deb Futter read it and saw its power. Her support turned it into a bestseller and reshaped what memoir could be.
And last but perhaps most important to the hope that I carry (like a well-worn talisman) that an editor will discover me and, in a poof, turn me into star dust is Andy Weir. He self-published his The Martian chapter by chapter online. Julian Pavia at Crown Publishing read it, loved it, and bought it. The novel became a bestseller and hit film.
Oh. My. God. I’m doing exactly what Weir did. I’m publishing all of my Foolin’ Around in Bedessays right here, week by week. Once again, my kingdom for a Pavia unless a Nan has already catapulted my bed into fame.
I could share other snippets, but I confess. Right now, I’m in a pickle. But don’t worry. I have a way out. It will work for me, and, as you are about to see, it will work for you too.
I’m going to do what Margaret Atwood did in her story “Happy Endings.” I’m going to give you options.
A. What happens next? Don’t be so impatient. History is based on facts and evidence. Come back for the ending when the ending is written.
B. What happens next? DearReader, you know exactly what comes next. Yours truly–Brent(ford) L(ee) Kendrick–aka TheWiredResearcher—keeps right on doing what he’s been doing with his writing and his research. And he keeps right on hoping that an editor–a believer—is out there, poised and ready to do for him what he’s just done for Alexander Gordon.
Not just this blog. Not just my Foolin’ Around in Bed essays. But Gordon. Freeman. Years of words, research, story, and sweat. A whole body of work—waiting for the right editor/reader to say: “This one. This voice.”
“Which ending do you like?” someone queried.
I much prefer B. After all, keepin’ on keepin’ on is the road I’m traveling. Even if it is the one less traveled by, it makes all the difference. Especially when it leads past the stats and toward the stars. (Whew! What a relief. I figured out a way to bring Robert Frost into this post. It’s been too long–far too long.)
Besides, putting aside my own preference for an ending, I have no doubt in the world that right now, an editor is out there who believes in me, who might be scrolling through my “About Me,” pausing over a sentence, clicking “Contact Me,” and thinking:
“Thisone. Thisvoice.”
OMG. I just felt the earth shift.
I did. I really did.
Did you?
No? You didn’t?
Don’t worry. Be happy.Somewhere, right now, someone’s opening a drawer, clicking a link, or flipping a page—and everything’s about to begin.
The Wired Researcher 