Agentless Agency: On Submitting to Lit Journals
1.
Last month, I came across a sentence in Cal Newport’s A World Without Email that took my breath away: Outsource what you don’t do well. Newport describes how one entrepreneur’s decision to hire a part-time assistant swiftly drove up the startup’s efficiency and the entrepreneur’s satisfaction with his job. I put down the book and watched two dogs wrestle in my neighbor’s yard. Newport’s dictum had sparked an idea that seemed so scandalous, so alluring, so taboo, that it might just work…
What if I could find the funds in my teaching salary to hire a writing assistant for a few hours a week? Namely, someone to submit my stories and essays for me?
Creating work has never been an issue. I began composing short stories and poems as a kid, majored in creative writing in college, and attended an MFA program, where I largely worked on fiction. I rarely submitted the stories that I’d
