The People Who Want In

Something happens when you open a door and ask strangers to walk through it. You expect a range of candidates. You don’t expect the specific texture of who actually shows up.

I put out a call for a new writer for this journal—someone with a fresh angle, a strong voice, a personality worth spending time with on the page. What came back: a reporter from somewhere in southern Germany with what I can only describe as a specialized devotion to rabbit breeders and wannabe film directors; a bartender, self-described creative, who claims never to leave home without cigarettes and Red Bull and mentioned, as a point of casual autobiography, that he lost his virginity at thirteen; a psychologist based in England with comprehensive expertise in pills and controlled substances, her words. None of this is a complaint.

There’s something clarifying about this kind of process. You think you know who your audience is—who’s reading, who gets the register, who might actually be able to add something. Then the applications arrive and the readership turns out to contain people you hadn’t fully imagined. The rabbit-breeder reporter. The precocious bartender. The criminal psychologist. All of them, for whatever reason, wanting a seat at this particular table.

No decision yet. The initiation test is still being designed—something appropriately grueling, something that will at some point involve what I’ll describe only as lizard shit. Whoever makes it through that will have earned the byline.