Agents & Editors: PJ Mark

Is sending a story to a magazine substantially different from sending a manuscript to a book editor?
No, it’s in fact the same thing. Success is often in knowing what’s appropriate for an editor and what’s not—what an editor has previously responded to, and what that editor may or may not be able to push through. It’s knowing your audience. And it is extraordinary when Tin House or The Paris Review or The New Yorker want to publish a piece of work by your writer. It’s an amazing thrill to be able to make that call.

What about the editorial work you do with an author? Are there any differences between stories and novels?
No, there aren’t. I read both as closely, and I give as many detailed notes as needed. I will read a short story and do a two-page letter if I think it needs the work, and I do the same thing with the novels that I’m reading. I’m very fortunate to have a colleague who reads along with me. To have a conversation with her before I have the dialogue with the author is incredibly valuable. It helps me articulate my response and things that I might not have seen.

A writer understands very clearly, very quickly, whether an agent understands her work. Sometimes I can really love something and my response to the work is not what that author wants to hear, and I’m not the right agent for that author. Sometimes I want work to be done on a book that the author doesn’t want to do. If I was to take that book on, and the work wasn’t done, and the work was rejected by editors, all I would think is, “What if we had made those changes?”

When I submit something, I know that I am right. Even when people are rejecting that book: I know they are wrong. The value of that book is the value that I see. It might not be appropriate for them, but their reaction isn’t my truth. I need to find the editor who mirrors my reaction.

I don’t want to interfere with a writer’s work or muck it up, but I want a writer to value our engagement and the time that I’m giving their work. Ultimately it’s the author’s book and he can take my response or not, and there are plenty of times when we’re in the process of revision that I want something changed and an author is not willing to do it. It’s his vision and his book, and it’s important for him to have it be his.

Do you have any guilty pleasures?
I don’t feel guilt about anything. I just have pleasures. [Laughs.]

Good for you!
I’m sort of unapologetic with my interests. I’m not ashamed of what I’m interested in because I feel it’s just a further expression of who I am. I like to watch television sometimes, I like to watch movies, I like to see Broadway shows, I like high art, I like camp, I like kitsch.

The flip side of that is that I don’t feel guilty or ashamed about the stuff that I don’t know. I always feel like I’m learning. There are plenty of books that I have not read. I’m not ashamed that I haven’t read them because I hope to get to them at some point. Part of the joy of being alive is exploring and finding those things that you don’t know.

Is fiction harder to sell than nonfiction?
I think it’s dangerous to say that nonfiction is easier to sell than fiction, but I think that it’s true. You can make an argument for an audience in nonfiction more clearly than you can in fiction. For fiction, you’re reliant on a lot of things lining up to find an audience. That’s what I was getting at earlier—that it’s imperative to position a novel with enough identity to break out from other fiction and to find that audience.

I don’t know the statistics, but I wonder if people read less fiction than they do nonfiction because they don’t understand why they should be interested in a novel. Of course, you can sell nonfiction on a proposal, but a novelist has to write the whole thing first. If a proposal doesn’t sell, you may just come up with a different idea and try again. It’s harder to come up with another novel very quickly, or with the same enthusiasm.

Can you imagine doing anything else with your life?
No, but at one point I couldn’t imagine being an agent. I think the kind of creative engagement that I have with my writers, and seeing the reaction from readers to their work, is immensely satisfying. It’s a privilege to be a part of the creativity of these writers and to feel like I’m helping change a writer’s life but also putting ideas forth.

Maggie Nelson sent me something just recently. She has a book, The Art of Cruelty, which was about representations of cruelty in high and low culture. She sent me an article from BOMB in which Matthew Barney talks about something that he’s working on in response to her book. That’s bananas. The conversation that Maggie started, and which I helped put forth, is having its own dialogue independent of us.

That’s what books do. That’s what’s exciting about not knowing the life a book can take. On paper it can look like a book is not successful, but that book could have changed the life of a reader. You may never know. That is amazing to me. The impact of that can’t be lost.

Do you get a physical sensation when you read something you want to take on?
There is a physical experience, and I want to talk about that. But each of us has his or her own truth. When we see that reflected in something else, that is authentic. But what is true to you may not be true to me, and what affects you may not affect me in the same way.

The experience of reading something on submission that speaks to me as authentic, or articulates something I have been unable to put into words, or surprises me, creates a feeling that is very hard to deny.

There is a physical manifestation of that. I felt it when I read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, physically shaking and knowing that it was a book that I had to be a part of. Talk about a book about isolation and loneliness and longing! I read that book right after my mother had passed in 2005 and I was numb. That was the first thing I had read in about eight weeks that sparked a response. I immediately recognized it: “Oh, right, this is what it means to be alive again.”

You represent Choire Sicha, who cofounded The Awl, and there’s a lot of other interesting literary activity happening online. Do you find writers on the web?
The web is a place where agents are finding interesting writers. I am not online enough to be finding writers there. I am so occupied with my clients and the material that’s coming in that it’s difficult for me. I’m not online during the day and I refuse to go online at night because it would be impossible to decompress. I am reliant on journalists and writers like Choire and Ed Park to tell me about writers who are doing interesting things.

A lot of new nonfiction writers are exploring their ideas online because that is the form and venue available to them.  I see those stories when they reverberate widely, and hear about those pieces that could be the inspiration for something larger. The online form is just another way for writers to explore their work and get their work out there. 

If you were to move to New York City today as a twenty year old, I see you starting a literary website rather than a print journal.
If I was a young person now arriving in New York and had all of the same instincts I had in 1990, I would start a journal online immediately and publish new fiction and photography and new-form journalism. I would absolutely find those writers and explore those options. And it would cost me nothing, by the way.  It would not have been the student loans that I paid off for the next ten years in order to produce a bound literary journal to be distributed by Ingram.

I think writers feel isolated outside of New York, but writers are available to go online and to submit their work and to get readers for their work, and to be on websites where people are reading each other’s work and giving feedback and to be engaging in that way. 

You’ve had a pretty varied set of experiences. Do you think you could have taken any shortcuts?
I know that everything that has happened in my life has led me to now. It is very clear, from meeting Ira Silverberg to reading for Clare Ferraro to working for Mary Anne Thompson and then Kurt Andersen, to agenting and arriving where I am today. I see the through-line. I see the evolution that was necessary at every step along the way. I don’t think I could have created a shortcut.

The interesting thing is: What’s next? How does my list evolve? How do I change? How do my interests continue to grow? Discovering that is the satisfaction of this work. The really exciting part of being an agent is that the book that will propel me to the next step is potentially in my inbox right now.

Michael Szczerban is a senior editor at Regan Arts.