Maybe Publishing Isn’t for You

“Dude,” the girl says, picking at the wilted lettuce on her plate. “Your life is like, a movie.”

The girl—from another department—whispers this over a lunch of stuffed pita sandwiches, both of your fingers glazed in blood-red sauce. You try to hold back an eyeroll as you crunch into the leaves, grateful for the mouthful to keep you from conjuring more cinematic moments for her to react to. You aren’t sure which is worse: Alejandro’s six-month-long deportation that has stretched parallel to your Minnesota winter, the niece you’d both left behind, or the horror-film epiphany that maybe you should be back home after all—or that opening up over a lunch hour that ran overtime without either of you noticing really was just proof that you were nothing but punchlines, stage-lighting, and zero delivery.

If you and Alejandro had been anything, you were You’ve Got Mail outfitted for a modern era—all Whatsapp messages, Snapchat streaks, Indie bookstores and, the most glaring difference: he self-deported, and you just a Native intern tucked into the outskirts of downtown Minneapolis. We were very much not two blonde, middle-aged people at the precipice of a war between the bookstacks. Add a country border and few thousand miles, sure, you think. I’m practically Meg Ryan.

These sentiments, you realize, will follow you from book-basements, conferences, and market-runs punctuated with I know you miss your people so often you cannot help but wonder if it is a form of hazing. You will try to hold out your culture as a shield, until they excavate what little you offer in the landscape of your hands. Can I ask about _______ ceremony? What was it like when…

It will reach fever-pitch when you are forced to dance between two schedules, fending a table at an Indigenous conference while arching over a laptop in a quiet, overly sunlit corner on the floor of a ballroom, trying your best to attend publishing meetings to the backdrop of Native laughter, a river of rainbow skirts ribboning around the pebble of you. The manuscript you’d been charged with shepherding—at its core—focused on creatures that flared from the pages with hazard-yellow midnight eyes, silently telling you to run.

On screen, you are grateful that the sunlight eclipses you into shadow because, as a toddler races past in a tiny symphony of silvered cones, leading a small parade of kids to the moccasin-making seminar, it uncoils you completely. For a second, you see a version of the inner-child you could’ve been at sudden odds with the dream-self that you’d begged—an entire lifetime—to be.

When you try to put it into words back at the table—the moccasins, the manuscripts, the ribbon skirts, the meetings—you expect for another punchline to land, for the laughing backtrack to tell you that you filled your role completely. Instead, she’ll purse her mouth, her eyes already squinting with mirth, a touch of sarcasm.

“Well, maybe publishing just isn’t for you.”

Brianna G. Reed is a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts.