DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB
by Michael Fedo; Holy Cow! Press (135 pages, $15.95)
Good reviews, Michael Fedo will tell you, do not necessarily translate into good money. He’s had plenty of the former, and little of the latter. And so his 50 years working as a writer—of books, magazine pieces, book reviews, short stories and essays, even a few poems—were also spent working as a teacher.
In his memoir “Don’t Quit Your Day Job,” Duluth, Minn., native Fedo (author of a biography of Garrison Keillor pre-scandal, and a devastating history, “The Lynchings in Duluth”) recounts with humor and honesty the difficulties and rewards (more difficulties than rewards, perhaps) of becoming a writer.
He was dogged. While at grad school, he wrote a funny piece that he sent to Reader’s
Digest. Reader’s Digest sent it back. “Writers expect rejections, and they simply send their manuscripts elsewhere and hope for better luck,” a friend advised. So Fedo sent it off again, and again, and received rejection notes again, and again.
(He did eventually sell a rewritten version of that piece for $60, and celebrated with a fine steak dinner.)
Fedo’s subtitle is “The Adventures of a Midlist Author,” but it could have been “Adventures in Frustration.” Fame, fortune and glory remained beyond his grasp. He steadily published pieces in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, BusinessWeek, Scholastic magazine and many smaller places. His books often were well reviewed. But publishers folded. Magazines folded. Editors moved on. Budgets of nonprofit presses were slashed.
The structure of the book is not chronological, but thematic, which gives it more a feel of a “how-to” book than a true memoir. Practical, rich with anecdotes and wisdom he learned along the way, it’s an entertaining read that will likely be useful to anyone who thinks that a publishing contract is a guarantee of—anything. “Are we after fame and wealth?” he writes. “Most likely so, but I long ago learned to accept reality.”
Fedo’s book is a healthy dose of reality for aspiring writers.