With graduation approaching, I started to reflect on what I’ve been doing these past 4 years and what I want to do from now. Why am I studying Literature? It’s a career path that faces a lot of ridicule, despite its very practical real life skills, so definitely not for the prestige or salary. Because I like to read? My undergraduate program tried to cram so much material into a semester, turning reading into a chore, sucking all the fun out of an activity I used to enjoy so much and leaving behind only the burnout. Because I like writing? I haven’t touched creative writing since 2015 because academic writing, the bane of my existence, has made it so that at the 500-word mark I get tired and quit.
But it wasn’t always like this! I genuinely and passionately loved books since I was little. According to my parents, both doctors finishing med school by the time I was born, at 2 years old I used to sit down with them while they were studying and pretend to read a Mickey Mouse children’s book that I had memorized by ear. All throughout my first 10 years of life, my parents and grandparents used to recite poetry to me. In second grade, I performed Ruben Darío’s poem “A Margarita Debayle” for a school talent show. I spent my preteen years reading arguably bad YA novels I was definitely too young to be reading. At 13, I stumbled upon the Twilight saga and, funnily enough, that became a turning point in my life: my mom bought me some Twilight-themed journals for writing. I wrote so much I filled all 4 of them within a year. Then, after laptops became more accessible for my family, I switched to online platforms like Wattpad and Fanfiction.net. Yes, I was that nerdy teenager writing self-insert Naruto fanfic, but at least I was writing. My senior year of high school, I was the president of the newspaper club, and that, coupled with years of debate and model UN training, led me to different kinds of writing. I started liking journalistic writing more and more. But I still loved fiction, and poetry had always been a big part of my life. Before transferring to McGill, I did a year of Journalism at a university in my home country, and while I did learn valuable things about ethics, research, and audiovisual production, it was not the thing for me. I came to McGill with a mission: I was going to graduate and become an editor. Because I started to feel like writing original pieces myself was too draining, I convinced myself I could be more useful if I took something that already existed and improved it.
4 years later, my mission remains the same, but my motivation for pursuing this path has changed. If there’s one thing McGill’s conservative academic environment did for me, other than help me improve my writing, was radicalize me. I’ve learned so much about the world and solidified my viewpoints on important subjects along this journey—if my 19-year-old self who came here only knowing life in Panama could see me now, I hope she’d think I’m cool. I want to be an editor, but I also want to be a writer.
My dream is to work in one of the big names of the North American publishing industry—Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, etc.—because there’s a system in place that needs to be dismantled. I’m so dissatisfied with current publishers because the market is controlled by a racist, misogynistic, white elite. I don’t think people understand just how influential the media they consume is in shaping contemporary society. You might think, “oh, it’s just a novel, what harm can it do?” or “it’s just fiction, it has no impact in real life.” But the truth is, the things we read, the things that become popular, those things can have a deep, deep impact on collective cultural memory, even more now in the digital age when something can go viral on Twitter or TikTok in days. What we read matters. Take for example, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, and how it depicted an abusive relationship passed off as romance, with zero knowledge of safe and consensual BDSM practices. Every mom and young girl was talking about those a couple of years ago, and the novels even got movie adaptations. Why? The reason behind its popularity honestly evades me—other than women, oppressed by a dictatorial patriarchal society that consistently shames female sexuality while oversaturating the literary market with objectifying and oversexualized depictions of women, finally having access to sexual liberation via mainstream erotica—but what I do know is that the fault is not on a single individual: yes, maybe the author wrote a bad book, but the people responsible for unleashing that monster into a place where people could consume it were everyone involved in the printing process. Editors exist to filter content, they have the biggest responsibility in preparing a manuscript for publication. It’s not just about grammar and spelling and syntax—a book isn’t defined just by its aesthetic qualities, its intellectual ones are just as important. Say the author made a transphobic remark offhandedly, either accidentally or intentionally, in one of their works, and it is a narratorial remark, rather than part of characterization. This is where the editor intervenes: the person editing has to know enough to spot these kinds of problematic points and inform the author of what they’re doing and how to correct it. If the author is a terrible human being who thinks people who are different from them don’t deserve basic human rights, then their manuscript shouldn’t have been picked up in the first place! Easy as that! Publishing is a very competitive industry, there will be better submissions in the pool.
The main problem we have right now is that all the good editors are working for smaller-scale, artisanal publishers who are not well known and thus don’t have the pull that the big names do. And to add insult to injury, the big names continue to refuse to hire anyone who’s not a white cishet old man. Hell, if I were to knock on a publisher’s door right now asking for a job and they saw me, a brown queer woman whose first language isn’t English, they’d laugh in my face and assign me secretary instead of editor.
And that’s the reason why I write. I write because I’m angry, I write to change things, I write to give others like me a chance, I write to prove that I’m capable, I write so one day there won’t be a single person who can question my ability. But the road is long and hard and all I have is my brain and a dream and with graduation approaching I’m more scared than ever. Is that going to stop me? Absolutely not. I didn’t have the privilege of having someone else do this work for me so I could have it easy, so it is my responsibility to provide a platform for the marginalized voices that the publishing industry has incessantly tried to bury. It’s time to make space for entertainment that can also be political, for fiction that can be enjoyed but also critically thought about. I love literature so much because words make me feel so many things. Maybe my vision is far-fetched and idealistic, maybe the future is uncertain and I don’t actually know where I’ll be in a couple of years, but I’m a Taurus, and you know what they say about Tauruses.
Stubborn beyond anything else.