1/17

i'm thankful that a few months later, i started writing a series of long weird daily blog posts about the short-lived US version of i'm a celebrity get me out of here, which was my best attempt at writing "relevant," and choire linked to one of them one day (i knew because the awl had already become the center of my internet universe) and then another the next day and to several other posts over the course of that month and suddenly i had all of these new people reading my work, i had felt so silo-ed away, and suddenly everything i wrote people were reading and i was talking to the people in the comments and we were emailing each other and i had a community (which was so important because i was living with my parents and undiagnosed mental illness and i had no friends in real life and i didn't know what to do for a job).

i'm thankful for how this motivated me to stretch myself as a writer. i had been writing basically just about reality TV for years at that point and i started to try writing things about other topics and to stretch myself out formally. i'm thankful that when i did that, the awl was there and that sometimes when i was really proud of something i'd written, they would link to it and i would feel for a moment like i imagined the celebrities i had been writing about so long were—i would go back and refresh the posts over and over, rereading tags and alt-text. i'm thankful for the tags and the alt-text, which were these lovely little surprises in every post, like extra prizes in your box of lucky charms.

i'm thankful that, of course, i didn't just read the posts mentioning me, that i was reading all the posts every day and in doing so inhaling a certain sensibility that i found increasingly intoxicating, all the sparkle and fizz of gawker without any of the bile, a pleasure in being weird and idiosyncratic (but without being, like so much of the internet, about Being a Geek in a boring commodified sense), a sense of "we can do whatever we want and if people don't want it, that's their problem" and i was learning about new writers by reading their work and emailing them to say "hey, i read your post on the awl" i'm thankful that for years it was the first place i went on the internet every day and the place i went the most often, my home on the internet.

i'm thankful, as someone who has never been good at promoting the weird things i write or at coloring within the lines of a publication's house style, to have had this place that gave me a seal of approval, that said, repeatedly, "hey, this person is doing some weird stuff over here, you should check it out." i'm thankful for that. i'm thankful that, probably because of the awl, i got offered a job writing a real article for a "real" magazine. i'm thankful for that experience (and for the money, which helped me afford to go to new york, a city i mostly thought of as being where the awl lived, for the first time), even though i got frustrated during the editing experience, because i felt like the (talented and well-intentioned! i was a brat used to getting my own way) edits were just about making me fit into the box of the magazine rather than making my piece the best it could be.

i'm thankful that when i finally wrote something that i thought was really good, i emailed choire to ask if he might publish it on the awl, a ridiculous pitch email that ended, after a bulleted list of descriptions of the limitations of the essay and of myself as a writer, with the paragraph "Listing the potential problems with a piece being in a particular publication is probably not the way you are supposed to pitch things to editors of publications, right?  Well, FINE.  If it doesn't work for you for the aforementioned reasons or any other ones (I'm sure there are other ones!), no problem, I'll just blog it on my blog, but I'm getting bored with scanning 10,000 word essays and I've always wanted to have something on the Awl so I thought I'd see if you wanted it first."  

i'm thankful that he took it immediately and that over the next few months pushed me into revising it in ways that made it better than i could have made it myself, all the while supporting me and never making me feel like i had to accept something just because he said so. i'm thankful for how proud i was when the essay was published, how i felt like it was the best thing i had ever written and it was published at my favorite place on the internet. i'm thankful for e, who emailed me from new york to tell me how she had been at a coffee shop and overheard people (STRANGERS) discussing it. i'm thankful i was in my mfa program at the time and one day soon after i came into my pedagogy class, which we shared with the literature phd students, and this girl i vaguely knew told me that she'd seen it in the awl and had passed it around to some other people. i'm thankful that later i emailed choire something else to see if he'd publish it and he wrote back:

"OH I THINK I DO?

maybe we should do this for that???"

i'm thankful that this is what the awl was to me, a place where doing a thing they wouldn't normally do wasn't a problem but was even more fun, where they would put a WEIRD THING up at the end of the day friday to stay up all weekend and scare people. i'm thankful for everything that it gave me and everyone else, for what it gave the culture, and i'm thankful that even if it's going to go away, there are so many people who were touched by its influence that are writing today and will continue to write and that some fragment of it is in all of us and will never really go away. i'm thankful that at the end of 2009, its first year, i was writing descriptions of websites i'd read that year as food and i described the awl as "a pretty good sandwich served on an ugly plate by someone who loves you." i'm thankful for the love, which i'll never forget.