WE HAVE GOT TO STOP MEETING LIKE THIS

on the insufferability of email & why I still go into my inbox with hope

This is where I live:

On a bad boundary week, I have unblocked email from my phone and I’m responding to clients at 5:22am and 9:18pm. I’m refreshing email on my phone while my kids splash in a bath in front of me. I’m typing a newsletter after sliding zucchini boats into the air fryer for our dinner. The factory can’t work itself, what if something is on fire in there?

My first day as a literary agent, my boss said to me, “Nothing is open heart surgery here.” But boy does my nervous system treat me like I am holding the scapel to a chest when I haven’t checked my email. I am addicted to work—it’s a fine little comfort zone (my therapist doesn’t read this newsletter, thank god). I am mostly in control of things there, I know what I’m doing, not because I don’t make mistakes, but because I don’t fear them enough not to try.

Being someone who is on email for most of the workday (and let’s be honest, unblocked, I believe I might actually refresh that gmail box in my sleep) has been trying to say the least, but not in the ways I imagined. I thought it would feel dull, boring, lose some sort of gloss when I do it day in and day out, but I genuinely love my job, and our books, and the authors I get to commune with (yes, via a lot of emails). It’s also exciting to find someone who I think might equally love a book or get excited about a weird little sentence in a pitch, or want to say yes to an essay pitch. I am no extrovert, but the possibility of what could happen is thrilling to me. And I try to spend my days thriving closer to that could, rather than finding reasons why I’ll fail.

I used to be brutal over email. One of my old bosses taught me some self-regulation techniques to save me from myself. Before him, I would spout off some *truly mean* sentences (on purpose). It was easy, I didn’t have to look at the person receiving whatever whiplash comment I was sending through, and/or they were being passive aggressive, or my anger (which reads as frustration because I’m a woman raised >here<) would get the best of me for whatever I assumed in their initial outreach or response. These days if I receive an email that hurts my feelings, I immediately look to see if we’re in some sort of retrograde. Shout out to Jeanna Kaldec’s newsletter Astrology for Writers (AND NEW PODCAST!!! SO EXCITING!!!).

And we joke about corporate email speak all the time, right? How to say things without really saying them. How to speak around things. How to nice-up what we’re saying or professionalize it, call it what you will. Loe Whaley creates great videos about this on Tiktok. Seasonally, I spend a few minutes thinking long and hard about whether “warmly” is really doing enough work in my sign-off. One time someone responded to me, “first name, hello” instead of “Dear first name,” or “hello, first name” and now all my emails open that way. I’ve tried to make paragraphs shorter, I’ve tried to eliminate paragraphs altogether for bullets or staccato sentences, I’ve tried to include emojis in email or in my sign off (three little twinkles, Cassie), but what most often works isn’t some friendly-email-formula, but attempting to be human, even if I come off quirky instead. Saying something like, “I haven’t had enough coffee this morning, how about you?” or “I hope your Monday didn’t suck,” or “I almost said good morning and it is in fact 1:28pm here.” Because maybe we all need a little reminder that there’s a human being on the other side of that whoosh. We might have moved on from “You’ve Got Mail,” but did all of the earnestness of mailing a physical card or package have to go out the door too? I miss the stickers.

Because while I am willing to fail many times and keep trying, I am very bad at taking (unearned? tbd.) passive or not-so-passive aggression. I am bad at responding when someone forsakes kindness in order to be right. And email is rife with the curt, the cruel, the rude, the snippy, the blunt, the perfectly-constructed blow to someone’s morning or self-confidence or even regulation. Quite frankly, we’re bad at it and it’s bad to us. I am fully realizing that this newsletter moves mostly through email as I type this.

I don’t assume friendliness in email or that I know the person, but I do desperately miss the half-hearted “what are you watching right now?” conversations of the office, or “listen to what we did this weekend,” or simply “how are you?”—I’m not sure in email the last time I got to talk to someone about how they really are (that’s not true, the dear Emily Van Duyne about a week ago), but I do want my “PR EMAILS” (hOw AnNoYiNg) to feel like they come from a person who wants to know how the person on the other side of the inbox is, because I do. I miss knowing how you are.

Of course I want folks to imagine me friendly across the screens, floating into their inbox on a sun ray maybe, feeling like a Sunday maybe, you know vibes are good, vibes are up. Especially when I’ve had the chance to shower that morning, even if a little smudged eyeliner from yesterday never hurt anyone.

And that’s because I spend hours everyday in my inbox. I do most of my communication in that inbox. I am literally sending my little emails in a closet in our bedroom that I converted—there are jeans to the right of me, and a printer to the left, here I am. My days, if I don’t have any meetings, are full of silence that feels like communication because I’m typing away in a little box, scaring myself over comma placement, asking Zoe and Alisha if “this sounds okay?” A box, four walls, and an inbox, which some days gets the best of me—like today when I ended the work day with a “Right, but … (insert “you’re an idiot” to the rest of this paragraph). It can feel like I want to scale that metaphorical box and drag my claws through every filter I’ve created in hope that it might save me from the spiraling anxiety of one person’s coldness (cantankerous, apathetic, or snide responses).

When I told Zoe I was going to write about “rudeness” for this week’s newsletter (and then I ended up writing about emailing, email etiquette—what have I become?), she said this:

And she’s, as usual, exactly right. Whatever gloss we have on phone calls, lunches, fêtes, book tours—it wears off via email and we’re just doing business as usual.

It’s never the readers, and it’s always the business folk. What we don’t acknowledge about gatekeeping is that it’s not just a hedge to try to keep people out (or maybe from seeing the castle at all), but it’s also the way we talk and communicate with one another—how we talk and communicate with one another. When I became a high school teacher I was fascinated by the amount of acronyms I learned in a year. Not from students, but from other teachers who would say, “yadda yadda, are you doing any PBL this year in your classroom?” and I would have to silently go Google what PBL stands for so I could be a part of the conversation. The way we speak to one another, NAY, the way we type to one another (because that’s what we’re all most often doing in publishing—communicating 92% of the time in email mode) is how we stifle questions, squash transparency, approve elitism, and reveal ourselves to be walls, rather than bridges. I want nothing more than to collaborate. Nothing more than to share knowledge, or find new ways of doing something. I am mostly working on gut, with a business that is just now two years old, having not much publicity experience before begging the amazing duo of Ross White and Noah Stetzer to let me work on Bull City Press titles. I am making some of it up as I go, y’all. I am constantly testing. Constantly wondering. Constantly learning.

I’m tired of trying to be “right” or trying to have some imaginary “upper hand.” I left agenting because I have no poker face. You can read it all, every feeling, right there in my brows, my wrinkle lines, the turning of my mouth. Since I was a child, you could see the chaos of emotion on my face. Mostly, I want to be throwing my head back in laughter on a call. I want giggle over email with you. When I’m reaching out, I likely haven’t giggled in a few hours, but instead I’ve been stuck in my own mind trying to finagle the perfect phrasing about a book you’ve yet to hear of, I’m trying to catch you on intrigue.

What you need to know about emails is that I spent hours crafting my email to you. I’m reaching out to you because I spent too much time scrolling through your previous work, your website, your socials, your LinkedIn, your retweets, to figure out if you might like a book. I might have spent an equivalent amount of time scouring the internet for your email. I find new ways to say something with every new email I send, and the best pitch I’ll write is probably months away from the one you’re receiving—when I’ve really figured out the connection point between readers and a book, but I am doing my best to play literary matchmaker the whole time. If you’re in publishing, and we’re collaborating, I want to brainstorm WITH you. I want your very good mind, and what happens when our two, four, ten very good minds team up.

Why can’t this email be an invitation? Why can’t it be a meet up? I’m a guppy. I’m sincere about my excitement over what surprise could be awaiting for me there every morning—our authors, our books, our potential. All my talking that isn’t to my family is pretty much in email, and it’s lonely, and worse when I look at an email and think, “oh, that person thinks I’m dumb / annoying / not doing my job / foolish. I’m also anxious about could be emergencies that have never actually materialized. But some days, instead of talking to myself and hoping, I’d love to find an inbox of how are you’s, of real conversations with real people.

---

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Kelly McMasters & Iris Jamahl Dunkle were on the fiction | non| fiction podcast talking biographical ethics, The Warehouse was excerpted in The Appeal newsletter, Jessica Jacobs was interviewed about unalone in Niv Magazine, Sarah LaBrie’s No One Gets to Fall Apart was named a Best Book of Fall by Oprah Daily, and a Most Anticipated by Literary Hub, Rachel Zimmerman’s Us, After was an NPR Book of the Day, Didi Jackson’s poem was excerpted in The Atlantic, Blood on the Brain by Esinam Bediako was excerpted in Brittle Paper, Jesse Lee Kercheval was interviewed in Hippocampus, Tatiana Johnson-Boria was interviewed in Honey Literary, Vic Liu was profiled in THEM, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.