20UNDER40′s Selection Process is Complete!

Narrowing it down to twenty... not an easy task.

It was no oil spill 5,000 feet beneath the sea, nor a record rainfall that flooded the home of honky tonk, but on May 1 there was a major water main break just outside of  Boston.  For 72 hours everyone in the metro area was told not to drink from the tap and advised to boil water two minutes before using it to cook, to clean, or to brush your teeth.  Like a lot of people, I just tried to go the weekend without water—drinking Poland Spring sparingly while the plates piled up in the kitchen.  By the time Monday hit I was nearly out of utensils and there was a funk coming from the clay pot I’d used to make Friday night’s roasted chicken—I’d never had such a burning desire to do the dishes…

But despite the Boston water crisis of 2010, I had work to do… and the variety of work I had to do was not the least bit easy. It had finally come time for me to choose the twenty essays that will be published within the 20UNDER40 anthology.  Having received 304 chapter proposals and then invited 32 authors to submit full chapters, the level of quality and the wealth of ideas I was dealing with was overwhelming.

But this was not new work for me.  Since the March 1 deadline for full chapters I’ve been walking around with each of the prospective authors’ chapter ideas floating in my head.  Mulling over them.  Playing mix and match with themes, balancing issues upon issues, weighing idea x against idea y and dividing both by through-line z.

In the end, the decision making process wound up being a jigsaw puzzle of content—placing one essay next to another, switching them around until the pieces started to fit together and I began to see it in front of me—the book.  On the surface, this was the work of deciding what would be included.  And all this deciding reminded me of what a professor once taught me—that the words decision, precision, and incision all share the root word cis which is a French translation of the Latin caedere: to cut. Perhaps the hardest part of this process was deciding what would not be included.  What to cut.  In order to stick to the twenty essay quota, I had to sadly let a lot of good work go, and write a handful of emails that I really didn’t want to address.

If you do the math, twenty chapters out of 304 proposals is a less than 10% acceptance rate.  This makes getting a piece in the 20UNDER40 anthology more competitive than getting into our country’s most elite art schools, universities, or professional journals.  But just because something is competitive, just because something is selective, just because something is elite doesn’t mean it’s good.  But I can assure you, though 20UNDER40 may not be the last word on the future of the arts (nor should it be!), it will be a powerful one. Each chapter that has been selected for publication pushes the boundaries of our field, goes against the grain when necessary, blazes a trail here and there, and reorients us back to why we do the work we do in the first place.

I couldn’t be more excited to blurt out everything about the selected chapters, but it’s still too soon to make such exclamations.  As of right now the authors are reviewing their publishing contracts and slowly confirming my publication offer.  Once all the authors have signed on we’ll be jumping into an intensive editorial revision process geared towards finely tuning each chapter.  This will take the bulk of the summer, and then it’s off to the publisher.

I’ve been incredibly protective about the ideas of 20UNDER40‘s prospective authors.  The best anyone has been able to squeeze out of me are over-arching themes that pertain to all of the chapter proposals I’ve read—and all of the people I’ve spoken to about the future of the arts sector in the 21st Century.  I plan to continue to protect 20UNDER40‘s authors’ ideas until there’s a book to be read.  In the months to come, however, I hope to upgrade the 20UNDER40 website to include interactive discussion platforms that preview the content in the book.  I hope to direct the attention the project has garnered off of me and onto the authors who will be the backbone of the anthology, and I hope to find a way to increasingly promote dialogue that highlights not just these twenty ideas, but the great mass of ideas that are out there, waiting to be tapped, hungry to be articulated, thirsty for an audience.  Until that day comes… watch this space, remember to stay hydrated, and don’t forget to do your dishes.

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