Introducing: The Discard Pile

Short-form essays about long-form subjects, rescued from the piles of abandoned drafts

Hi there and welcome to The Discard Pile, a new project to give a home to wayward drafts. Those half-finished essays and 2 am thunderbolt ideas that have floundered in a Notes app for years, looking for a little oxygen.

My advice? Always meet your logo designer via your son’s hippie-leaning outdoor preschool. (Thank you, Christina!)

If you don’t know me (though, I wonder how you’re here? Welcome anyway) I’m Matt. A writer, dad, husband, poet, owner of too many cowboy boots, etc, etc. The boring stuff, but also the good stuff. I’m a freelance writer for places like Huckberry, Esquire, Runner’s World, Field & Stream and other places with big blue checkmarks and editorial staff and copyeditors whose good graces I’m not in. I frequently typo. I haven’t figured out title capitalization without googling it. And, newly, I’m trying this thing out: a home for homeless ideas looking for the authority of Substack’s ones and zeros.

Owner of too many cowboy hats, too, if I’m honest

The concept is simple: small essays on big topics, rescued from the bin of yesterday’s rejects. Mostly by me, sometimes by others.

The Backstory

At some point in my journey from marketer to grad school poet to boat washer to PR person to freelance writer, I stopped submitting writing to creative journals and started submitting writing to glossy mags of the online era. AKA, commerce arms of once (and occasionally still) venerated publications. As a poet, this was thrilling. Instead of laboring in quiet pain over a manuscript for months, paying a four-dollar reading fee, tossing that manuscript into the maw of a creative lit mag run by volunteer graduate students and then waiting a year for my summary rejection, I could have an idea, email an editor, and then be told if my idea was any good. It saved so much time! And at the end of the line, there was a paycheck. Not always a great one, but real money in the bank. Then, thanks to some generous editors, I stopped having to pitch and started receiving assignments. Brilliant, now I could skip even the idea phase and just get to writing.

But skipping the idea phase means I’ve entirely ceded agency over my own writing. Instead of poems and sprawling philosophical essays about chopping onions, I’m writing about sweatpants. Cozier, but different than I planned. I could continue to write on my own ideas without a guaranteed publication, but I’ve faltered in momentum

There are many exceptions, thanks to my talented editors at the aforementioned pubs ( HB, Esquire, RW, etc.) who have trusted me with wild ideas and run-on sentences and tamed my rogue TKTK placeholders and shaped them into better writing. But even the best editors can’t greenlight limitless ideas.

The Madmen

Writers have a lot of ideas. That’s what drives us to write. Like the protagonist in Billy Collin’s poem “The Madmen,” the fleeting inspiration to chase a muse sometimes cripples us mid-conversation.

As a third grader, I once stepped out of soccer practice and asked a teammate’s parent if I could borrow a pen because I had an idea for a poem. Just stopped, cold turkey, in the middle of practice to write a poem. This story mortifies me now, though obviously not enough to not recount it here. The other writer’s problem is an insatiable need for a public flogging of our private moments.

I finished that poem. But for every poem I have finished, there are, conservatively, twenty-seven abandoned as partially scribbled lines in notebooks of various pretensions. And my Notes app. This is part of the process, but also embarrassing. On bad days, it feels like I can’t finish anything.

All writers have these: skeletons¹ in our writing closet, castoff documents full of scree, rejected pitches, half-finished projects. Some need to be put to an unceremonious end. But some have the legs to get somewhere, they just need the runway.

The Essay as a Form of Public Accountability

I’m particularly arrested by a quote from William Zinzer about bylines, from his book “On Writing Well,” from an also arresting chapter title, “The Tyranny of the Final Product,” speaking of his writing students who have an idea “perfect” for a certain magazine like Sports Illustrated or The New Yorker:

“That's the last thing I want to hear. They can already picture their story in print: the headline, the layout, the photographs and, best of all, the byline. Now all they have to do is write it. This fixation on the finished article causes writers a lot of trouble, deflecting them from all the earlier decisions that have to be made to determine its shape and voice and content. It's a very American kind of trouble.”

Unfortunately, over the years, I’ve become reluctantly stuck with myself and my very American kind of trouble. I do not start things under my own initiative, for the joy of learning or the pursuit of the moment. I need a deadline to finish the project, or the project will not happen. So let’s call this Substack a public accountability project, something to help me write the damn thing, to exorcise the half-finished story and move on to the next. I think here of the panic-inducing Annie Dillard quote: “How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives.”

So that’s this: a commitment to the essay as a form of public accountability.

The Rules (and an excuse to use the royal we)

1. We’ll publish non-fiction.

2. These essays will be short-ish. 750 - 2500 words. We’ll probably break that rule, but whatever.

3. We’ll publish bi-monthly, and lean into the intentional ambiguity of whether that’s twice a month or twice every other month.

4. It won’t just be me. Guest posts will abound. Guest writers will be more talented than I and paid promptly in cases of Michigan beer and/or Zingerman’s² goodies

5. We’ll usually not write about stuff, but in the spirit of the manifesto, we might sometimes—overlooked favorites, things we love editors haven’t bitten on, stories of craftsmanship or style, or a favorite thrift store find.

6. We’ll have fun with it. We’ll take the art seriously, but not ourselves.

The Manifesto

We’ll follow in the footsteps of Barry Lopez, Jim Harrison, Annie Dillard, MFK Fischer, and E.B. White. Certainly not in quality, but in spirit. We’ll write observationally, rooted in passion and reflection, hopefully funny, sometimes serious, often contemplative.

E.B. White’s aspiration (and very focused) writing set-up.

Big hopes? How napkin ideas become short stories become novels, these little essays spark something somewhere. Or, they don’t. They exist as small tributaries in an online river of content that never ceases and never slows. That’s okay too. I like little tributaries. Maybe one day I’ll build a house on one.

Come Along For The Ride

Thanks for being here, thanks for reading this, and, if you’re interested in writing something, send me a message. Public accountability towards personal writing only goes so far, I gotta pad the stats somehow.

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1. another great Collins’ poem, "Purity” features skeletons and typewriters and some lasting imagery that I won’t spoil for you

2. a Michigan deli that Jim Harrison frequented and which features the aforementioned Dillard quote on its house blend coffee bags. Full circle.