My first literary read was The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I found it on my paternal grandmother's bookshelves, alongside works by Edgar Rice Burroughs and J.T. McIntosh.

I was a locust back then, devouring any and every story I could find: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines, pulp SciFi and Fantasy from the '60s, my maternal grandfather's college literature and theological texts, whatever I could lay my hands on at the library, or at the homes of my parents' friends while the adults played cards and the other kids carried out wild adventures.

My mind was always more comfortable living between the pages of a good book than sharing my sibling's adventures in reality.

There are few books I remember as well as The Good Earth, though the story itself has taken on the soft patina of memory. It wasn't the characters or their stories that enchanted me so much as the exoticness. At the time, my experience with other cultures was limited almost solely to those contained in books.

Excepting a memorable trip to Houston, Texas, one summer when I was, oh, seven or eight. I don't think that counts, in spite of the bizarre experience of viewing huge-horned cattle grazing on endlessly flat land. For a mountain girl, such a sight is nearly incomprehensible. Where were the mountains, the narrow cricks cutting between rift valleys? Where were the trees?

So yes, the world Buck described was so different from my own as to take on the air of fantasy. My family was poor, as the central characters in Buck's story were, and we're human, just like those characters. But they lived in such a different world, we may as well have lived on different planets.

I'm sure I'll be criticized for such a view by the narrow-minded intersectionality crowd (I was twelve when I read it, ffs; of course, it seemed exotic to me), but it's that exotic air that is the point of this story.

I was reminded of The Good Earth when I read a hand-wringing article on Publisher's Weekly written by Anjali Enjeti. In the article, Enjeti remarks on having one of her pieces rejected because it wasn't as strong as other pieces "coming out of India."

(I'm not sure what the author of such a statement meant, only that Enjeti considered it to be "racist." Racist may be a bit of a stretch. Clueless, tone deaf, and/or insensitive would be better words.)

Enjeti is working on her first piece of fiction, and she assumes, like most literary wannabes, that her only path to publication is through traditional, corporate publishing. Find an agent, wait while they find a publisher, wait again while the publisher does their job...

As it happens, Enjeti's first two books were published in a less traditional way, through unagented processes, but still with corporate publishers. She despairs, I think, of ever finding an agent, of gaining the approval and status rendered by publication through a big name publisher.

Why?

Will that make her novel more interesting to readers? Will it do anything to help her find an audience other than lend her, as an author, an ephemeral (and meaningless) air of credibility?

Our current cultural mindset is such that we're no longer allowed to ponder why readers read in the first place. It isn't, as many intersectionality proponents insist, because we need stories filled with characters just like us and situations just like the ones we're in right now.

Such a belief ignores the purpose of story: to help us understand something we have never experienced.

We live vicariously through story, not to relive our own reality, but to immerse ourselves in a completely foreign one. To suffer with the characters as they journey through hardships, so that we don't have to endure such suffering in our own lives. Or perhaps to escape that suffering by living through someone else's. We read to experience something different, not to wallow in what we already know.

Yes, even when we read about characters that are similar to us, living in a world with which we're familiar. We look for ways we can connect with characters (look, they're dirt poor, just like me), then we open ourselves to their experiences and live through them.

I have never been to Pern, but I know what it's like to ride a dragon while Thread falls from the sky and devours everything it touches.

I've never been to the moon, but I know exactly what it feels like to be imprisoned there.

And I've never been to China, but I know that life in rural villages was just as difficult as life here, even though the culture is very different from my own. The kernels of understanding rural Chinese culture are in my mind now because I read a novel written by the daughter of white missionaries who lived there.

So to all you writers who have not found a home in the corporate world of publishing, my advice is this: Stop trying.

No, don't stop writing. Never do that.

But stop trying to find a home in the narrow-minded world of Manhatten publishers.

Look instead to the indie side of publishing. We don't care where you were born or where you live. We don't care what color your skin is, whether you're male or female or other, or if you prefer dogs or cats to goldfish or parakeets.

We don't care!

And while I'm at it, let me bust another myth you've been led to believe about books: Readers don't care either.

Sure, some readers will be drawn to you because you're a gay Catholic AAPI waiter from the Bronx, and some will refuse to pick up your stories for the very same reason. Those folks, on either side, are in the minority.

Most readers don't give a shit.

Do you know the secret to gaining a reader's attention? Write something they want to read. That's it, the entirity of what you have to do: Write a book readers want to devour then make them aware of said book.

It's not easy, but it's certainly not the years- or decades-long slog that corporate publishers expect of their serfs. Whoops, I meant writers.

Free yourself from the chains of corporate publishing and go indie. If you're uncertain of the whole process, try a small press instead, or join one of the many self-publishing groups on Facebook or elsewhere. (We welcome writers who want to try a different path, too.) Write for magazines if that's your thing. Write series or stand alones, or blog a book if you really want to. Why not? It worked for Andy Weir. And shoot, E.L. James started out writing fan fiction.

The world is your oyster, baby doll. But don't rely on someone else to crack it open for you. Find your own path, make your own opportunities, then work your ass off to take advantage of them.

Your readers are out there. Now go find them.