Write or Die (or Die)

An English Major's Universal Guide to Making Friends.

"Kailey is a kindred spirit of ours in that she has sacrificed a tremendous amount of thankless, profitless minutes, hours, weeks, and years of her life to pursue what is ostensibly a life of homework. She founded and fostered Write or Die, which is a magazine, community, and home of writerly badassery. She has been writing Subs & Chill, a column on Chill Subs that interviews writers and editors about the submissions process. Today, she joins us to talk about how she grew her passion for writing into a business."

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I like to say Write or Die began out of loneliness. It paints a dramatic picture (and I’m a writer, after all). 

One minute I’m loving my college life in classrooms with people who love writing and want to talk about it with me and who read my stories and tell me I’m good, that I’m going places. In the off-campus dive bar, we sipped cheap beer while we exchanged novels and writing tips and nothing mattered because we were just college students, doing our college thing. 

Then it's graduation, and I’m like, oh, shit *hair flies back*  now what?

So picture me all summer, sweating and armed with a bachelor’s degree in English,  applying for writing jobs in my teenage bedroom with enough bloated confidence to power a small fan. I blew through applications for copywriters and freelance editors on the good faith that my years in academia and my writing sample (and being a member of the English honors program, thank you very much!!)  would be enough to get my foot in the door. I genuinely believed getting a job that utilized my degree would be easy. 

So imagine my shock when every single one of those jobs replied with a fat NO and a note that I needed more experience in the field.

Umm, excuse me? Did you not read that I researched the history of the domesticity of women in the home and then wrote a whole collection of stories, each one taking place in one of the rooms I studied? 

The collection is a tour of the home through the lens of women! How are you not wildly fascinated with my ability to make art?!

They were not.

Writing the way I had in school felt a lot harder after that, despite how much I missed it. In my post-grad depression, while working as an administrative assistant for a state grant (where my soul left my body Monday- Friday from 9-5), I started experimenting with blogging.

I wasn’t writing much fiction,  but I wanted to be writing something, aside from moody journal entries, and I figured the best time to experiment was on the clock, computer tilted away from my boss's office window. I played around with Squarespace, wrote some posts about what I was reading and listening to, and some personal essay-type pieces about navigating my mid-twenties (yikes).  My boss caught me several times and delegated new busy work to my schedule. Towards the end of my admin career, she had me pull out a whole file cabinet of documents, photo-copy each one, and set them in 6 inches binders (twelve in total!) that sat in the corner, untouched for the remainder of my time there; my first bought of suffering for my art. 

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And so I was writing again, yeah, but what I really missed more than anything was writers in my life. And so, I did what any career-less,  kind of extroverted, kind of introverted, over-ambitious, yet wildly self-conscience person would. I started my own writing community online.

In 2018, it began out as Write or Die Tribe. It had a nice ring to it, evoking the community I was envisioning, and I was too naïve at the time to understand the problematic use of the word tribe. (So bear with me here. I promise the name gets changed.) 

It was a blog, but I knew it needed to be something more. I wanted to create a hub, a real gathering of the like-minded. And while I added a membership feature and writing resources, what really excited me were the author interviews. Published authors, to me, are the real celebrities. (My favorite YA authors, like Markus Zusaks and Jennifer Donnelly, got love notes sent from kaileyxo16@aol.com in the early aughts, praising their work and asking for advice on how to write a novel even though I had never even tried to start one.) Alice Bolin, Brad Listi, and Chelsea Hodson were the first three to graciously agree to answer my questions. I was too scared to speak to them, so I made sure to conduct the interview via email. Around this time, I quit the admin job, found a freelance gig for an HR company, and was a nanny for two tweens before waiting tables at a country club. (I write a bit about it the server life  here.) 

I saved my mornings for all things Write or Die, spending hours on Instagram talking to writers, posting about books, and working up the courage to interview authors on the phone. My first was Hannah Lillith Assadi. I sat on the floor of my living room with my phone on speaker, recording our conversation into the microphone on my Mac next to my printed-out copy of questions about her novel, Sonora. Her novel wasn’t even new at the time, I had just liked it and didn’t know much about book publicity, when interviews run, or even how. I was working my way through my library hold list. Hannah was warm and generous with her responses and soon enough, my hands stopped shaking and I realized I was actually doing it. I was interviewing!  

While juggling all these jobs, all I cared about was Write or Die. I started adding more and more to the site, taking on volunteers to help write blogs and essays. I conducted enough interviews to run one per week, speed-reading ARCs. I fit Write or Die into every spare moment of my life, once, leaving my nannying job on my way to the country club, pulling over onto the side of the road to conduct a phone interview with Richard Cheim, who had no idea the person he was talking to was parked haphazardly on a dirt road in front of a reservoir. (That was one of my favorite interviews, by the way. Richard’s King of Joy is a banger.) 

It sort of became Write or Die or Die for me, because this community brought me so much joy, put me in contact with so many amazing people, and kept me going through the drudges of another attempt at a stable admin job (because money). People even told me Write or Die was cool, and as someone homeschooled on and off as a youth, that really means a lot. 

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In 2022, my admin job laid me off. They said it was because of budgets and restructuring, but I think they knew I was bored to tears and doing Write or Die stuff during work hours. (I absolutely was.) By this time, over 100 writers had volunteered their time and submitted blogs and interviews, we were holding writing workshops and virtual community events and the site got a space-themed makeover because I really like alien movies. Gone now were the bondages of  “holistic approaches” “let’s table that,” “deep dives,” “CIRCLING BACK,” and I had a much wider bandwidth (sorry) to work on Write or Die. 

I dropped “tribe” from the name and now we are Write or Die Magazine. Shelby Hinte, one of WODT’s OG members (and interview extraordinaire and indie lit scene queen), has come aboard as associate editor. Tamar Mekredijian, (who is also my writing partner, a match made in Heaven thanks to Chelsea Bieker!) is editing our fiction. I interviewed Brad Listi again, over Zoom, and hopefully redeemed myself.  I have come to realize that we are all fumbling around in the dark, trying to make this writing thing happen. And since it's such solitary work, having a community feels integral to the process. It has been to mine, anyway. 

So did this all start as a selfish plan to make friends? Yes. 

Was it easy? Absolutely not. 

Will I keep going? WRITE OR DIE, BABY! 

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Find Kailey on Twitter & Instagram.

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