Screw Your Chutzpah to the Sticking Place
By Jason Tanz ’05
Jason Tanz '05
Before I arrived in Ann Arbor, I harbored all sorts of fantasies about my Fellowship year. Most did not pan out. I wasn’t able to rent a three-bedroom house with a Jacuzzi and air-hockey table for $250 a month; I never got the chance to test drive the physics department’s petawatt laser; and as for my plan to glue myself to the floor of the Wallace House and refuse to leave at the end of the year… well, let’s just say that I’m writing this from back in New York. But at least one of my dreams did come to fruition: I was able to use my time in Michigan to write and sell a book proposal.
Almost every year, some journalist leaves Ann Arbor with a book deal or plans to secure one. Last year, two of my fellow Fellows sold their proposals as well. Cynthia Barnett is writing about Florida’s water woes as a way of examining how fresh water is disappearing from the American east. Faye Flam is studying how advances in the fields of genetics and neuroscience are changing the way we think about ourselves. My book is about the spread of hip-hop culture through suburban America, a topic that doesn’t pack quite the same gravitas. When visitors stopped by Wallace House, I rarely talked about my proposal when I introduced myself, instead mentioning the study plan I’d used in my application, which I think had something to do with artificial intelligence.
Maybe I would have written a successful proposal without my Fellowship. Most authors, after all, get deals without the benefit of eight free months to work on their ideas and writing. But I cannot for the life of me figure out how they do it. At the University of Michigan, I took classes—from intellectual history to film—that inspired me and provided important new perspectives. I am still in touch with my music theory professor, who helped me develop some of my most important theories and pointed me to relevant source material. The members of my creative nonfiction workshop offered me feedback on my sample chapter, and so did Nicholas Delbanco, the acclaimed novelist and Knight-Wallace board member, who graciously agreed to read and discuss my work with me—an intimidating, but incredibly productive, experience.
Here’s something else that my Fellowship taught me: chutzpah. I returned to work with the intention of writing my book while holding down my day job. Again, authors do this all the time. But not me. I think Michigan spoiled me; I missed all that chin-stroking time I’d spent in the library or under a tree on the Diag. So I requested book leave. Yes, three months after returning from an eight-month Fellowship, I asked for another six months off. And I got it. This is another lesson that I learned from Charles: if you make a ridiculous request with a straight face, nobody but you need know it’s ridiculous.
Now I’m nearing the end of my book leave, and putting what I hope are the finishing touches on my manuscript. Honestly, I have no idea what will become of it. I don’t know how my publisher will respond to it, when it will be published, what kind of reviews—if any—it will receive, whether it will have any impact, or whether it will just waft away, unread, into the ether. But I do know this book is of an entirely different class than anything I could have written before I came to Michigan. And if it does sell, maybe I’ll finally be able to afford that air-hockey table.
—Jason Tanz is a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine. He is currently writing his first book, tentatively titled Walk This Way: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America, for Bloomsbury USA.
