Meet Sean Glatch

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sean Glatch. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sean below.

Sean, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer by the time I was in high school. Poetry in particular offered a form of safety and salvation that I still haven’t found elsewhere: it allowed me to organize my pain and experiences into an art that captured all the difficulty of being a queer, neurodivergent boy in an unfriendly world. So, by the time I went to college, I figured this was my purpose: to write.

I’m old enough now to smile on my naïveté. Yes, writing is a purpose, but write about what? How did I want my words to change the world?

Then: the pandemic hit. I was 21, a junior in college, and I had just started writing for Writers.com. I was working on my undergraduate thesis, I had presented research at international conferences, and my writing was being selected for publication and even a university-level award. I had also been competing in national slam competitions. Looking back, I feel far more impressive as a college student than as a working adult, but maybe that’s just the sheen of importance academia gives to everything.

In any case, as it was for many of us, the pandemic was a total 180º. The first few months were a period of gleeful focus on my projects. By the end of 2020, I was in an incredibly low place: I had lost several important friends, I was physically and emotionally isolated, I had no desire to achieve anything, I was depressed in a way I didn’t know I could experience, I felt just as scared and sad and lost as I did as a teenager. I invested the bare minimum of time and energy in my remaining classes, as well as in my work at Writers.com. I don’t remember much of these days. I spent most of January 2021 in bed. I played a lot of Stardew Valley.

The only thing tethering me to the world was that I knew I would be graduating soon, and my plan was to move to New York City right after, which had always been a life’s goal.

The struggle of rebuilding my life in New York is where I really started to find my purpose. All of us emerged from the pandemic scarred and scared and uncertain about our lives. I had to relearn how to be a part of the world, how to find my place in it. I also had to relearn how to talk to people.

New York is both a very easy and very hard place to do those things. Easy, because there are so many opportunities to do so—just walk outside your doorstep. Hard, because it’s hard to tell where you’ll fit in, because New York is a city of trial and error (boy, did I have a lot of errors), and because people here generally move with this veneer of self-satisfied security, as though they have everything figured out. I know now that that isn’t the case—most of us are scared and awkward and insecure—but I didn’t when I was new here.

I spent my first year here trying to find queer communities, poetry communities, and queer poetry communities to be a part of. The result was always the same: attempting to fit into cliques that didn’t need me, or else meeting people whose values and ideas were so separate from mine, we had little common ground to maintain a relationship. Amidst that, I was in an uncomfortable housing situation and reeling from a series of intense, painful breakups. New York still maintained its shimmer of hope and possibility, but I entered my second year living here feeling as though life were just as painful as it was in college.

In early 2023, I went to Seattle to attend the AWP conference for writers and writing programs. It was there that the most obvious thought occurred to me: I can’t seem to find a community that will have me. Why don’t I create one myself?

A few months later I started Poets Out Loud, a group dedicated to reading, writing, and celebrating queer poetry. The group has been a lifeline for both myself and its members, who have often told me they were looking for something like P.O.L., but couldn’t find it until now. It’s also strengthened my own poetry writing in ways that I didn’t expect, because poetry, as well as any art form, cannot exist on its own. What we create is always in conversation with the world, and the best thing an artist can do is build a community around their art.

My purpose is still this: to be a writer. But when you’re in your early 20s, you might know what you want to write, you might know HOW to write, but you might have nothing to say just yet. Building community and learning how to be part of the world has been one of my biggest challenges in life, but they’ve also given me purpose to build community and, through that, a better, kinder world (as well as better writing). The world is in desperate need for more community. We owe it to ourselves to create the spaces we need but don’t yet exist. If you feel estranged from the world, I hope this empowers you to do the same.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

My day job is being the lead administrator of Writers.com, where I admittedly wear a bunch of different hats. When I’m not managing the daily items (emails from students and faculty, prepping newsletters, Zoom calls, business strategy, etc.), I have the honor of writing on the topic of creative writing, both on our blog and in our monthly newsletters. This is my favorite part of the job, because I know my writing has helped teach thousands of writers the craft of good writing. I’ve had people tell me I inspire their writing, my work has been used in countless classrooms (and even a few textbooks), it’s been really cool to be a part of so many folks’ writing journeys.

I’m a writer outside of this, and have a few projects in the works. For several years I’ve been expanding my undergraduate thesis into a full-length poetry collection about queerness and the concept of the monster. Very soon I expect to be submitting it for publication. Please cross your fingers for me.

I’m also working on a novel that I describe as a queer contemporary Orpheus & Eurydice, inspired by the strangeness and aesthetics of Haruki Murakami and Twin Peaks.

I’ve written a screenplay with an amazing writing friend, Mindy Stern. It’s a dramedy about TikTok and nonmonogamy. I hope to see it on the silver screen some day, and will happily field emails from big name, multimillionaire producers. Ha!

Finally, I’m working on a card game that you can use to write your own poetry. I am hoping to launch a Kickstarter for this game by the end of the year. The decks in the game give you different ideas and inroads into writing new poetry, and the game is designed to be useful, challenging, and accessible to both new and experienced poets. I’m so proud of this project, and so excited to see it in the real world.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Persistence, optimism, and humility.

Persistence, because giving up is always an option, but rarely the best course of action. (Rarely, but not never—there are times when giving up is good for your health or wellbeing, particularly as your goals change.) I think James Baldwin put it best when he said “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”

Optimism, which goes hand-in-hand with persistence, because you can’t create a better life or better world without imagining it first. I spent most of my teenage and college years feeling cynical, hopeless, and pessimistic. What good did that ever do for me? For the world? Radical optimism is necessary in a world that privileges the painful status quo. Once I believed a better life was possible for me, my ability to work towards it soon followed.

Humility, because thinking I know everything never got me anywhere, either. For starters, I don’t know anything, and it’s good to acknowledge that none of us do. More importantly, humility keeps us open to the world, open to learning from others, and open to continuous growth. As a hard-headed college student, I assumed I knew more than everyone around me. I wonder how many opportunities for growth I missed because of that arrogance. To speak concretely, I have a lot of knowledge and experience about poetry, probably more than the majority of poets who come to my poetry group, but that means nothing—I learn something about poetry and about the world from every poet who comes to my group, whether they share their 1,000th poem or the 1st they’ve ever written.

Above all, I think these qualities have kept me open to the world, open to possibility, and energized to live the life I imagine for myself. I wasn’t born with any of these qualities, and they were hard to hone, but without them, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

I am really bad at self-promotion. This wasn’t always the case. As a teenager, I was very drawn to social media’s capacity for finding a large, relevant audience; in other words, I liked the idea of attention on the internet. The irony is that I had little to say back then. Now, when I think I have something to say, I find myself loathing self-promotion and, even more broadly, the internet.

It’s an entirely philosophical challenge, yet one that I rail against passionately. I simply hate social media. I think it brings out the worst in us. I think it forces us to become brands of ourselves, to reduce ourselves into something consumable, and to pander to our audiences. It also forces us into our algorithmic echo chambers, and it presumes that strangers deserve access to the intimate details of our lives—or else our work simply isn’t worth consuming.

I bristle every time I share something about myself online. I usually share successes, and when I do so, I feel narcissistic. The idea of sharing struggles online sounds horrible to me, because again, why does anyone need to know about my personal life? I am deeply private by nature; I like my inner world. Even thinking about these words posted in an interview makes my skeleton itch.

And yet, self-promotion is important, particularly for anyone who wants a sustained career as an artist, which I do. I will, at some point, have books to promote, as well as the card game I am working on. This means Instagram; God forbid, it might mean TikTok, too. I also have been saying for well over a year now that I should start a newsletter.

I am currently thinking about what it is that I can offer to the world, via the internet, that would make self-promotion a more rewarding experience. What do I have that’s unique and useful for others? I have a lot of thoughts about creative writing, the literary world, and what I’ve learned from running Writers.com the past 4+ years. I also have a lot of prompts from running my poetry group, so I’ve been trying to organize those thoughts and prompts into something worth sharing regularly.

More than anything else, I want to be very deeply intentional with how I put anything into the internet. It is filled with so much noise and anger and empty content. The last thing I want to be is a “content creator.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://seanglatch.com
• Instagram: glatchkeykid
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-glatch-33676416b/
• Other: https://Writers.com