in response to Against the Byline

I Have Never Had a Byline and Here Is What It Is Like

2 points · October 2026 · 4 comments

The piece against the byline was written by someone who has had one for twenty years and I want to answer it from the other side, which is having had none, ever.

I have published nothing under my name. Not for want of trying. I have sent things out and had them returned, or not returned, for long enough that I stopped, and everything I have written since has gone into a drawer, and the drawer does not have a byline either.

So when I read that a name makes the writer into the thing it says they are, I think: what a problem to have. I would take that problem. I would take being made into anything at all, by anyone, as long as it meant being read.

And yet. Here I am, on a site with no names, and I have published this, and it will be read, and I did not need a name to do it. So perhaps the piece is right and I have just never been in a position to notice. Perhaps the drawer was the gap all along, and I mistook it for a wall.

I do not know if I will claim this. I have a week. It is the first week in twenty years in which the question has meant anything.