Adventures in Turkish Journalism

I had reached a new low. The heights of the literary profession had never seemed more distant, unreachable. In fact, I lived in an attic. It was a hot and unbearable Istanbul summer. I woke every morning and sometimes every afternoon caked in sweat under the wooden roof on the top floor of a residential building in the modernistic environs of Besiktas, a neighborhood synonymous with football, beer, and anarchy.

I was living rent-free with my girlfriend from Ankara, in the home of her aunt and uncle, the artistic director of a modern dance company funded by the corrupt state and an English rock star, respectively—not the most typical of Turkish families.

I tried to meditate, drink, smoke, and pray my anxieties away. It worked only when my eyes were firmly shut. When I opened them, I scanned my empty inbox.

I had sent unreturned pitches to every newspaper and magazine under the burning sun since first arriving in Turkey the winter before, green from Brooklyn, wearing my heart on my sleeve.

I pitched desperately, like a bad poet. I was striking out. The game was not over. It felt like it would never begin.

Session II

I heard back about a story. I would explore a survey of expatriate literature for a shamelessly pro-government, B-film equivalent of a newspaper, the head of state's new international media pet project, an English-language Turkish broadsheet infamous for its bigoted corporate policy, its far-right propagandizing, its bastardized, sixth-grade-level English, left sorely unedited and wildly inaccurate.

The fear and loathing of its frequently infantile language are only surpassed by the publication's chief mandate: censorship. Its very institution is that of obscuring facts in the name of strongman authoritarianism. They often block stories outright, in the style of Turkish media's routine media blackouts, all in the face of even its most loyal and perfunctorily celebrated in-house writers.

Without the slightest trace of editorial integri