Steacy Easton Interview
Steacy Easton is a music critic and the author of Why Tammy Wynette Matters, which “reveals a musician who doubled back on herself, her façade of earnestness cracked by a melodrama that weaponized femininity and upended feminist expectations, while scoring twenty number-one hits.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I don’t really know. I got fired a lot. I started writing for the student newspaper at the University of Alberta, where I was an unofficial student, and shouldn’t have really been doing extracurriculars, but I stumbled into the school paper and wrote for three years—opinion and arts coverage. I had ideas, but had absolutely no structural skills what-so-ever, and did not know how to write for an audience. After three years, and more than 100 issues (it was on paper then) I was called into the editor-in-chief's office and told very politely that I needed to stop writing for them.
It was a good launching pad–people got jobs at dailies, or for the CBC, or to do PR work for major universities, and I never did. I pitched myself relentlessly after that—and I think again and again, my ideas were better than my writing. I noticed that there was a gap in writing about country music for Stylus, and ended up writing for them, including for the Singles Jukebox, for a few years, and again my formal skills got the better of me, and I got fired from that—though I found a few friends, including Alfred Soto, among others. I pitched reviews to local places, including PopMatters, and again did okay, got stuff placed, but left or was fired. I had some great luck—Jonathan Bogart got me into the Atlantic Online a half dozen times, about country music–but the editor shifted and the new editor didn’t take my emails.