Reflections On Moving Past the Awkward "Emerging Artist" Phase and Why that Phase is Not So Helpful

My name is Dmitri Akers. I am 27-years-old, which is closer to middle age than it is to youth. And I believe that we should do away with the label of 'emerging artist' because, for one, it sounds infantilising and, secondly, I have felt like one for far too long. I have been writing since I can remember, and never reached a stage of development I would call 'professional', nor 'established'.

I have always feared being read, or being rejected. This comes from my anxiety and low self-esteem. (A 19-year-old Dmitri feared agents and rejection so much, he planned to self-publish a poorly wrought novel; thankfully, it was never released to the light of day). But I grew out of this, because it is somewhat narcissistic to think anyone really thinks too much about you after a submission.

To explain why, let me give you a snapshot of my writing 'career'. My first publications were poetry and one short prose piece in 2020. My first poem to be published, which was quite bad and vers libre, was actually written 3 years before in my first year of university in 2017. It is inspired by the times of Charles Dickens and the First Fleet. Many prisoners at this time lived in prison-ships docked in London before anyone thought to send them to Terra Australis for penal servitude. They were called 'hulks'. This was published in a student-run magazine called "La Piccioletta Barca," named after a line from Ezra Pound's Cantos (which I researched in a PhD the next year).

I ended up wanting to be a poet, since the tangle of language and the thorn of beauty vex me; poetry was always something I did since I was a young child, too. I tried to understand poetry through the lens of literary modernism, vorticism, and 'make it new' (Ezra Pound's tagline for making art). But this was when I was still a very naive 22-year-old who hadn't really left the University scene. I had no idea why modernism was important, nor did I really engage with the history of art and literature in an earnest capacity. What was the point of engaging with art in a sterile environment?

Fast-forward a few years, and I began to pick up the pen seriously with the determination to make it a facet of my life. You need to write, edit, reread, polish, and write again, even when you do not like it. Still, I was an 'emerging writer', in the parlance of the industry; I wasn't a mid-career writer by the time I began writing seriously, which was in 2023 when I started focusing on the weird tradition and horror genre. I chose horror because it required a mood and style that I consumed for pure aesthetic titillation. And my publications have been, to my mind, not as groundbreaking as they could be. But they could always be more groundbreaking, more innovative, more beautifully mad. That is the bug that bites the writer and makes them insane with a vision of literary perfection, which must not exist outside the muses of our fertile, almost deranged minds.

I still possess a cognitive bias where I think my writing is not of interest to anyone else. I tend to live in my head; I am a solipsist. But when I look over my output over the last three years, I realise my writing must be of interest to someone out there. My literary output may not be as prolific as my favourite writers, but I have had 5 short stories accepted, a form I am still learning to get right, as well as 11 poems (some of them quite long). My writing credits are fairly diverse, from Hippocampus Press' Spectral Realms and Penumbra, to the local Australian scene in Midnight Echo and Spawn II, all the way to the new weird, indie magazines like Skull & Laurel (Tenebrous Press) and a forthcoming story in The Deadlands (Psychopomp). So, am I still emerging with all these credits in the span of three years? Not quite.  

'Emerging artist' or 'emerging writer' are terms we use to designate anyone who isn't set up professionally as an artist--whatever that may mean in a wide array of social, cultural, and even economic formations--and I think it is, at the end of the day, an unhelpful term. I believe the need to label people who are still defining their voice, working on their vision, and developing their style, comes from a need to put people in boxes and sell them to a market. And that is not what art is about. It is certainly not why I got into writing and poetry, which has always been a form of relief from the tangle of everyday life and the thorn of the mundane.

If I had it my way, we would all see ourselves as types of artists, as humans who can touch at something that escapes us at times. We should see humanity as capable of countless types of art. We should make art beyond definition, art that escapes our abilities to shut it away and label it and never consider it again. We must be done with the label of 'emerging artist' and instead see ourselves capable of art all the time!

We cannot hope to have a healthy society when we denigrate, infantilise, and codify those who want to pick up the pen, the brush, the canvas, the camera, the keyboard, or whatever tool. Because we are not tools for the taste-makers. We make art not to prove ourselves to others, or to prove how we are human, but to be so vulnerable as to be able to create. We create art at the behest of death and the forgetfulness of Time. Creation of art is, after all, the only vanity that can exist beyond death. We accept that our attempts are futile in the grand scheme of things, that we will ultimately be forgotten, but we choose the ephemerality of beauty.