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The email arrived at 7:12 a.m.

>We have received your submission(s) in the 2027 Pulitzer Prize competition,>including the corresponding entry fee payment(s). A list of itemized transactions>follows below.>>Embracing the Local Glen Cantrell: $75

That’s my book, that’s my name, and, yeah, the space between them is where the colon was supposed to go, but also they got my submission to the 2027 Pulitzer Prize competition!

The email message closed by explaining that it was automatically generated and asking me not to reply. I hadn’t planned to, and it was a little off-putting to be told. Did they put that there to make sure I didn’t get too comfortable in this new room I’d wandered into?

I’d just entered my first book in the 2027 Pulitzer Prize competition for Memoir or Autobiography. This is an objectively ridiculous sentence I can now type without lying. Also, I probably sat a little longer than necessary with the thought: My book is in the Pulitzer Prize competition.

The Pulitzers have been administered by Columbia University since 1917. They’ve survived two world wars, the collapse of the afternoon newspaper, the invention of the internet, and Jeff Bezos. They obviously haven’t been left unscathed by occasionally displaced colons, and it remains to be seen how they’ll weather my little intrusion.

My Pulitzer entrant (yes, I am going to be obnoxious about this) is about the year I spent serving as president of a small, all-volunteer Chamber of Commerce in California’s Sierra Nevada, thirty-six hundred and eight feet up a winding two-lane mountain highway, a position I acquired after wandering into a wine bar and making a series of increasingly consequential decisions.

I wrote it myself and I’m publishing it myself. I’m almost entirely unknown outside a small collection of people who know me from Chamber work, my consulting work, or one of several local controversies I’ve chosen not to include in my author bio. I was pretty sure my market was going to be roughly that same small collection of chamber and consulting folk.

I also don’t secretly think the Pulitzer jury is going to get three chapters in, summon the Pulitzer bailiff into the room, and demand to know where this strange Chamber president has been all their lives. I am a first-time author who happened to be ballsy enough to enter a self-published book that I wrote about a tiny little corner of the world in one of the most prestigious literary competitions in the country.

I am not expecting to win a Pulitzer Prize. This feels unnecessary to establish.

Alas.

More than 1,400 books enter each year. Thirty jurors read across six categories. Three finalists come out of each. I appreciate the arithmetic.

What I didn’t appreciate, until I looked at the rules, was that I could enter at all.

I had assumed there’d be a gate somewhere. A publisher requirement. An agent requirement. Some evidence that a Very Important Person had already encountered the book and decided it belonged in the same rarefied room as a Pulitzer jury. To my delighted amazement, the Pulitzer rules explicitly allow self-published books. Meet the eligibility requirements, pay seventy-five dollars, upload the file.

There is literally an upload form. You put your book in the upload field. You hit Submit.

I was expecting a gate, or at least a speedbump, because I’d recently had a completely different experience with a much smaller literary institution. Someone suggested I enter the California Book Awards, administered by the Commonwealth Club of California. My friend’s logic was sound, their confidence in my writing skills maybe a little overblown. My book is set in California and largely concerned with the civic life of California communities. The awards even have a tailor-made category: Californiana.

All this seemed promising until I reached the eligibility rules: the publisher must have an editorial vetting process.

Ah. They meant, self-published books need not apply.

I want to be clear, I don’t object to eligibility criteria. An award is allowed to decide what constitutes an eligible book. There can never be too many books in the world, but there are a lot, and every institution has to decide which pile it intends to read.

Still, I was bewildered. The Pulitzer Prize will consider my book. The California Book Awards will not. The Commonwealth Club was not where I expected to find the bouncer guarding the velvet rope.

My first instinct was to turn this into a convenient argument about gatekeeping, which is why you should worry about my first instincts. Gatekeeping is one of those terms that can make the person using it correct and heroic at the same time. I distrust words that do two perpendicular things at once.

There are perfectly defensible reasons for using traditional publication as an eligibility requirement. A publisher’s acquisition process is a filter. Editors possess expertise. Publishers stake reputations and money on the books they choose. None of that becomes false simply because I happen to be standing on the other side of the rule.

The Pulitzer built a different entryway. Theirs lets my book in the door and allows its own judgment to determine what the room does with it.

I like that system better. Obviously.

This all arrived at a rather fortuitous moment because I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about standing and belonging, and about my obsessive need to know how much of either I've accumulated.

There's a word for people like me where I live: flatlander. It’s local slang for outsider, transplant, and a bunch of other things, some friendly and some not. I’ve been interrogating that word a lot lately.

I may have moved to the mountains from the Bay Area, but I grew up in Kansas. I'll concede the slang might apply, at least on geographic grounds. Kansas is distressingly flat.

What interested me wasn't the accuracy of the label being applied to me. Labels aren't new. Instead I was intrigued how much additional work it could be asked to do. Sometimes flatlander means origin. Sometimes it means inexperience. Sometimes it means newcomer. Sometimes it means someone who doesn’t understand how things work around here. Okay, in my case, that's what it usually means.

Sometimes it’s affectionate. Sometimes it isn’t. More often than not, I can’t tell.

But origin is origin. There are things I can’t know about this place because I wasn’t here. Someone who lived through a dispute twenty years ago possesses knowledge I can only receive secondhand. That isn’t an insult. I simply wasn’t here. Knowledge travels, memory does not.

We get ourselves into trouble when we let a fact about one thing quietly become a verdict about something else. Trying to market my book, I realized I had been doing exactly that with the word self-published.

It does tell you something very real about how my book came to be. No publishing house acquired it. I hired the copyeditor and cover illustrator. I bought the ISBNs. I created the imprint. I arranged the printing and distribution.

And there was no acquisitions editor sitting across a table somewhere making a case for my manuscript before it existed as a book.

The adjective matters.

But self-published doesn’t answer every question I want it to. Self-published also doesn’t tell you whether my book is any good, but neither does entering it for a Pulitzer.

This would all have been considerably easier if there were a ceremony for becoming an author. There isn't. You write something long enough to become a manuscript, then spend an alarming amount of money and time turning that manuscript into a book. Eventually boxes arrive containing physical objects with your name on the cover. People begin referring to you as an author. If you're me, you attach varying degrees of meaning to the tone with which people say that word.

I caught myself treating authorship the way I once treated belonging to a place: as though enough evidence would eventually accumulate and tip some invisible scale. Enough work. Enough readers. Enough recognition. Enough external validation. Then something would click, some status would be conferred. Welcome to the club, here’s your membership card. Would you like that laminated?

I know better than that. Or, more accurately, I’ve written a book recently about why I should know better than that. Not quite the same thing.

I made the acquisition decision for my book. I’d written about a Chamber of Commerce serving a tiny highway in the Sierra Nevada, and I assumed, reasonably enough, that its readership would be similarly local. I’d also decided there were enough people who might want to read it to justify the time, money, and effort of publishing it myself. So I did.

In my case, the person pitching my book and the person empowered to acquire it happened to be the same guy. I brought donuts to the meeting. The vote was unanimous.

But unanimity created a strange contradiction: I had acquired almost unlimited authority over the process and virtually no standing from it. That didn’t mean there was no judgment involved. I myself had made a judgment about the manuscript, its audience, and what I was willing to invest in reaching them.

What my particular process lacked was independent judgment. I hadn’t outright rejected traditional publishing. I simply hadn't tried it. No agents or publishers had weighed in on my manuscript. I hadn't given anyone the opportunity to tell me not to publish my book.

That was liberating right up until I realized nobody had told me I should, either.

Then, surprisingly, my little book hopped in the car and took off downhill. It found readers beyond our little highway, then beyond California. And eventually its joyride took it to New England.

I'd started to wonder if I had misjudged its range and then I received an email from some guy on the other side of the country, in Vermont. I had sent him an advance copy of the book after we began talking about some of the strangely similar work our Chambers were doing. He’d started reading it and emailed me while he was still in the prologue. He wanted to let me know he'd picked it up, but he needed to stop and actually go to work. He was looking forward to continuing.

That was it. No cookie. No feedback. A man who owed me nothing had started reading something I wrote and had taken the time to let me know he wanted to keep reading it. That small sentence gave me a sense of ease I didn’t know I’d been looking for.

Nobody had declared anything. Someone had noticed.

My writing has now traveled from a rural highway in the Sierra Nevada to Vermont and then down the interstate to one of the nation’s most prestigious writing competitions. I’m glad the folks at Pulitzer HQ left the garage door open.

I am a Pulitzer entrant because I paid seventy-five dollars and uploaded an eligible book. That’s all the sentence means. It’s also still, I confess, delightful.

The deserving few will be announced on May 3, 2027. Sometime before that, five unsuspecting jurors in Memoir or Autobiography will have a pile of books to consider. Mine will be somewhere in it. I don’t know whether one person will read twenty pages or whether several will read the whole thing. I don’t know whether someone will laugh in the places I hoped they would laugh or stare at the cover for three seconds before deciding life is too short and the reading pile is too tall.

I don’t get a vote on that part. Even if the Pulitzer jury decides I don’t belong in the room, they’re not there to keep me out. And while they’re deciding if my book is worth anything, I get a momentary peek into their mahogany paneled room. Because they left the door open.

And that’s what surprised me enough to spend seventy-five dollars to see what was on the other side. The jury didn’t ask whether I was a real author. They didn't ask whether a publisher thought I belonged there. They didn’t ask whether I’d paid enough dues, accumulated enough recognition, or waited the appropriate number of years before developing the dangerous confidence necessary to press Submit. Though they may come to regret that.

They asked for the book. So I gave them the book.

At 7:12 in the morning, I got a receipt in my email. My book’s title and my name had been mashed together, but the seventy-five-dollar charge was correct, and the message confirmed that the work was now in the same competition as everybody else’s.

Then it told me what to do next:

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