Thank you. I am pleased to see an essay like this come out. Your examples are clear and real-world. As a fairly new writer myself, writing about topics which do not always fit into the current mainstream literary narrative, I think about this subject all the time.
And my advice to all new moms! Sleep whenever you can. And enjoy it.
Excellent piece - the author's experience writing about her chronic illness only to be scolded for not being an example of an intersection of hardship really rings true to me. It shouldn't be about 'who wrote this' only it should be about 'what are they saying and why?" Too. But all to often now it's about communicating self only, and only the parts of self that are acceptable to the zeitgeist. Excellent piece.
"It's not the end of the world," is one of the most helpful things we can include in our self-talk. I used to think politics was a matter of life and death, but I don't think that way anymore. How can it possibly hurt me to listen to someone else? Or simply to allow them to speak? A wonderful piece, and the best part about it, in my humble opinion, is your aspirational statement, "I hope to be engaged in the literary world for my whole life." You could have said, "I'm here ... and I'm in your face!" or you might have said, "Go ahead, cancel me," but you simply and confidently invited everyone, whether they agree or disagree with you, to engage with you, and convincingly explained why doing so will benefit anyone who does. Thank you for this. Good luck with your book.
I'm a little confused. The author says she had never been to a creative writing workshop before, and implies this is the reason she starts believing "this analysis of work was the standard". I'm guessing there's other sources she absorbed this belief from, but without context I can only assume that she had a bad experience with one creative writing workshop. This absolutely might color one's perception of such workshops, but I find it a little unfair to come to the conclusion that all analysis will be the same at *every* workshop after only having gone to one of them.
I think that including context does a great service for writing, especially when we think about who might be reading it. Art is profoundly shaped and informed by the beliefs and perspective of the artist, no matter the topic at hand; this is something I learned as early as high school AP Literature, so I will never agree with the concept of a clean separation of art from artist - it just can't be done without harming the art itself.
When I'm writing something, I often like to think about who it's for, not on a commodification level, but on the level of a dialogue between a creator and their audience. Art carries an implicit message, an implicit belief, a feeling that was had when it was made, because it's a form of communication as well as entertainment. Writing an autobiographical piece, you are sharing a slice of life, like a story or a narrative from your own life experience. Is it that weird to expect that readers will want to know more about your background and where you come from, in order to more concretely place themselves in your shoes and see the ways in which they relate to you, and the ways in which they don't? In my opinion, empathy comes more readily when you can get a fuller picture of someone's life, including the ways in which they deal with socioeconomic & material constraints such as class status, employment, cultural background, because these are important factors in a person's life experience.
The people giving critique might have not used the best language for it, or might have come off too strongly, but I do think it's valuable advice to think about how you're communicating your ideas or your experience to other people while you're writing about it. Like everything else in writing, it's an incredibly difficult balance and you risk ruining the flow of the story, but the same things can happen with exposition, dialogue, etc.
The part of cancel culture that I do think is truly harmful and even scary, and that I have seen time and time again in creative spaces, is the aversion to even writing about negative or taboo topics such as sexual assault, paraphilias, stigmatized mental illnesses like bpd or aspd, racism/xenophobia, and other such topics, just because 'people don't want to read/watch something about that', or fear of grossing people out or offending them. The aversion to feeling negative emotion of any kind is one that I think needs to be talked about more in writing spaces, and I was hoping this critique might go into that a little bit more, because I have been met with backlash from even *within* alternative spaces like LGBT and furry communities for making and supporting art that is just a little bit too "out there" and might risk offending some pearl-clutchers who oppose the idea that I should have human rights as a transgender person.
Thank you for your clear and compelling article. You have shone light on a very serious threat to free speech, a personal freedom long fought for and still not available to many. I was shocked to hear of your experience in university. A painter I know presented her MA thesis project in a Canadian University (landscape paintings), to her peers and they turned their chairs around so she was forced to talk to their backs.
Reminds me of the puritanism of the seventeenth century.
First and most importantly, congratulations on your new child! Hooray!
For this essay in particular, while I appreciate you had a shitty experience, I would like to invite you to read into the topic of "bothsideism," or if you want the philosophical term for this logical fallacy: false equivalency.
This essay is a classic piece of bothesideism, and although I am genuinely sorry you felt personally attacked by the response to an essay you wrote in a college course, I would like to gently point out that your reaction to that is not remotely in line with the five questions you reference towards the end of this essay.
Did you, yourself, ask these questions about your reaction to that situation? Have you examined why you feel attacked by people who oppose the uncritical promotion of right-wing American Christian worldviews? (Because to be clear, the problem is almost never "this promote Christianity" but "the way this promotes Christianity is actively harmful to some people.")
Here are a few articles you could read about bothesideism when you are ready and willing to learn more about that and more closely examine your own blind spots—which is super hard and uncomfortable to do (I know this as someone who spent much of my childhood in the south!) but is an important part of being human, and of growing as a writer and a person.
I think the issue they are trying to put their finger on is that if you cannot engage in argument or even conversation you are creating a silos when it comes to certain topics and then the rumblings and ruminations of that thing just grow and grow in a vacuum of ignorance. We are seeing the very real repercussions of this now played out around the world. If a topic is not discussed with anyone other than the people who all agree it's never interrogated properly. It's also important to acknowledge that the personal is personal. You can't read a person's essay on an illness that has profoundly changed their life and give the feedback that 'oh you forgot to talk about how privileged you are' without insulting them. I think that we like to think in academia that we are above this and we are being reflexive and helpful when we do this but really we need to think on what it means to critically interrogate a person's ability to communicate on something by saying 'oh you can't talk about that," or "you can't talk about that without xyz because you are abc' - that can silence the person and take away their power to communicate instead of getting them to broaden their thinking. I don't want to go into details as it's probably triggering for others but hopefully this example demonstrates why I think this: my mum is now dead and before she died I posted on Instagram that she was heartbroken to realise that her first name 'Karen' means 'racist complaining woman' among young people and on the internet (This was about 7 years ago the name is now ubiquitous with just meaning complaining). Because of this I got a lecture from an acquaintance calling me racist and telling me to read a book on white fragility with a link to it. My mum was dying and sad. And that was this person's response. I didn't 'feel personally attacked.' I was. That person achieved nothing. I was interested in reading that book before they mentioned it but now I never will. Maybe this example will get the point across to you a bit better than the author of this essay has. If you alienate people and make it feel that they can't talk about something they will still talk about it, but never with you or with anyone who could gently and appropriately question them on their ideas.
Thank you. I am pleased to see an essay like this come out. Your examples are clear and real-world. As a fairly new writer myself, writing about topics which do not always fit into the current mainstream literary narrative, I think about this subject all the time.
And my advice to all new moms! Sleep whenever you can. And enjoy it.
Excellent piece - the author's experience writing about her chronic illness only to be scolded for not being an example of an intersection of hardship really rings true to me. It shouldn't be about 'who wrote this' only it should be about 'what are they saying and why?" Too. But all to often now it's about communicating self only, and only the parts of self that are acceptable to the zeitgeist. Excellent piece.
"It's not the end of the world," is one of the most helpful things we can include in our self-talk. I used to think politics was a matter of life and death, but I don't think that way anymore. How can it possibly hurt me to listen to someone else? Or simply to allow them to speak? A wonderful piece, and the best part about it, in my humble opinion, is your aspirational statement, "I hope to be engaged in the literary world for my whole life." You could have said, "I'm here ... and I'm in your face!" or you might have said, "Go ahead, cancel me," but you simply and confidently invited everyone, whether they agree or disagree with you, to engage with you, and convincingly explained why doing so will benefit anyone who does. Thank you for this. Good luck with your book.
I'm a little confused. The author says she had never been to a creative writing workshop before, and implies this is the reason she starts believing "this analysis of work was the standard". I'm guessing there's other sources she absorbed this belief from, but without context I can only assume that she had a bad experience with one creative writing workshop. This absolutely might color one's perception of such workshops, but I find it a little unfair to come to the conclusion that all analysis will be the same at *every* workshop after only having gone to one of them.
I think that including context does a great service for writing, especially when we think about who might be reading it. Art is profoundly shaped and informed by the beliefs and perspective of the artist, no matter the topic at hand; this is something I learned as early as high school AP Literature, so I will never agree with the concept of a clean separation of art from artist - it just can't be done without harming the art itself.
When I'm writing something, I often like to think about who it's for, not on a commodification level, but on the level of a dialogue between a creator and their audience. Art carries an implicit message, an implicit belief, a feeling that was had when it was made, because it's a form of communication as well as entertainment. Writing an autobiographical piece, you are sharing a slice of life, like a story or a narrative from your own life experience. Is it that weird to expect that readers will want to know more about your background and where you come from, in order to more concretely place themselves in your shoes and see the ways in which they relate to you, and the ways in which they don't? In my opinion, empathy comes more readily when you can get a fuller picture of someone's life, including the ways in which they deal with socioeconomic & material constraints such as class status, employment, cultural background, because these are important factors in a person's life experience.
The people giving critique might have not used the best language for it, or might have come off too strongly, but I do think it's valuable advice to think about how you're communicating your ideas or your experience to other people while you're writing about it. Like everything else in writing, it's an incredibly difficult balance and you risk ruining the flow of the story, but the same things can happen with exposition, dialogue, etc.
The part of cancel culture that I do think is truly harmful and even scary, and that I have seen time and time again in creative spaces, is the aversion to even writing about negative or taboo topics such as sexual assault, paraphilias, stigmatized mental illnesses like bpd or aspd, racism/xenophobia, and other such topics, just because 'people don't want to read/watch something about that', or fear of grossing people out or offending them. The aversion to feeling negative emotion of any kind is one that I think needs to be talked about more in writing spaces, and I was hoping this critique might go into that a little bit more, because I have been met with backlash from even *within* alternative spaces like LGBT and furry communities for making and supporting art that is just a little bit too "out there" and might risk offending some pearl-clutchers who oppose the idea that I should have human rights as a transgender person.
This is a great perspective, and I love that last paragraph! We still have taboos and they are not often interrogated or explored.
Thank you for this brilliant response to what is (in essence) a bland, tired, "both sides matter" argument.
Thank you for your clear and compelling article. You have shone light on a very serious threat to free speech, a personal freedom long fought for and still not available to many. I was shocked to hear of your experience in university. A painter I know presented her MA thesis project in a Canadian University (landscape paintings), to her peers and they turned their chairs around so she was forced to talk to their backs.
Reminds me of the puritanism of the seventeenth century.
First and most importantly, congratulations on your new child! Hooray!
For this essay in particular, while I appreciate you had a shitty experience, I would like to invite you to read into the topic of "bothsideism," or if you want the philosophical term for this logical fallacy: false equivalency.
This essay is a classic piece of bothesideism, and although I am genuinely sorry you felt personally attacked by the response to an essay you wrote in a college course, I would like to gently point out that your reaction to that is not remotely in line with the five questions you reference towards the end of this essay.
Did you, yourself, ask these questions about your reaction to that situation? Have you examined why you feel attacked by people who oppose the uncritical promotion of right-wing American Christian worldviews? (Because to be clear, the problem is almost never "this promote Christianity" but "the way this promotes Christianity is actively harmful to some people.")
Here are a few articles you could read about bothesideism when you are ready and willing to learn more about that and more closely examine your own blind spots—which is super hard and uncomfortable to do (I know this as someone who spent much of my childhood in the south!) but is an important part of being human, and of growing as a writer and a person.
https://democracytoolkit.press/resources/avoid-both-sidesism-journalism-tips/
https://theconversation.com/suicide-for-democracy-what-is-bothsidesism-and-how-is-it-different-from-journalistic-objectivity-230894
I think the issue they are trying to put their finger on is that if you cannot engage in argument or even conversation you are creating a silos when it comes to certain topics and then the rumblings and ruminations of that thing just grow and grow in a vacuum of ignorance. We are seeing the very real repercussions of this now played out around the world. If a topic is not discussed with anyone other than the people who all agree it's never interrogated properly. It's also important to acknowledge that the personal is personal. You can't read a person's essay on an illness that has profoundly changed their life and give the feedback that 'oh you forgot to talk about how privileged you are' without insulting them. I think that we like to think in academia that we are above this and we are being reflexive and helpful when we do this but really we need to think on what it means to critically interrogate a person's ability to communicate on something by saying 'oh you can't talk about that," or "you can't talk about that without xyz because you are abc' - that can silence the person and take away their power to communicate instead of getting them to broaden their thinking. I don't want to go into details as it's probably triggering for others but hopefully this example demonstrates why I think this: my mum is now dead and before she died I posted on Instagram that she was heartbroken to realise that her first name 'Karen' means 'racist complaining woman' among young people and on the internet (This was about 7 years ago the name is now ubiquitous with just meaning complaining). Because of this I got a lecture from an acquaintance calling me racist and telling me to read a book on white fragility with a link to it. My mum was dying and sad. And that was this person's response. I didn't 'feel personally attacked.' I was. That person achieved nothing. I was interested in reading that book before they mentioned it but now I never will. Maybe this example will get the point across to you a bit better than the author of this essay has. If you alienate people and make it feel that they can't talk about something they will still talk about it, but never with you or with anyone who could gently and appropriately question them on their ideas.
I’ve always believed in separating the art from the artist.
The best art is full of passion.
Most of the best writers are/were passionate and quite fixed on their beliefs.
Passion creates dialogue, too.
It’s not for the weak, though.