Bad Art Friend

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm trying to understand what Alexander Chee means in this tweet. Anyone smarter than me care to explain?

Ditto. And again, tons of likes, so this gets circulated a fair amount.

I think he's just saying that he doesn't want to talk about the kidney story anymore and he's tired of it continuing to dominate conversations.

They just announced the panels for AWP, the biggest writers conference in the US, for next March. It's a big deal because they didn't do the conference in person this year, and the 2020 AWP was very weird with low attendance because it basically happened as everything was shutting down. It's the last time a lot of folks last saw each other in person. I think a lot of people just want to move on to that and be excited about the idea of more in person literary events, and this story is a big bummer and kind of heavy and incriminating. Very much not the vibe folks like Chee want right now.

Though I have to say as panels were announced and people started talking about seeing each other in Philly next year, I definitely chuckled to myself thinking about some of the potential awkwardness do to this whole thing. I don't personally know anyone involved (Grub Street is not my scene and very little overlap with my little corner of the world) so I feel untouched by it, but I'm guessing there are some folks who suddenly have some very mixed feelings about seeing people again. Or not! I don't know. But it's a very weird time in literary circles right now!

I Iove this insight and I really hope you share more.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do we know where the name Chunky Monkeys came from?

I believe it's a reference to the way the members share their work -- instead of exchanging full drafts for feedback, they send each other "chunks" of manuscripts. Which is kind of necessary if you are going to have a writing group were most or all members are working on novels because otherwise people do not have the time.

That seems ... unoriginal.

[Anonymous]

So I just looked up the AWP panels, and this should be really interesting. (Understatement!)

AAWW at AWP: Stories in Solidarity for Asian Artists (Jafreen Uddin, Piyali Bhattacharya, Mira Jacob, Nayomi Munaweera)
In-person event
Piyali Bhattacharya, Mira Jacob, Nayomi Munaweera, and Jafreen Uddin ask each other: why is it often difficult to build writing coalitions of color? What does it mean to build artistic
community among Asian women, and why are these spaces so often riddled with drama? Is the root of the problem internalized racial oppression? That white supremacy tells us "there can only be one?" If so, what can we do in our writing communities to address this elephant in the room when or even before it comes up?

[Anonymous]

I'm pp who just posted the AWP, and I thought for sure that it was crazy to say that Ng was somehow really crafting this, but it sounds like there is enough issue in that community, which is pretty sad. I really hope it is a productive conversation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So I just looked up the AWP panels, and this should be really interesting. (Understatement!)

AAWW at AWP: Stories in Solidarity for Asian Artists (Jafreen Uddin, Piyali Bhattacharya, Mira Jacob, Nayomi Munaweera)
In-person event
Piyali Bhattacharya, Mira Jacob, Nayomi Munaweera, and Jafreen Uddin ask each other: why is it often difficult to build writing coalitions of color? What does it mean to build artistic
community among Asian women, and why are these spaces so often riddled with drama? Is the root of the problem internalized racial oppression? That white supremacy tells us "there can only be one?" If so, what can we do in our writing communities to address this elephant in the room when or even before it comes up?

Mira Jacob and Celeste Ng are pretty tight, I think. I haven't looked at the panels yet but I'm curious if Ng will be speaking anywhere. I have no idea what she is working on though. Mira has a memoire out fairly recently I believe. Ng hasn't released anything in a while, now that I think about it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm pp who just posted the AWP, and I thought for sure that it was crazy to say that Ng was somehow really crafting this, but it sounds like there is enough issue in that community, which is pretty sad. I really hope it is a productive conversation.

Eh, it will be the same conversation it always is. These conferences always have lots of panels like this and they are pretty repetitive. People are always talking about furthering the conversation but mostly people just talk in circles.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm pp who just posted the AWP, and I thought for sure that it was crazy to say that Ng was somehow really crafting this, but it sounds like there is enough issue in that community, which is pretty sad. I really hope it is a productive conversation.

Eh, it will be the same conversation it always is. These conferences always have lots of panels like this and they are pretty repetitive. People are always talking about furthering the conversation but mostly people just talk in circles.

Yeah, that doesn't strike me as indictive of much.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some people just become this vessel into which others project all of their issues. It's frustrating and weird. I remember thinking this back when Hillary Clinton was running for president the first time -- I felt she never really stood a chance because even though she had strong supporters and organization, for a lot of people (including lifelong Democrats I knew) she just represented all these negative ideas they had that they didn't like thinking about. Like my mom hated Hillary for not leaving Bill. I'd say "But that's someone else's marriage, who even knows? How is that relevant to whether she'd make a good president?" and my mom would just shrug and say "I don't know, I just don't like her."

Eight years later, my mom was beyond thrilled to cast a vote for Hillary for president, was like captain of the Team Hillary club in my hometown. I asked her what changed and she still couldn't really answer. "I don't know, that was a long time ago," she'd say. But Hillary didn't change. She was still with Bill (who remained problematic at best). Same personality, same person.

You know what changed? My mom. She matured in that time and I think realized that her negative feelings towards Hillary about Bill's behavior weren't really about Hillary. They were about other stuff. About Bill Clinton, sure, but also about feminism and my mom's own experience as a woman and a wife. About my mom's not well-hidden insecurity about being a SAHM in an era when women like Hillary were doing something else. In her sadness about how little a life like the one Hillary had was available to her because of her class and background. But by 2016, my mom had reconciled a lot of that stuff and no longer needed to pour all those negative feelings into Hillary Clinton to avoid having to feel them herself. Instead, she could use Hillary as a vessel for all the good feelings she wanted to feel about herself -- hating Trump, being an older woman and still mattering, eschewing fashion and beauty standards in favor of what works for you, etc.

I think that's what Dawn Dorland became for these people. The reason the rest of us have spent the last few weeks confused is that this whole thing was billed as a referendum on Dawn Dorland, but she was actually incidental to any of it. She was a vessel for a bunch of negative feelings that Sonya Larson and Celeste Ng and some of their friends had floating around. It was easier to pour them into Dawn than to deal with them. I think her kidney donation was a real catalyst for them because they had previously seen Dawn as someone beneath them -- less successful, less important, a hanger-on. And then she did this insanely amazing thing, more amazing even than publishing a best selling novel (at least in some people's eyes), and it shook them. They were thinking existential thoughts -- why am I here, do I matter, will anyone remember me, am I wasting my time, am I any good? That's some deep stuff but it's scary and uncomfortable. I've been there. And they just threw those feelings into a Dawn-shaped jar, screwed the lid on tight, and painted "DFD" on the front. Problem solved! Eff Dawn and her effing kidney.

They are going to have to take those feelings out of the jar eventually. Do you think they know that?

Wow. PP that’s downright profound. Very curious what your background is. You write well and that is a compelling idea.

[Anonymous]

One more weird and disturbingly cynical detail that just came out. One or two days before the NYT story came out, possibly the day before, Sonya Larson changed her Twitter banner. For years, it had been an image of books. But 1-2 days before the story dropped, she changed her banner to her with GrubStreet's writers of color group. This is the same group that (white) Allison Murphy suggested weaponizing again Dawn Dorland. Maybe a coincidence, but I doubt it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let's see. You encounter someone who grew up low income and seems kind of clueless socially, needy too, and maybe some mental issues thrown in. Wouldn't it be hilarious to mess with their brain a bit and invite all your sophisticated friends to join? Such a hoot, haven't had that much fun since middle school.

Oh, and when caught red handed, invoke the race card. Go all progressive on them and ask your friends to do the same. What a poor hick to do against a woman of color.

Effing truth. Of course.

One side has Roxane Gay and Celeste Ng and some nobody from Motherboard tripping over themselves to snatch out over #whitewomantears on Twitter. And the other side is this strange woman - but for her awkward letter, Larson would have no story. (She may say “phew!” now but that wasn’t her song when the Globe was knocking on her door). It’s just grotesque.

Celeste Ng comes off terrible and the whole thing just reeks of the worst parts of these insular writer-artist circles

I can't ever buy any of her books going forward. The mean-girl thing, the picking on someone who was vulnerable, and weaponizing race to defend plagiarism - just evil.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One more weird and disturbingly cynical detail that just came out. One or two days before the NYT story came out, possibly the day before, Sonya Larson changed her Twitter banner. For years, it had been an image of books. But 1-2 days before the story dropped, she changed her banner to her with GrubStreet's writers of color group. This is the same group that (white) Allison Murphy suggested weaponizing again Dawn Dorland. Maybe a coincidence, but I doubt it.

Certainly not a coincidence.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One more weird and disturbingly cynical detail that just came out. One or two days before the NYT story came out, possibly the day before, Sonya Larson changed her Twitter banner. For years, it had been an image of books. But 1-2 days before the story dropped, she changed her banner to her with GrubStreet's writers of color group. This is the same group that (white) Allison Murphy suggested weaponizing again Dawn Dorland. Maybe a coincidence, but I doubt it.

Mean girls.

[Anonymous]

I really wonder what the members of the Grub Street Writers of Color think about all this. Do any of them feel exploited by Alison Murphy? Or did they tend to believe Sonya Larson's world view? I feel like if I were one of them, I would be angry at Alison Murphy in particular, who comes across as casually exploitive, a most Karen of Karens, willing to suggest without thought that POC women do dirty work. Larson was at least one of the group, and if Larson had come up with the idea of using the Writers of Color that would be one thing, but to come from Alison Murphy feels really off to me.

I was trying to learn more about the group and I found this, which features Ng and Larson. Some interesting quotes from Ng in it.

https://lithub.com/at-the-grub-street-writers-of-color-roundtable/

[Anonymous]

Part of me almost feels bad for Larson. She was given really shitty advice by everyone surrounding her.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I really wonder what the members of the Grub Street Writers of Color think about all this. Do any of them feel exploited by Alison Murphy? Or did they tend to believe Sonya Larson's world view? I feel like if I were one of them, I would be angry at Alison Murphy in particular, who comes across as casually exploitive, a most Karen of Karens, willing to suggest without thought that POC women do dirty work. Larson was at least one of the group, and if Larson had come up with the idea of using the Writers of Color that would be one thing, but to come from Alison Murphy feels really off to me.

I was trying to learn more about the group and I found this, which features Ng and Larson. Some interesting quotes from Ng in it.

https://lithub.com/at-the-grub-street-writers-of-color-roundtable/

That’s the same round table that Dawn was at where she asked the question about class and got iced.