Bad Art Friend

[mochihada]

Anonymous wrote:I used to live in Boston. I have a friend who is a published novelist and poet, and he was somewhat obsessed with teaching/being a part of Grubb Street. He thought that his personal appearance was what was keeping them from accepting him, and I thought he was paranoid. But now I think maybe there was something to what he said.

Also, I took one class through Grubb Street in person, and it was lackluster. The teacher was not a published novelist "yet"; she was very young and it was her first year out of her MFA program. She wasn't very good (but she was cute and perky, so now I am wondering...).

I also paid for one of the Grubb Street staff to read my novel and give a report, and now I regret that. It took a lot of courage to show my book to someone, and I felt so vulnerable, wondering if the reader was going to show passages to other staff and laugh at me. Now I am guessing that this very well could have happened. (The reader I chose was not one of the people mentioned in this scandal).

I also live in the Boston area and took Grub Street classes for a while. Did the manuscript reviewer have the initials LB?

The exclusive vibe there was subtle, but I felt it.

[Anonymous]

mochihada wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I used to live in Boston. I have a friend who is a published novelist and poet, and he was somewhat obsessed with teaching/being a part of Grubb Street. He thought that his personal appearance was what was keeping them from accepting him, and I thought he was paranoid. But now I think maybe there was something to what he said.

Also, I took one class through Grubb Street in person, and it was lackluster. The teacher was not a published novelist "yet"; she was very young and it was her first year out of her MFA program. She wasn't very good (but she was cute and perky, so now I am wondering...).

I also paid for one of the Grubb Street staff to read my novel and give a report, and now I regret that. It took a lot of courage to show my book to someone, and I felt so vulnerable, wondering if the reader was going to show passages to other staff and laugh at me. Now I am guessing that this very well could have happened. (The reader I chose was not one of the people mentioned in this scandal).

I also live in the Boston area and took Grub Street classes for a while. Did the manuscript reviewer have the initials LB?

The exclusive vibe there was subtle, but I felt it.

Any dirt to spill?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This Tweet crystallized what I felt was wrong about both GrubStreet and Castellani's letters.

I agree and this tweet is well put. I see our thread fading and that’s a shame. I think this dialogue is important snd we shouldn’t let off the pressure. Is Twitter still active on this?

It's pretty much died on all fronts. Celeste Ng, Roxane Gay, Helen Rosner and the rest, not to mention the actual GrubStreet folks, have pretty much come out of this completely unscathed and completely unashamed of their role in this.

I think Celeste Ng will take a long term hit on this. Her behavior was abhorrent and I suspect it will be brought up in the public sphere every time she releases a book or anything. I dont see her getting any more TV shows, either. And no one really pays attention to Roxane Gay anymore

[mochihada]

(I'm trying to figure out the system for replying here--it doesn't seem intuitive, so sorry if this goes to the wrong place.)

No dirt at all. Very boring. Barely perceptible. While I was still taking classes there they started up two full-year intensive (and expensive) programs called the Novel Incubator and the Novel Generator. They were all about getting your novel completed and published, and were highly competitive. I think if you got into one of those programs, you were an elite. I applied for one of them and wasn't accepted. One of the two people who ran the program (and made the acceptance decisions) was someone whose classes I'd been taking for a while, we were seemingly friendly in class, friends on Facebook, etc. When I didn't get the acceptance, I was disappointed that I didn't hear personally from her. But whatever. I saw this person once or twice at local readings with some student-friends from the Incubator program. I felt like an outsider based on these interactions. But again, nothing "wrong" was ever said. Just impersonal.

They (I'm gonna assume it's the Chunky Monkeys) had a bottle of whiskey they kept in a cabinet somewhere at the original Grub Street location. I thought it was a cute. Hemingway-esque detail. There's nothing wrong with writers being drinking buddies. But maybe they all took themselves too seriously.

I just wrote to GS telling them I can't continue with my regular donations while Castellani is still on staff and the issues are not being addressed.

[Anonymous]

mochihada wrote:(I'm trying to figure out the system for replying here--it doesn't seem intuitive, so sorry if this goes to the wrong place.)

No dirt at all. Very boring. Barely perceptible. While I was still taking classes there they started up two full-year intensive (and expensive) programs called the Novel Incubator and the Novel Generator. They were all about getting your novel completed and published, and were highly competitive. I think if you got into one of those programs, you were an elite. I applied for one of them and wasn't accepted. One of the two people who ran the program (and made the acceptance decisions) was someone whose classes I'd been taking for a while, we were seemingly friendly in class, friends on Facebook, etc. When I didn't get the acceptance, I was disappointed that I didn't hear personally from her. But whatever. I saw this person once or twice at local readings with some student-friends from the Incubator program. I felt like an outsider based on these interactions. But again, nothing "wrong" was ever said. Just impersonal.

They (I'm gonna assume it's the Chunky Monkeys) had a bottle of whiskey they kept in a cabinet somewhere at the original Grub Street location. I thought it was a cute. Hemingway-esque detail. There's nothing wrong with being buddies. But maybe they all took themselves too seriously.

I just wrote to GS telling them I can't continue with my regular donations while Castellani is still on staff and the issues are not being addressed.

Good for you. We need people putting their money where their mouth is here. What a group of horrifically miserable, evil people in that group- you should be thrilled they didn't see you as "one of them"

[mochihada]

Honestly, after a while the classes seemed pretty expensive for what they were offering, and I just realized that GS wasn't All That, you could still be a writer without them.

This is also not dirt, but I met Dawn Dorland once at a reading. She seemed quite nice. Almost everyone mentioned in the NYT article is someone I've seen around, if not interacted with. They're definitely good at presentation. If they're the gatekeepers, which I doubt, then I'm even gladder that I stopped taking classes years ago.

[mochihada]

In the past I've even interacted online with Tom Meeks, who was the one who originally tagged DD and SL, notifiying DD that SL had written a kidney story...now THAT is something that needs to be explored more!

I remember reading long ago that writers get really petty in their disagreements, disproportionately so because the rest of the world doesn't care about them....

[Anonymous]

So almost a month after this all went down, I'm curious about the one thread in the story that seemed the most egregious to me in terms of the NYT article covering up misconduct-- using Dawn's plagiarism suit and her earlier sexual harassment suit as evidence that she was an unreasonably litigious person. While the article and group texts pretty clearly showed the IP violation to be legit, I haven't heard anything about the sexual harassment claim, even though at least one writer on twitter has talked about CM/Grubstreet members attempting to sexually coerce her. It sounds conspiratorial but it really seems to me like Kolker tried to frame Dawn Dorland as a narcissistic stalker to make her allegations of sexual misconduct by Grubstreet staff sound bogus. It doesn't sound like Dawn or anyone else involved wanted to get into the details of this, but it's a much more serious problem, legally, than the trash talking/group stalking. I wonder if anything's going to come of that, or if Dorland and Lauren Hough and whoever else are (understandably) too burned out to keep pursuing action?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So almost a month after this all went down, I'm curious about the one thread in the story that seemed the most egregious to me in terms of the NYT article covering up misconduct-- using Dawn's plagiarism suit and her earlier sexual harassment suit as evidence that she was an unreasonably litigious person. While the article and group texts pretty clearly showed the IP violation to be legit, I haven't heard anything about the sexual harassment claim, even though at least one writer on twitter has talked about CM/Grubstreet members attempting to sexually coerce her. It sounds conspiratorial but it really seems to me like Kolker tried to frame Dawn Dorland as a narcissistic stalker to make her allegations of sexual misconduct by Grubstreet staff sound bogus. It doesn't sound like Dawn or anyone else involved wanted to get into the details of this, but it's a much more serious problem, legally, than the trash talking/group stalking. I wonder if anything's going to come of that, or if Dorland and Lauren Hough and whoever else are (understandably) too burned out to keep pursuing action?

I think you are confusing different events. Dorland filed an internal complaint against Larson and others at Grub Street, but it wasn't for sexual harassment. It was for the plagiarism as well as the "freezing out" Dorland experience at the Muse conferences. As an employee of Grub Street, she felt she was being targeted and treated unfairly by her colleagues and she filed a complaint. But this wasn't the sexual harassment complaint.

The sexual harassment complaint, the details of which we don't know, was filed by Dorland against a different writing organization in California. I think all we know about this is that Dorland requested it be handled via mediation (so she wasn't looking for money just resolution) and that the writing org went belly up before it was resolved so it became moot. This one has absolutely nothing to do with Grub Street or Larson or the plagiarism claim or any of the other facts in Bad Art Friend, and since it didn't go anywhere and Dorland specifically requested it be mediated, there is a question as to why it was included in the BAF story since it seems to imply "she's a professional victim!" but there isn't really anything there. And we don't know anything about the facts underlying the case.

As someone who has been sexually harassed at an organization like this (small, arts focused, mission driven), this drives me nuts because these organizations are often incredibly poorly run and it is easy for people with abusive tendencies to exploit disparities in power in order to take advantage of people, which is what happened with me. I wasn't a victim, I just had a handsy supervisor who knew they could touch me inappropriately and there wasn't really anything I could do about it -- there was no HR, they were in a much more senior position at the org, the org had no money so there was no point in bringing a law suit, and since the major currency of the place was access to people like this supervisor, I would not have found many if any allies among my colleagues. It sucks, and it's why I don't mess with places like that anymore, even though as an artist you crave community like that. This happens in all kinds of artistic communities. There was a lot of talk about it in the improv world a few years back during the height of Me Too, as well as in stand up (though that tends to be a professionally driven environment). I've heard of problems at dance and theater organizations, and someone up thread talked about issues in visual arts as well. It's just really, really common.

But the article paints Dorland as oversensitive and litigious and makes a complaint that look spurious while providing no detail. It's upsetting.

[Anonymous]

mochihada wrote:

They (I'm gonna assume it's the Chunky Monkeys) had a bottle of whiskey they kept in a cabinet somewhere at the original Grub Street location. I thought it was a cute. Hemingway-esque detail. There's nothing wrong with writers being drinking buddies. But maybe they all took themselves too seriously.

I've kind of picked up on Sonya having something of a drinking problem. I could be wrong, but based on a few comments she made and that others made to her, as well as some innuendo, it's possible she has some degree of functional alcoholism. (Not saying this because Chuntao seems her working class avatar, but, it's interesting she writes about alcoholism too.)

[mochihada]

I have absolutely no intel or even hearsay around that. I had the impression it was a communal bottle for the Chunky Monkeys (I didn't know that term at the time).

[Anonymous]

I think you are confusing different events. Dorland filed an internal complaint against Larson and others at Grub Street, but it wasn't for sexual harassment. It was for the plagiarism as well as the "freezing out" Dorland experience at the Muse conferences. As an employee of Grub Street, she felt she was being targeted and treated unfairly by her colleagues and she filed a complaint. But this wasn't the sexual harassment complaint.

I'm the PP, thanks for clarifying this, those are indeed very different situations. I also run in visual arts/writing circles and the kind of institutional sexual predators is upsettingly common, I'm sorry that happened to you. But yeah, that's a very different thing from multiple legitimate complaints with the same org being twisted to discredit each other.

[Anonymous]

Anyone else getting targeted ads on social media from Masterclass for a class on - wait for it - Empathy, taught by Roxane Gay?
You just can’t make this stuff up.
I’m so tempted to leave comments about whether the class with cover navigating other people’s organ donations.

[Anonymous]

^will cover not with cover

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anyone else getting targeted ads on social media from Masterclass for a class on - wait for it - Empathy, taught by Roxane Gay?
You just can’t make this stuff up.
I’m so tempted to leave comments about whether the class with cover navigating other people’s organ donations.

No but now I will look for that! You are right, you can't make this up.