Bad Art Friend
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Anonymous
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@kidneygate’s chronology of the emails between Dawn and Sonya is more damning than I can even describe. I’m not on Twitter but anyone on and interested: can you share broadly?
https://mobile.twitter.com/kidneygate/status/1447625724052004864 |
Anonymous
Such a good point that feasting on others in this shitty way is innately malign. |
Anonymous
Wow, Dawn was not badgering her at all. She genuinely talked about why she was confused and hurt because she thought they were friends. Sonya went above and beyond to string her along. It definitely shows a clearer story, not the dramatization in the NYT. |
Anonymous
Yeah, I'm pissed at Kolker. |
Anonymous
I wonder if he’s connected to Grub Street or the monkeys |
Anonymous
| So what is the line between just being terrible and plagiarizing? |
Anonymous
Cheryl Strayed’s partner with Dear Sugar taught at Grub Street and she just promoted his “dawww, both sides erred” essay — which he clearly wrote in order to defend himself and Strayed. Dawn Dorland noted in the NYT story that she had written in to Dear Sugar for advice, and they did not respond. People responding to Strayed aren’t having it. |
Anonymous
It also seems really bad to publish a letter for advice you never responded to two years later. |
Anonymous
Those emails in context make clear that Dawn thought (for good reasons) that the kidney donation was going to be depicted in a negative light in Sonya's story. I think Dawn may have known the kind of person Sonya is. |
Anonymous
They're both part of Penguin Random House. https://www.prhspeakers.com/topics/bestselling-authors |
Anonymous
Strayed is a turd. https://mobile.twitter.com/CherylStrayed/status/1447579114794147840 |
Anonymous
+1. I took a few creative classes at a local MFA program 15 years ago and managed to publish a handful of short stories in literary magazines before drifting away from it. But this conversation is actually making me think about writing again. I've realized, also, that I'm not interested in chasing literary stardom in the way I once was, and that's OK. I'm happy with my current job and have zero interest in becoming a writer who tweets or a writer who teaches or lectures. Also, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the posts here. I'm not on twitter, so I appreciate y'all digging up the salient stuff for me to look out (without making me do it myself.) |
Anonymous
That's what crazy about this -- Larson wasn't stealing Dorland's content and passing it off as her own because she thought it was great literature. She was stealing her content because she viewed Dorland as a "goldmine" for parody. That isn't plagiarism. The real moral error here was not stealing at all; it was the extended cruelty of snickering about the weird girl for years on end, and stringing her along to continue the entertainment. |
Anonymous
I can't quite figure out his angle here. Did he not read the court documents? Does he worry about being kept from publishing by friends of powerful writers like Gay and Ng? Why would he publish something like that article, knowing that the receipts would all be checked, that there is not a factual dispute about what actually happened? Is the NYC literary culture so insular that the bald words on the page are irrelevant? I don't understand. |
Anonymous
Thank you for this link, so much clarity. The following excerpts made me think of something I wanted to share: When Sonya talks (derisively) in her text to Sari about how Dorland is using Facebook for "emotional food" and how she can't stop pulling that lever, I think there is something to that. Facebook does operate in that way, and getting validation on Facebook does in fact feel like being a lab rat pulling a lever for your little hit of dopamine. And I do think Dorland likely was pulling that lever, as many of us have and do on Facebook -- the platform was in fact designed for this purpose, as has recently become more abundantly clear. I think it's strange, though, to judge someone for this. First, many, many people use Facebook in this way. Yes, it is annoying and if you spend any time at all on the platform, many people become tired of this feedback cycle. So it is odd to single Dawn out even if she seems like a particularly keen example of this. It's an exceedingly human need, validation. Everyone craves it to some extent, I don't care how self-actualized you think you are -- at some point or another, you feel vulnerable and need someone to say "You are okay." We're born needing this, and many people don't get it at the time when it would be most useful to them as people (childhood) and spend their lives looking for it. It's sad, but not something to ridicule. Which brings me to my second point, which is that this is all unbelievably hypocritical. One thing I get very clearly from the many text and email exchanges I've seen between Sonya and her friends is that they are constantly engaging in the very "emotional food" they deride Dawn for needing. It's one big circle jerk of people telling one another how much they love each other's writing, how right they are, how justified even their least attractive or appealing feelings and behaviors are. Is it any surprise that someone like Dawn, who was in proximity to people engaging in this kind of mutual admiration society, would have an intense craving for the same validation? What is more lonely than feeling unloved? Why, feeling unloved while the person next to you is showered with praise and affection of course. It's just interesting to me that this group of writers, a profession grounded in observation about the human condition, would manage just 20% of the observations available to them in this very rich human drama. All they could see was "look how needy Dawn is!" without once seeming to see how they themselves are needy, how need is human, how our institutions both feed and create need, etc. etc. The situation is ripe for fictionalization, and yet they stopped at the most prosaic and obvious part. Sad. |