Bad Art Friend
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Anonymous
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I think one reason I feel so upset and bothered by this is that I know what happens to you, mentally and emotionally, when you get ganged up on in this kind of way. When it happened to me, I became depressed, self-loathing to a disturbing degree. I started self-harming, my husband worried that I would do something terrible. If I hadn't been a mom, I would have worried too -- caring what happened to my kids and needing to protect them from the situation got me through.
The Vox piece upthread about Isabel Fall brought all that back. Getting rejected and humiliated in this way (and I wasn't dealing with a Twitter mob of thousands, just a small group of friends and professional acquaintances upon whom I'd based a huge part of my sense of belonging in the world) is life changing. I do worry for Dawn, and part of what makes me so angry is that people don't seem to understand that no matter how annoying someone is, they don't deserve to want to die because of it. Like you don't have to punish socially awkward people for being socially awkward -- it punishes itself! You can just leave people like this alone and move on with your life instead of giving into your perverse need to crap all over them until they hate themselves as much as you hate them. Anyway. |
Anonymous
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I don't know the Corker letter proves what people say it proves. If I were a writer trying to get someone to talk to me, or a detective trying to get a murderer to talk to me, I would try to see the story from their point of view and explain as well as I could how I found their POV relatable. Even if maybe I didn't, completely. Corker had already been working on the story for a while with material only provided from Dorland, so he had to know that Larsen would need a reason to be persuaded about how he wasn't already biased against her. So he gave her that.
I don't feel one way or the other about who Corker really sided with or what he was trying to do when he wrote the article. But the only way he was going to get Larsen to talk to him is if her persuaded her that her point of view would be represented in the story, and that he was a good person to articulate what the POV was. |
Anonymous
Hmm, disagree. Journalists are supposed to be neutral, and he should have gone into the story without an agenda - yet he stated it. Therefore anything he found that refuted that he couldn't well use because then she could (rightfully) claim he'd duped her. There's absolutely no reason he couldn't have said: "Hey Sonia, Dawn pitched us about your legal entanglements. I'm going to write a feature about it for the NYTimes. I would love to have your input to get the full story and represent both sides...." Then, tack on the line he actually wrote "As I hope you'll see from my other work, I do not come into stories as a judge and jury." Honestly, if she didn't participate, he could have written the story about Dawn, but that wasn't his angle. He even said he wanted people to "experience it" what she (only Sonia) went through. |
Anonymous
Wait, that's Sonya Larson!? I would have 10000% assumed she was White |
Anonymous
I feel like this is one reason I have always consciously/subconsciously avoided group friendship scenarios. Too scary to contemplate being turned on by a whole group, and I think I always sensed that I would end up ostracized if I tried to enter a group. I am very happy with the close 1:1 friendships I have, happy to meet my friends' friends every so often. But getting enmeshed in a "friendship group" ... shudder. |
Anonymous
I was ostracized and shamed by a peer group as an adult and it is 100 percent what had me reading this thread and rooting for Dorland. I don’t care about boring Boston short story literati; I totally care about what it is like to be wrongly ganged up on, and to have the gang exposed as the lying cheap frauds that they are — well, that’s what everyone in my shoes, or Dorland’s shoes, has been waiting for. For someone else to see the lie and call it out. |
Anonymous
I get you, PP. I'm the PP who wants to learn about writing and when I read the Isabel Fall story, it really bothered me. I still think about her a lot, and hope she is maybe some day okay, some day feels safe again. I'm socially awkward (neurodiverse, woohoo lack of social skills) and I relate so hard to being the vulnerable awkward one on the margins, who doesn't say the right things, and can't navigate the unspoken rules. I have spent a lot of my life teaching myself scripts and rules that I need to use to get by, but these situations don't have social scripts you can teach yourself. I'm sure I'm probably too wrapped up in all of this, but it hits deeply, bringing up years of trying to figure out just how people manage to be in-group, something that has been an endless mystery since childhood. |
Anonymous
Eh, no, because that's not how he wrote it, is it? If he were really going to write it from the perspective of what Sonya went through, he would have shown from the beginning how she took Dawn's Facebook post and used it in her story thinking it was harmless because Art, and joked around with the monkeys via text. He clearly didn't provide Sonya's viewpoint throughout -- which is why we do not identify with her. But he did explain that he wanted to portray what she went through in her fight for authorship of her story, which he legitimately did attempt to explain. I'm not a journalist (and suspect that you aren't either), but I do note that this is in New York Magazine and not the New York Times news pages and that this is more of a deep dive by way of think piece and less of a Watergate expose. I think there is probably some leeway to writers in how they reach out to members of the public to get them to participate in their stories, but writers/journalists please correct me if I'm wrong. |
Anonymous
Yup. It’s hard to keep track of exactly which white woman is weaponizing what. |
Anonymous
Nah, sorry - this email is not a biased smoking gun. Even serious print journalists say these things to get an interview. They write buttered-up letters to convicted killers in prison asking for interviews for goodness sake, with letters raising concerns about the cops/the lawyers/the anything. Koekler had to get Larson to open the door to him. |
Anonymous
It is not the best time for art. There is a lot of emphasis on only presenting the correct narratives, on having sensitivity readers, on only crossing boundaries that are allowed to be crossed. This makes a world that is stifling and insular and awful. I am a little more removed from the NYC publishing scene than I was once, but I am not sorry for that. I found a group of like-minded writers online, and many of us have parlayed our shared efforts into real careers writing fiction, writing scripts, writing games, and just writing. One thing the last two decades have taught me is you write because you love it, because you want to know what happens, and because you have something to say. But it is a strange thing interacting with other writers. I have a friend who lives nearby now. When we were kids we wrote novels together. We tried to start a Sunday afternoon writing group a few years back... but we were just in such different places, we had such different opinions... it didn't work. I'm not even sure we are friends anymore. It is very hard to find a writer's community. It involves trust, and maybe it also involves distance. There is a competitive edge that's hard to shake. There is an ugly part in all of us that isn't sure of ourselves, but knows we thing what someone else wrote is bad. Sometimes it's even hard to separate that feeling from their perceived success--or lack thereof. Things are subjective: sometimes you look at a piece of writing that is beautifully executed and it leaves you cold. Other times, you do something like read "The Goldfinch" and wonder wtf was going on with the last third of the novel. It's all a mess, and short stories... I mean, they're lovely, but who really reads them as a genre besides aspiring mfa students? Or aspiring science fiction and fantasy writers... It is hard. It is painstaking. And at the end of the day you have to be doing it for the love of it or that will show in the work itself. |
Anonymous
Coupled with the fact that he left out relevant information about Larson and seemed to paint Dawn in a particularly bad light I think it’s damning. |
Anonymous
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I'm on Dorland's side in this, also, and think the group texts were unbelievably mean, but I'm not sure the way he wrote the story is due to deceptiveness. He sifted through a lot of material, and presumably had live interviews that we didn't have here. Where he came out in the story isn't necessarily where we would come out. That doesn't mean he was trying to hoodwink us. Remember too that there was a Boston Globe exposee of the whole thing earlier and nobody seemed to have a problem with what Larson did there (though presumably they didn't expose the group texts.)
Anyway, ymmv. |
Anonymous
Consider also that while he can relate to - and write about with true understanding - writing culture, how writers treat each other, what is plagiarism, ambition and success — he’s also a dude writing about a woman being mean-girled, and THAT is the piece of this story that so many of us, as women, have lived and are recoiling the most over. |
Anonymous
Funny you ask that. I am one of the published authors who posted above and i just so happened to be turning in a MS this week and I ran this by my editor — what would you think if i included a verbatim private FB post in my book, and didn’t tell the original author? Would that be cool. She laughed hard, and then said, “But seriously, no. Don’t do that.” No legit author in their right mind is confused about this. |