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).

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....

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.

(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 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.