Diversity
When Erin Bartels and I agreed to be critique partners, we knew we had similar writing sensibilities and a commitment to telling emotionally resonant stories. Interestingly, both of our debut novels explore race in America. However, as much as we are alike, we approach the world and our characters from vastly different perspectives: She’s white. I’m black.
Erin’s novel, We Hope for Better Things, which releases in January, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. It takes a compelling journey through the intertwined lives of three women—from the volatile streets of 1960s Detroit to the Underground Railroad during the Civil War—to uncover the past, confront the seeds of hatred, and discover where love goes to hide.
I’m revising my first novel, The Kindest Lie, which tells the story of a black woman engineer trying to reconnect with her biological son. She befriends a poor, 11-year-old white boy. Their mutual need for family collides in one fateful night, exposing the fault lines of race and class in a dying Indiana factory town.
In anticipation of the release of Erin’s debut, we talked about the critique process and how we navigated the weighty, and often uncomfortable, topic of race as we provided our feedback.
Nancy Johnson: I had this huge fear all along about how I would tackle my predominantly black cast of characters. You may think that’s absurd since I’m black. But that’s the thing. I desperately wanted to represent the best of my community since we’re often perceived negatively in literature and media. Then I began to worry that I was over-correcting and villainizing my white characters. You flagged my blind spot on how I portrayed white parents.
Erin Bartels: Yes, I did notice when I read that, while black parents in your book were portrayed as fully three-dimensional, with both good qualities and bad, there really didn’t seem to be any “good” white parents. They were neglectful, inept, or abusive and seemed disinterested in their kids. I flagged it more as an observation than a critique. There are a lot of bad parents out there. But I think what I liked about your black parents was that even if at first Mama seemed harsh toward Ruth, as I read I could see why; I could see where she was coming from and how she thought that it was the best thing to do at the time. She was understandable to the reader.
I think it’s natural for us to make those characters we feel we know better more three-dimensional. One of the things I worried about in We Hope for Better Things was that some of my black characters would feel two-dimensional, that they would seem like they were only there to serve the storyline I had set up. Especially characters in the most historical of my three storylines, the 1860s. I just have zero real idea what life was like for them and research can only take you so far.
And though I’d had three black friends read the book before you did, I was worried that they weren’t saying everything that was on their minds as they read it. You mentioned that you struggled to know what to say and what not to say in your critique.
NJ: Yes! As I was writing my critique notes […]
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image by Sheng P.
My novel The Kitchen Daughter was published in 2011. Seven years is not that long ago, really, but for many reasons, it feels like a different lifetime. The world has changed a great deal in less than a decade, and publishing has changed along with it—in ways both negative and positive.
When I made the decision to write a novel from the perspective of a character on the autism spectrum, such books were relatively rare on bookstore shelves. Basically, if people had read a book with an autistic narrator, it was almost certainly Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (Which of course, in certain circles, gave rise to the typical publishing conversation of “Isn’t your book kind of like a book that already exists?” And the standard, exasperated answer, “Yes, except not at all.”)
In the beginning, my decision to write from an autistic character’s perspective originated from a logical place, not an emotional one. I love to cook, and when I prepare meals, I’m doing it to connect with people. I wanted to write about someone who cooks without any intention of connecting—someone isolated partly by circumstances and partly by choice—but who comes to realize that she can use cooking to connect.
When I began writing the book, I had recently met the writer John Elder Robison, whose memoir Look Me in the Eye brought what was then called Asperger’s Syndrome to the attention of many. After delving into everything I could find written on the topic, including first-person accounts written by women on the spectrum, I made the decision that the narrator I wanted to write had undiagnosed Asperger’s, and the story unfolded from there. I dug in, learned everything I could, worked to define Ginny’s unique experience, enlisted a host of readers who could tell me what didn’t ring true, and wrote and rewrote until the book was the best I could make it.
If I were facing this decision in 2018 instead of 2008, would I have made the same choice? I’m not at all sure.
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Be impressed with your Writer Unboxed Breakout Novel Dissection Group. In our last round of discussions, we dissected not one, but three novels. All at once. We were trying something new, just this once, and there’s a good reason why.
If you have been following posts from the dissection group, you know that four times a year we ask members to nominate a recent novel they’d want to discuss in order to understand the mechanics that led to its breakout success. From half a dozen nominees, members vote to select the one novel we’ll dissect.
Members of the dissection group are writers (and readers) of all genres. Thus, we’ve ended up dissecting novels from nearly every genre: sci fi, dystopian, literary, women’s, historical, young adult, humor, thriller…
The range has been satisfying. Don Maass’s writings on breakout fiction – on which our group bases its dissections – recognize that the craft underlying breakouts applies across genre. In Writing 21st Century Fiction, he underscores that high-impact fiction merges both character- and plot-driven craft, propelling breakout success. And a frequent observation after dissections is how much participants gain from discussing novels in genres outside their typical reading or writing tastes.
Still… going into last year, the moderators and members of the group expressed a greater push for diversity. The democracy of picking one book often left stellar second and third choices. And – as much as we’d seen some range in author and main character diversity – we noticed that those near-misses would have included greater diversity in gender, race and culture.
So in July, we tried an experiment. Rather than reading only one top vote, we culled a poll from all of those near-misses, and then dissected the top three, which yielded this amazing list:
Warning: If you haven’t read the novel(s), know that SPOILERS MAY BE PRESENT in shared excerpts here or on the Facebook discussion.
Three books, one discussion.
Before you panic on behalf of our participants: members only had to read one of the books to participate (although our group is full of avid readers, so many had read two or all three of the books). We provided guidelines and summaries to keep things clear.
There are lots of reasons why this was a successful experiment. It allowed us to get to three books that had repeatedly been suggested by participants, where we might only have gotten to one or have missed these titles altogether. Sometimes we’ve lost participation when people were disappointed a great book wasn’t chosen — and we were legitimately stoked to be more inclusive with more choices.
And, from a craft perspective, it allowed us to compare side by side the ways each writer attempted (or ignored) aspects of breakout fiction. As we all know from workshop discussions, those kind of comparisons can lead to fresh insights.
Threads of Breakout Characteristics
Our group uses a set of questions – approximately six per day for a week – derived from Don Maass’s advice in Writing the Breakout Novel. From the dozens of insights participants shared, here are a few highlights that stood […]
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Have you ever felt stuck in your isolation as a writer or mired in the world of your story? For months, I revised my novel and tried to turn it into the best version of itself but something was missing. I hadn’t explored the fullness and complexity of what it meant to be a writer in the world today.
I knew it. I felt it. Still, I couldn’t unlock what was missing in my story or in me as a writer.
Sometimes, you just have to switch things up and risk everything to engage with a new community of writers. The day I arrived on the campus of Reed College in Portland, Oregon to study at the Tin House Summer Workshop, I gawked at literary luminaries like Lauren Groff, Alexander Chee, and Benjamin Percy.
You don’t belong here with real writers. Many of these writers have MFAs and book deals; you don’t. This isn’t for you.
Self-sabotage is real. If I told myself enough times that I wasn’t worthy and didn’t deserve to be in that writing space, I would eventually believe it and inoculate myself from tough critique and defeat. My workshop leader for the week was Tayari Jones, whose bestselling novel An American Marriage was the Oprah Book Club pick. Imposter syndrome stalked me in the classroom. It’s hard to learn in workshop when you’re fangirling but by mid-week I’d settled in enough to soak up her wisdom.
Tin House Summer Workshop
Tayari’s advice will forever transform the way I tell stories. She taught me that conflict isn’t borne of hostility, that too much estrangement and anger strangles narrative. Our workshop inspired me to soften the mean mama in my novel and bring the temperature down on my protagonist who “yanked curtains” and “snatched silverware.” Tayari said, “We learn to connect with characters by seeing them connect. You want to make all your characters feel like they’re right, like they have a legitimate point.”
Lectures from the most unapologetic badass authors I’ve ever met buoyed my spirit and girded me for the fight we’re all in to make our voices and stories heard. Memoirist Kiese Laymon talked about being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and the secrets and lies we tell in our nonfiction narratives in hopes that readers will forgive us for the hurt we’ve inflicted upon others. “In our intent to write honestly, sometimes we write other people’s trauma out of our stories,” he said. If Kiese could courageously tell his truth, I could at least own the space I had earned as a writer at Tin House.
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Photo by João Silas on Unsplash
I’ve been getting some interesting questions while on book tour.
1 – Do you plan on all on your novels being so political?
And
2 – How come your novel doesn’t get more political?
The funny thing is, these questions actually don’t contradict one another other. In fact, they reveal a lot about how we think of art and politics. They are what happen when we think of art and politics as being two wholly separate things. Rather than seeing them as being organically intertwined, we like to think one can be applied to another in increments or measurements, as if making a novel political is as simple as baking: mix in X or Y amount of Issue A to a plot and you get a novel that is either somewhat or very political.
My life experience does not allow me to see—or even experience—things quite so simply. As an immigrant and a Latina whose recent novel deals with family sacrifice, love, generational trauma, secrets, marriage, adolescence, borders, and immigration, I’m often told things like my novel is very timely, or that the topic of immigration is very relevant right now. I’ve lived my whole life as an immigrant; to me and millions like me, immigration is not a “topic” but a lived experience. We cannot separate politics from our lives because our whole lives there have been policies in place that affect us.
Which is why question #1 (do you plan on all your novels being political?) so often creeps up. What a question like this fails to acknowledge is that all stories are political—the only difference among them is the role those politics play. If they are unperceived in a story, it is only because the people in it are lucky enough to have politics working in their favor: unfelt and unintrusive.
In stories like mine, in a time and setting where the current (and historical) politics obstruct and oppress the lives of the Latinx immigrant communities I’m writing about, the political becomes more visible. It is a force that we do not have the privilege, as much as we’d want to, of ignoring. Even if I were to write a fun, “non-political” story that makes for an escapist read, it’d be difficult to do so authentically because my existence as a woman of color and immigrant is politicized in the world we live in. The example I often give is this:
Read MorePlease welcome Patrice Williams Marks to Writer Unboxed today! Patrice recently reached out to Writer Unboxed to tell us about her free 7-day course on becoming a Sensitivity Reader, and an idea was born; this seemed like a post-worthy topic to us. We’re thrilled Patrice agreed to be our guest today, to answer a few worthy questions:
What is a Sensitivity Reader? Can you be one? Should you utilize one? Will a Sensitivity Reader censor?
A little about Patrice, from her bio:
Patrice Williams Marks is a Sensitivity Reader and Course Creator, founder of a non-profit charity that works to diversify the newsroom. She is the founder of several film festivals with diverse entries from filmmakers and writers. She also has a background in public relations, marketing, and journalism with an emphasis on research.
Learn more about Patrice on her website, and by following her on Facebook and Twitter. And learn more about her course online HERE and through the Sensitivity Read Twitter account. Oh, and Patrice is offering a free webinar on June 28th. Learn more about that HERE.
Enjoy!
What Is a Sensitivity Reader and Can I Become One?
In 2016, Scholastic pulled the children’s book, A Birthday Cake For George Washington, after outrage from what some considered “whitewashing” of the history of slavery.
The book showed “happy slaves” making a cake for George Washington. To those of us with ancestors who lived through that period of time–my father’s grandmother was a freed slave–it was not only hurtful but insulting.
We know that Scholastic (and the authors of the book) had no intention of insulting or whitewashing slavery, but nevertheless, they did just that. How? By writing about a culture they knew little about, and filling in the holes with assumptions though their own limited lenses.
As writers, we all “fill in the holes.” I have. But it has always been after extensive research.
What could they have done differently?
Hired an African-American Sensitivity Reader during the first draft phase of the book.
What exactly is a Sensitivity Reader, and how could s/he have helped?
A Sensitivity Reader is someone who specializes in a specific niche (African-American, Muslim, Physically Challenged, LGBTQ, Little People, etc.) and is a part of the specific marginalized community that the author is writing about. The Sensitivity Reader thoroughly reads over the material for bias, stereotypes, offensiveness, lack of understanding, etc. and creates a report for the client outlining their thoughts, why they feel something may be a problem, and offering possible solutions.
Will a Sensitivity Reader censor the work?
The client makes the final decision whether to make the changes suggested, make only a few changes, or keep the project as is. Therefore, a Sensitivity Reader cannot absolve another author or publishing company of any future negative impacts from their project.
Does a project need more than one Sensitivity Reader?
Possibly. If you are writing about more than one marginalized group, and you are not part of those groups, then you would do well to hire Sensitivity Readers who specialize in each group.
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I like to think I’m a man of conviction. The kind of man who acts swiftly to right a wrong, who won’t tolerate an injustice, nor support or enable morally questionable behavior. For example, a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine alerted me that somebody had posted a racist sentiment on my Facebook wall. My justice was swift and decisive: I deleted the post and unfriended the person who posted it, despite the fact that we were former coworkers who had been friends for 20 years. My buddy who had alerted me was surprised by the speed and severity of my response. “Damn,” he observed, “KC doesn’t mess around.” I’ll admit, seeing his reaction made me feel kind of good – and maybe a little smug. Nope, I thought, KC does NOT mess around.
But here’s the thing.
Actually, the first sentence in my opening paragraph was carefully worded. And the key phrase in it is “like to think.” Because as much as I may want to pat myself on the back, the truth is that quashing a racist sentiment on social media is not a very hard thing to justify, nor is it particularly praiseworthy. I suspect most decent people wouldn’t tolerate racist language on their Facebook walls. But what about something a little less directly impactful?
I mean, this was a racist statement, and it was posted on MY wall. Clearly that was not to be tolerated. But what do I do when I find out – after the fact – that the person who wrote a song I like is a racist? Or that an actor I admire has a history of spousal abuse? Or that a novelist I enjoy actually murdered somebody? Where do I draw the line?
It’s a question that’s coming up more and more these days. In the past year, we’ve begun to see a flood of bad behavior by popular artists – particularly male artists – being exposed. The #MeToo movement is shedding some much-needed light on a long history of indefensibly bad behavior by powerful males in the arts, who have been using sex, gender and power to dominate and/or manipulate – and in some cases, flat-out ruin – careers and lives.
One by one we’re seeing artistic icons being toppled. Louis CK. Bill Cosby. Harvey Turdstein (okay, I might have gotten the spelling wrong on that one). Many of us are relishing the experience of witnessing this sea change. It’s high time, we think, as we watch Roman Polanksi ousted from the Oscars academy. Good riddance, we think, as Kevin Spacey is dropped from his TV series. Yes, it feels kind of good, a rare glimpse of karma in action.
But it also leaves each of us with a challenge. Specifically, once we’ve identified an artist as being a not-so-good person, what do we do about that artist’s body of work?
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Our social media feeds are cluttered with the significant yet chaotic issues of the day. Either we’re resisting or resisting the resistance. I’ve engaged in a war of words on occasion via Facebook and Twitter, trying to convince someone I can’t recall ever meeting in real life to consider my point of view. Did we meet at a writing conference or in fourth grade? When we want to be part of the larger conversation and extend our voices beyond 280 characters, many of us turn to the power of our prose.
Writing an issues book feels like the world’s on fire and we’re trying to snuff out the flames with a garden hose. Our stories and characters seem too small to carry such big topics. But they aren’t.
No one is looking for a didactic text or a sermon or an edict from on high. We want to understand the heart of these charged issues through human experience. That’s where we come in as storytellers.
I can’t stop raving about An American Marriage by Tayari Jones because that novel tackles the lasting ramifications of wrongful incarceration on families without preaching to the reader. In media interviews, Jones explains that she received a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University to study this weighty topic. However, she got nervous when she didn’t have much to show after a year of research. Soon, she realized that the best way to tell this story was not with statistics and data points but through the lens of one marriage.
At the start of Roy and Celestial’s young marriage, he’s imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. He asks the ultimate question of his wife: Will she wait more than a decade for him, for his release? In letters they write to each other during his time behind bars, they say:
“Dear Celestial, I am innocent.”
“Dear Roy, I am innocent, too.”
At its heart, this is a love story. At its heart, this is also a human story about impossible choices and the devastating impact of wrongful incarceration.
To tell the story of war is not to write about nukes and napalm. Every war has its people and their stories, as the author Tim O’Brien discovered when he served in the Vietnam War. I read The Things They Carried often just to immerse myself in the rhythm of the language he uses. That collection of linked stories makes you feel but doesn’t tell you what to feel about the Vietnam War. There’s no running tally of battles and body counts or discussion of whether the conflict was justified. Instead, O’Brien writes about a world where there are no winners and no one is right or wrong. They just are.
He writes about First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and the letters he carried from a college girl named Martha.
In the late afternoon after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.
Grief, love, and terror have faces through O’Brien’s stories. We understand war as much as we ever can through these soldiers and the things they carried like rifles […]
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At Qutb Minar. Image – iStockphoto: Train Arrival
Because Diversity Is So…Diverse
If you’ve ever flown to New Delhi, you’ll have encountered one of the more peculiar time-zone anomalies in world travel: The mighty capital of India is not just 10 hours ahead of Eastern time, it’s 10 hours and 30 minutes ahead. Like Tehran, New Delhi has a half-hour time change atop the usual whole-zone adjustments.
And when I was in New Delhi this week for the International Publishers Association’s (IPA) biennial world congress, an interesting situation developed. As I wrote it up at Publishing Perspectives, the stage was busy with many publishing and intellectual property players, most of them rightly energized and newly sensitized by the political realities around us today.
In a nutshell:
As many as 70 national associations’ representatives were at the conference, which was designed as three days of intensive, relentless presentations, debates, and discussions around the key issues impacting the world industry. The event drew close to 400 people–with probably 400 views of what we mean when we say “diversity.”
In my congress-closing article, it fell to me to point out that the concept of gender diversity in publishing’s leadership had gotten away from the planners. We watched as waves of talented, intelligent men moved across the stage, but the organization fell short of its goal of gender parity in these presentations. Even some of the most prominent women publishers in India, well known to many of us in the international business, were oddly missing from programming. The local organizers had focused elsewhere and surely felt they were entertaining a fabulously diverse audience with as many as 60 nations’ delegates in place.
The international association has handled this criticism extremely well, without defensiveness. This is very much to the IPA’s credit, how constructive.
And what’s important to recognize, of course, is that an outfit like the IPA has the interesting dilemma of occasionally competing constituencies. In a congress cycle that’s hosted by a market like India still laboring with a major overhang of traditional male domination, the dynamic of the wider, multinational group can end up in conflict with the interests of the local hosting body.
The next IPA congress is set in Norway, and it’s logical to expect a very different reality there; the Nordic and Scandinavian publishing markets have long reflected their societies’ more even-handed gender relations.
Nevertheless, the experience in New Delhi–on the […]
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Please welcome Nancy Johnson back to WU today, this time as our newest WU contributor! We’re thrilled to have her with us!
Race has colored every part of my life from the stories my parents told from the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement to my own experience of being called the n-word by a white coworker. During the years it took me to conceive my novel and write it, I encountered the stories of countless black boys and men murdered nationwide at the hands of white police officers and in my city of Chicago at the hands of people who looked like them in their own communities. There were also the stories of the disenfranchised white working class that felt left behind struggling to grasp a new foothold in America. All of these stories informed my understanding of the world and the question of my novel.
The complexities of race and class loomed above me gray and amorphous like a storm cloud and I wrestled with these issues that offered no easy answers. I thought about what I really wanted to know. What was the question that kept me up at night?
Is what connects us in our common humanity more powerful than forces of race and class that divide us?
Over the years I’ve often heard the advice to write what you know. Many of the characters in my novel are composites of relatives, friends, ladies from the beauty shop, the guys who gather to swap stories at my local Starbucks, and of course, me. However, the larger story is all about interrogating what I don’t know through the lives of my characters.
When I worked as a journalist, one of the most important storytelling lessons I learned was to tell the larger story through the narrow prism of one person, one family, or one community. I couldn’t easily get my arms around the socio-political behemoths of race and class. However, I could relate to Ruth, a black engineer trying to connect with the son she abandoned at birth. A woman isolated by her own mother and brother when she left them behind in a dying factory town to pursue her ambitions. I found myself drawn to Midnight, a smart, mischievous eleven-year-old white boy with a dead mother, a sick grandmother, and a father who recently lost his job at the plant.
The lives of Ruth and Midnight intersect in The Kindest Lie, my novel about two people from vastly different backgrounds with a common need for family, belonging, and home. I chose them to bring my story question to life, to put flesh on the bones of my understanding. Throughout my writing of the book, I asked even more questions of these characters: Are we always tethered to our pasts, to the people and places that birthed us? Is mothering innate or learned? How does toxic masculinity transcend race? What are the perceptions we hold about our own race and class status that we hide from the world for fear of judgment? Do our mistakes define us or can we rewrite our own stories?
As I wrote each scene, I returned to my primary question and the secondary ones to make sure every scene addressed them. I tried to […]
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In the nearly three weeks since white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, many of us have been (rightfully so) discussing ways to combat hate and dismantle systemic racism.
But the truth is, these conversations have always been urgent and necessary. And not just in that large-scale, overwhelming, how-do-we-stop-more-white-supremacists-from-marching kind of way. Our efforts to build a more just and equal society cannot be reactionary, galvanized only by tragedy. They must be happening constantly, in large and small scales, in each of our communities.
This includes our community of writers, editors, and publishers. What happened in Charlottesville is a chilling example of why diverse representation matters in the books and media we consume. It’s a chilling example of why sensitivity reads are not about censorship, but preventing harm. A book that stereotypes its characters of color and a Neo-Nazi march may be two very different things, but they exist on the same plane and slope. No one lights a torch and joins a hate-fueled march without ever having been exposed to ideas that—intentionally or not—dehumanize people who are different from them.
That being said, this is not a post about how to write the other (this, however, is a very good one). This is a post about writers of color, and the kind of help and actions we most need most from our white writer allies. To all who have felt helpless, or asked what you can do, here are some ways to be better allies, compiled by me and other writers of color whom I asked to weigh in.
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Please welcome back author Elizabeth Stephens, who’s here to further the discussion of a somewhat controversial but important topic: Should white writers craft protagonists of color, or vice-versa? A little about Elizabeth from her bio:
Elizabeth Stephens–a self-acknowledged weirdo who has been writing since the age of 11–is a mixed race (black and white) romance and science fiction author and reader of all things that feature tough leading ladies. Her newest release, The Hunting Town, came out July 16, 2017 and is a small town, mafia romance. Last year saw the publication of Saltlands, book two in her dystopian romance series which began with Population. She is a big fan of inclusion and her books always include kick ass ladies of color.
Her day job is in communications for public and private sector clients across Africa.
When she isn’t writing or day-jobbing she can most often be found reading, drawing, throwing pottery, watching horror movies, and protesting for causes that she hopes will make the world a better place for all.
Learn more about Elizabeth and The Hunting Town on her website (where you can find a free self-publishing guide), and by following her on Twitter and Facebook.
White Writers Writing Non-White Characters: Why I Vote Yes, for Commercial Fiction
I recently came across an article in which an author advocated that white writers should not feature characters of color as leading protagonists in their novels. This author made some compelling points that I believe are critical to consider for all writers of literary fiction looking to portray characters outside of their race. Are you a white author trying to tell the story of a disenfranchised Mexican immigrant? Maybe reconsider.
However, are you a white author of erotica looking to cast a dark-skinned black woman as your leading lady? Please, write on! Because when it comes to mainstream, commercial, and genre fiction, I would wholeheartedly challenge this author’s assumption. Characters of color do just as much for minority empowerment as the authors who write them. Thus, I urge this author and others who share the same opinion to place a small asterisk in their argument. Here’s why:
We need to acknowledge some (frustrating) facts.
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DISCLAIMER: The views presented in today’s post do not necessarily reflect those of Writer Unboxed or its other contributors. They are solely the opinions of the author of this post, and should not be read while flossing, practicing goat yoga, or ghost-writing a book for James Patterson.
Last September – before being eclipsed by our current all Trump, all the time zeitgeist – a flurry of conversations erupted across the internet focusing on cultural appropriation. Fanning the flames of this topic was a keynote speech best-selling author Lionel Shriver gave at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival. Regardless of where you stand on cultural appropriation, it’s well worth reading the text of her whole speech.
Taking the stage wearing a sombrero, Ms. Shriver quickly made it clear where she stood, lashing out at political correctness and flat-out dismissing the concept of cultural appropriation – particularly when writing fiction. She cited a recent incident where some college students were excoriated on social media for a cruel and hurtful act of “ethnic stereotyping” – because they had been photographed wearing miniature sombreros at a tequila-themed birthday party.
Ms. Shriver observed, “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.” She went on to offer numerous examples of important books that would not have been written if the authors hadn’t dared to explore experiences or cultures other than their own:
“If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to ‘appropriate’ the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.”
A disrespectful vocation
In her speech, Ms. Shriver pushed back – hard – against the notion of writers being somehow morally restricted to writing only stories that are “implicitly ours to tell.” Instead, she maintained that “any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.” Taking her defense a step further, she said:
“This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature – prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best. When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.”
Stating her hope that the concept of cultural appropriation is just “a passing fad,” Ms. Shriver worried that if writers restrict their work to only what they have directly experienced, “all that’s left is memoir.”
I agree – in theory – with much of what Ms. Shriver said. But it soon became clear that plenty of people didn’t…
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