For more than a year I have been updating to its fifth edition a textbook in creative writing. Fifth edition means that, having written it in 2002, I have revised it three times (2006, 2010, 2013) before this current task, each time working to improve my text and to modernize its examples.
This time is different.
Against my expectations, my experience of revision has revealed a danger to artistic expression and free speech that is the flip side of censorship; a kinder, gentler moral quagmire. Like my publisher, I am eager to see diversification in both the publishing industry and its publications. But as the writer Maggie Kast put it to me: You can’t simultaneously diversify and sanitize.
This book is a college text, which means that virtually all of its users are 18 and over. My publisher is, with my enthusiastic concurrence, eager to introduce these reader-writers to LGBTQ+ authors and to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) authors who have been denied attention for most of American history (and at last count, 2018, were still underrepresented in print by 30 percent). The publisher also wants to avoid giving offense to its diverse audience. And because it also needs to sell books in Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and Tennessee, such diversity includes, for instance, evangelical Christians. Scores of similarly squeezed textbooks must already be in proof or in print.
Mine is a beginning course that offers informal writing advice in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. It’s arranged on the principle that the central elements of imaginative writing — image, voice, character, setting, and story — are relevant to all of the genres; and it encourages students to play with the possibilities of these elements before trying to produce a finished piece. So the early chapters discuss what has worked in the past and invite students to fool around in any and all forms. Later chapters deal with structure and the elements peculiar to each genre. About half the book is in my voice, including prompts for imaginative play on the page. The other half consists of exemplars from published writing, either brief passages analyzed within the text or, at the end of each chapter, complete pieces in the relevant genres.
Unusually, this time around my publisher asked for no refreshing of my ideas, no major swaths of rewriting, only that I conform to the new sensibility. I was asked to change the binary “he/she,” for example, and to substitute they as a neutral nonbinary, or to refashion the sentence so that the plural made sense. The latter was often easy. The former not so much.
My instructions suggested that even if I was positing a hypothetical stage scene, I should not designate an actor as male or female. I was asked not to say “pregnant woman” since trans men can sometimes give birth. I was asked to substitute “home” where I had said “house,” on the grounds that some people don’t have houses. (What of those who have a house but no home?) I was to add “or caregiver” to every mention of mother, father, or parents. “Heroine” and “hero” are out. “God” should not be referenced, since different people have different gods, or none. Likewise, “Him” should not be capitalized. Noah’s Ark should not be mentioned, since non-Bible-savvy students might not know the story. “First year” must be used instead of the sexist “freshman.” “Foreign” and “foreigners” are offensive in any context. “Nerd,” “tribal,” “naïve,” “’hood,” “ugliness,” and “race” should not be said. Don’t mention shame, straitjacket, suicide, Donald Trump, or Kevin Spacey!
To virtually all of these admonitions, even when I thought them misguided or silly, I agreed. My own prose was not after all sacred. But when it came to the imaginative prose of other writers, trouble began.
This book reprints about a hundred examples of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama from as many professional authors. Choosing these examples has always been challenging. In addition to illustrating the principle of craft being discussed, there should be some balance among the genders, ages, and races of the authors and among the tone, subject matter, and style of the writing. This time the goal was to pay still more attention to gender and racial balance, including LGBTQ, Black, Asian, Native American and Hispanic authors.
The search for these examples was exhilarating. I asked friends, colleagues, my writing group, and my book club what I should read. I gathered the longlists of recent Pulitzer, Booker, National Book Award, and Authors Guild prizes. I pored over literary magazines. I read hundreds of poems, short stories, essays, and plays and encountered dozens of authors I had never read, many I had never heard of. I felt newly inspired. It expanded my joy in reading.
The problems began with a short paragraph — one that had already been in the book for a couple of editions — from, as it happened, a white male author. Scott Russell Sanders, in a lovely memoir piece about his boyhood, “Coming from the Country,” records how his family moved north from Tennessee when he was “not quite six” and “still a two-legged smudge.”
“The kids in Ohio took one listen to my Tennessee accent and decided I was a hick. … hillbilly, ridge runner, clodhopper, and hayseed.”
This passage was flagged by the “development editor” (read: sensitivity reader) with the admonition that “these are derogatory terms Southern readers may feel strongly about.”
“Yes,” I said; that was the point: “The terms are ugly and unfair, and no matter where we actually come from, we identify with the boy from Tennessee. No reader could miss this.”
My own editor granted the point. He had an English-literature degree, and he knew how point of view works. But couldn’t I, he asked, nevertheless find a passage that would illustrate my point of craft without these offensive words?
Well, I could, of course. Literature is nearly infinite, and nearly everything in print illustrates nearly every point of craft. Remembering this disagreement later, I thought I had capitulated and found another example, but later still, I saw that the Sanders passage remained in the proof, so I must have fought harder than I remembered.
If publishers want to enlarge the literary project to include everyone, and ask them to tell their truth, and then censor the work in which they do so — who is protected then?
Nevertheless, similar hassles continued in piece after piece. There was a one-act play by José Rivera, Gas. The single character in this play is a gas-station attendant who has a soldier-brother in the 1991 gulf war. At one point he quotes his brother as referring to Iraqis as “towelheads.” “That’s what he calls them,” says the monologuist. Later, imagining his brother’s death, he uses the word again, as a curse.
This publisher, I was told, categorically would not print the word “towelhead.”
But, I argued, this play answered to our diversification plan: a Hispanic playwright of reach and honor, an Academy Award winner, with a play that illustrated the possibilities of both monologue and physical metaphor. The word came from an off-stage character who, as a soldier in Iraq, absolutely would use this word.
No, they would not print it.
Who must be protected, in literature, from the very concepts they confront every day? If writers and publishers want to enlarge the literary project to include everyone, and ask them to tell their truth, and then censor the work in which they do so — who is protected then?
Other words in the examples from published writers were flagged with phrases like, “please be aware,” “please note,” and “guidelines advise against.” In addition to the aforementioned hick, hayseed, clodhopper, ridge runner, and towelhead, I was to omit, regardless of context, third world, homeless, white trash, whore, slut, slave, the Blacks, beaners and noble savages. Outlawed were Nazi, minstrel, blackface, homosexuals, boy, skinheads, dead animals, Rooskie, kike, spic, exotic and gumbo. Also Indians (cowboys and), dementia, shame, crazy, insane, ape, goddam moose, make love, fart, hell, goddam, screw up, asshole, along with some stronger expletives.
Clearly we were not going to start rewriting published pieces, which meant that where any words were unacceptable, the whole example must be dropped. An essay by David Sedaris was disallowed because its joke rested on a pun, as an airline hostess walks down the aisles with a plastic bag, saying, “’Your trash. You’re trash. Your family’s trash.’” A short story by George Saunders, “Victory Lap,” because in part it takes the point of view of a kidnapper; a story by Angela Carter, “The Werewolf,” that is a grim retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story; a single line by Allen Ginsberg because four skinheads are hanging around in it; a play by David Ives, The Philadelphia, because it makes repeated fun of Philadelphia; a story by the late Scott Blackwood, “One of Us is Hidden Away,” because it deals with a very young pregnant girl; a poem by Maxine Kumin, “Woodchucks,” because it compares the gassing of the rodents’ underground burrows to the Holocaust; a poem by Erin Belieu, “Love Is Not an Emergency,” because it speaks casually of serial sex; a play by Joe DiPietro, Executive Dance, because in it two men dance together in satirical representation of corporate culture; a short story by Edith Pearlman, “Self-Reliance,” because it ends with a suicide.
The “becauses” in these statements represent my own interpretation of the careful notes of the development editor. A few of the pieces mentioned I argued for and saved. Many more were dropped. And the humor quotient of the whole book was lowered, because humor habitually pushes the social envelope.
Of course, some would have to be dropped in any case, to make room for the diversity I was seeking. But many of my choices were made, perforce, in response to the sensitivity reading. Worse, I began to self-censor as I read. Slurs, I had learned, were out of bounds no matter how central to the author’s experience, as were certain words and actions. So I began to anticipate the objections: They’ll never print those obscenities. This experience is too violent. That language is too crude. Nope, can’t have self-harm. Is that bullying?
There was, for example, a short story by Yoon Choi, from her debut collection Skinship, that was perhaps my favorite among the new authors I read. In this story, third-graders call each other names irrespective of their meanings, not knowing the difference between an ethnic slur and a “nerd” or “dweeb” (the author does avoid the N-word). These words don’t really mean anything to the children and don’t really matter. But — fast forward to the protagonist’s adulthood — taking stock of the person she has become, she realizes that in fact the words mattered crucially, and that there was a turning point when their meaning, and her choice, influenced her essential self.
I made no move to include this story. Again, although the author was young, female, Asian, and eloquent; although the story’s central and powerfully made point was that it matters what words we use for one another, I would never be allowed to include it, for its very use of those words. It would not be “appropriate for my audience.”
The stricture against suicide was a particular problem for me. I was told that mention of it might be “triggering for some.” I objected that, as the mother of a son who came back from Iraq and took his own life, the term “triggering” is especially triggering for me. I grew up in a family where suicide was too sinful to mention, since it was against God’s will. Now I am unwilling to hide either the circumstances of Tim’s death or my grief and anger at the war machine in which he was caught. More than 16 veterans kill themselves every day. Do we think no students must deal with these deaths? Or with countless other instances of self-harm?
My editors were genuinely understanding of my position. Still, all the same, another example might be chosen here, no? This word “suicide” was not really necessary in this context, was it? And so forth.
Let me be clear: My editors are intelligent, well-intentioned people. The DEI director appeared congenially responsive, and asked me to meet with her team to present the perspective of imaginative writers (a meeting, however, that never materialized). Some of these people may have felt caught in the same contradictions in which I found myself. No doubt the company itself feels trapped in political crosswinds, not to mention shareholder demands.
Nor was I a hero (don’t say “heroine!”) in any of this. Salman Rushdie, as far back as 1996, warned the American Society of Newspaper Editors that “citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizens’ opinions.” But I pussyfooted. I want this book in print. Though I might once have hoped that my novels would change the world, I have come to terms with the fact that my two writing texts have had more impact than all my fiction put together. I have frequent evidence, by mail and on social media, that these books have been important to young and not-so-young beginning (and not-so-beginning) writers. Nor would some grand gesture on my part keep the books out of print. Standard textbook contracts are written to say that the author must produce a revision when asked to do so, or the book will be passed on to another reviser who will get some, and then most, and then all of the royalties. And would presumably follow the rules more docilely than I. So I argued, reasoned, wrote impassioned emails, and then sometimes I caved.
The most disturbing education the revision process offered may be my own.
Only once did I dig my heels in without any bargaining. Fairly late in the revising process, I was “invited” to peruse a “mandatory online orientation module,” sent round to codify “For Content Partners” (writers) “the company’s principles of diversity, equity and inclusion,” so as to ensure that they “develop high quality content that inspires, excites, and is reflective of the many different individuals and communities we serve on their learning journeys.” This is the kind of language that blurs my vision and which would lower the grade of any story, essay, poem or play written by one of my students.
The “mandatory” part of this “module” was that “content providers” should sign an agreement that, to my mind, required me to agree in the name of “policy” with the company’s imaginative choices. I said that I could not sign off on the module, which I considered tantamount to a nondisclosure agreement. As soon as I said this, I was told that it would not be necessary after all.
After a year and a half of often-distressing work, I am proud of this book, pleased and somewhat surprised to see how many potentially “disturbing” examples of imaginative writing it still contains. It also occurs to me that the most disturbing education it offers may be my own.
The period in which I was revamping my text, at the peak of sensitivity training and diversity statements, also coincided with nationwide threats to the autonomy of libraries and schools. New repressive educational policies in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and other red states were kept vague for the purpose of worrying teachers about what they were allowed to say. One teacher in Minnesota was fired for showing her class a picture of Muhammad (insensitive to Muslim students), and another in Florida for showing a picture of Michelangelo’s “David” (pornography). The warring factions give credence to the “horseshoe” theory of American politics, that at extreme right and extreme left, policies bend toward each other.
This is not to say that the purposes or the methods of silencing were similar. Ron DeSantis rose on the extreme-right trifecta anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and anti-education. He began with the homophobic “Don’t Say Gay” bill and took on the Disney juggernaut when that company balked; he passed with the help of a docile legislature a law against abortion after six weeks; he banned gender-affirming care for minors; he loosened anti-gun laws and backs the stand-your-ground code; he set up a commission to screen social-studies textbooks (which rejected 82 out of 101 and set about rewriting them); he backed the censoring of LGBTQ+ books in schools and libraries; he restricted the very mention of LGBTQ+ in classes up to the third grade, and later up to early puberty. At one point, a parents’ group targeted the picture book And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins who raise a chick.
In any case, the encroachment of legislatures on academic freedom has been going on since Ron DeSantis was a glint in his father’s eye. Its justification is, at bottom, value for money. When I arrived at Florida State University in 1972, the legislature was the main source of the universities’ funding. (The football team, pre-Bobby Bowden, was losing.) Over the years, the state funding diminished as the football rankings improved, and legislative oversight increased. We became familiar with the corporate vocabulary of mission statements, appropriations, learning objectives and outcomes. By the time I retired, most undergraduate classes were taught by jobbing “adjuncts,” and the business school grew fat as the humanities starved.
Now, when DeSantis moved on higher education, he moved to cut off the head. He stocked the board of the New College of Florida with right-wingers (who fired the president), defunded diversity programs in state colleges, declared professorial speech subject to the laws of the state, and moved to weaken tenure.
DeSantis has famously declared Florida to be the place “where woke goes to die.” The concept of wokeness, which Thoreau called “being wide awake,” posits intense receptivity to life and language. “Moral reform,” in Thoreau’s words, “is the effort to throw off sleep,” to “live deliberately.” The current use of the term “woke,” which came out of Black slang, refers like Thoreau’s “awakening” to an alert and full awareness of one’s place in the world, society, and history. “Woke” is “awakened” in Ebonics, as the governor’s followers are all too aware.
So the lawmakers also found it crucial to move against Black scholarship, introducing legislation to prevent courses from covering the national history of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. One dictum forbids any instruction that suggests: “A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously. … ” It occurs to me that the banning of these ideas cuts off a central question we need to explore in higher education: Why does bigotry persist? To what degree is it in our DNA, and to what degree is it learned? How could we tackle each of these destructive possibilities?
The governor has never been modest about his kingly ambitions. His memoir The Courage to Be Free is subtitled Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. Courage! Freedom! Florida! Blueprint! America! Revival! What’s not to like? The placement of “Revival” in this title is a dog-whistle shout-out to evangelical Christians, the constituency that Trump has so successfully cultivated, and which is crucial to any run for the presidency.
Roughly speaking, contemporary censorship from the right is mainly of parental or institutional origin, concerns race or sex, and is focused on grades K through 12. From the left, it is therapeutic and advocacy-generated, concerns the “triggering” of negative feelings, and is aimed at higher education. The danger of the right is dictatorship, of the left, self-righteousness. But the banning of books and language is anti-democratic whether it comes from the fragile left or the power-grabbing right.
If, as textbook publishers and writers, we want to hear from people of all races, ethnicities, and genders, and if their experience includes some of the dramatic or traumatic experiences people face, which may include, even apart from slurs, alcoholism, abuse, abandonment, or suicide, how can we excise those experiences from literature, and to what end? If, intending to expand examples from BIPOC writers of imaginative literature, we nevertheless insist on omitting their experience of expletives, racism, and violence, we silence the very people we have claimed to represent. The same can be said of the experience of some LGBTQ+ writers. We insist on their inclusion but lop off important parts of their truth — sex, love, rejection, violence, despair — in the interests of classroom comfort. Doing so defeats our expressed purpose, implying shame in place of acceptance. Promulgating such censorship, we become racist and homophobic.
As I sit in my condo in Chicago turning over these ideas, a thousand miles from the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, Fla. — a city where I lived and taught for 30 years — I don’t want to suggest that I think there is equal danger to free expression in the laws of the right and the pressures from the left. On the contrary, where the goal is power, including money, censorship becomes one more maneuver in the playbook of white supremacy.
The strictures of the left are more tentative and more benign. They are strictures, nevertheless.
