I read the day’s news this morning—mostly horrors, of course. Shootings, nightmares, violence against those who can’t fight back, various forms of collapse—then I washed a few dishes, thought how grateful I am to have running water, made a second cup of coffee and sent out a link to a story which I love…
After I hit “send”, I started to wonder if some of you would prefer a trigger warning.
Here goes.
Warning: illness, violence, shooting, domestic violence, police, food shortages, children in peril...
It’s all there.
I’m conflicted. I have no desire to do anyone harm. At the same time, I’m with Kafka when he said we need stories like an axe for the frozen sea inside us…
Writing and reading is so much about navigating emotion. Surprise is a part of the package.
Once I assigned a college class a somewhat autobiographical story called “River of Names,” by Dorothy Allison. It’s an amazing story, written early in the author’s career. One student in particular cried for hours, afterward. She complained, loudly. The class was hijacked by a discussion of trigger warnings. The student upstaged the award-winning author’s work. We never discussed the story, at all. Ultimately, I made the difficult choice to take Dorothy Allison’s work off my syllabi, into the future.
Basically, students were engaging in book-banning lite…
I hate to say it, because those events feed into certain conservative ideas about higher education, while for the most part college and teaching college is awesome, but that round, it happened.
Dorothy Allison grew up going through the school of hard knocks, to put it lightly. Her stories come out of her life experience. To suppress her words is to ignore the existence of her, and others like her.
As Allison herself writes:
Understand me.
What I am here for is to tell you stories that you may not want to hear.
What I am here for is to rescue my dead.
And to scare hell out of you now and then.
I was raised Baptist, I know how to do that.
Students were resisting reading the words of a self-proclaimed, “cross-eyed, working-class lesbian addicted to violence, language and hope…”
Still, I respect those who would prefer trigger warnings, for reasons of their own. We’re all fragile and have our struggles.
These are hard waters to navigate. Literature thrives on conflict and often is exactly the right terrain for considering darker corners of the psyche.
What is drama without tension? Good writing can be such an antidote to the daily news, to the false placidity of an anchor person or a journalist’s direct, bland delivery of horror…
Did any of you happen to see the Booker Prize judge who laughed at the idea of working-class people participating in a book group? I believe she was also laughing at the idea that a man was in the book club…it wasn’t entirely clear, but she seemed to find it amusing that a “dinner lady” and a man were among book club members. This judge, I would say, would do well to read more working-class authors. Dorothy Allison might be a fine starting place. These are the stories of real lives, and writing is in no way only for some elite demographic.
Anyway, apologies for anyone who read the story and was caught off guard. Trigger warnings will remain my weakness: I don’t always know where or when they’re needed. So many of my favorite stories, life-changing stories, stories that actually come around to a place of hope and vision, start with a maze of anxiety and twisted, dark corners…
The one thing I can say, though, is that nothing I send, nothing I suggest, share or assign will ever rest in the gratuitous.
Take care of yourself!
With all best wishes,
M
When I started writing, it was in the workshop that would come to be known as Dangerous Writing. "Dangerous" could mean so many things, including the work Chuck Palahniuk came to write, but also interpersonal and confessional....writing in any direction which moves *away* from conformity and the status quo is all dangerous, on one level or another, perhaps mostly for the author, the beating heart, the shaking hands holding a sheaf of pages, a voice hoping to be heard. I think somebody could probably come up with a conference panel proposal called Dangerous Writing in Safe Spaces: How Risk and Revelations Interface with Academic Culture, Author and Audience. There's room for so many questions--or at least I have questions....what came to concern me, in my job as a professor, was how often voices of the historically marginalized ended up in the pool of content requiring trigger warnings, while standard violence, the kind we've all become accustomed to, was blasted through mass media, fully normalized...but I don't want to speak too strongly to any of this because I'm always still sorting it out, flexible and listening.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-if-trigger-warnings-dont-work