Early last week (Back off; I have a full-time job and it takes me a while to get going on stuff) I stumbled across a Tweet from someone named Hannah, stating her disappointment with a literary magazine for publishing an interview that was “hurtful on a lot of levels.”
Because I used to watch Jerry Springer faithfully every afternoon, I clicked on the link she included. The interview was of a former Iowa Writers Workshop alum named Alex Perez and the interviewer was Elizabeth Ellen, the editor of Hobart. I read the interview. From beginning to end. It was long. The questions were long.
Here’s the thing.
I knew, before I even clicked on the link, that the interview was going to be “hurtful on a lot of levels” because it was going to say something contrary to progressive Twitter culture. I just knew it. I knew it wasn’t going to be a Cuban-American writer ranting about how much America sucks, or how much all cops are bastards. I knew it was going to be some combination of: a) anti-woke b) anti-feminist or c) trans women aren’t women. I hardly needed to read the interview. But I did.
For the record. Alex Perez. That boy said some. Ill. Stuff.
Dayum.
But he also said some things that needed to be said. Such as the fact that the literary world is another hyper-educated subculture that (like journalism) refuses to sincerely address its class issues. They sidestep by focusing on race and gender. The fact that many publishing houses and agencies (to their undying credit) make a concerted effort to hire women and people of color, but somehow only seem to find those women and people of color in the halls of Princeton, Colombia, Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, or Duke; that many of those women and POC come from privileged, upper-middle-class backgrounds from all over the country, and settle into an eco-system that used to be in Manhattan but has shifted in recent years to sections of Brooklyn (Carroll Gardens, Prospect Park, DUMBO). Among themselves, they circulate all their luxury beliefs and those beliefs provide a critical lens through which they gatekeep the type of fiction and poetry they wish to share with the world. Magazines, like the New Yorker, newspapers, like The New York Times, and publishing houses, like Simon & Schuster, speak often about how they want to “diversify” their staff. Really? So how many employees have they hired that attended community colleges? Outlets like this will rightly shudder at the offensive assumption that hiring a POC means you didn’t hire “the best candidate,” but have no problems assuming a candidate who did two years at a community college or a relatively unknown state school is not among the “best candidates.”
But Alex Perez was mean and nasty about it. Which means he was mean and nasty to women. Which means he can be entirely ignored because misogyny.
People smarter and more embedded in the media industry have made this point before, but it’s worth noting that the hiring practices at media outlets may not be naked and deliberate. It’s not necessarily that hiring managers at Harper’s or The New Yorker are holding a resume that says “community college” at the very corner of the paper and dumping it with disgust into the trash bin. More often than not, what’s really happening is that entry-level jobs and internships at media outlets are so low-paying (or no-paying), that only college grads with home support, trust funds, or discretionary income can afford to take the job. This situation creates a cycle of privileged candidates with the independent means to make coffee and read the slush pile for peanuts while living in the most expensive city in America. They work hard, put their nose to the grindstone and work their way up the ladder as the next cycle of independently wealthy college grads fills in behind them.
I would like to think what I am saying here, and how I’m saying it, is not controversial. Meaning it won’t garner the same vitriol and disgust that Alex Perez’s interview garnered. A couple weeks after the interview dropped, writers who published with Hobart were reaching out to remove their work from the magazine’s archives. Writers who were still waiting to hear back about their submissions, withdrew their submissions before a decision was made. And, in a stunning display of overreaction, more than four editors for the magazine resigned in protest. Many people have made it a point to note that the editors were unpaid for their work, but I don’t see why that even matters.
The larger issue is what the interview, and the fallout, says about the state or our literary world, which feels lately like it’s been hijacked by people seeking to turn fiction and poetry into a large-scale therapy session. Literary magazines are turning into counseling brochures, and the editors of those literary magazines are de facto counselors adhering to some sort of odd Hippocratic oath. Recently I gave a fiction reading at a large private university, and every writer who went up to the podium before me issued a trigger-warning before reading their piece.
If this sounds hyperbolic, just think of what has actually transpired here at Hobart. Assume, for a moment, the position that Perez’s comments were misogynist and regressive. I’ll admit, there are moments in the interview where Perez does seem to wish things went back to when goils were goils and men were men. (Mister, we can use a man like Herbert Hoover again). The editors read this interview, an interview which they reportedly had no involvement in conducting or publishing, and decided that it was so harmful to the “group,” that they all needed to take their talents elsewhere. Additionally, in their resignation letter, they stated their intention to create a new space with different editorial policies to “prevent any similar act from occurring again.”
Now if that doesn’t sound like a Thursday night support group, I don’t know what does. This problem is not limited to a handful of editors at a relatively obscure litmag, either. A similar dustup at Poetry magazine, the leading magazine for up-and-coming poets, led to the resignation of the editor and the removal of an “offensive” poem from the magazine’s archives. The only reason a similar move wasn’t made here at Hobart is because the editorial structure of the magazine is designed in such a way that Elizabeth Ellen’s removal (and the removal of the piece) wasn’t possible. A structure, as I mentioned before, the resigning editors plan to remedy in their next go around.
The issues seems clear to me. If you’re involved in the arts, and you’re serious about serious art, you are bound, at some point in your career, to offend somebody. How many hundreds of thousands of people were offended by the homosexual imagery in Allen Ginsberg’s poetry? How many Catholics in New York City and elsewhere were offended by “Piss Christ?”. Even some liberals were offended by the artists who mocked Donald Trump with an unflattering statue. The platforms that publish art need to be willing to risk such offenses, or “harms” as is the parlance of our times. A literary magazine (particularly an online one) is a big tent. It should platform work that moves us, makes us think, leads us to the way out, maybe even comes across as a little punk rock, a little rebellious. What the editors who left Hobart have signaled is that they wish to run a homogenous literary magazine, where only interviews, fiction and poetry that reflects their worldview is worthy of publication, otherwise they risk causing harm.
Perhaps these editors would be better social workers, counselors, political activists, and clinical psychologists. That seems a job description much more fitting to what they wish to accomplish than what they’re seeking inside the literary world. We should not be seeking safety in literature. We should not be seeking comfort in poetry. We should not be seeking affirmation, or healing, in fiction. If, in some cases, a person finds those things in literature, that’s wonderful. But I don’t see it as the principal job of literature. And any editor who does think it’s their job to uplift some voices, oppress others, avoid harm at any cost, is not being a steward of literature. They’re working toward its ruin. They’re hastening its diminishing purpose in society. And, in that case, I’m sort of glad to see them resign.