"Believing in Literature," by Dorothy Allison

[lb_lee]

Rogan: In Skin, Dorothy Allison has a number of essays about her belief in the power of fiction, story, and writing. She taught writing, and in "Believing in Literature," some of this really got us thinking! For instance, she talks about how, in her classes, she would encourage her students to pick out stories they considered unequivocally "good" or "bad," and towards the end of the class to bring in the BEST and the WORST story they'd ever read:

In one of my most extraordinary classes the exercise worked better than I had hoped when one of the women brought in a "best" selection that was another woman's choice for "worst[,]" [...] a painful but beautifully written account of female survival after rape in a wilderness setting. It was bad, said my student, because of how well-written and carefully done it was. It stayed in her mind, disturbed her, made her nervous and unhappy every time she went into the woods. She didn't want those ideas in her head, had enough violence and struggle in her life, enough bad thoughts to confront all the time. I understood exactly what she was saying. She was, after all, a lesbian-feminist activist of my generation, and both of us were familiar with the kind of feminist literary criticism that supported her response to the story. But many of the students were younger and frankly confused.

[...]We had agreed that essentially judgments about fiction are subjective--mine as well as my students'. But the storyteller seized up inside me. I thought of my stories, my characters, the albino child I murdered in "Gospel Song," the gay man who kills his lover in "Interesting Death," the little girl who tries to seduce her uncle in "Private Rituals." Bad characters, bad acts, bad thoughts--as well-written as I can make them because I was my people to be believable, my stories to haunt and obsess my readers. [...] It is a completely amoral writer's lust, and I know that the author of that "bad" story felt it too. We all do, and if we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments.

Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief of the reader?

This is the most elegant explication of the sorta creative breakdown I had in 2021 when I locked everything up, that sort of hovering, nebulous fear that my fiction would harm someone. (Nonfiction, perversely, was easier--it wasn't hard to guess EXACTLY what damage Cultiples could do, and how to do my best to mitigate it. Fiction was so nebulous--I could never be sure who it'd harm or how, which meant it could be EVERYONE and EVERYTHING.) It's such a relief to see this so elegantly laid out by a woman I've never met thirty years ago.

Me and Mori ended up doing the good/bad exercise at home, which spurred a huge conversation about what good/bad meant (and what our goals with our writing were). We realized that the "very good" books we chose were ones that fit into traditional genre and publishing conventions. It was far easier to be able to go, "Oh yeah, Stardance is good, Chrome is terrible AND I LOVE IT." But is the Walking Boy good? (I'm inclined to say yes, but I feel like I need to experience it a few times before I have a firm grip on it; it's one of those books.) Is The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions good? (I truly have no idea.) I love all those books, but "good" and "beloved" are very different.

Once in a while one of my students will ask me, "Why have there been no great lesbian novels?" [...] Most often I simply disagree and offer a list of what I believe to be good lesbian writing. It is remarkable to me that as soon as I describe some wonderful story being by a lesbian, there is always someone who wants to argue whether the individual involved really deserves that label. I no longer participate in this pointless argument. I feel that as a lesbian I have a perfect right to identify some writing as lesbian regardless of whether the academy or contemporary political theorists would agree with me.

Some things never change, alas.

What I find much more interesting is that so many of my gay and lesbian and feminist students are unaware of their own community's history. They may have read Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, On Our Backs, or various 'zines, and joke about any magazine that could publish such trivial fiction, believing the magazines contemptible because they do not edit badly written polemics and true confessions. But few of them know anything about the ideology that made many of us in the 1970s abandon the existing literature criterion to create our own.

We believed that editing itself was a political act, and we questioned what was silenced when raw and rough work by women outside the accepted literary canon was rewritten or edited in such a way that the authentic voices were erased. My students have no sense of how important it was to let real women tell their stories in their own words. I try to explain, drawing their attention to ethnographies and oral histories, techniques that reveal what is so rarely shown in traditional edited fiction--powerful, unusual voices not recognized by the mainstream. I tell them how much could not be published or even written before the creation of the queer and lesbian presses with honored that politic. [...] I make it personal and tell them bluntly that I would never have begun to write anything of worth without the example of those presses and magazines reassuring me that my life, and my family's life, was a fit subject for literature.

I feel this so much as I've watched more plural writing come out of the ether, but also on a queer level. Like, looking at my shelf, I have a lot of queer books... and they're OVERWHELMINGLY small or self-published. Quite a few of them are small queer/feminist/anarchist/etc. presses that have since gone down (RIP Alyson, Gay Sunshine, Firebrand, Contagion...), a couple still exist though possibly bought out by larger companies (the Crossing Press, Cleis), and a lot are bootleg print-outs I made from creator's digital-only work. The biggest publisher any of these people came from is Routledge (Baby, You are My Religion) Image Comics (SFSX) and Arsenal Pulp (the Walking Boy and Oracle Bone). I've read a lot of newer queer books that came from larger publishers, like Del Rey and Tor, but not a damn one of them has managed to stay on my shelf, apparently! How come?

Part of it might be just that we're old-fashioned. We like reading older books, I guess, and older queer books tended to come from small presses. But I feel like there's also a case that the smaller presses often have rougher, weirder work that sticks with us better. (The Book of Autonomancy is my favorite DID book.)

Comments

[minoanmiss]

contemplates

[buttonsbeadslace]

Absolutely fascinating the different ways people define a good book or a bad book. The first title that jumps into my mind whenever someone asks me for the best book I've ever read (including when I was reading the first few lines of this post) is also hands-down the book that emotionally messed me up the most. (The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald.) It's the best to me largely because it was able to affect me like that. It's not the book I would most recommend other people to read, it's not the book with the most important message, but it's the "best" because it's skillfully written in a way that I could not help but be swept up in it.

[lb_lee]

Mori: Yeah, we restricted ourself to "best books in our fiction prose shelf" to avoid the, "Well, we don't actually LIKE any of these books or writers, but they are very well made and we feel obligated to note them the best" thing. There's a very big difference between books we LIKE and books that are GOOD, but just for convenience, we tried to stick with the intersection of the Venn Diagram, since aspiring to write Amazing Works of Literature that we give zero shits about... isn't something we want or should do.

[acorn_squash]

I miss Firebrand Books so much.

I love Arsenal! They're my favorite indie press. Please tell me you& have read Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's books.

[lb_lee]

So many queer publishers, just GONE. And because they were small publishers, not much of their work ends up in libraries either... T_T

We have not! Tell us about them!

[acorn_squash]

They're a Disability Justice activist and a queer, sick, Mad, autistic femme of color! Also one of my favorite writers :D She writes essays and poetry and does performance art. Their most recent book was The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs (published 2022, focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic). My other favorite books from them are Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (essay collection, spans at least 10 years of work) and Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (memoir). All three were published by Arsenal Pulp Press and are popular enough that they should be available at public libraries. There's also a lot of things online.

I have content warnings for Dirty River, but I wrote them in my copy and then lent the copy to a friend, so I don't have them handy right now - the short version is that you'd probably prefer The Future Is Disabled. I did think you might be interested in a few quotes I pulled, though. They're non-graphic but discuss incest and dissociation.

But what if I was just born fucked up? What if, as my mom had said, some kids are just born this way, born oversensitive, born crazy, full of storm-cloud child rages and open treetop, head-ripped lightning? Just born this way, and I was making this up as a convenient excuse for all my weaknesses.

You want there to be a video in the attic of the abuse. You hit play and it’s all there, signed and dated. You’d know.

It doesn’t happen that way. But even if you were crazy little when whatever went down did, it’s everywhere, in the breath of air behind the windows in your house that your mama won’t let you open.

(Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, page 51, "5. Some Notes about the Going Away: or, You Are a Twenty-Two-Year-Old Brown Slutty Girl Who Thinks Maybe You’re an Incest Survivor Reading The Courage to Heal Standing Up in the Bookstore")

Sometimes the selves I am shift like digits over my skin. This ain't academic, though the academic has corrupted the language I could use to say what I'm trying to. Chameleon, I'll still become anyone you want me to be. Is this real or illusion? What's real, when there is no before the abuse for me since it started so young? You know that as a femme what you are is not fake but it is profoundly made up.⁴

(“gonna get my girl body back: this is a work in progress,” collected in the anthology Brazen Femme - the footnote (4) is: Amber Hollibaugh, in an interview with the author, “Gender Warriors,” anthologized in My Dangerous Desires (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).)

In two years of working off-the-books jobs, being an activist in subpoverty, I get way too skinny, don't leave my house for days as I rock my kids and move through my scars.

(“gonna get my girl body back: this is a work in progress,” collected in the anthology Brazen Femme)

^^This is one of several references to kids (probably inner kids; they don't have external children) in the Brazen Femme essay - not sure she's talked about it publicly anywhere else