It was a dreamy writers workshop, one that few get to go to, in the legendary ‘heart of the arts’ Black mountains of North Carolina. Impossibly cutesy-looking black bears were running loose around campus, triggering alternate and equal parts panic and squealing excitement. The serious-minded but brief torrential showers cooled off the wooded setting and generated more squeals—also equal parts panicked and excited—in the unwary who got caught in the torrents without umbrellas or raincoats. Everywhere, writers were reading, reciting, chanting, listening, thinking, planning, dreaming. Heaven.
And yet, in the midst of this creative idyll, how did this girl get tarred brown again?
Because I said something in a Zoom workshop that the leader didn’t consider important or worth engaging with. And in case I continued to be a gadfly, she made her rejection of my participation very unmistakable. She said, in no uncertain terms, that I was ‘bogging the group down’ in a consideration of pronouns, when the really important craft elements were clearly going over my head.
Pause.
I am a University professor. I have written three scholarly works of fine reputation, many journal articles in reputable venues, a novel, and short stories which have won prizes and been nominated for a Pushcart prize. I also think (of course, I could be very wrong, and so please see my invitation at the end of this piece) that I am a respectful person in general, and want, in general, people to get along and help each other.
How then did I become a ‘bog’?
And how this fate worse than death for saying that the writer we were critiquing that day needed to make her pronoun references less ‘mysterious’ before one could begin to appreciate and sink into the ‘mystery’ story that her novel aimed to be?
But wait, that’s not all I can’t understand. Then, a fellow student, possibly emboldened by the workshop leader, jumped to the ‘defense’ of our ‘Broken Blossom’ colleague so boorishly interrogated on pronoun usage, though she had not seemed so frail the day before, when she critiqued my work a bit…oh I don’t know…warmly negatively. I was informed in the Zoom Chat by her champion and defender that she’d read Broken Blossom’s work before, and could vouch for how amazingly better and compelling it had become. In vain, my reply in Chat, that I was raising the impossibly humble subject of pronouns because it was not so minor if understanding who is doing what to whom when and where was important in writing stories.
No expectedly pacified response or even acknowledgment to my saying so in the Chat, though, from Defender of Broken Blossom! Sigh.
What gives?
Brown Straw Girl. Is what.
I’d been made the typical straw man/girl, in that I was charged with saying something I hadn’t said, then scolded for it, and then asked to defend myself for what I hadn’t said.
Well, I didn’t leave the workshop. First, because it would be unprofessional, and second, because I needed the time and space it offered, as long as I stayed out of sight and hearing, to ponder what kid of disrespect I’d shown to receive such disrespect myself.
Anyone has an answer for me, please write back to me here; I would sincerely like to hear from you!!!