The Arts Have Been Captured

It’s up to artists to lead the way out. (Plus, an announcement.)

Photo by Kim Vladislav on Unsplash

This week, a scandal rocked what’s left of the literary world. Guernica, a long-respected journal, bowed to pressure from its all-volunteer staff and on Monday retracted an essay it had published on March 4 (an archived version can be found here). “From the Edges of a Broken World,” written by Joanna Chen, a British-born Israeli who works as a translator of Hebrew and Arabic literature and for years has driven Palestinian children from the West Bank into Israel for medical care, describes a torrent of conflicted emotions in the aftermath of October 7.

It’s a beautiful and textured piece of writing that does what literature is supposed to do: it wrestles with moral ambiguity and personal confusion while maintaining a baseline humanity. As I see it, the confusion is the humanity. To be torn apart—or, as Chen writes, to try to “tread the line of empathy”—is what it is to be alive. At least that’s a lesson I’ve gleaned from a life of reading. 

But over on the hellscape formerly known as Twitter, some people were determined to impart a different lesson. Within days of publication, a social media firestorm had ignited in classic fashion. That is to say, it combined reflexive sanctimony and recitations of tribalist loyalty with performative outrage directed less at the subject at hand (indeed, most people appeared not to have read the piece) than at an audience of real or imagined peers who are thought to account for some critical mass of right-thinking intelligentsia. 

Many of the vilest tweets have now been either deleted or blocked from the prying eyes of genocidal moderates like myself. But this was the gist: 

Madhuri Sastry, who was among the magazine’s “publishers,” whatever that means, boasted in her resignation post that she had prevented an earlier essay of Chen’s from being published in “Voices of Palestine,” a compilation that, as was later pointed out by The Atlantic, contained an interview with writer Alice Walker, whose anti-Semitic positions are not unknown to the public. Another editor said that publishing the essay made Guernica “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.” 

The journal’s retraction of the essay was accompanied by a simple statement: “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.” As of this writing, that explanation is still forthcoming. Also unknown is whether the word “fulsome” was employed with knowledge of its actual meaning, though there’s been speculation that it will turn out to be the most appropriate word possible, given the stylistic conventions of the Promise-to-Do-Better genre. 

But as maddening as the whole episode has been, the words that best describe these sorts of machinations are, well: standard operating procedure.

Literature, and the arts more broadly, is supposed to serve as a vehicle for the aesthetic manifestation of ideas. Now, however, it is more often than not a delivery mechanism for simplistic notions about social justice. I’m tempted to call it a form of idea laundering, given the way it takes muddily reasoned talking points and passes them off as legitimate artistic expression.

But the truth is, no one is being fooled. Everyone knows the deal. With some exceptions (and there are exceptions—for instance, Chen’s essay), the relationship between author and reader has devolved into an unholy and codependent alliance between a terminal narcissist and a boundaryless empath. The narcissist controls the narrative, no matter how wrongheaded or self-indulgent, and the empath laps it up unquestioningly. Any author who diverts from that role by presenting something too complex to be swallowed in one gulp risks punishment for wrongthink. (And, yes, most authors are narcissists in one way or another. It’s part of our charm.)

In the fall of 2022, in the wake of another literary scandal, I wrote about the glut of MFA programs (Poets & Writers magazine lists 259) and the way the pursuit of creative writing has become largely a pursuit of entry into a certain social class. The Guernica eruption this week happens to coincide with the announcement of a project that I hope will plant the seeds of an alternative to the ideological lockstep that persists not just in MFA programs but in the countless private workshops and nonprofit community writing centers that have sprung up alongside them. 

Here’s the backstory. I’ve taught nonfiction writing in all of these capacities and have found talented students in each of them. But I’ve found even more students—including, and maybe even especially, the talented ones—who emerged from workshops with what I can only describe as creative battle wounds. Instead of receiving critiques on their work from classmates and instructors, students are subjected to indictments of their own morality. What matters is not whether a fictional character is well-crafted or a memoir is well-told but whether the author has the right to even invent such characters or recount such memories.

I hesitate to give examples since they are so egregious as to sound to the uninitiated like hyperbole. But believe me when I tell you that I can scarcely tally the number of students who report being effectively driven out of their workshops—in some cases their MFA program entirely—because they were deemed problematic for writing characters whose identity categories did not match theirs, telling personal stories that “centered” their own privileged identity, or just generally not having the approved taste in reading. (Roth, Nabokov, Cheever and the like are no longer allowed.) They described classrooms that felt like minefields; the slightest misstep, either on the page or in verbal feedback, could result in social exile or even a complaint to some authoritative body. 

I don’t doubt these reports for a second. As a teacher in writing programs at Columbia and the University of Iowa, students routinely visited me during office hours, asked to close the door behind them, and proceeded to tell me, often in hushed tones, what they really wanted to write about but wouldn’t dare to for fear of censure from their peers. This was heartbreaking since the projects they described were not only more interesting than what they were submitting but utterly unobjectionable by any reasonable (which is to say, pre-2014) standard. Also heartbreaking was that faculty were strongly advised not to meet with students behind closed doors, lest we put ourselves at risk for any number of life-ruining accusations. I quickly figured out an unobtrusive way to get up and open the door in the middle of the conversation. 

What a devastating world this has become. We need to make art about it.

Is this even possible in the current climate? Don’t get me wrong. An MFA program can still offer tremendous value, depending on a number of factors—not least of all how much you have to pay for it. But as Leigh Stein pointed out on a recent episode of the podcast Blocked and Reported, they also are their own form of multilevel marketing scheme and, moreover, almost entirely captured by identity-obsessed groupthink. This is true of higher education across the board (as listeners of The Unspeakable have heard me bang on about endlessly). But while there are now efforts to create more heterodox educational institutions, the arts—especially the teaching of the arts—is sequestered in a holding pen of its own making. Everyone’s miserable, and no one seems able to imagine an alternative. Maybe because everyone’s imaginative impulses have been cut off at the knees.

This week, I’m making my own small offering toward an alternative. You may have heard me talk about how my project The Unspeakeasy, which endeavors to bring together freethinking women for honest conversations about complex issues, arose directly from my teaching experience. As one student after another came to my classes seeking a “safe space” (sorry to use that phrase, but sometimes you must) to explore stories and ideas, I saw just how desperate people were for intellectual and creative fellowship. This led me to build our online community and organize retreats. More recently, I put my own private workshop under The Unspeakeasy umbrella. 

But there is so much more out there to be offered. I know countless artists and other professionals who would teach with exquisite authenticity and integrity if given the chance. I know countless students who would jump at the chance to work with these professionals. And while I don’t have the infrastructure (yet) to build a bricks-and-mortar school, I can begin to assemble the brainpower for what I believe will be learning opportunities unlike any other. 

As such, I am hereby introducing The Unspeakeasy School of Thought.  

You can read more about us on The Unspeakeasy website, but the quick story is that we’re rolling out three courses to start. All on Zoom, there will be a fiction course taught by four-time novelist Caeli Widger, a screenwriting course taught by the prominent playwright and screenwriter Sam Wolfson, and a class that I’m almost certain has never been formally taught and that you won’t find anywhere else: Writing Your Cancellation Story, taught by the revered short-story writer and novelist Sherman Alexie. 

That one is not for everyone. (For your sake, I hope it’s not for you.) But as you’ll read in the course description, stories of professional and social exile, either large or small, are poised to become a genre unto themselves. When I got the idea for this class, I immediately thought of Sherman, a best-selling author and National Book Award winner who endured his own cancellation event several years ago. Would he think I was crazy if I approached him with the idea? I’m pretty sure he did think I was crazy. He also enthusiastically agreed to teach the class. Some very lucky people are about to become his students. 

Who knows where we’ll go from here? I envision not just writing workshops but courses in philosophy, literature, art and music history, even science and psychology. For now, though, I’m focusing on what I know, which is writing, and I am so proud to be working with these fine teachers. Lest there be any confusion, Unspeakeasy School of Thought courses are for everyone, not just women, and writers of all levels are encouraged to apply. 

End of announcement. And before I sign off, back to the Guernica incident for a moment. As dispiriting as it all is, it also offers hope. That’s because, even as its own editors and writers caved to zombie peer pressure, plenty of others said no, this won’t do. Several large media outlets, including The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, reported the story and named the cravenness for what it was. PEN America issued a statement saying, “a writer’s published work should not be yanked from circulation because it sparks public outcry or sharp disagreement.” That may be cold comfort for some, given the ideological track record of some of these institutions. Still, it suggests that a movement to abolish the thought police might be afoot, even if those feet are taking baby steps. 

Classes begin the week of April 15. The application deadline is April 1. The future looks fulsome.