The Risk Taking Marginalized Writer
Take risks!
Be bold!
These are currently some of the writing advice phrases du jour. I see them everywhere. Lengthy essays about how powerful writing from the standpoint of the personal being political is, how freeing it is to be authentic and risk taking in your choice of subject matter.
It is not terrible advice.
However, there are layers to this that never get addressed.
What about marginalized writers?
Often in the rush to sell me workshops that I simply must attend, magical books to teach me to be vulnerable in my writing, seminars on being authentic in my work there is no inkling that this is what many POC writers, especially Black writers do constantly.
For me as a writer the ideas that I see most frequently as being the risks we writers face, are really nothing. Failure? Sure, I’ll take it. Rejection? Yeah, okay I can paper my walls with it. Risking being emotionally naked? Yeah, look at the ass of my feelings.
What is lacking is space for the uglier risks that many of us face.
Stalking, harassment, doxxing. Deciding if my new piece that has any inkling that I am saying no to Whiteness is worth having to spend hours wading through the messages, comments and emails from White people correcting me. How do we make peace with the fact that for many of us, being authentic means we are not welcome in the greater literary community?
There is a huge gap in spaces that are safe for marginalized people to talk about these things, and there we find another layer of risk. Another layer of vulnerability that we often have to deal with alone or in silence because it doesn’t fit the current narrative of risk taking in writing, nor are many of the people who teach this, qualified to speak on it in the context of marginalized people. Especially People of Color.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, especially since returning from AWP and it being workshop selling season. I personally am deeply privileged in that I have a small circle of other POC/marginalized writers and we can talk about these things openly. After experiencing solidarity with other creators this way, watching the wider lit world be completely without it bothers me.
On one hand, I would really like to see the conversations about what the risks we take mean in the context of things like publishing opportunities, not silencing ourselves when our authenticity is read as aggression or as being pro censorship etc. On the other hand, I don’t trust the lit world to do this with any measure of respect. I don’t trust the greater literary community.
Given my own experiences talking about racism in the industry, participating in making a showing that some aggressions won’t be tolerated, even in just writing the stuff I want to write- my trust is pretty broken. I have no faith that the experience I have talking about these issues with other folks who go through them would survive being opened up to the greater literary world.
And that is a shame.
In my dream literary world, the recognition of the need to redefine and open up the opportunities for folks to be guest speakers in workshops, to give talks. To add their own narratives to the dominant method of advising writers to take risks and be bold.
In that world, through these openings we could start to deal with the things that can keep marginalized people from taking these risks, or being vulnerable and bold in their work.
Here’s hoping.
