It's hard to let go when you feel like an exile

The past few days have seen the sacking and pillaging of Hobart Pulp. I’m pretty sure all that is left are smoking ruins and one very pissed off white lady. I have long been public about my feelings on Hobart: specifically, how they suck and I will never submit to them and how I read my friends published there with some amount of hesitation and grief. I didn’t really anticipate how much this conflagration would hit me in my feels. I love drama on Twitter. I thought this would be a pleasant diversion. Instead, I am just so fucking sad. And I am so tired of writing about the same things over and over. So herewith a list of the things I think and feel, looking at the husk of Hobart from afar.

1) Burning things down sucks. In 2015, Claire Vaye Watkins broke Tin House’s website with a manifesto about the patriarchy that ended with, “Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better.” I had already helped burn down Alt Lit at this point in time and was probably in the process of burning down Coconut. And the essay was fine enough—yes, let’s burn down the patriarchy, sure why not—but it struck me as so naive. It still does. No one who has actually burned things down enjoys it. All kinds of people get hurt. There is collateral damage. It’s not too hard to look out across the sea of wreckage on Twitter to see HOW MANY editors, guest editors, and writers got hurt here.

1a) That Watkins manifesto goes after Stephen Elliott. And yet Hobart has BOTH of them in their list of fancy people they’ve published. Callouts are meaningless. Jesus fucking christ, help us find a way out of this shit.

2) Becky Tuch has been talking about unpublishing over at her Lit Mag News Round Up. She has a conversation planned with guests and one of them is Tim Green, the editor-in-chief of Rattle. Fucking Rattle! I am on board with the idea that unpublishing is bad. But Rattle goes beyond unpublishing and into platforming people who are just shitty. (Looking at you, Jay Sizemore.) I like Becky; I have met her in person and found her delightful and thoughtful. But I . . . dunno . . . who am I even talking to here? Just to myself? Just listing a lot fo links so I can feel like I’m not crazy?

3) Uncritically keeping work by known abusers on your platform is also bad. There is some middle-ground between unpublishing/de-platforming and just leaving everything up like a precious time capsule that cannot be touched. You can put a note on the piece. You can bury it by removing overt links to it. Fucking hell, you can take that writer’s name out of your brag list!

4) But just leaving bad people’s work online helps launder their reputation. Seeing Tao Lin’s name over and over across the internet—as I definitely do, still to this day—sends a signal that there’s nothing wrong, nothing to see, the scandal was just gossip. And I truly believe that there are bad people who gain access to more victims because they are well-published. The more their names are out there, the more attractive they become. And it functions like a kind of vetting: If this person is so well published and connected, they must be good. But no, they are not. Their reputations have been laundered by the good names of the publications they appear in. (“Good:” names.) This works especially well for targeting people new to the scene.

5) All of Hobart’s editors and writers who didn’t know are part of the laundering. Their good names have provided cover for bad people and their bad actions.

6) How did all these people not know? How? Please understand this is me keening, ripping out my hair, bleeding internally. If I search Facebook, I find MANY posts dating back YEARS pointing out the issues. And Facebook has a shitty search engine.

7) People didn’t know because they didn’t want to. They looked away. They thought it was gossip or the woke mob. Even people who don’t disparagingly use the word “woke’” think those of us pointing out the problems at Hobart were just an unthinking mob going along with it for internet clout.

8) People didn’t know because they saw the fancy names in the brag list on the about page and decided it was worth it to stay aligned.

9) The guest editors should have known, and also they were exploited. Literature is a whole giant system of exploitation. We’re all just using each other for prestige—not even fucking money! Just a good name. The good names of those guest editors further help launder the images of the bad people associated with the mag. And the guest editors sign on because the fight for jobs is huge, and any extra line on your CV is good. Or the guest editors sign on because they want to promote the work of excellent people. But then they find out they were building on a rotten foundation. They were window dressing to sell the house that was falling down.

10) Everyone wants to be part of the club. Or part of a club. It’s normal to want to belong. It’s unavoidable.

11) Clubs are just as much about who they keep out as who they let in. That’s the thing about boundaries: they keep some people in by leaving other people out.

12) HAD is so fucking clubby. So chummy. That vibe itself is kind of hard for me, makes me feel unwelcome before I even try.

13) Aaron Burch, who founded Hobart and runs HAD, finally broke away from Elizabeth Ellen and Hobart. I mean, good. But it took him so so so long. And then he used the popularity of that tweet to MARKET HIS OWN BOOK. I cannot with that shit. Oh my god.

14) Tweet-replies suggest that he is a great guy who has encouraged so many writers and done a lot of great stuff. But many of us know what Elizabeth Ellen wrote before, we know what she stands for, and we never felt welcome to even TRY to be part of his club because we did know and we can’t look away.

15) He built his good name and HAD’s good name on the back of Hobart, which provides sanctuary to shitty people and has for a long long time. Did he choose his good name, building his good name, over the safety of others?

16) Once you are inside the circle, it feels like belonging. But who gets there? And once they’re there, how are their names wielded against those who speak out? The cooler the circle, the harder for the people on the outside to sound like anything other than complainers. We sound like sour grapes.

17) Is the price of belonging the willingness to look away?

18) Aaron Burch says sorry and gets praised. Says the smallest kind of sorry and does the least possible and gets to feel supported and heroic. (Who knows how he feels. But certainly many are treating him as heroic.)

19) So many of us have been shouting and we feel like exiles. We have long felt like exiles. We have found no quarter or we have built our own quarters. We have been told we are doing too much. Call out bad behavior and get kicked out of the cool kids club. Reluctantly acknowledge the role you have played over years in enabling bad behavior and you are a hero. Victims are blamed for what their abusers did. But Burch, of course, cannot be held accountable for what Elizabeth Ellen did.

20) Look, honestly, sometimes I think people are doing too much. Some people out there are looking for reasons to cancel someone, to stoke drama. Mobs are bad. Being holier than thou is bad, I know.

21) I find it interesting that the discourse so quickly turned away from the misogynist/racist writer being interviewed to the editor, Elizabeth Ellen herself. Why is this the time that the umbrella of prestige blew inside out? Why is this the time Ellen found herself unprotected in the pouring rain?

22) Hobart has been publishing for a long time, and they published so many people. All those people have a reason to look away: to preserve their own successes. I suppose now preserving those successes means asking to have their work taken down and severing ties. To protect their good names.

23) This feels like the last time I burned things down. The more established the writer, the cooler they were, the more published they were, the less likely they were to support the victims asking for accountability. Most people protect themselves, their prestige and their accomplishments, over the safety and concerns of others.

24) Everybody has a different place where they draw the line. I’m not necessarily out here saying everyone should have long ago stopped submitting to Hobart. Your line may be different than my own. Being in community requires compromise and negotiation, and we will never all be in lockstep.

25) But oh my god, why did you all keep submitting?

26) Somewhere there is a gray area between personal slight and institutional dysfunction. Sometimes we are asked to cancel people and publications for infractions that feel interpersonal, not universal. This Hobart disaster leans so heavily toward institutional dysfunction that I just do not understand why this took so long to happen. It was not that one editor that one time. It was not that one piece that one time. Yes, it was the same person behaving badly each time. But she did so for almost a decade! And because of some complicated interpersonal dynamics . . . she was given a pass? And so was Aaron Burch?

27) It’s good that Hobart is a husk now, but oh my god the cost to everyone. If you all had just paid attention the first few times we said things.

28) If Aaron Burch had left long ago to build new something new without the faulty foundation. This feels unfair to him. But also everything feels unfair. And why do the people with the power always get the pass?

29) This has hijacked my brain and my heart. I can’t let it go. I got a legal threat before for speaking a man’s name. I don’t think that will happen now. But also some part of me fears that will happen now.

30) There’s a whole thing about names and reputation here that I can’t quite pin and don’t want to deal with. But for a long time, Hobart was bad but with a good name. Now Hobart is bad and its name is bad. And there are weird trickle-down effects for everyone involved, both before and after the fall. Everyone is still out here trying to keep their name clean. Everyone is running from the fire, cradling their names in their arms like babies in need of saving.

31) I feel, inside my chest, such enormous grief and rage.

Back on my Bullshit, or Why I Will Never Publish with Hobart

I read this really fun poem the other day. I liked it so much I bookmarked it in my Evernote with some suggestions to myself about how I could teach it in Creative Writing (if, you know, I ever teach anything again). The website was refreshingly minimalist, and the font was not so small that it hurt my old-lady eyes to read. I clicked through to the table of contents and who was there, right in the middle of the long list of contributors, but Tao Lin. Tao fucking Lin. This motherfucker. Surrounding him I recognized a number of other alt lit names. Can these alt lit assholes not just stay dead, please. As if I needed any more proof that our concerns about “cancel culture” are bullshit. Also, the journal is called Neutral Space. Lolololol. If you publish a known abuser, you are no “neutral” space.

Did some googling around, some Facebook searching, and found “What Are We To Make of Tao Lin’s Comeback?” by Jakob Maier in Buzzfeed, from 2018. It made me feel less crazy, like the alt lit fiasco wasn’t just some fever dream. Have you forgotten all the horrible details about why Tao Lin sucks? Important reminders about, from Jakob Maier:

Lin responded to the allegations in a lengthy Facebook post that was set to the friends-only privacy option, in which he confirmed that the two had sex when he was 22 and Kennedy was 16, but he claimed that their relationship was “not statutory rape, let alone rape.” (The age of consent in Pennsylvania is 16.) He also refuted claims that he had stolen Kennedy’s writing, saying that he had “made sure” Kennedy was “okay” with what he was writing about in his book Richard Yates. He offered to give Kennedy all the profits of the book or to cease its publication altogether, saying Kennedy “seems very affected by the fact that I wrote about our experience.”

Setting aside the technical legality of his conduct, Lin’s response reads like every other non-apology from famous men accused of sexual misconduct or emotional abuse in that he dodges responsibility for his alleged actions. He refused to acknowledge the massive power differential within the relationship, and also failed to consider the inherent issues with dating a high school student when he had already graduated from college. Instead, he stressed the good things he did for Kennedy, including publishing Kennedy’s poetry book and paying for his trip to a poetry reading, as if that would mitigate the harm caused by what he was accused of. He did not refute any of the allegations of emotional abuse leveled against him, only denying the accusation of statutory rape, and still has never publicly apologized for any other personal wrongdoing whatsoever. Instead, he minimized the effects of his actions by simply saying, “We were in a relationship that had problems.”

. . . Details of the 2007 relationship with Kennedy make up the narrative of his 2010 novel Richard Yates, including the passages that Kennedy said he directly lifted from their emails.

Another detail worth noting: Tao Lin once told an interviewer that the original title for Richard Yates was Statutory Rape.

Fun fact about Facebook searching, though: All those old fights we had on Facebook, during the alt lit and [redacted] sexual assault firestorms? Those fights are still there! A brutal little time capsule hiding behind a weak search engine, just waiting to come back for you when you least expect it.

I did a lot of fighting on the internet between 2014 and oh, say, 2016. I remember very deliberately stalking Melville House to see if they would make any kind of statement about Tao Lin, his being their author. Around the time alt lit blew up, Tao Lin was also blowing up and had secured a deal with Random House. So I stalked around Random House, too, looking for at least some kind of non-apology apology. But literally NOT A THING. And it’s not like he was just accused of abuse. He was accused of abuse AND plagiarism AND profiting off that abuse. The book that Melville House was selling was autofiction based on how Tao Lin abused his then-girlfriend and literally used her emails verbatim. Anyway, it’s not surprising to me that Tao Lin is doing just fine. Of course he is. It just fucking sucks is all.

*

Somewhat against my better judgment, I submitted to Have Has Had when I managed to actually be sitting at my computer when one of the two-hour-long submission windows was open. Have Has Had is obviously the cool kids on Twitter. I don’t like being part of the cool kids; it gives me the heebie-jeebies. But I’ve been submitting a lot, and I figured why not. In the submitting process, I realized that have Has Had is part of Hobart Pulp. And then I felt double dirty.

Back when the literary “community” was fighting about alt lit, Hobart published a pair of really epically awful takes by Elizabeth Ellen, one of their editors. You can find them on the Wayback Machine but not their website because they were so fucking gross Hobart ultimately took them down: An Open Letter to the Internet and Bow Down Bitches, Or What Makes a Catchy Headline: an Interview with Elizabeth Ellen. It will not surprise you to hear that “Bow Down Bitches” is pretty deep in my brain as a thing I cannot forget or forgive. The backlash to Elizabeth Ellen was so widespread that Black Lawrence Press dropped her from an anthology it was publishing and Daniel Lavery spent a lot of words critiquing her in The Toast. Yikes!

I keep seeing my friends publishing with Hobart. Friends I really like and respect—friends I actually interact with on the internet and in real life. And I’ve been wondering when it’s time to forgive Hobart? Or, rather, at what point do you forgive a journal, and what journals are just fundamentally unforgivable? I understand this to be a highly personal question, with both writer and journal being really big variables in the equation. I mean of course I want to hang out with the cool kids, my own issues with joining things notwithstanding. But ugh, alt lit cool kids are . . . problematic. It feels like part of hanging out with them REQUIRES a glossing over of past misdeeds. The totalizing pose, as far as I can tell the most distinct feature of alt lit writing, makes sincerity impossible. Even when alt lit cool kids do apologize, it comes out like Tao Lin’s apology: like a fat nod at something real but without anything real about it. And then anyone who acknowledges that the sentiment was fake is breaking the rules of the game and that is proof that they are NOT COOL.

So should I forgive Hobart? Yeah, no. As far as I can remember or can tell, there wasn’t any real shame or apology over their takes. And Elizabeth Ellen remains one of their editors. And look at this, from their about page:

There are a number of problematic writers in this list of their favorite writers. Stephen Elliott? Fuck that dude and also worth pointing out that his own memoirs make him sound like an asshole. Oh, yep, there’s Tao Lin, right on in there. Oooh, Blake Butler, formerly the founder of HTMLGiant, a not problematic website at all!. (Can’t find a good link for that one, but I seem to recall lots of bullying and factions and shit happening directly on HTMLGiant, in the very active comment sections. Also maybe Blake Butler himself is a fine OK dude, I honestly do not know. ETA: This recent tweet suggests he doesn’t suck. Question mark?) Putting these names in this list, KEEPING these names on this list, sends an explicit signal to writers. And the signal it sends me, personally, is that I am not safe in this space. Continuing to highlight your past work with people who are grody and/or abusive signals to some that you are hip and cool and just there for the art, not this bullshit political stuff, man. But it signals to lots of the rest of us that you would rather have that abuser with the big name than us.

Fuck that. I’m not submitting to Hobart or Have Has Had ever. Ever. (Ditto for Neutral Spaces, for that matter.) I have some personal skin in the game thanks to the alt lit connection—not that I was part of that scene, but I did a lot of editing and writing around that particular scandal, made some friends because of it and lost even more friends, honestly. I blame no one for publishing with them. I happily (with a twinge of unease, yes) read my friends when they’re published there. I admire some of the editors who do work there. But it’s clear to me, now, that even if we can never exorcise these abusers from our lives, I don’t have to put myself next to them.