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.

[sixty-minute memoir] Signals and Noise

I had this idea many years ago to create a wiki that was structured like TV Tropes only it would catalogue red flags, those signs in a relationship that something was wrong and you had to get out. “The Dictionary of Red Flags,” I would call it. The idea was to rigorously catalog and cross-reference women’s stories—not just the ones that end in rape, date rape, and abuse, but everyday stories of bullshit, too—to show that we werem’t making these things up. It was a way to take the fuzzy science of intuition and make it logical, irreducible. I may still try to pursue this idea, who knows. Stay tuned! Or email me if you’re into the idea!

I remain fascinated by the idea of red flags. And I wonder what more stories could have done for me when I was young and flailing about. I suspect there’s no saving everyone from all bad encounters. But as a teenager, it was almost impossible to recognize the red flags because all I could see anywhere was red. I was lusty and confident. I had a firm grasp on my sexuality. I had a firm grasp, sequentially and with mixed results, on a number of boys, too. The noise was overwhelming: anything could be a sign that he liked me, he wanted me, he’d be good to me, we had a chance. The noise was filled with signals. The real signals were no better than noise, ultimately.

I was in the marching band my entire high school career. There are some marching band logistics you should know before I tell this story: the band was organized by ranks. Each rank was stable throughout the year, and each had eight people. The rightmost member of the rank was always a senior and the rank leader. The leftmost member of the rank was second in charge and an upperclassman, never a freshman.

This is the band my sophomore year, marching in the Rose Bowl Parade. I am not in this photo. My dad took dozens of pictures of me. Turns out, though, that he took dozens of pictures of my friend Caitlin. We admittedly look a lot alike.

So my freshman year, I was in my friend Dana’s brother’s rank. Eric played saxophone and was generally a solid guy, as far as I can remember. His friend Justin, who also played saxophone, was in our rank, too. I can’t remember if he was the leftmost member of the rank or if he in fact marched right next to me in the middle of the rank. As an adult, looking back, this is the first red flag. Why didn’t he get his own rank? I have some vague memories that Justin, Eric, and . . . a third saxophone player whose name I forget? . . . were mischievous, naughty. But to be disallowed from having your own rank? What did Justin even do?

I had a miserable crush on him. Again, with adult eyes, I can tell you that it was less a crush and more an overwhelming physical chemistry. But anyway, I thought he was great. The band trip that year was to Disney World, taking that week after Christmas and before the return to school. My friend Eve and I spent nearly the whole trip hanging out with Eric and Justin. I remember a banquet with other bands where I was devastated because Justin was dancing with some older girl from another school district and barely registered me as a person. After days of riding rides together.

I remember so distinctly being inside that big ball at Epcot, sharing the tiny car, and our legs touching. I had these dumb curly shoelaces and he was commenting on them. I didn’t even want to move my feet as we talked about those shoelaces because that would mean my leg would no longer be pressed against his and I wasn’t sure how I could get back to that place once it was over. And now he had forsaken me. I cried, lying across three banquet chairs, obscured by the tablecloth. (Shoutout to Nate Dawg, yes he called himself that, who was like the only person who noticed and checked in on me.) So here’s another red flag then: why did two 17- or 18-year-old boys hang out with 14-year-old me and Eve for the entirety of their senior band trip, save that one banquet? Also, as I learned that same night, he had a whole girlfriend at home. So really, multiple red flags. But it was all so noisy. I believed so fully we would get together. I never believed at all even a little that we would get together. The whole trip hung in that place before the hookup, where it is all anticipation and fortune-telling.

A few years later, let’s say I was seventeen and Justin was 21, I ran back into him. Somehow. I don’t even know. He was in school at the University of Pittsburgh, and I was at least a little older but definitely still in high school. We went on a date. He played a CD in the car but skipped to the next track after the first minute of every song: “I remember how it goes,” he explained. Was this a red flag? Or just seriously fucking annoying? I couldn’t tell then, and I can’t tell now either. We went to the Borders and wandered around for a bit. Then we made out in his car until the windows fogged up. He put his dick back in his pants after some period of time, saying we shouldn’t press our luck. Was this normal desire or a red flag, the part where I was jerking him off in his car in the parking lot of the Borders?

We went back to my house where we continued to make out on the floor of my family room. I remember knowing, with certainty, that he was trying to get his dick in me. Not like generally trying to get in pants. But specifically angling himself so his dick would be in my vadge. This is definitely a red flag. This was, even at the time, a red flag to me. I knew I was a virgin, but he didn’t. But also there was no condom anywhere, and I was very clear that unprotected sex was a very not okay thing to try. The night ended, and I did not talk to him again.

I told Dana all about it, though. Dana who was Eric’s sister, who knew Justin better than anyone else in our grade. I told her I didn’t want to see him again because he was a little rapey. It was a whole vibe he had about him. I bet it was all the red flags I’ve outlined above hitting me, but I couldn’t have told you those were important signals in all the noise. I only know that somehow the signals had reached me and coalesced into a strong sense that I should, in no uncertain terms, go out with him again. Dana laughed and agreed wholeheartedly. Whatever it was about him, I was not alone in recognizing it. And Dana probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was exactly, either. But it was real and to be avoided.

Did I go out with him again? Did I talk to him again? I know he knew that I called him rapey because I remember him confronting me about it, joking with me about it. That was a red flag and I knew it in the moment.

On Valentine’s Day, I got a Valentine in the mail from him saying it had been too long. I think he spelled my name wrong, “Sara—” it said, probably. Lol: an obvious reason to not go back out with him, but not necessarily a red flag. His printing was blocky, done in a think pen like one of those Papermate Flair felt-tipped pens teachers all love. It was distinctly unsexy. I threw the card away. This is likely the first time my intuition told me things I couldn’t explain but I listened to it anyway.

I still don’t know how a teenage girl can untangle the signals from the noise. Desire alone is so noisy. And the body wants things the mind and heart often do not—especially when the hormones of puberty are pumping away. But how do you know a guy is a creep when the only signs are subtle, or subtler than flamingly obvious anyway. I think back at how I used to flirt—I watch high schoolers flirt, from a distance as their teacher—and subtlety has no place in that world. Yet still, small signals are going up all the time, and we missed them at our own peril.

This is, I think, why the “Dictionary of Red Flags” project still appeals to me. The impossibility of adolescence is eternal. And the way that the culture devalues instincts, small signals, and women’s voices continues to endanger girls who are trying to navigate the impossibility of adolescence. What would it be to read stories and actually see an articulation of a thing you had only ever felt?