George Dinwiddie20h ago
Kick Murder Squad Pleasurebot

Them: “Poetry needs to be layered with meaning. If your writing describes a flower, then the flower needs to be a metaphor for something else. It can’t just describe a flower.”

Me: “Here’s my poem.”

Them: “It’s a beautiful poem, really. But it’s just about sailing. We want poems with a deeper meaning, not just poetic descriptions of life on a sailboat.”

Me: [turns to camera]. “The poem was about growing up in an abusive home with a substance’s abusing parent, and having a hobby that everyone mocked and doing it in secret because it was the only thing that kept me alive. All that was there. The sailboat was a metaphor.”

Apr 4 at 10:21pmWeb
Show threadKick Murder Squad Pleasurebot23h ago

Maybe something that will help @aroacemagicalnerd, maybe not. The above mentioned poem was rejected by two white editors …of the literary journal I founded and ran. 🤣🤦🏽‍♀️

We had open blind submissions but we had to recuse ourselves if we thought we knew the writer. I sat there in silence listening to two white women say it is very beautiful, but we don’t need another description of sailing. And maybe if the sailing was a metaphor or something, but it’s just a poem of sailing.

After that edition was published, I told one of them that it was my poem. She said “I didn’t know you sailed!” I told her I don’t, and that was about growing up in an abusive home. She just started at me, and finally said “I’m so sorry.”

Show threadKick Murder Squad Pleasurebot23h ago
@aroacemagicalnerd I’ve spent all day thinking about this, and how your experience maps onto mine. I feel like I could write an essay on it all.
Show threadKick Murder Squad Pleasurebot23h ago

@aroacemagicalnerd I feel like so many of the struggles I’ve had with writing teachers (and professional who want to critique) is that they think everyone else is playing checkers while they are playing chess. And there’s this feeling of superiority. Like “you should stay in your skill area with the checkers.” This is mostly because my experience is white people teaching me.

So that whole “your rough draft needs to be rougher” thing? Yeah. It’s not even “how dare you be that good.” It’s an assumption that the rough draft was actually edit number five (because it can’t possibly be edit number one) and they want edit number one.

So we end up trying to dumb shit down because it doesn’t make sense to them unless we take the same path to where they are.

Show threadKick Murder Squad Pleasurebot23h ago

@aroacemagicalnerd Because they are the chess player, so obviously a checkers player can’t be that good. This is especially true with Black writing, because they can’t “hear” it. So assume it’s checkers. They go through all these mental leaps to make sure they can teach us. To make us play the more complex game of chess.

Here’s what I realized: They are trying to teach us chess and assuming we’re playing checkers, but we’re playing Go.

Show threadKick Murder Squad Pleasurebot23h ago

@aroacemagicalnerd We’re playing a game that’s not only significantly more complicated than chess, it doesn’t even exist in the same coordinate space.

But they can’t see that, because they have their European standard for writing.

So we show up used to playing Go and they are like “these are the rules, what are you playing checkers? Silly person, I’ll teach you. These are the rules.”

And you’re like “nah I can put this anywhere I want” and flanking them and surrounding them and they are like “no no, naive person, follow these rules.”

But like, we learned as a child that those rules were not made for us. Our writing CAN follow those rules, or it can exist in the negative space of those rules (that’s hip hop, right?) or it can just fuck of and play a different game.

Show threadKick Murder Squad Pleasurebot23h ago

@aroacemagicalnerd So then I show up and use the rules to play a deeper game, but play the deep game so well that I play it to appear like the shallow game. And they are so twisted by that they can’t even see past the shallow game.

But our rough draft is their finished product because we had to dance around those rules just to walk down the street. They can’t understand that.

And all this comes back to Black Excellence is scary as hell.