They Don't Call it Art Friends

Grandma was the postmaster. Dorothy worked at the telephone office. Alice knew everybody.

Many days a week, after work, these three would congregate and compare notes on the intelligence they’d gathered about our little farming community of 400 people in rural west-central Missouri. Grandpa called them “the FBI.”

But I can’t imagine that the Feds ever had so much fun. The frequent uproarious laughter of these three robust 60-somethings sitting around Grandma’s kitchen table was loud enough to pull a 10-year-old away from cartoons or Andy Griffith reruns. With much humor, they dissected the town, its people, and their foibles: who showed up drunk at Lion’s Club, or who hadn’t been seen in church in awhile, or the couple that had been seen in church — kissing each other during the service.

The first time I heard the line “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me,”¹ I thought of those women. Grandma wouldn’t have said that, but Dorothy would.

It was a mark of my growing up that Grandma would later confide things to me. “Now, you know who her uncle is, don’t you?” she might ask in her patented I-shouldn’t-be-saying-this stage whisper, the back of her hand placed to one side of her mouth.

That was the cue for me to pay attention, the promise of something approaching conflict or real emotion in the midst of our our mostly-repressed, Midwest Lutheran day-to-day.

I still have this impulse. My ears prick up if I overhear someone sobbing into a cellphone on the street. Katie hates it when we’re out at dinner and I eavesdrop on nearby tables.

Earlier this year, we watched from across the street as our neighbors’ marriage split up. First she was gone, and then he was gone, and then no one was in the house for awhile. She came back for a few weeks in the spring.

One morning, she was sitting in the front yard, talking animatedly into her phone. I sat at my usual workstation — on the steps, just inside the front door — straining to pickup on the drift of conversation. No luck. A little later that morning, I came down the stairs and noticed that she and her mom and another woman (an aunt? Who knows? We’ve never talked to them that much) loading up a car I’d never seen before. Like the nosy sitcom neighbor I am — I’m picturing, like, Don Knotts in a bathrobe — I slowed my descent to watch, absently placing my coffee on the ledge… or not, the cup crashed to the ground, washing a giant swath of our white walls brown. By the time I’d finished cleaning up, they were gone.

I offer the foregoing as a way to explain my apparently bottomless appetite for today’s New York Times Magazine story, “Who is the Bad Art Friend?,” and the sermons, scuttlebutt, and snark that have accompanied it.

It is not exaggeration to say that this story about Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson — which touches on organ donation, friendship, the limits of literature, the ethics of using real people in your fiction, and the horror of having excerpts from your group chat published in The New York Times — has gripped Boston’s literary scene and a good chunk of the Internet spaces I hang out in since it went live online last Tuesday.

If you know what I’m talking about, then you should feel free to skip the next 11(!) paragraphs and rejoin us below, after the DiCaprio picture.

The story that launched a thousand thinkpieces (including this one, I suppose!)

For those of you (hi Mom, hi Dad) who haven’t yet read any of the gazillion memes, jokes, explainers, takes and tweets about this story, well, I’ll try to do my best at a quick summary. The piece is very well done, by one of the really good longform non-fiction writers working today, Robert Kolker. It’s worth the hour. 

But as briefly as I can: Sonya Larson and Dawn Dorland met each other more than a decade ago through Grub Street, Boston’s independent creative writing center. It’s a great resource for so many writers in the area, and I know lots of people who work and learn there.

In the years since they met, Sonya “leveled up,” as the story puts it. She runs Grub’s Muse and the Marketplace conference and a story of hers appeared in the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories. Dawn, meanwhile, has not published as much, and she now teaches writing at a similar community writing center out in California.

Five years ago, Dawn donated a kidney. She made an “altruistic donation,” which means her kidney would go to the first solid match on the list. Incredible! She set up a private Facebook group so that friends could follow her journey. She added Sonya and others. 

At one point, she posted an open letter to her future kidney recipient, whoever that turned out to be. At another point, she EMAILED Sonya because Sonya hadn’t interacted with any of her donation posts. (Memo to my Boomer readers: don’t do this).

Fast forward a little and enter a hapless dude named Tom who writes to Dawn on Facebook, tagging Sonya, to say hey, Sonya wrote a story about a kidney donation, this you? Dawn started to get suspicious and reached out to Sonya to say “Neat! Can I read it?” 😬

Sonya doesn’t let her read it. There’s a lot more back and forth. Sonya publishes the story in American Short Fiction, and it’s announced that that same story, “The Kindest,” would be the One City, One Story selection for the 2018 Boston Book Festival. 

At some point, Dawn reads the story and finds that it’s about a Chinese-American woman (Sonya is Chinese-American) — a not particularly sympathetic alcoholic — who needs a kidney after an accident. She receives one via an altruistic kidney donor, a well-off white woman named Rose (though named “Dawn” in an early draft!!!), who — and here’s the sticking point — has written an open letter to the recipient very much like the one Dawn posted in the Facebook group. 

Cue the lawyers: The Book Festival drops its selection of Sonya’s story, Sonya sues Dawn for “tortious interference;” Dawn sues Sonya for plagiarism. As part of the discovery process — and this is part of what has spawned so much online discourse this week — Sonya has to turn over her group chats for Dawn to read. 

Friends, imagine if your group chats were published in The New York Times. 

Dawn f-ed around and found out: the writing group — called “The Chunky Monkeys,” it included a number of quite successful published authors, including Celeste Ng, the author of Little Fires Everywhere — was, in fact, talking a lot of smack about Dawn behind her back, and it’s also very clear that Sonya copped Dawn’s open letter to use in her own story. 

Me reading “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”

I'm not a Grub Street guy, but I know a bunch of those people, and I am actually Facebook friends with both Dawn and Sonya. I have never met Dawn in person, but I know and like Sonya a lot. The fact that this whole mess is taking place among people whom I actually know has flooded my brain’s already-large gossip receptors.

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

Friday afternoon Me: <spends 30 minutes talking about Bad Art Friend> Therapist: You seem very alive in this session.

I’ve been swimming in raw sewage; I love it.

I thought about Grandma and Dorothy and Alice a lot this week. But as the takes proliferate in concentric circles — reactions to the reactions to the reactions — I’ve seen the gossip machine warp things in ways that render all the people I know in this story unrecognizable.

The initial consensus (in the first 48 hours or so) on Kolker’s story was that Dawn was, as he put it in the opening paragraph, “a little extra:” She’d done a very good deed, but how “altruistic” is it to keep insisting on a parade?

But then, as online sleuths used the freely available public records to dive deeper and deeper into the chat and email transcripts of Sonya’s writing group, the worm turned. Sonya, this new angle held, was the manipulative one — taking advantage of Dorland’s story and then casting her (both in her story and in the community) as a narcissistic white woman with a savior complex.

Spooky N. Gore @moorehn

@substockman Those chats read like a RICO case. Like literal conspiracy. Larson pumping friends for support to recommend her work at book festivals, NEA grants etc. And where there's a ring, there's something they're protecting. It's not painting each other's nails and gabbing about boys.

Heidi Moore — whose take above, to be clear, I find overblown — has gone deep into these records. As we might expect, the more she and others dig through these group chats, the less sympathetic anyone involved looks.

One way to look at this is that the members of the Chunky Monkeys writing group are being treated as ungenerously as they had previously treated Dawn. It’s just that now everyone’s treatment is public.

What Moore and many other journalists seem preoccupied with is the plagiarism. Sonya definitely lifted language from Dawn’s Facebook post. And so in a very strict sense, it is plagiarism. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like — except for the lack of attribution — Sonya has a strong case for fair use.

My friend Josh, a history professor in Baltimore, asked me if I didn’t think Sonya’s use of Dawn’s letter was plagiarism. Specifically, he said:

But if a student submitted a short story to you that copied someone’s Facebook post almost word for word like that early recorded version that she found online – you wouldn’t consider that plagiarism?

If a student turned in a short story that used Dawn’s post the way Sonya had — and I knew that the student had done it — I would advise them to cite it in a footnote. I wouldn’t flunk them.

“Cal, you lovable, mentally-ill scamp.”

This whole thing has had me thinking about a not-dissimilar piece of hot Boston lit goss from two generations back. You can get an overview of the story from Parul Sehgal’s Times review of The Dolphin Letters. But, again, more briefly: Lowell took a teaching gig at Oxford in 1970 leaving behind his wife, the great writer Elizabeth Hardwick (whose Collected Essays are on my shelves as I type) and their daughter. At a party, he met Caroline Blackwood and decided, in a manic fit, that he wasn’t going to come home to the States.

Hardwick was not amused. She wrote him a bunch of letters — beseeching, castigating, desperate letters — to try to get him to come back. He married Blackwood and they had two children. He then began writing a book of poems, The Dolphin, about his new life. In that book, he used lines and chunks of Hardwick’s letters.

Reading these in drafts, his friend Elizabeth Bishop was appalled (I’m quoting from this book): “Please believe that I think it is wonderful poetry,” Bishop wrote. “… I have one tremendous and awful BUT.”

Sort of interesting, for our purposes, is the nature of Bishop’s objection. After quoting Thomas Hardy about misrepresenting the dead in fiction, she writes:

“Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a ‘mixture of fact and fiction,’ and you have changed her letters. That is ‘infinite mischief,’ I think. [Those quotes are from the Hardy passage.] One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them … etc. But art just isn’t worth that much.” [prior ellipses and italics hers] … It is not being ‘gentle’ to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way—it’s cruel.”

Bishop doesn’t object to Lowell’s writing about his marriage (though she does later on grouse about the “confessional poetry” frenzy for which Lowell bore a lot of responsibility; she didn’t enjoy reading about the students and their sex lives). She didn’t object to the idea of his using Hardwick’s letters (with permission). She objected to their alteration.

Lowell writes back:

“Now Lizzie’s letters? I did not see them as slander, but as sympathetic, tho necessarily awful for her to read. She is the poignance of the book, tho that hardly makes it kinder to her. … The trouble is the letters make the book, I think, at least they make Lizzie real beyond my invention.”

He knows it’s not kind to her to use the letters — though he doesn’t think it’s slander! — but the main point, “the trouble,” for Lowell, is that “the letters make the book.” The man’s hands are tied! What’s he supposed to do, NOT publish this searing portrait of a new marriage emerging from the wreckage of the old?

Well of course he published it, as he and Bishop both knew he would. The Dolphin won Lowell his second Pulitzer Prize.

This is one of those stories that gets passed around — old, treasured gossip — in writing circles, and it seems to me the kind of thing I (and, I’m going to hazard a guess, most of Sonya’s writing group), take for granted: the work is more important than the people. We have Didion’s line to point to, to fondle like a talisman: “Writers are always selling someone out.” The job is betrayal.

This is a self-serving and self-mythologizing stance, and it makes us feel like Necessary Art Martyrs. If you know those are the terms of the game going in, well, you pay your money and you take your chances.

But I now see this as a story of two people playing two very different games. Sonya understood the Lowell game — we’re here to take what we can and use it ruthlessly — and Dawn thought she was in, as she told Kolker, “a community of service.”

This guy had a good series of tweets posing Dawn as a victim of the Creative-Writing Industrial Complex (it’s a pyramid scheme, but so is everything these days):

Sam Allingham @SamSamAllingham

kidney lady is clearly operating from a place of deeply unhealthy obsession -- but it would be remiss not to point out that much of the lit world's business model is about encouraging people like her to feel appreciated, "part of something"

Anyway, I think the question posed by the title “Who is the Bad Art Friend?” while good for clickbait, does a disservice to this very good story, which at the very least approaches the status of literature itself, in that it does the thing the best literature does: honors the fact that we are each complicated, damaged people who hurt one another in ways we intend and not.

1. Attributed, variously, to Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Dorothy Parker. But I almost certainly heard it from Olympia Dukakis in Steel Magnolias.