Writing About the Living // Lauren Davis

This month, Lauren Davis guest edits on the theme "Writing about the Living," posing the question: How can writers protect their own privacy and the privacy of others?

I’ve committed the taboo. I estranged myself from my mother, and then I wrote about it. And then there are the poems about my sexual pain disorder and my beloved’s response of compassion. When it comes to my mother’s privacy and my beloved’s privacy, I have approached the issue in wildly dissimilar ways. I try, in all things, to tell the greater truth. How I get there has, in each case, been highly individualized. I don’t take the issue of privacy lightly. I consider it an act of violence to write about the intimacies of my beloved’s life without his consent. My mother, now that’s another story. But is this some cloaked justification for retaliation towards her? Where, oh where, are my ethics? How do we as authors in the digital age, when our work can be shared so quickly and so widely, handle the sensitive (and sometimes legally expensive) matter of confidentiality? In the coming weeks, you will hear from professional writers on how they have handled the issue of privacy. Poets, publishers, editors, essayists, and bloggers will share their beliefs and experiences. Meet Robin Zabiegalski, who not only asked for her husband’s consent when publishing an essay concerning him, but also went to the hard and vulnerable work of obtaining consent from everyone mentioned. All her exes, including her ex-husband. Samantha Ladwig, a writer and bookseller on the Olympic Peninsula, has also written of the struggle of publishing work about her mother. “My mother and I don’t talk about my writing. What I mean is, we don’t talk about my writing that deals with her: short, and what I hope are powerful, attempts to untangle our relationship. Movie and book reviews, interviews, histories, you name it; they’re all open on the table, spoken about loudly and proudly. My essays, on the other hand, are not.” And Maura Snell, an editor and poet, will explore the work of emerging writers and the calculated risks they take on the page. With her guidance, we’ll take a closer look at the collections of Cassie Pruyn, Elijah Burrell, and Meaghan Quinn and how they handle “their muse with utmost honesty without compromising their muse or themselves.” Meaghan Quinn, author of the forthcoming poetry collection Slow Dance, Bullets (Route 7 Press), will speak for herself, too. She’ll explore the ways she invokes the muse to both run from and face her issues with substance abuse and sexuality. We’ll hear of her fear and the repercussions that arose from exposing herself and her former beloveds. In addition, we’ll learn from Joanne Clarkson, a poet who worked for many years as a nurse and a librarian, two professions where confidentiality proves fundamental. She will share five devices to not only preserve privacy but to ensure the artful use of identity through words. Julie Christine Johnson, who has tackled the issue of privacy in both fiction and nonfiction, will expand on her struggles with confidentiality. She writes, “Through the medium of personal essay, I have shared deep personal grief, choosing to make public that which has altered my world as an adult. But with the exception of revealing the shared pain with my ex-husband of child loss, my words have rarely extended to other identifiable people in my real life. Yet my fiction is no less intimate.” Jennifer Porter, an editor and fiction writer who has faced privacy issues on both sides of the desk, will explore the issue from multiple angles. We’ll hear of how she steps “Into what it must be like to be that person and write from their perspective, even if they are monsters,” and the betrayal of “Forrest Carter,” and how it affected her approach to privacy. She writes, “Why wouldn’t an author strive to be authentic? Just as our characters are neither all good nor all bad, so are writers.” The poet, essayist, and teacher Emily Mohn-Slate will enlarge on her ideas “about the complicated space between speech and silence.” She writes, “Our writing is best when it cuts close to the bone, when it doesn’t hold back from entering the uncomfortable spaces we often fear airing out in our everyday lives. But we are not only writers who deal with the page, we are also people who live in the world. When we implicate real people’s lives and feelings in our work, we can’t ignore the potential consequences of our words.” And Barrett Warner, an editor and poet, wrote an entire book, My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius, 2014), consisting only of poems about specific friends. We’ll hear how his philosophy has been informed by visual artists; great ones, such as Picasso and Andy Warhol. Risa Denenberg, poet and co-founder of Headmistress Press, writes of the problem of memory: “Recently I was talking to my brother and mentioned ‘the green couch.’ He said, ‘What green couch?’ It was a vivid forest green couch in the family room that held important memories for me; he (of the better memory than mine) doubted its existence.” She writes further, “Protecting my own privacy is a concern as well, although I do have a picture of me naked on the back of one of my books.” And Timothy Liu tells of his book Vox Angelica (Alice James Books), which contains poems of sexual abuse: “Hundreds of hours of therapy, of the talking cure, preceded and proceeded the making of that first book. Did I have the right to write about my own mother, never consulting or seeking her permission let alone approval? Of course you know the answer. But did I have the right to publish the thing, to go public with something so private while she was still alive?” We will be informed from all of these authors in the coming weeks. They have walked the hard road of vulnerability and moral ambiguity. They have put more than their pocketbooks on the line. They have opened themselves to retaliation and silencing. I am honoured to present these authors to you. Together, let us explore the murky world of privacy. Let us look behind the closed door.

Lauren Davis is the author of Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press). She holds an MFA from Bennington College Writing Seminars, and her poetry and essays can be found in publications such as Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Empty Mirror, and Lunch Ticket. Her flash fiction and fairy tales are forthcoming in Automata, Cabinet of Heed, and Gingerbread House Literary Review. Davis teaches at The Writers’ Workshoppe in Port Townsend, WA, and she works as an editor at The Tishman Review.