We are proud to run today’s piece and the accompanying short story. Both underscore the need—now more than ever—for publications that are fearless and refrain from censorship of any kind. Please consider a paid subscription to continue supporting Persuasion’s mission of free speech and free expression.
– Sam Kahn, associate editor.
In 2022, we were the fiction co-editors for Crab Creek Review, a long-standing, independent literary magazine. Crab Creek Review is the kind of small publication where writers get their first break and, hopefully, go on to literary stardom and a book deal. Like most fiction editors, we were volunteers, and that year we read over three hundred submissions. Among them, we fell in love with a short story that re-interpreted the tale of the Lone Ranger—the iconic masked lawman of 1930s Westerns who fought villainy in the constant company of his trusty Native American sidekick, Tonto. In the opening line, Tonto declares, “Me not happy.”
Tired of being support staff, Tonto takes back his original name (Puhihwikwasu’u) and returns to his tribe, thus derailing the Lone Ranger’s life of adventure.
A fiction editor’s role is to exercise taste and judgment, which is not an easy task. Crab Creek Review published between 1-2% of its fiction submissions, but many magazines consider upwards of 2,000 short stories each year. When a writer beats these enormous odds, it’s a sign that you have what it takes. The Masked Man story, we privately agreed, would be our nomination for the illustrious Pushcart Prize.
Although Crab Creek Review’s editor-in-chief approved the story for publication, she couldn’t shake her fears of getting blasted on Twitter. She asked a sensitivity reader to review the piece. The unidentified (to us) reader found the story’s title, “Who Was That Masked Man?”, so upsetting that he/she/they refused to read on.
Over the next year, the EiC began tampering with the story’s essential character. We had published our own work in over thirty literary magazines combined, and had never seen demands like this before. The EiC wanted the author to replace “Me not happy” with “I am not happy”—and to “revisit” Tonto’s 49 lines of dialogue. We disagreed. To our minds, the author used “Tontoisms” skillfully and for the purpose of upending a racist stereotype. To counter the EiC’s fears, we suggested interviewing the writer so he could explain his language choices. The EiC green-lit the interview to run on the magazine’s blog on publication day. The writer answered our questions beautifully, but the EiC never asked about or mentioned the interview again.
Months passed.
Right before we went to print, the EiC rescinded the story from publication. In her email to the writer, she said the retraction was due to “the problematic depiction of Indigenous peoples … and the harm that this depiction would cause to the Crab Creek community.” We pushed back, twice requesting to meet with the magazine’s board to discuss the story. Twice, the EiC refused. When we reached out to them on our own, the EiC fired us.
When it comes to censoring or banning books, most Americans prefer the freedom to make up their own minds. But readers may not realize that writers require a long incubation, and books are at the end-stage of the publishing pipeline. Poets, essayists, and novelists toil for years in small literary magazines such as American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, and Ploughshares. At this publishing level, there is zero-to-paltry money to be made, but there is prestige, status, and an education in what it means to be a “good literary citizen.”
But today’s culture of censorship and censure in literary magazines is stifling writers’ careers at their most vulnerable stage. Our experience at Crab Creek Review offers a case in point and a warning.
We knew from others in the lit mag community that our experience wasn’t uncommon. Eventually, we interviewed over a dozen writers whose work had been retracted for a variety of offenses—personal, political, perceived, and fabricated whole-cloth. Their editors, unable to countenance online outrage, alternately chose to A) rewrite the offending language, or B) “unpublish” the piece, with either minimal commentary or extravagant, self-flagellating apologies.
Some of the most egregious examples include, in 2018, The Journal removing NEA winner Rachel Custer’s poetry after behind-the-scenes allegations of racism and homophobia. The dossier included hand-wringing letters from Custer’s accusers with screenshots of her Internet wrongdoings. The first accusation: a Twitter post in which Custer declared her support for Chick-Fil-A. When Custer pressured Ohio State University to conduct an internal review, the editors were forced to reinstate the poem and the English Department apologized in a private email. In 2020, POETRY removed, and apologized for publishing, Michael Dickman’s “Scholls Ferry Rd.,” a “persona poem” that used the word “negress,” and the editor resigned. In 2022, citing complaints from readers about social media posts, Wigleaf removed the trans writer Danielle Rose’s short story in order to show “full support for non-binary people.” (Wigleaf never clarified what, exactly, they meant by this justification.) In March of this year, Guernica retracted the Israeli translator Joanna Chen’s essay about ferrying Palestinian children to a hospital during war, and the editor resigned. Today the University of Tennessee’s Grist openly states, “If an author behaves or speaks publicly—or is revealed or accused to have behaved or spoken, even in private—in ways that contradict these expressed values of the journal, then we reserve the right to … remove their work from our archives.”
Public censorship creates a culture of self-censorship. Today most editors simply choose—quietly—to avoid publishing controversial but high-quality work. If pressed, they might say, All writing is political. By now most writers in this sphere know where the boundaries are.
Fear of reputational damage and public censure are ample motivations for writers to embrace the lit community’s talking points and denounce those who don’t. This is a culture in which the Director of Creative Writing Curricula and Managing Editor for Georgia Tech’s lit mag, the Atlanta Review, breezily solicits a “solidarity doc” on Twitter. This “solidarity doc” is one of six blacklists we discovered; it is certainly the most ironically named. Some comrades are particularly eager to dole out punishment, chasing their marks around the Internet to ensure they cannot publish ever again. During a Zoom interview Rattle’s editor Tim Green said, “These literary firebugs have become addicted to the dopamine of outrage. They tell themselves they’re working for social justice, but really they’re just searching for that dopamine hit that makes them feel good.”
We offered anonymity to all of our contacts, but several dared not speak at all. If free expression were alive and well, editors could defend their publication choices—and writers would not dread punishment more than they dream of success. Multiple censored writers told us how, during the maelstrom, their inboxes filled with private support from famous writers. The messages say: I wish I could do more.
The right to disagree is sacred. This includes those who disagree with the consensus du jour. Coordinated attacks on magazines and writers that decline to take a stand or take the “wrong” stand or the not-strong-enough stand make it clear that many believe literature’s primary obligation is to political purity, rather than literary quality. Certain cultural and political events like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the Israel/Hamas war become litmus tests while others—the opioid crisis, the war in Sudan, the literal silencing of women in Afghanistan—pass mostly unheeded.
Perhaps it’s cynical to doubt that all of these editors hold passionate positions of conscience about today’s thorny issues, but so be it: we are cynical. Editors should embrace complication, not run from it. But for many, standing their ground doesn’t seem worth the trouble. Some prefer the safety of uncritical belief and, judging from the retraction struggles, lack the spine for vigorous debate. Regardless, if you are a literary leader, one thing is made clear: Declare, or be purged. Declare, or make way for the next junta.
Truly great literature is written by outsiders—the unorthodox and the nonconformist. When their careers are destroyed before they begin, we all lose.
Writers privately tell us that they are concerned about the inevitable literary pablum of the coming decade. It’s already here.
Elizabeth Kaye Cook is a writer in New York City. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Carve, The Gettysburg Review, Three Crows Magazine, etc. Her website is elizabethkayecookwriter.com and her newsletter is Notes from Elizabeth Kaye Cook.
Melanie Jennings is a MacDowell fellow whose short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Fiction Southeast, Hotel Amerika, and the Crab Orchard Review. She lives in Oregon where she is working on a novel. Her website is mjennings.com.
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