We're All Bad Art Friends
If you haven’t read Who is The Bad Art Friend then I’m incredibly jealous of you and I’m sad in the knowledge that the two days it took me to finish that journalistic deuce is time I will never get back. If you’re inclined to read it, I guess I can’t stop you.
Before I hit on the concept of an “art friend” because that’s fucking fascinating to me, I want to just make some points:
Dorland is a giant walking micro-aggression and I’m shocked more people who knew her didn’t talk shit about her.
Sonya Larson didn’t do anything wrong and definitely didn’t deserve legal action.
White women in all walks of life, but especially in art, need to calm the shit down - AAPI and BIPOC writers aren’t taking our spots or our successes or edging us out. There is enough room for all our stories, and if you think there isn’t, that means you don’t value all kinds of storytelling and that makes you a turd.
People are going to talk shit about you in the business, personal, art, and internet world. You’re going to need to find a way to deal with that.
As someone with an invisible illness, I gotta say Dorland’s aggressive need for a pat on the head, attention, and admiration for donating a healthy kidney was really, and I mean really ableist and just gross. It’s very Munchausen-y.
What I did take away from this was the concept of an “art friend” and what that is. I don’t know what it takes to be a good art friend. Retweets? Buying your book? Talking you down off a Twitter ledge?
Something my instructor said on the first day of graduate school stuck with me and I feel like it applies in the context of this question. “Once you’ve published something, you can’t take it back.” We were talking about memoirs, experiences, fiction inspiration, and reader perception.
“If you do write about someone, don’t be cruel. Never substitute cruelty for honesty or to get back at someone because you won’t be able to take it back, especially if you feel different later. Even if they don’t know it’s about them, it’s still cruel. Even if they never read it, it’s still cruel.”
Don’t be cruel feels like the most important lesson any of us could learn about anything in life. It feels like the only lesson we’d really need to understand our friendships, relationships, and our art. Don’t be cruel.
If we’re using the context of the article, I used to have a lot of “art friends” but it was such an ego-driven space that became catty and pay-for-play that it wasn’t worth it. This got me thinking about what’s okay to borrow, how to be inspired without hurting someone, and how do you write something you shouldn’t have to take back? What’s our responsibility as a community when we come across borrowing and what do we owe each other as a community? What constitutes an “art friend”? In a world where we tweet a lot of random thoughts and stories into the void, what stories do we own and what’s fair game?
When I think of bad art friends, I think about the guy in my Intro to Creative Fiction class who read a new short story every week, but those short stories would sound very problematically like something another student had shared the week before, or I think about the person gatekeeping press info or bragging about nepotistic connections. I think about people who wouldn’t succeed anyway.
This made me want to tell a story about a bad art friend and ask the writer scene at large how to deal with someone else’s success when they’ve hurt you because I have no idea how to handle that. I’ve referenced this obliquely but about a decade ago another aspiring writer and a long-time friend asked me to review their manuscript for a novella contest. When we talk about art friends, this person was my first true art friend. I was so impressed with them that I couldn’t see the red flags. The rose-colored glasses slipped over time and I saw this person had a habit of gatekeeping, of borrowing from other people’s manuscripts, writing retellings of classics or translations of work that didn’t need to be retold or translated - they were just….using classical work in the public domain and putting their name on it. Neat. The talent that I thought I had been attracted to in this person was their ego. I assumed this novella was another retelling of some classic fiction but it wasn’t fiction. Not one lick.
A few years earlier, a mutual friend “Jamie” had disclosed a very personal and traumatic life event to both Bad Art Friend and myself in confidence. Because of this life event, Jamie made choices we didn’t agree with as part of their healing journey. These choices strained our relationships with Jamie, but ultimately, their healing and safety came first (as they should have).
Bad Art Friend’s manuscript, when I finally read it, was Jamie’s story word for word. Jamie didn’t write it down in an email or letter, they didn’t DM us that information. Jamie sat down with us and shared their experience. There was no copy/paste moment. This was deliberate. What was even shittier was that this was a take-down of what Bad Art Friend thought of Jamie’s choices; choices Bad Art Friend didn’t have to make because they had a stable and healthy support system, money, and access. Bad Art Friend turned a friend’s trust into something they thought they could profit and benefit from. They turned Jamie’s confidence in them into something vicious to look and feel important. Unlike snagging a line from a Facebook post or a phrase from a tweet, this was full names, places, dates, times. Bad Art Friend even included the names of Jamie’s pets at the time. There was zero fiction here. It was breathtakingly cruel; beyond exposing someone’s pain that wasn’t their story to tell, they thought so highly of their own intellectual and artistic standing that they assumed that Jamie was now so beneath them and unintelligent that they would never read the novella should it be published. I called Bad Art Friend out, they said it wasn’t illegal and that Jamie wasn’t smart enough to read it.
I did what I thought was right and contacted the press holding the contest. This was equally shitty because now I had to break Jamie’s confidence in a small way to protect them in a bigger way and tell them that while I know this isn’t illegal, I can recognize this person and they have a right to privacy. Their response was “oh, that sucks”. I don’t know what happened but this was before writer Twitter would go apeshit over everything and Instagram didn’t care about small presses and we were too old for Tumblr so I guess BAF placed second but they didn’t publish. The press isn’t around anymore anyway, and the novella doesn’t exist in print or KDP. To this day, BAF has a certain reputation for very closely skirting the line on plagiarism and being unethical, but they still enjoy a very stable and increasingly popular writing career. We haven’t spoken since and I have no desire to read their work. Jamie and I lost touch and last I knew, BAF and Jamie haven’t spoken for years.
I don’t know if I mourn not having my Bad Art Friend by my side all these years. There was value and support in that friendship that pushed me to be a better writer, but there was also secrecy, competitiveness, and gaslighting. The friendship made me a better artist and writer but it also made me, I think, a shittier person in some regards.
My Gdrive is a wasteland of nine, yes, nine, ¾ finished manuscripts because I choke at pivotal plot points even when I know exactly where the book should go next. I choke because I don’t want someone to think it’s about them; that the situational tension I’m creating, the outcomes, aren’t a testimonial about my feelings regarding certain people, it’s an observation on a situation, a catalyst, an environment. My characters are, largely, dolls in a dollhouse, as I feel most of our characters should be.
Before I realized how bonkers the entire bad art friend article was, I was almost on Dorland’s side. I’m not comfortable using too much from real life; some stories aren’t ours to tell. But Dorland went above and beyond to make sure everyone heard her story, even if they didn’t want to. She wanted attention and she got it, however indirectly.
I still don’t understand what an art friend is, or how to be a good one. Just know if I can’t say something nice, I’ll try not to say anything defamatory. If I can’t buy your book, I’ll ask my library to carry it, and if I think you’re a fuckwit, I’ll just mute you on Twitter.
If I donate you a kidney, you better throw me a fucking parade or so help me.
Go forth. Be good art friends, but mostly, don’t be shitty.
