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Bestiary Magazine is a poetry and art journal. Inspired by projects that can be accomplished using MagCloud, Bestiary hopes to offer something new and interesting to the world of poetry journals.
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I learned yesterday that a poet whose work was published in Bestiary Issue Two is a fictitious person. The poem published under the name Winnie Oliver was in fact written by a writer named Jennifer Donnell. Normally, nom de plums don’t interest me one way or another, but in this case, I became frustrated, and then angry when I learned the reason behind Donnell’s decision to use this alias.
In an editorial published at poetix.net, Donnell reveals that she is a married, straight woman who decided to pose as a lesbian because she had grown frustrated with the submissions process of Write Bloody Publishing, who accept submissions only via an annual book contest. She entered Write Bloody’s 2010 contest using poems she’d written because she felt she could identify with the struggles and frustrations of gays and lesbians – in her words, she “had always felt “different” due to a hemangioma birthmark” on her cheek.
She went so far as to create a fake Facebook account, send friend requests to people she believed would indicate to Derrick Brown, owner of Write Bloody, that she was a real person, including myself and several of my friends. And she submitted a poem to this magazine’s second issue, which was accepted, because it was a good poem.
Write Bloody’s contest is annual, and in the year between when her first manuscript was rejected and her second, as Winnie, was an honorable mention, Donnell exposed herself to new writers, did a 30/30 exercise (where a poet will write 30 poems in 30 days), and submitted to new journals — in short, she did the work all poets should always be doing, and I suspect that it was that work, and not the pseudonym, that improved the quality of Donnell’s writing.
Whether or not the poem in question required that Donnell pretend to be a lesbian while writing it is up for debate. I’m fairly certain it could have been written without such machinations, and what’s more, I’m of the opinion that Donnell was ultimately only fooling herself — it was she, Donnell, who wrote the poem, not Winnie Oliver, and she could have written the poem without the pretense.
But what really bothers me about this whole business is not the deception, although that is troubling — it’s the deeper sexual and gender politics at play. Co-opting the identity of an oppressed group in order to fuel creative work isn’t merely distasteful, it’s actually a very willing participating in the (in this case) heterosexist power structures about which she is clearly very angry.
The white male patriarchy has a long history of co-opting the voices of women, non-white, trans-gendered, and gay people, sometimes for explicit purposes of exploitation, and sometimes for no other reason than to succeed in some creative genre. An easy example of this is Shakespeare’s Othello, which, in Elizabethan England, where neither women nor blacks were allowed to perform onstage, was performed by two male leads, one in blackface playing Othello and the other in whiteface playing Desdemona. Both of those roles are fraught with incredibly complex racist and sexist tropes.
Gays and lesbians have struggled, in the face of anti-gay laws, oppressive, unhealthy and hate-based narratives from religion and dehumanizing narratives and stereotypes from Hollywood to claim their right to speak for themselves and have their own words about their own struggles, pain, and sorrow be heard above the din of so many cultural voices who have sought to either oppress or exploit them.
So part of my frustration at Donnell’s choices comes from the fact that she deliberately chose to participate in that oppressive structure, and all because she didn’t win the Write Bloody contest the first time she entered, and because her overjealous husband sent rude emails to Derrick Brown.
My anger comes from the fact that my many queer friends who are writers deserve that space Winnie Oliver occupied, or rather, co-opted. We have heard enough of straight people think about how queer people ought to feel. Queer folk do not need straight people speaking for them. It is condescending, patriarchal, rude, and selfish to assume that as a straight person, one can speak on behalf of queer folk.
And my sadness comes from the fact that one thing straight folk can do, and do not do enough of yet, is examine themselves, their own sexuality, and their own participation in heterosexist structures that continue to silence and oppress queer folks. Ms. Donnell’s role, if she is truly angered by what is happening to queer people, is not to pretend to the queer, her role is to be a straight ally.
Early on in her essay, Donnell relates the story of another straight woman who is Mormon and who had gay friend but didn’t share Donnell’s rage at the way the Mormon church was treating the gay marriage debate. She reports she doesn’t speak to that friend any more, and one part of me doesn’t blame her for not wanting to be close to a bigot, but on the other hand, I totally do blame her.
Having grown up in the South, and having been raised evangelical, I am close to, by blood or by friendship, a great many bigots, either racists or heterosexists. Because I love them, I am unwilling to shut them out of my life, and I am ever hopeful that in the end, compassion will win out in their heats against prejudice and ignorance. My stepmother told me, when I was a child, the story of how, when she was in college during the 19060s, she would bring home black friends to visit to challenge her racist father. She argued with him. I don’t know that she ever felt like she changed his mind, but she tried. twenty years later, during a heated dinner table discussion about gay marriage, I reminded her of that story: “Remember how you used to challenge Papa’s beliefs about race? I know it’s annoying, but I’m that same thing now, for you, about sexuality.”
I don’t know that I’ll ever know if my parents or my friends from my church days change their minds. And making my opinion known requires that I risk offending them – no one likes the be thought of as ignorant or bigoted. But I’m committed to try, and that is what I believe straight people who are allies of queer folk ought to be doing with their voices. Our own stories — stories of our own fears and homophobia, of how we “came out” of that fear into tolerance, then acceptance, and finally love, stories of our anger at injustice — those stories are stories we are uniquely equipped to tell, and by choosing to hide, in a rather cowardly fashion, behind Winnie Oliver, Donnell has denied other straight people the benefit of that self-examination.
And cowardly is what Donnell’s behavior has been. It is easy to be a mockingbird. It is much harder to do the real emotional work a poet must undertake to examine her/his own bigotry, ignorance, heterosexism, participation in oppression and how we benefit daily, even still, by the continued systematic oppression of queer folks.
That is my challenge to Donnell, and to any straight person rightly concerned with heterosexism, or any white person rightly concerned with racism, or any man rightly concerned with sexism: examine yourself, and write about it. Don’t tell me the world is sexist, racist, heterosexist. Tell me that you are, and how. Tell me the story of your own healing and education. And rejoice in, enjoy, listen to, learn from the many amazing, talented writers out there who have something to show you about themselves. Step outside your own neighborhood. Risk being wrong. Learn why your life requires grace. Write about that.
- John Paul Davis, editor Bestiary Magazine
How It Works
When we announce a new issue, an overall topic for the issue will be revealed. Poets will have ten days to submit poems that fall under that theme. We will interpret the themes pretty loosely, but will require that the issue topic be either the poem’s main subject or the source of the imagery. When the poems are selected, the exact topic of each poem will be posted (so, for example, if the issue category were “rocks,” poem topics might appear as “diamonds,” “gravel,” “skipping stones”), art/photography/illustration submissions will be opened. Artists will submit illustrations for subtopics or for the front and back covers. Then art submissions will be closed, and the magazine will be designed and posted to MagCloud, where you will be able to purchase it.