Link Post: Thoughts Inspired by Robin Black’s “The Subject is Subjectivity”

[Editor’s Note: Robin Black’s “The Sub­ject is Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty” orig­i­nal­ly appeared on her blog on March 13, 2010.]

Here is an excerpt from Robin Black’s “The Sub­ject is Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty”:

…writ­ing work­shops car­ry in them the dan­ger of train­ing us all to seek
con­sen­sus.  Not every work­shop falls into this trap, but many end up
defin­ing them­selves in terms of ‘lik­ing’ or ‘not lik­ing’ the piece.  We
all say that we’re there to get advice, but in my expe­ri­ence, when I ask
a writer how a work­shop went, she’ll almost always answer either ‘Great! They loved it’  or ‘Awful, they didn’t like it at all’ and only
very occa­sion­al­ly some­thing along the lines of ‘It went well, I got some
real­ly good advice.’

Recent­ly, the jour­nal I man­age, The Jour­nal of Com­pressed Cre­ative Arts, opened for  sub­mis­sions (it had been open for solicit­ed sub­mis­sions since Jan­u­ary 1, 2011). In decid­ing how we read­ers (degree-can­di­dates and grad­u­ates of Rose­mont College’s MFA in Cre­ative Writ­ing Pro­gram) would decide what to pub­lish, I strug­gled with the dynam­ics of vot­ing and con­sen­sus. Sim­i­lar to Robin Black’s idea above, I thought about how a group seems to desire a final agree­ment or judge­ment about a piece, a kind of mid­dle ground. I know that Robin Black is talk­ing about a writ­ing work­shop, a place to go with a piece in progress, but that desire for a final agreed-upon judg­ment feels to me like it applies also to a group of peo­ple try­ing to fig­ure out if a piece should be pub­lished in a jour­nal.

This blog arti­cle rein­forced my own desire to find a way not to have con­sen­sus be the decid­ing fac­tor at the jour­nal. Our sub­mis­sion man­ag­er, with its YES or NO or MAYBE vot­ing sys­tems, implies that con­sen­sus should be we’re after. And the ini­tial com­men­tary from writ­ers about pieces sup­port­ed Robin Black’s idea, that writ­ers are trained to try to per­suade peo­ple to see the sto­ry as they see it in an effort to come to some final all-encom­pass­ing sense of the piece. The mod­el appears to cry out for a final vote, a final quan­tifi­ca­tion of what to me is often more like the feel­ing of love, some­thing, at its heart, ulti­mate­ly unknow­able.

In our short expe­ri­ence of that ini­tial vot­ing, no piece has had every­one ini­tial­ly say YES. The abil­i­ty to get at least one read­er to feel pas­sion­ate­ly that we should accept a piece seems to come with it the abil­i­ty to get at least one read­er to feel pas­sion­ate­ly opposed to the piece. There’s some­thing of Shake­speare­an tragedy in this dynam­ic, as one increas­es the “great­ness” one also increas­es the like­li­hood of doom. 

The point? There’s some­thing remark­able about that per­fect match between the right read­er and the right sub­mis­sion. It’s as if that bond­ing, that love, aris­es in a place that is removed from the expe­ri­ence of the oth­er read­ers. I think that’s what the sub­mis­sion process is about, not get­ting a bunch of peo­ple to agree about a piece, but evok­ing a deep, last­ing, in-the-end unex­plain­able con­nec­tion with at least one of them.