Thursday
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.]
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.
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.
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