As a mom, I hope & pray you put marijuana in my kid’s candy

[smock]

Oct 6, 2021 14:03:46 GMT -5 onomatopoeia said:

Oct 6, 2021 13:32:14 GMT -5 smock said:

Yikes, I checked in to see if we've started fighting about the Bad Art Friend piece yet. Nope, fighting about board rules and Reductress. *backs out slowly*

*backs back in to see if anyone wants to fight about the Bad Art Friend piece*

I don't want to fight but man that article was...something. My final takeaway was that I thought they were all insufferable (Larson, Dorland, and all their friends/frenemies) and they all could/should have handled the entire situation differently from the beginning.  I'm actually interested to hear your perspective though, as a writer.  Did Larson do anything wrong? Was she a scheming plagiarizer or a writer who was simply inspired by a casual acquaintance's story?  I think we can all agree Dorland needs therapy. I actually cringed at some of the things she did.

Larson definitely crossed a line with using Dorland's letter. There's a difference between taking inspiration from life and lifting someone's words almost verbatim. But it's not a crime (I doubt it even counts as copyright infringement). It's not NICE, but there's a reason why writers are always posting cheeky sayings like "don't cross me or you'll end up as the villain in my next book." 

There's a whole world of difference between making fun of someone's sanctimonious kidney donation (a phrase I never though I'd type) or basing a character on an acquaintance and the frankly unhinged response from Dorland. Tracking who responded to her FB post? Complaining that no one at a conference asked you about your kidney donation? Calling a writer's employer to try to get them fired? And pitching the story to the NYT?!? Yikes.

[redheadbaker]

Oct 6, 2021 12:24:52 GMT -5 Michelle said:

Whoa - ok - i definitely wasn't trying to start a pile-on-angryharpy post.

@angryharpy, I'm sorry i didn't just PM you.

@@@@@@@


@ajl - it was a post from reductress that was light-hearted and funny, which is probably what angryharpy was trying to share since it's October and Halloween season. It was a woman who wrote to please put some marijuana edibles in her kids' Halloween candy because she could really use it when they get home.

It probably was, in fact, better content for ML or Drinking While Parenting. But gosh sometimes some levity on this board is nice. I just commented because I (probably being overly sensitive today) thought the actual title of the post could be triggering to parents who have had kids harmed by drugs. I wasn't trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.  

We can -- and do -- have levity while still following board norms. 

[raangoli]

I can't wait to read the novel that will be inspired by this Bad Art Friend story

[BlondeSpiders]

Oct 6, 2021 15:17:37 GMT -5 raangoli said:

I can't wait to read the novel that will be inspired by this Bad Art Friend story

Novel? This will be straight to Lifetime Network, honey.

[somersault72]

Oct 6, 2021 12:01:59 GMT -5 krystee said:

I feel like it is an annual tradition for OP to pop in out of nowhere, post about @-related content without the @ and dig in her heels. And in this case, all for an article that wasn’t even all that funny or well-written.

It’s one keystroke. I’ve forgotten it myself, but the answer is to fix it, not come up with reasons your post doesn’t have to follow the rules.

My thought exactly. Why her goal in life seems to be "not use the @ on CEP" I'll never know, but this seems to be her hill to die--er--gbcn gbcn on every time.

[goldengirlz]

Oct 6, 2021 12:45:02 GMT -5 Vespasia said:

I know the OP is gone but I am going to clarify for anyone else wondering. I think the reason the @ symbol is used in thread titles even when the title is clearly @ related is because it's easy for your eyes to skim over a thread when you see it. Rather than having the read the actual words and have them brought to your attention. 

I'm CFBC so the content is not painful to me but I still appreciate having that symbol make my life easier. I just don't understand what's so hard about taking a half second to hit two buttons. 

Thanks, I was about to post something similar.

As someone who gets triggered by a particular subject (not kid-related), often thinking about the subject matter itself can start a spiral. With a visual or TW tag, it’s easier for me to nope over it without having to spend too much time digesting the content (and details of that content). It’s a small nuance that probably seems irrational to someone who’s never faced that kind of pain, but if it helps people, why not?

[tacokick]

Oct 6, 2021 13:32:14 GMT -5 smock said:

Yikes, I checked in to see if we've started fighting about the Bad Art Friend piece yet. Nope, fighting about board rules and Reductress. *backs out slowly*

*backs back in to see if anyone wants to fight about the Bad Art Friend piece*

This is all everyone I know is talking about.

[AJL]

Oct 6, 2021 15:36:30 GMT -5 BlondeSpiders said:

Oct 6, 2021 15:17:37 GMT -5 raangoli said:

I can't wait to read the novel that will be inspired by this Bad Art Friend story

Novel? This will be straight to Lifetime Network, honey.

Tangent! Lifetime Network has some of the best commercials for their network.

[AJL]

From the NYT article:

"Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily." 

[AJL]

Oct 6, 2021 14:28:14 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Huh. The original is behind a paywall, so going off the synopsis... Sounds like the person who donated the kidney is attention seeking, but I'm not going to try to diagnose her. The writer shouldn't have lifted her words exactly, especially if they were in a private group. Technically I believe the poster holds the copyright to those posts. Her story isn't her own, though, especially if fictionalized. So... neither side comes out looking good? (question mark used intentionally)

I didn't read the summary so I don't know how they portrayed Larson, but the story that used the kidney donation trope sounds like totally unveiled dig at Dorland. **crying laughing emoji**

"Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao... 

"Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism."

[Michelle]

I hadn't heard about the Bad Art Friend discussion until this post. I went down the rabbit hole of the NYT article.

From that article, I'd say:

1) Dawn is a narcissistic attention whore
2) Sonja was definitely turned off by Dawn's behavior and did some mean girl private messaging shit with her friends, so in that way, she's kind of a bitch
3) Sonja never claimed to be "friends" with Dawn, but if there is a community and an expectation of trust and genuine affinity and support for each other, taking Dawn's exact words crossed the line to full on trolling. I mean, her initial story even had Dawn as the name of the self-serving donor in the story, until she changed it to Rose. Writing a book with passive aggressive trolling taken directly from someone's posts is a next-level of shade throwing for sure!
4) Sonja's use of the "letter" would get an F from me if i were grading a student's paper - too close to plagiarism. Seems like she knows that too since she said "it's too good!"
5) Sonja's story probably has so many incredible layers that deserve to be read, but her dislike of Dawn seems to have been too pervasive to change enough of her story to get it the attention and following it might warrant. Her own bias against Dawn seems to have bitten her in the end.
6) Dawn knows this is less about plagiarism and more about her being next-level trolled and humiliated among their mutual group of writers and creators. She knows she was put on blast with some extreme shade and is horrified and embarrassed to be called out - accurately - about her attention whore behavior. And she probably does commit a lot of the white savior types of behaviors that made Sonja annoyed with her. It is easier for her to frame this as plagiarism to hurt Sonja back than to say, "You know, you're a real bitch, Sonja," and walk away.


Who's the bad art friend?
Neither. They never were friends, really.

[Michelle]

Am i violating terms and services of the paywall for the sake of this discussion? Here is a c&p of the NYT article located here: www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html

*poof*

[redheadbaker]

Oct 6, 2021 18:54:42 GMT -5 Michelle said:

Am i violating terms and services of the paywall for the sake of this discussion? Here is a c&p of the NYT article located here: www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html

You mean copyright law? Yes.

[smock]

This thread from Celeste Ng (author of "Little Fires Everywhere") sheds some light on the wiring group perspective.

[Michelle]

Oct 6, 2021 19:32:11 GMT -5 redheadbaker said:

Oct 6, 2021 18:54:42 GMT -5 Michelle said:

Am i violating terms and services of the paywall for the sake of this discussion? Here is a c&p of the NYT article located here: www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html

You mean copyright law? Yes.

oooh damn - i thought copyright law applied when you didn't give credit and/or used something as your own to get a profit. Ok... off to delete. thanks

[Michelle]

Oct 6, 2021 19:38:40 GMT -5 smock said:

This thread from Celeste Ng (author of "Little Fires Everywhere") sheds some light on the wiring group perspective.

I'm imagining that "writers' group" to be a forum like this one, where some people are friends IRL (which would likely include off-board discussions), some people are genuinely internet friends (which might also include offboard discussions), and a lot of people post regularly and maybe from the beginning but aren't actually friends with anyone to the degree that they should expect courtesy, collaboration, or any kind of real loyalty. Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt if you find out folks are dissing you behind your back.

But only a real narcissist would try to file a lawsuit about it and solicit a major newspaper to try to discredit the other person. 

[goldengirlz]

It’s crazy that Dawn pitched the story because she doesn’t come across as sympathetic AT ALL in the reporting.

[mouse]

I don’t think any of them came across well. There’s something fairly absurd about saying, “but it’s my art” about someone else’s words. What she did with it sounds really interesting, but those aren’t her words. That’s not a minor technicality. If she wanted to use them as inspiration, that would have been fine, but she knowingly stole them.

Part of the problem is that Dawn isn’t actually upset about her words being used, but how they were used. That makes the whole complaint disingenuous.

[Gato]

I’m only halfway through the NYT article, but my impression is that Dorland is a decent writer, based on the excerpts. I’m not sure who (agent or publisher) would take her on NOW, knowing her issues. She’s demonstrated a hugely over-inflated expectation that the world revolves around her, and would be a major pain in the ass to work with at the very least.

As Anne Lamott famously said, ‘If you base a character on your ex, write that he has a tiny penis. Nobody will ever publicly claim you were writing about them.’ Larson should have made more effort to disguise the character’s origins, but Dorland is the crazy one in need of psychiatry.

[TR]

Oct 6, 2021 23:50:31 GMT -5 goldengirlz said:

It’s crazy that Dawn pitched the story because she doesn’t come across as sympathetic AT ALL in the reporting.

Right? Although I guess her lack of self-awareness is at least consistent.

[litebright]

Oct 6, 2021 23:50:31 GMT -5 goldengirlz said:

It’s crazy that Dawn pitched the story because she doesn’t come across as sympathetic AT ALL in the reporting.

I mean, that's the risk you take when you pitch a story. You basically give a journalist an idea to write about and you have no control over the end product of how/where they take it. The only thing you have agency in are the words you say in your interview(s) -- you can't control which portions they quote directly, which ones they summarize, what other sources they talk to, what other documentation or information they find, whether they bring up something you wish wasn't included, etc. 

Pitching a story to any reputable reporter doesn't mean you're going to come out looking good or that your side is the one that will be presented in a positive light. It just means you might be the person to present your side first. And speaking as a reporter, you very quickly develop a radar for attention seekers and people who aren't telling you the whole story and you need to dig. (Or you get burned once by not doing your due diligence and getting an angry response from someone who says, "Why wasn't THIS included?" and you have to write a follow-up or correction and you never do that again.) I'm sure NYT writers (and their editors) have a pretty finely tuned meter for those things.  

So yeah, the reporter probably wouldn't have heard about a random writers' group spat/legal battle unless it was pitched to them. But I think the people saying "she pitched this to the Times herself" like it's an implication that her side is presented more favorably than it otherwise would've been, are kind of being disingenuous and in a way, kind of disrespectful to the reporter, who obviously dug way beyond any pitch or anything Dawn told or provided to him. I do think it is a revealing point that the author could've included, because again, it points to Dawn's attention-seeking in a way that say, a family asking a reporter to write about a missing loved one doesn't. But pitching a story doesn't mean you control the story. Far from it. 

[Gato]

I finished the article less on Lawson’s side. While I still think writers have the right to use any situation, she really did not do enough to change that letter. She knows this and acknowledges this to her friends: “it was just too good.” She should have apologized and offered a piece of the profits, maybe 10%. Which would have been a whopping $42.50!

I don’t really care about the mean girl aspect. I’ve met so many writers through classes and readings, etc, and very few turn out to be friends from whom I would expect loyalty. All the rest can think and say whatever they like about me; it’s no skin off my back. That’s where it seems like Dorland doesn’t understand boundaries. Plus the fact that Dorland seems to feel ownership over Larson’s work, even though that letter, and Dorland herself, was pretty unimportant to the work as a piece of art. She can’t seem to accept her unimportance, which ties into all the weird stalking stuff. I still feel sorry for Larson for now having to deal with that.

[goldengirlz]

litebright I think you misunderstood my point. I’m not surprised she looks bad in the story just because she pitched it — I’m surprised that as a writer herself she assumed that the coverage would be favorable to her. It reads extra narcissistic that she thought she would get redemption from telling her story publicly like this in the Paper of Record.

[hanspatiz]

You know, all these jokes about marijuana give rise to an attitude towards it as something terrible. Of course, no normal parent will give their child candy with marijuana! But in some cases, marijuana can be useful. I suffer from insomnia and on the recommendation of my doctor I order marijuana on parsl.co. And she really helps me feel better. But of course I do not use it with my children and use it exclusively for medical purposes. And because of such jokes, the attitude even to medical marijuana is terrible.

[redheadbaker]

Oct 29, 2021 8:57:58 GMT -5 hanspatiz said:

You know, all these jokes about marijuana give rise to an attitude towards it as something terrible.