The Alex Perez interview at Hobart was many things, but it was not boring

I was recently in a conference with about a hundred participants. The event organizers decided, for some reason I'll never understand, to start the conference with all hundred or so of us giving self-introductions. Part of the self-introduction was to include the answer to the ice-breaker question, "What's the best job you ever had?" With so many of us, it ended up taking a very long time. Attentions waned early. I stopped paying attention about 1/3 of the way through. I don't think I even listened when it was my turn to go. When we had finally gotten near the end, a guy near the back named Eddie got up. Eddie was not content to stick to the formula, and Eddie did not know how to read the room, which clearly just wanted the introductions to be over. Eddie proceeded to not just tell us his favorite job (he'd been a cop in Philadelphia), but his favorite story about being a cop. It involved a man he'd pulled over on the street who ended up having a sock full of chicken wings in his pants. As he went through his animated telling of the story, which he'd obviously told many times and enjoyed telling, he used a voice that might have been a semi-racist caricature of the person he'd pulled over. At the end, we all kind of laughed nervously, and the event leader, who obviously was familiar with him, said, "And that is everyone's introduction to Eddie." 

What this has to do with the latest literary brouhaha on Twitter 

The latest Twitter culture-war-inspired literary spat (meaning all of like .002% of the US population noticed it) has to do with an interview Hobart editor Elizabeth Ellen did with Cuban-American writer Alex Perez. In his interview, Alex kind of reminds me of Eddie. He makes me uncomfortable at times, and he obviously has his take he wants to get through, and there's really nothing to do but get out of the way until he's finished. But at the end of it all, I honestly did have a few laughs, was challenged a few times, and found it hard to not like the guy. At the conference, Eddie was never alone during breaks, and he was at the center of a few groups during drinks in the evening. I'm sure most everyone needed to walk away now and then to get a break from Eddie, but you also didn't want to miss out on a few minutes with him completely. 

That's not the way most people apparently feel. Many of the editors at Hobart quit over the interview, leaving a statement on their way out the door. They called the interview misogynist and white supremacist, but they also called it "boring." A LitHub article on the subject called it "tedious." It was many things, but I don't think "boring" or "tedious" were it. 

In short, Perez, who went to the very exclusive Iowa Writer's program, feels that the high-brow world of literature to be taken seriously (as opposed to literature for the masses) has been infected by "wokeism." It's run by a cabal of rich white women in Brooklyn who push an agenda of diversity, but whose real interest is to stay in power. They mouth conformity to certain woke principles and demand the writers they grace with publication to do the same. So does the majority of the literary community. 

Yes, that sounds boring when I summarize. I'm tired of articles ranting about wokeism, too. But Perez somehow isn't boring. He has a unique background as the child of Cuban immigrants who were disappointed their son chose writing over baseball. This isn't your typical Praeger University claptrap. There's a sense that Perez has earned at least some of his gripes. I don't think his critique of rich whites and his perception of how the baseline political take of a rich white has changed in the past ten years can be completely dismissed. From his perspective, I can see how he'd think that.

There are reasons to think that the current ideological majority surrounding writing--the kind of  ideology you'd see assumed at places like the AWP conference--isn't entirely sound. Surely, no ideological consensus is ever fully correct. Surely, any political consensus always needs critiqued. 

Some of the same white writers I see on Twitter lambasting Perez I've also heard in private expressing their own doubts. They've sent in stories using fake, person-of-color-sounding names. They've complained that they didn't fit the right demographic to get into a collection. I'm sure a lot of that is white fragility and sour grapes, but I don't think it all is. We all sense something isn't quite right, but it's hard to say exactly what, and it probably isn't altogether safe to ask the question.

I've tried from time to time on this blog to question what it is I find troubling about the assumed ideology I find around literary journals and publishers. I don't know that I've ever succeeded.  The closest I've seen anyone get was this love letter to the profession of literature by Mark Edmundson from a few years back. I was hoping Perez would knock it out of the park a little more, and I was disappointed that at times, he used the lazy shorthand "wokeism" to describe that difficult-to-pin-down something that makes so many people feel uneasy. The closest he got was this: 

What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.

I tried to write something similar when I summarized the most recent Best American Short Stories a few months ago. I also did it four years earlier, again summarizing BASS. One Asian Tweeter responded to that part of the interview by saying, "cool unfortunately my existential despair comes from the fear of being stabbed in the street as an asian woman." I totally understand that, and I don't want to put my existential despair that I'm privileged enough to feel in front of real existential (as in, will I live or die) fear. I just know that the writing I remember and that provides solace to me in my life usually is responding to that. 

Even Jonny Diamond, writing his piece for LitHub, acknowledged that "like all clichés, there is some truth to it." That's sort of what The Economist said about Trump's critique of the world order. My problem with Trump wasn't that he was assailing ideas I found too sacrosanct to assail, it's that he did such a shitty, illiterate, incoherent critique of it. Perez wasn't Trump-level incoherent. He seemed kind of like one of the Eddies of the world. I'm sure I'd find having a few beers with him to be more enjoyable than dull, even if I might find some of his ideas confounding.  

Perez and others who are trying to critique what they're calling "wokeism" because they can't find a better word yet are trying to do something very difficult. I'd like it if, when they did an imperfect job of it, the conversation focused more on that "truth behind the cliche" that they are trying to get at than it did on rage about one's beliefs being questioned. Auto-naming things "misogyny" and "white supremacy" is just about as lazy as calling something "wokeism." 

Hardly anyone reads serious fiction now. Novelists have very little voice in public discourse, or at least discourse that affects anything. To tell the truth, I'd never paid any attention to Hobart before yesterday. (I don't write fiction under 2,000 words, normally.) Clearly, something is off the rails. It's off the rails enough that we ought to be willing to hear just about any spaghetti-at-the-wall idea out there for what's wrong. Perez's ideas were off in a lot of places, but I'd rather see subsequent analysis of where the wheat beneath the chaff might be than burning the field to the ground.