VANESSA GEBBIE'S FICTION WORKHOUSE (2)

I had intended to post here an honest exposé of VG at the helm of FW and how she operated and how after only 4 months she entrusted me with the reins of her 'baby' and afterwards how she thanked me profusely for the very good job I did in steering FW forward. I have written the post, but at the eleventh hour have pulled it. Rereading it, I thought it might be hurtful in its honesty, hurtful towards VG, and, you see, I am not that kind of person. It would serve no purpose to publish it save to hurt VG. If I have hurt her with posts below I am sorry, but have only done what I did below to defend myself against her and others. I am still doing that.

I have recently been writing under a pseudonym. I feel I have been forced into this. I entered a comp last year, throwing in 3 very strong pieces (two have won comps since (one a very a big comp) and the other was an unpublished winner from elsewhere and has since gone on to be highly commended). I entered them into a comp where I had done well several times before, always been on the shortlist and been on the podium twice. I bombed. It made no sense. This happens in entering comps, so I just shrugged. But then someone sent me an anonymous e-mail saying I was not being read by some comp judges... but every comp I had entered had duly accepted my entrance fees! So I felt I had to adopt a pseudonym if I was to be sure in my head that I was being judged fairly.

A writer called Benjamin Judge accepted some of my freely given pieces for a site he had set up. Then my pseudonym was unmasked and he presumed that my adoption of the pseudonym had a malicious intent. It did not. Even VG has written and subbed under a pseudonym before and her mentor AK and many others besides. I did so in order to be read and in order to save others from being targeted by an 'anonymous' person who seeks to undermine my successes at every turn: I had three stories accepted by 100 Stories For Haiti; these were subsequently pulled because someone threatened the editor that he/she would go to the publisher and inform them of my 'past' and so risk having the plug pulled on the whole charitable venture. Again freely given work, to do good only, and again the rug pulled out from under my feet.

Vanessa Gebbie, Jane Smith, and Tania Hershman have all at some time acknowledged that I am a writer with some ability, even some talent. The word 'gifted' has even been used. And yet I am forced to adopt a pseudonym to be read.

Someone on Benjamin Fudge's blog commented that I was a sociopath. This person is called Beebe Barksdale-Bruner. (A sociopath: someone who commits antisocial and sometimes violent acts against others and shows no guilt for the harm that they do. *(see below)) I do not know this person and she does not know me and clearly has not read my blog or any of my defence. Calling a person a sociopath without appreciating the sensibilities of the person and without any consideration of the impact of that act of calling, does, it seems to me, rather epitomise what a sociopath is. I hope Beebe stumbles along here and sees the sense of what I am saying. I bear her no malice.

I have apologised to VG and JS and to TH. I apologise to Benjamin Judge and to anyone else I have hurt or who feels let down because of me... but in what I did, including the posting under a pseudonym, I do not admit any wrong-doing. I have asked for a definition of what plagiarism is and what it is not. I have pointed to how writers going back to Shakespeare and coming right up to date with VG have taken from other writers and shown how I simply fit into this process. I have resolved not to write in this way again (without any admission of guilt in what I did, save that I am sorry for any hurt caused). If Benjamin Judge or anyone else can suggest how I might now go on being a writer and having my work seen and read, I would appreciate it, because I am a writer and worth being read... after all Benjamin Judge, you posted several of my pieces and thought they were good.

* This definition is written in my own words, but it conforms in general to what can be found in a standard dictionary. Online dictionaries sometimes refer you to the word Psychopath as they are related in meaning.

It Never Ceases To Amaze Me

“People lie…all we can count on is the evidence.” (Gil Grisham, “CSI”)

It never ceases to amaze me the ease with which some people lie and how easily the lies can be accepted by others. Just spotted this on the blog of a writer I once knew; she was talking about writers using other writers’ ideas:

"I really object to the word 'stealing' here. Having been the victim of a real thief of published and unpublished work, who went on to subject an erstwhile close working colleague to a couple of years of abuse in one way and another, I can tell you that theft really is a ghastly thing. When people are talking about 'inspiration', I wish they'd be wary of calling it theft and thus encouraging people like this.



Not that it is relevant, but my treatment, after going out of my way to give this man professional encouragement, help, and a platform for his work in the form of publication in a text book, among other things - knocked me back so that I could not write for the best part of a year. I am not young - and time is something I do not have. My abuser found my upset hilariously funny and stupid. I was ridiculed in public for months, by a professional man who ought to know how to behave better. Misogyny perhaps? Certainly a deeply cruel person. I would not wish that experience on anyone."

I am the mysoginist ‘thief’ she refers to. She once called me ‘kind’ and ‘soft’ and ‘dear’; now I am cruel. She several times described herself to me as ‘unkind’ and ‘not nice’ and having ‘teeth’ that can ‘bite’… but here she says I am cruel!

Anyone who really knows me (and this writer does not) would laugh at the labels 'mysoginist' and 'cruel', really laugh. I am considered a very very gentle man, and driven by equality in everything, and non-judgemental, and fair, and thoughtful, always seeing both sides and always trying to be understanding of all differences of view... all this I am considered, to a fault, by people who know me and by the pupils I teach. So, let me get to the evidence, the lies, that demonstrate the untrustworthiness of what this woman writer says so you might know too: see my bullet points below.

She says that she could not write for the best part of a year. A quick perusal of her two blogs will tell you otherwise. (You can look for yourself!)

• In the time she is talking about (Aug 2009 until August 2010) this writer posted more than 150 blogposts and some of these run to a thousand words or more.
• She went on numerous writing retreats during this period where she said ‘What did I achieve? Lots!’ That’s what she said on her blog. (The year before any of this happened, she reported once that writing was going slowly and on another occasion she had done none at all and had only read books – both of these occasions involved breaks away from the world.)
• During this ‘lost year’ she said she worked hard on her poetry, something that was new and she was developing.
• She also promoted, with over 15 blogtours, her textbook on short story writing, as well as promoting it in the real world with various live events.
• She put together and published another edition of a magazine she edits.
• She was a competition judge for probably the biggest fiction comp in the world, and for another very big comp only six months later.
• She put together a complete collection of flash and micro fiction of her own, which she has so far had placed with two different publishers.
• She put together another collection of short stories for publication and this has now been published.
• She worked on her novel, which involved adding tens and tens of thousands of words to what she had, and then extensive rewrites over the period.
• She applied to the Arts Council for a grant and following the success of her application was involved in even more intensive and extensive rewrites.
• She contributed fiction and poetry to very many publications over this time and had many pieces accepted.

I do not begin to touch on the business of the rest of her life, suffice it to say that she is never still for long and had a lot of personal difficulties to deal with in this time.

But how can this writer claim that she could not write for a year and suggest that I somehow stole a year from her when the years are so precious to her now that she is older? There aren’t many writers who could claim to have done as much as she has in the same period.

She lies about herself quite spectacularly; how much more easily does she lie about others?

Her mentor and writing guide, the person who taught her so much, runs a writing camp thing. I once considered doing a spell at this camp. I asked her what she thought. She said the man who ran the operation was a great teacher and I might learn a lot from him, but that he was also a bully and probably a misogynist too. He was, she said, after falling out with him, the reason she set up her own writing place called ‘The Fiction Workhouse’, a gentler more friendly writing club. If she doesn’t like you, if she falls out with you, then her default setting if you are male seems to be to label you a mysoginist.

I did not steal from this writer as she claims. She says everywhere that I stole very specific ideas from her, but she nowhere has specified what those ideas are and no one seems to have picked up on that. I worked very closely over the internet with this writer. We wrote a novel together spread over nine months, a novel of letters winging back and forth; and several stories we wrote together, too, and we critted each others’ work in close detail. If I absorbed stuff from her work then I did no more than a good writer does. One of her favourite novels is ‘Austerlitz’ by W G Sebald. In it there is a moment that looks into a window in Tierzin, one of the Nazi Death Camps near Prague. In the window we see a box of seashells. This collaborating writer in the novel we worked on together and set in Prague and the surrounding country, was writing about Tierzin and a woman incarcerated there. The woman owned the same box of seashells. At the time I read this I thought it was a lovely piece and strange and magical. Then I read ‘Austerlitz’ and was surprised by the shells in the window. I do not say that she stole from Sebald, but can see that she absorbed from him something from his book, and that in writing about the same place, Tierzin, the shells crossed over into her writing. This, it seems to me, is normal and natural and not theft. I have not stolen from this writer as she claims. If I had, she would have sought legal representation in suing the pants off me – that’s what she would do and that’s what she didn’t do, that's the teeth she would bite me with.

I look forward to the publication of her upcoming novel so that I might then openly discuss what she claims I stole from that work and which I also hotly deny.

I find it hard to believe anything that this writer says now... but others swallow her lies with surprising ease. Check the evidence - it is all that we can count on.

This writer I write of is called Vanessa Gebbie.

VANESSA GEBBIE’S FICTION WORKHOUSE (1)

I am a hoarder. I rarely throw things away, thinking they might have a use further down the line someplace. E-mails I hoard, too, and in reviewing how I come to be where I am I have been rereading many of those e-mails, over two hundred from Vanessa Gebbie alone.

In April 2008 Vanessa Gebbie, having read some of my work, invited me to be a member of her hand-picked group of writers working in her closed on-line site called 'The Fiction Workhouse' (FW). I was like a kid in a sweetshop on my first visits to the Fiction Worhouse – I remember the time so clearly. One of the first pieces I read there was a flash fiction piece by VG in which a young girl was observing an older man. Members were encouraged to read each other’s posted work and to pass comment on the posted pieces. Eager show-offy puppy as I was, I went one better: I wrote a reply to VG’s piece changing the point of view so that the man was now observing the girl. I wrote it in the same style. VG was so taken with what I had written that she wrote a response from the girl and so we ping-ponged back and forth until we had written between us 9 or 10 flashes. Then VG said we should each take away what we had jointly produced and using the pieces construct a complete story. This we did so that we had, in the end, two stories out of the process.

VG was excited at this new way of collaborating and wanted others in Fiction Workhouse to see what we had done and to see what fun this kind of collaboration could be and how it could produce very good writing. A brief online discussion took place about how we should submit the pieces, whether to competitions or to magazines. I was keen to acknowledge VG’s contribution to my piece. Someone else on FW suggested we sub only one of the pieces and that we go for co-authorship. VG got quite cross with this person and broke off discussion; instead, she e-mailed me privately. This is what she said:

“I was a bit thrown by X’s view that we should only sub one of the stories, and then as a joint thing. I can’t agree! Don’t know what you think… but we’ve invented a new form of collaborating in which the work becomes two very different pieces. Some of the images are the same, sure… but the themes, characters, focus, the whole story is entirely different. I have no trouble with them being treated entirely separately, do you?”

I didn’t. I was excited that as a writer she saw ideas as I thought they should be seen, as common property rather than private property, a sort of socialist view of ideas. She had used some of my ideas and I had used some of hers and there was no sense on either side that this was wrong. Indeed, VG wanted to hold it up as model for others to work by.

So taken with this way of working was VG that within a few weeks, on a quiet night in FW, she asked if I wanted to ‘play again’ and if I did she suggested I flash something up on the site to get the ball rolling. And so we did it all over again.

This sharing of ideas was established between us, so for VG to now cry 'thief' seems strangely absurd.

Early in 2009 VG was in South America. She still popped into FW sometimes, at a distance, to post prompts to stimulate members into writing. At this time she posted half a dozen. No one responded at all - no one except me: I responded by writing something to each of the prompts, show-offy puppy eager to please VG and not wanting her to be upset that others were not responding to her prompts. VG posted no more prompts but she sent me an e-mail saying there was a piano tuner in Ushuaia and there must be a story there. That's all she said. I responded: I wrote a complete story. On her return from SAmerica I was excited to show her and asked her if she wanted to see. I was a little crestfallen when she said she didn't want to see it as she was sure it would be extremely good and she did not want my ideas in this case to influence the story she wanted to write. There was no sense that I had done anything wrong in writing mine - why should there have been? Later, when my story did well in competitions, VG got upset. Whatever your thoughts about this, and the facts are as I have presented them, what is certain is that there was no malicious intent to misappropriate VG's ideas. So why does she cry 'thief' still, without giving any specifics of what I am supposed to have stolen from her?

"I am not a nice person," she once wrote to me; on another occasion, "I am not kind"; and yet another, "I have teeth and I bite". VG frequently fell out with the writers on FW and when she did it was all so acrimonious and she was known for her temper at FW and some of us acted as peacemakers on the site. And now she has fallen out with me.

Challenge to Karen Clarke et al

Been a way for a while. An accident at work escalated into something more serious and so ended up in hospital enduring two operations under general anaesthetic. Slow road to recovery through the school summer hols lies ahead. Feeling crap. So that’s where I’ve been, and may not feel much like being here online for a wee while, and when I am I won’t be so chipper… that’s the drugs talking.

Anyway, I have a lot to catch up with: missed some competition entries for June, which was a shame, but health is more important than that; got some comp results to check up on: and the matter of someone leaving a comment here a wee time back needs addressed.

I don’t get many comments here these days (you find out who your friends are when something goes wrong), but one person did drop in to comment on a post of mine. She made two comments actually, but the second was just to goad me into publishing the first. There was no need for the second: I posted Karen Clarke’s comment with a response and a challenge. If you are going to criticise me then the least you can do is to think the criticism through. Karen said I showed no remorse for the ‘wrong’ I did two years back. I pointed out that I had apologised, withdrawn the ‘offending’ story and resolved to work differently; what I did not do was admit that I had done wrong. I did not admit this because rationally I cannot admit this. I challenged Karen Clarke to say where the line should be drawn given that all writers pick up their influence from other writers and that all honest writers admit to borrowing. I am still awaiting Karen’s reasoned response. I don’t expect much.

I have asked other writers the same question and when they get down to it they admit to not having an answer. Personally, I sit in the camp where using someone else’s actual words is an actual crossing of the line, but the evidence around me, in all things creative (art, writing, music, dance, theatre and film) is that the borrowing of ideas is natural and all a part of the creative process. That explains why the copyright law does not prevent such borrowing, cannot prevent it.

So, Karen Clarke and any other writer worth his or her salt, tell me, if you can, where is the line of what is allowed and what is not when it comes to borrowing others’ ideas and making them your own Make your statement and make it fit what happened with Shakespeare and a million writers since. Make it reasoned and sensible. Mud-slinging is just dirty, Karen Clarke, so try something more cerebral.