The Writer's Studio: Appropriation or Affinity? How to Write Well About Others

On October 30, please join us for Appropriation or Affinity? How to Write Well About Others, a Writer's Studio workshop hosted by Austin Smith.

Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, writes: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” This is a radical act of empathy. The poet recognizes that it is his responsibility not merely to report what the wounded person feels, but to feel what the wounded person feels. Another poet, John Keats, told a friend that, through an act of the imagination, he could feel what it feels like to be a billiard ball, experiencing “a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness, volubility, & the rapidity of its motion.” And yet we live in a moment when people are understandably concerned about writers inhabiting the perspectives of characters unlike themselves. The fallout over the controversial novel American Dirt is an example of a writer being called out for appropriating a story that isn’t theirs to tell. In this Writer’s Studio, we’ll discuss examples of writers successfully inhabiting different perspectives, and examples where writers have failed in such efforts. At the end of the workshop, we’ll practice some empathic writing of our own. Our goal is to emerge from this workshop newly inspired to write about others with respect and consideration.

Austin Smith is the author of two poetry collections, Almanac and Flyover Country. He has received an NEA grant and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. A Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he lives in San Francisco.