yesterday in my blog post i made a couple of jokes and used a little irony and i think some of that was lost on a couple of you. maybe it’s because i’m british and we use sarcasm and irony so much that it can often resemble normal speech. 

i’d like to again point out i am not into girl hate and slut shaming. i don’t have any dislike for this writer. i am indifferent to this writer as a person, it is the literature produced that i have opinions about, and that doesn’t relate directly to them as a person, i am seeing the literature as a stand-alone rather than an extension of the writer. maybe this is something i learnt at university when i was spending hours poring over poetry and poems and discussing their meaning and worth. maybe i’m a little too stuck in those traditions. 

my problem was precisely that: *my* problem. my own concerns over what this means for the rest of the female alt lit community who are already relatively over-looked unless they are very slim and beautiful, which is a very contentious thing to say indeed, but i am not slim nor am i beautiful, but i am a good writer. when i write something i take an idea and i expand on that and i try to do that in an artful way. i spend time sometimes researching the thing i’m writing about, or i’ll carry a notebook around and write down the odd word or phrase that i think might be useful and try to weave it in later. i read a lot of work by poets writing today, a lot of alt lit too, and these are all mechanisms working toward the construction of the work. 

but this is 2012 and of course literature can be produced and experienced on many levels. rather than go about literature the way i do i could instead be “living” and writing about that. i could be copying and pasting, i could be getting myself involved in red-hot situations with questionable men, the whole time knowing that i will later use this as part of a piece of literature. every word exchanged in my head i could be thinking “i could use this for something” and whilst it might make the exchange slightly contrived and insincere, it’s still a method of writing. it’s called collage, it’s also found writing. it’s legitimate and i accept that. it is not the standard of literature i’m contesting. i have always argued that absolutely anything and everything can be art, i love conceptualism, i love dada, surrealism, everything. when i first heard about flarf i felt completely content knowing this was a movement that existed. 

as stated before, my problem was just my problem. i am not going to try and use the word feminism any more because i’m not entirely convinced that some people really know what i mean when i say that word. there are many different kinds of feminism, no two feminists are the same. i am clearly from a different chapter of feminism and that’s fine. i do not wish to tell marie calloway what she can and can’t do. i do not wish to “slut shame”. a friend said to me that this wasn’t writing, it was just whoring, and in this instance i disagreed with their comment. no woman should be called a whore, or slut, or anything like that. those words shouldn’t exist in our vocabulary. 

so this is perhaps a kind of rebuttal. i shouldn’t have an opinion on this, i suppose it just briefly hit a nerve. today i woke up thinking why can’t we all just stop fighting and get on and yes, girls getting at eachother’s throats isn’t a good idea in any situation.

as marie calloway sarcastically told me yesterday “don’t worry one day you’ll get in the new yorker!” - well, maybe i will, probably i won’t. but if i ever do i think i’ll feel pretty happy knowing that it was down to a lot of hard work and dedication and love for my craft, reading as much as i can and trying to create something innovative and “good” and the way i produce literature is completely my choice, the same way that how marie produces hers is her choice too. who knows. maybe one day she’ll get in mcsweeney’s.