Lavender Wyldes

Co-host of the Bad Books 4 Trainwrecks podcast, publishing romance of questionable quality on Wattpad.

[lavwyldes]

Hello world!

My name is Lavender and I'm working on starting a podcast with a friend about bad books. This is a sideblog for me to chat and indulge in the writer's side of things, whether I'm talking about my own work, others', or techniques.

I want to use this blog to explore other aspects of writing that I don't want to publish under my government name. I'm new to the romance genre, so either I'll be leaning into the fact it's bad, or pleasantly surprised people like it. :-)

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

don’t give me absolute freedom

don’t give me absolute responsibility

i’ve eaten a bag of popcorn for dinner

and i probably will again

-condemned to freedom

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

dark matter and dark energy

make up 95% of our universe

we don’t know what is holding

us together or ripping us

apart so maybe it doesn’t matter

that you don’t what you want to

be when you grow up at 30

-we don’t know what the universe wants to be when it grows up either

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

staring down the shotgun barrel of life happiness being mere moments sadness dragging like concrete shoes keep working for that house with the white picket fence and in-ground pool with a spouse with different genitals than you with 1.33 children even if you’d be happier with a bachelor’s suite downtown just waiting for those (maybe) 2 days a week you don’t need a blaring alarm to wake up and if you don’t have that you’re just lazy your body can be on- or off-trend depending on some esoteric force you’ll never meet apparently you need pills to make your brain not want to jump off a cliff but everyone will tell you just go outside there’s this hole where companionship should be but you don’t want to be someone’s secretary-therapist-maid again you just want peace you shouldn’t drink but how else do you tolerate those parties where you don’t know anyone and yet aren’t you human aren’t you supposed to get off on this sort of thing?

i look at this and i laugh

i laugh and i laugh

defiantly

Ya'll read any Kierkegaard lately? I certainly haven't. I just watch a bunch of YouTube videos about him.

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

you

in a building

on a block

on a street

on a highway

in a city

in a county

in a country

in a continent

on a planet

in a solar system

in a galaxy

in a universe

always expanding

-eat the damn cookie

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

if the universe was inevitable

so are you

-what will you do?

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

listen boys

if you compare me to

a flower or the ocean

one more time

my eyes will dislodge

from my skull

and go for a ride

-new material needed

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

the best poem i ever wrote

[followed by an otherwise empty page, then at the bottom at the second:]

-did you get it?

Ah yes much deep, so insighful.

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

when i slide my key into my front door at night

i always seem to struggle with the locks

i always worry that one day

it’ll take too long to slide the key in

turn it

open the door

and shut it behind me

-hypervigilant

The side effects of trauma may manifest in ways you wouldn't consider...

[lavwyldes]

[lavwyldes]

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

media literacy is learning

the man who taught me that kids could be

smarter than adults that i could swashboggling

happy was definitely an antisemite

the woman who paired feminism and fairy tales

who i patiently read with a dictionary by my side

liked younger men whom she didn’t share a language with

the poet who taught me the power of women’s love and the beauty of winter in equal measure might’ve had some *opinions* about trans folks and wondering

what do their works mean now?

-unsurprised weirded out sad

So what's my opinion on reading *problematic authors*? Well, it's all on a case-by-case basis. All the authors I mention in the poem have passed now so none of them directly benefit from me purchasing their work, and there is of course always the option to buy their work from a used book-store or take it out from the library. If the author/work is really old and in the public domain, you might be able to find it on Project Gutenberg.

If a specific author that is *problematic* is still alive and their crimes go beyond being an asshole in that they have directly and/or indirectly caused harm to other people? Then I'm sure there's another author out there who writes in a similar style about similar topics I could try to engage with. See my above solutions if you really *must* read their work.

When it comes to me reviewing books, I do personally feel the need to try to purchase the book or take it out from the library because I believe that if you're going to criticize something, you need to have your best foot forward, and by buying the book (directly or because you pay taxes) you are more than entitled to give your opinion on it. However, because I often seek obscure and controversial books that may no longer be in print (or maybe is available but for hundreds of dollars because its rare), I'll use the Internet Archive or a similar source.

Of course, all the above comments only the the financial aspect of separating the art from the author. How you can protest with your wallet and all that. But what about from a literary critique standpoint? What about from an emotional standpoint?

In academia, there are two different (main) ways one could look at a work. That can be through formalism or through theory. Formalism is truly separating the art from the artists. You break down the form of the work, the themes, literary devices, etc. In this case, you take the words for the words they are on the page without context. In theory, you use a theory (such as Marxism, queer theory, feminist theory, etc.) to try to place the work into context. You might compare the work to other works of a similar style or written in a similar time period.

In my opinion, you can't stick to one way to analyze a work, as you are missing out on something if you don't use both. Analyzing and considering the written word itself and how different writing techniques may play into a work is important but art doesn't exist in a vacuum because artists don't exist in a vacuum. They are influenced by the what, when, where, and why they lived in. Considering the politics and philosophies of the time works were written in or the life of the artist themselves gives us context in which to view the text that formalism alone doesn't. This brings us to the emotional standpoint of separating the art from the artist, which is what I think most people truly struggle with with the Rowlings and Gaimans of the world.

Art has impact. If a work doesn't have impact, it's less likely that people will latch onto it. Art can come to us during important parts of our lives and change our perspective on things. In the case of Roald Dahl, the first artist I mention in the poem above, he helped me discover a love of language and words as a child and how one shouldn't listen to adults (authority) blindly. To question "the way things are," and yet he couldn't question his antisemitism. Angela Carter, the second artist I mention in the poem above I first read in university, but I truly fell in love with her word porn writing style when I discovered her short story collection Burning Your Boats. She is most well known for deconstructing fairy tales through a feminist lens, for analyzing the taboos especially those surrounding sexuality, and yet she didn't recognize the sketchy power dynamic it would be to date Japanese men decades younger than herself when she didn't speak Japanese...and they didn't speak English. How am I supposed to look at how Carter breaks down gender dynamics if she wasn't analyzing how gender and race may affect her own life? Finally, Adrienne Rich, the final artist I mention, counselled Janice G. Raymond in her writing The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, a transphobic screed that has influenced modern anti-trans movements. How can I come back her poems she writes about love between women when she may have had such a narrow view of what it meant to be a woman? It hurts to have artists we look up to turn out like this, but they are as human as we are. It's inevitable that you'll have one of your favourite artists be problematic.

When confronting questions like these, we can do one of two things: we can wave away the concerns or fixate of them. We could say that's "just how things were" when Dahl was alive (as if antisemitism isn't still alive and kicking today). We could say that the young men Carter dated were legal adults that were consenting. We could say "people can change their minds" when considering Rich. I can't wave away these concerns. After finding out about Rich's potential transphobia, it ruined Dream of a Common Language for me. I couldn't emotionally connect to it like I used to. These little niggles pervade my mind as I try to reread her work. Maybe me fixating on these few moments of a person's life is problematic on my end, but the art is a reflection of the artist and unless you feel like playing ostrich you can't full separate the two.

TL;DR? Protest with your wallet and find other methods of consuming media by problematic artists or wait until they pass. You can't get the full picture of work without analyzing it within the context of the history of the artist and the history that surrounded them, and finding out a favourite artist's problematic traits greatly impacts my personal relationship with the work, making it emotionally difficult to separate the two for myself.

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

in my youth i

got my uncalloused hands

on every “how to survive”

book i could

stuck in a building on fire?

lost in the woods?

shipwrecked at sea?

natural disasters?

if i read enough

i would survive

except

none of these things came

my disasters personal

contained

comparedly small

and yet

i had read nothing

about those

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript [words make a circle]]:

am i more impressive now that i wrote this in a circle making it harder for you to read

so...am I impressive now?

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

if i call myself

a hot mess

i can say it

with a wink and

a smirk

it suggests that

the messy hair

camisole with a hole

stuttering words and

tired eyes are all part

of some woven aesthetic

and not symptoms of something

less approachable

-dumpster fire

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

in life

you aren’t always the queen on stage

sometimes

you’re just the drunk white girl who thinks she can steal

the spotlight

-time and place

Don't be that guy, folks! It's a drag show, not a drunk show. If you're going to to enter a queer space-especially as someone who is not queer-brush up on your etiquette!

[lavwyldes]

[Transcript]:

poetry is

words

Time for some delicious (no so) faux-pretentious poetry about poetry from here on out!