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Chris J. Rice's avatar

The way this essay both displays the reality of trauma on the writing process and describes the way such writing can go astray helped me to better understand my feelings of failure and vulnerability around my own writing. Thank you.

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Luke's avatar

Beautifully put. I enjoyed the original essay but its a pleasure to read such a nuanced and well worded response, and I think the feeling that "bad writing in any genre or plot device is bad" is spot on, it's the artlessness that offends us rather than the subject matter. The shortcuts apparently taken to character development or pathos.

I also on some level related to your last few paragraphs. There is a lot of Irish literature about poverty, exile, domestic, institutional and religious sexual and physical abuse and I know it's powerful and well written work but I also know those things from being immersed in that Ireland and I've no interest in revisiting it in my reading.

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