Bully for You
Bullying in the Writing Community
I am thrilled to tell you that Fusion Fragment has purchased my short story, “Stone Test,” for publication in issue 23 due out this autumn! This story is near and dear to my heart and I can’t wait for you to read it in Fusion Fragment. Watch this space for more details on when and where you can read!
Now: The writing community has a bullying problem. And by “the writing community” I’m mainly talking about the writing community online—although this problem isn’t only online—because when something comes to light in an online space like X, Facebook, Threads, or another major social site, then we can all hear about it. When a case of bullying comes to light in, like, Barbara’s Wilcox County, Alabama, writing group, we don’t all hear about it. Unless we’re part of Barbara’s writing group. Barbara I am frankly insulted that you haven’t invited me to your writing group.
This is not the first time I’ve written about writing-community bullying in Shelf Life. In Fall 2021 I wrote Bad Cat Helicopter, which was on the topic of who a story belongs to and who is allowed to tell it. But, at the heart of the Bad Art Friend thing and the Helicopter Story thing were bullying.
In case you don’t remember, in October 2021 the New York Times published “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” about how Dawn Dorland donated a kidney and Sonya Larson wrote a short story about the kidney donation allegedly lifting some of the text from a letter Dorland had written to the recipient of her kidney. In 2023, a federal judge ruled that Larson’s story did not infringe on Dorland’s copyright (read the full story in Bloomberg Law).
That decides the copyright infringement case. But as the internet tugged on the thread of Dorland and Larson, a story of bullying ultimately came to light, with Sonya Larson and her writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. In fact, the judge in the case said, “Indeed, it would be difficult to read ‘The Kindest’ as anything other than a criticism of an altruistic donor’s choice to reach out to a kidney recipient”—in other words, the story itself is critical of Dorland’s choice to altruistically donate a kidney.
The Chunky Monkeys’ group chat, which came to light via a subpoena in the court case, echos the story’s critical sentiment of Dorland’s donation. The group chat participants purportedly made fun of Dorland’s performative altruism for years.
The “Helicopter Story” situation revolved around a story by Isabel Fall, originally took the well-known transphobic joke “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” as its title. Fall, a transgender woman, used this title as a means of reclaiming an offensive joke and exploring the theme of what gender really means in her award-nominated story, published online in Clarkesworld in January 2020. Shortly thereafter, due to online bullying accusing Fall and her story of being a transphobic attack on the queer community, she asked that Clarkesworld remove her story and then she disappeared from the community altogether. (You can read the full story of what happened with Isabel Fall in Vox.)
This kind of online pileup is what I’m talking about today, because the behavior persists even after it’s been proven many times over that it’s very easy for an instigator to whip up a crowd of online bullies against pretty much anyone they want. Remember when Redditors decided to identify the Boston Bomber? It was a disaster.
Recently, there have been several more instances of bullying in this same community, including some of these pile-ons. First, there was the Cait Corrain situation in which the author created a series of Goodreads accounts to give scathingly bad reviews to fellow authors who were debuting around the same time, mostly writers who are women of color. (I wrote about this in Winners Never Bully.)
More recently, queer fantasy and horror writer Freydís Moon was revealed to be an alias of Taylor B. Barton, Taylor Brooke, and Jupiter Wyse, among others, who had all participated in or ringlead social media bullying campaigns against other writers. One of Moon’s victims, D.N. Bryn, lost a Rainbow Crate deal as a result of Moon’s accusations. (See Rainbow Crate’s statement against Bryn and their later statement apologizing for their treatment of Bryn.) You can read an overview of the Freydís Moon scandal on LitHub.
(Full disclosure: Freydís Moon was one of the editors of the Spectrum anthology, in which one of my short stories was published.)
I have been spending some time trying to understand where the motivation to bully one’s peers comes from. In some cases, it’s clearly an if-not-you-then-maybe-me mentality: Bullies believe that if they are able to deny someone else an opportunity, then they might be able to step in and claim that opportunity.
In some cases, this actually happens: D.N. Bryn was dropped from Rainbow Crate in an August 2023 Instagram post and Freydís Moon’s book, Three Kings, was later featured in a spring 2024 Rainbow Crate box. Likewise, Cait Corrain harassed and bullied other debut authors whose books would be in direct competition with hers, and later admitted she was intimidated by their books and worried hers wouldn’t measure up.
This reflects the reality that there are limited opportunities in writing and publishing. There are only so many trad publishing deals to go around, only so many readers, only so many dollars going toward purchasing books and transforming into royalties. The mistaken belief these bullies have is that if someone else is denied the opportunity, then they themself might have it—and this is not true. When bullying comes to light, the bully often loses future opportunities—this is often true in the writing community. (I would not say broadly, across the board, that bullies in life lose out on opportunities.) Cait Corrain lost her book deal and Freydís Moon was dropped from several opportunities as well.
The other motivator is that the internet just loves a mob. Mobbing someone online, anonymously, via social media, gives people all the pleasure of participating in a mob with none of the accountability or consequences that come from being caught participating in a mob. And what are these mobs showing up for? You’re not trans enough to tell a trans story. You’re too performative about donating your kidney. These are mobs with a penchant for righteousness. This type of mob is fed by the belief that their own moral superiority gives them the authority to mete out justice to anyone who isn’t up to that standard.
But the thing all the bullies and bullying mobs mentioned in today’s Shelf Life have in common is that they were caught, correctly identified as bullying or harassing, and were reproved for their behavior. In some cases, perhaps in all cases, it took longer than it should have for the bullying to come to light, and harm was done to the people who were bullied, harassed, or chased right out of the community.
This is what people mean, I hope, when they say bullies never win. But if Cait Corrain’s fellow debut authors took sales hits, if D.N. Bryn lost their Rainbow Crate deal, if Dawn Dorland spent multiple years in court trying to prove copyright infringement, then the damage was done. The bullies might not have gotten what they wanted from it—to take someone else’s opportunity for themself—but the opportunity may have been taken away from someone undeserving, nonetheless.
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