Geek on Shells

The Kenyon Review adamantly supports the widest possible inclusiveness in the writers it seeks out and publishes, as well as in the students and workshop participants it supports, teaches, and attempts to inspire. David Lynn, editor, mass email dissemination shortly after the inauguration

David, although many might take issue with me on how I ascribe the utilitarian value of literary expression and its interpretation thereof, I have something to say: my thirty three years of relentless persistence and publication in print and digital media, from my first appearance in the hybrid English Canadian Slow Dancer as an over-aged upperclassman, to my most recent throw away to the young minority doctorate, Bianca Spriggs, of one of my strongest essays, for nothing, in Pluck, has done jack shit for my welfare, other than to give me a pedigree which the millennial student editors today might find mildly intimidating, hence my cynicism in relation to publishing, perishing, and Kenyom's strident and conscientious cultural appropriation. Indeed, the essay Bianca so graciously accepted did nothing to stop me from becoming a victim, four times over, as a disabled woman, of black arrogance, cruelty and corruption which has denigrated me repeatedly. The essay is just cleverly ambiguous enough, that it can be read either way, how urbanism generates racism or universal identification, and the grand lady of commitment to creative writers, Allison Joseph, who could have paid me for my courage, suffered over the piece, while Bianca read it as "crip became scarred liberal," and took the plunge. It was commendable, but doesn't alleviate how much I've suffered in your cosmetic pretenses to be successfully matriculated in an ambulatory, exclusionary world. Appearing in nearly a hundred publications never got me a job, or did all that much to further any sort of economic security. I'm closing fifty-six, and my next major break, be it computer, power chair, even my bed, may be my last. I never see people like me, let alone my dialectical rival, Vassar Miller, whom dung bitches like Josie Byzek weren't even aware of, and my former editor calls herself an intellectual, but perhaps took too much heat on twitter, truly integrated. In the industry, we're a sidelined cameo. Aside from the Hawking exception, whose condition seems to play into the cognitive dissonance of mad genius, we aren't a major presence in academics, and despite my best efforts, I am probably going to die, pathetic, in pain, in a welfare ward. You might say this puts too much onus on creativity, that using language skills to entertain offers us a valve, but what does the valve, the novel, the poetry collection, or the literary journal, do to mitigate ruthless hardship? I logged on this early morning to ease some flatulence, cut Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw down to size, adapting Philip Roth's imprimatur signature on counter culture. Goodbye, Columbus angered me as little more than orgasms are paramount and loving commitments an affect. Roth knows his culture as well as I know mine, and he's rich, having eroded it. Me, I'm just black balled for challenging community integration models, for raising my voice about women and their need to bring developmental birth defects into the world so developmental birth babies can be enslaved by case management. Sorry to rock your precious, inclusionary schooner of cultural appropriation.