Few in the writing world have managed to miss the recent Stranger diatribe by Ryan Boudinot (author of The Littlest Hitler), who currently bills himself as “Executive Director of Seattle City of Literature.”
In case you did: Boudinot betrays the confidence of former students who’d worked with him one-to-one for their MFA degree, and goes on to declare that he can count “real deal” students on one hand — all of whom were men, apparently, although Boudinot concedes “that’s not to say that someone with minimal talent can’t work her ass off and maximize it and write something great.”
Under the heading, “No one cares about your problems if you’re a shitty writer,” Boudinot goes on to explain
For the most part, MFA students who choose to write memoirs are narcissists using the genre as therapy. They want someone to feel sorry for them, and they believe that the supposed candor of their reflective essay excuses its technical faults. Just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable. In fact, having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more.
And so on.
While it comes as no surprise that “Seattle City of Literature” is an organization that Boudinot appears to have created himself, what does come as a surprise is that “Seattle City of Literature” appears not to have been created merely as something for Boudinot to fall back on, after trashing his students and colleagues, but in the hopes of getting recognition for Seattle as a UNESCO Creative City.
Yes, UNESCO.
UNESCO, people.
Whose stated aim is, among things, to “contribute to the building of peace” and “intercultural dialogue” through education.
And yes, Seattle writers, that means Ryan Boudinot is both your mayor and your ambassador to the larger literary world.
Need we say more?
Well, others have.
Author Jaimie Gusman
That’s right. He said he had wished that one of his students who was writing a memoir about being abused as a child would have suffered more because of the student’s “inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences…
Ryan Boudinot, an obviously white male professor who taught at the graduate level for eight astounding years, tells you how much his students, with the exception of the ‘Real Deal students’ he could count ‘on one hand, with fingers to spare,’ bored him almost to the point of quitting his job…. According to Boudinot, in order to be a ‘Real Deal’ writer, you must be a young and nimble, white, male that will have read The Great Gatsby and other canonical books way before graduate school….
Boudinot’s ‘Real Deal’ students, the ones who don’t make him want to quit his job, are assumed to be males with a privileged background, like himself. References to ‘he’ are given in explanations of students who show promise/have innate talent, while the she’s of the world are reading books ‘that don’t make me work so hard to understand the words.’
Author Chuck Wendig
Wh… whuuuuuh… why would… whhh.
That whistling sound is the dramatic whisper of oxygen keening through my open, slack-jawed mouth. Because holy fucking fuck, why would you ever say that and think anybody is ever going to feel good about it? Man, I am a huge fan of the TAKE YOUR MEDICINE LIFE IS HARD school of teaching writing, but never in a zajillion years would I suggest you suffer more child abuse because you’re a bad writer. Thanks, teacher, you’re so helpful.
Author Laura Valeri
We as teachers simply cannot dismiss students as ‘not having it’ and ‘not being born with it’ or ‘too late to get to it.’ It’s unacceptable. If we accept them into MFA programs, take their money, and time, and hopes and dreams, then we have to make it work. However difficult it may be. I’m sorry to say this, but I’m glad you quit. It takes stomach to be a teacher.
Author Adrian Van Young
Boudinot’s freeform mean-spiritedness does nothing but make bookish people feel crappy.
And last, but certainly not least, author Bhanu Kapil, so beloved here at Tarpaulin Sky, and one of Boudinot’s former colleagues
I think you should apologize.
To your former students.
The ones you wrote such devastating things about. Things that fall, for me, into the category of academic mobbing [LINK IN ORIGINAL]….
Please consider the suffering your words have caused.
To people without your particular
Place in life.
All of which is being aggregated at an apparently anonymous website called, most appropriately, RyanBoudinot.com, a “watchdog website for Ryan Boudinot, Executive Director of Seattle City of Literature, whose recent remarks — regarding child abuse victims as well as former students — stand in stark contrast to the mission of UNESCO Creative Cities, of which Seattle City of Literature had once hoped to be a part.”
Indeed.
Tarpaulin Sky thanks the creators of the website for contacting us, and we thank all who have responded to Boudinot. Readers — from Seattle or otherwise — may contact UNESCO Creative Cities at creativecities(at)unesco(dot)org