I want to tell you a story about how I’ve benefited from interacting with diverse people in equitable and inclusive spaces. I want to share this story because I know not everyone has experienced these benefits first-hand, and I firmly believe in and support such work. Certainly, I’ve benefited personally in countless ways—many that I probably don’t even realize—but one specific experience comes to mind.
Before we get to my tale, I think it’s important you know—in case you don’t know me and have come here from another corner of the internet—this is me:
I’m a straight, white, cisgender man with no disabilities from a middle class, blue-collar family that called northern suburbs and southern rural towns home. I have a master’s degree, and I have lived most of my adult life in and around the Washington, D.C., metro area.
Which is to say, in these matters, I’m a pretty typical dude who was relatively isolated for a portion of his life but who has gotten around and seen the world a bit (but not enough because it’s never enough).
Now, our story begins in my first year of grad school. Ah, I remember it like yesterday (so I’m probably forgetting or misremembering things, but stick with me anyway).
It’s winter, and I’m crossing a windy university campus corridor between academic buildings. It’s quiet, because most of the youngs go to class during the day so we olds can go to class at night. Speaking of the olds, here are some of them now. I’m one of the eldest, but several of my graduate cohort join me as we enter the building where our class is held. I should note that we’re somewhat diverse in age, race, sex, gender, ability status, religion, etc., but we’re all American and fundamentally Western, even if some of us are in touch with heritages from outside the United States.
We have a lot in common, is what I’m saying, you know? In the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot of cultural overlap.
We take our seats. It’s a workshop, so we arrange our desks in a circle. The professor—a writer who matches our cohort identity in many ways and whom we all admire for her warm, comforting, encouraging approach to teaching—comes in and suggests we get started.
Tonight, we’re workshopping a short story by a Ghanaian writer. She is beyond even me in years. She can’t engage with our lamentations of teaching the youngs because she isn’t a GTA like most of us, and she isn’t a full-time student either, so to my knowledge, this is her only class.
If you want a visual, imagine looking at that circle of desks from the ceiling, and imagine this writer is pulling her desk away from the circle because, probably, she doesn’t feel like she fits.
As an aside, there are few things in a writer’s life more anxiety-inducing than being workshopped. Contemporary workshops are generally much better than they used to be (traditional workshops are brutal, unwelcoming, and oftentimes harmful, in my humble opinion), but they’re still harrowing for most of us.
Let’s practice some empathy. Imagine for just a second you come from another country where your culture, customs, and way of life are very different. You don’t feel like you fit because the other writers have already formed strong bonds with each other. They’ve had more time together and gone through some stuff together, and they haven’t really made an attempt to include you. You don’t think they mean it, but you can’t help but feel excluded or isolated. To boot, you put your heart, soul, and identity into a short story, and now you have to be quiet for 45 minutes or so while 15 strangers talk about you and your work as if you’re not even there despite the fact that you’re sitting in the same circle.
Workshops can be weird and terrifying, is what I’m saying, but the difficulty can compound with other factors such as where you come from and how well you know the other writers in the workshop.
So anyway, in a graduate workshop, the professor usually lets the students take the wheel, and so we do. It may be me—because I’m an idiot know-it-all who generally means well but is wont to stick his foot in his mouth—who starts talking about the balance of exposition and scene work in the story. I bring up the distance from the characters as a challenge for a reader who seeks out access to characters. Other writers begin angling toward similar topics. The conflict is a bit muddy. Where’s the tension? And so on.
I’m not saying I feel responsible for this, but I do know workshop chemistry is consistently tenuous and fluctuating. One writer—even if they’re usually well-intentioned—can ruin an entire workshop for another writer. If it goes on too long, the workshop can be harmful for the writer whose work is the subject of the discussion, especially if the discussion strays too far from the kind of insight they hoped to gain. It can not only feel pointless but defeating.
That’s where a good graduate workshop professor will step in, and ours does. Our professor stops the conversation and tells us we’re all wrong. She explains that, in many contemporary African cultures, myth, fable, and folkloric storytelling are much more standard and widely accepted than they are in Western cultures today, and at this time, the professor asks the Ghanaian writer if she is writing for an African audience. In so many words, she says yes, that readers from her culture wouldn’t have thought twice about the issues many of us had raised.
It’s here, I realize, we’ve been wasting this writer’s valuable time using a Western literature lens to analyze an African piece of fiction because most of us had been isolated in Western literature.
We’d been looking at the story all wrong because we weren’t equipped to look at it correctly.
After our professor again relinquishes control of the conversation to us, the workshop shifts. We talk about theme and narration. We talk about symbolism. We talk about metaphor, allegory, poetry. We talk about the role of religion and magic and how they are seemingly natively intertwined in this story. By the end, I feel like we collectively salvage this writer’s workshop. At least, I hope she got something out of it.
What’s the point?
I want to be very clear that I am not suggesting this experience was the result of any diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative; however, I do think diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives can foster such experiences.
The point of my story is we all learned and grew in that workshop. Every workshop is a place where every writer who participates learns, whether their work is being discussed or not. This workshop stands out, especially for me. While the writer whose piece we workshopped received suboptimal feedback, we brought her into our circle, and had we all been afforded more opportunity to grow in interpreting literature beyond American and British, we may have been more well equipped to give this writer a more productive workshop.
One of the reasons I decided to pursue an MFA was I felt like my fiction creativity had just been ratcheted so tight, like I’d built a house of everything I thought I knew, and even though that house was imperfect, it was the house I had and there just was no space or budget for expansion, extension, or renovation. It was what it was, and I had to live in it.
This workshop detonated a bundle of dynamite in my house’s basement. This workshop exploded my worldview of fiction and storytelling, in particular, and art, broadly speaking. I thought I had everything figured out, and it turned out I had nothing figured out. I thought I was in the conscious competence stage of mastery, but it turned out I was still in the unconscious incompetence stage.
For me, this workshop demolished the very foundation of my understanding of storytelling, and it was good. It needed to happen. I am so very grateful for the opportunity. I needed the permission and space to sweep aside the debris and rebuild, because I was going to make something new and better of my fiction writing, of me as a person.
Why does any of this matter?
Let’s say the workshop participants were in a position to hire this writer and her story submission was her application. We would not have even considered her because of a perceived shortcoming, but our assessment would have had nothing to do with our judgement of her writing’s quality and everything to do with our familiarity with her culture and the audience she was writing for. Perhaps more critically, we would have missed an opportunity to grow our own understanding of storytelling, and we would have missed an opportunity to better understand other people in the world and how to communicate and form relationships with them.
We may have perceived a shortcoming in a difference and failed to see she had something incredibly valuable to teach us.
When we bring people like this writer into our circle, we all benefit. The circle expands. It strengthens. It saturates with flourishes of color. Whatever it is we’re pursuing—whether it’s fiction writing mastery or something more tactile, like, I dunno, cutting drywall or farming sweet potatoes or just lightening up—we learn fundamental and practical lessons about how to do the very thing we’re doing, how other people do it, and potentially how to do it better. We expose ourselves to other ways of living and being. That thing we’ve been doing because it’s the way we’ve always done it? Maybe we don’t need to do it that way. Maybe there is a better way.
Maybe diversity, equity, and inclusion is one of the keys to unlocking mastery.
We lose when we isolate ourselves with only what we know. We miss out on incredibly valuable perspectives if we not only neglect to invite them to the circle but also deride them so that they go elsewhere.
When we refuse to see color, we fail to see some colors are missing.
That’s the broader value of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives: education, knowledge, and understanding. Certainly, these initiatives benefit marginalized individuals by bringing them into environments where they were once excluded or unwelcome, but they benefit the people and places that make efforts to bring them in with new perspectives, greater learning, and broader capabilities.
However, maybe you’re just not interested in how other people on this planet live. That’s fine. Nobody is forcing you to participate, and nobody who wants to participate is taking anything from you. Just because we invite more people into the circle does not mean we’re kicking anyone out. We can always expand the circle. If the circle gets too big for our classroom, we can move to another. We can make it work. We can make the space. Inclusion never means exclusion. If you want in, you can come in. You’re welcome here. If you want to remain in your own corner or a dark closet down the hall and do your own thing, you can do that, too. Diversity, equity, and inclusion means you can do whatever you want, and it means everyone else can, too.
That fundamental freedom is what this is all about. It’s just, at some point, we recognized that freedom needs a little help for some folks to enjoy it, too. Not only does that take nothing from anyone, but it benefits everyone who chooses to participate.
And, frankly, I can’t think of many ideas more American than the desire to share freedom with others, to ensure we all get the same chance at life, liberty, and happiness, no matter what.
Honestly, I thought we’d all agreed on that value and put it to rest a long time ago, but here we are. It’s disappointing because I know we will never be able to count the number of people we’ve hurt or the number of people we’ve denied the opportunity to grow.
For what it’s worth, you’re always welcome in my circle, unless you’re the type of person who seeks to keep people out of it.