It pisses me off when a kid is persecuted because of his or her imagination. I've spent years in school turning in messed up, sometimes disturbing, fictional stories to teachers and, luckily, none of them ever decided I was a threat to society because of those stories. Not all teachers think that way, though. From
last Tuesday's New York Times:
Earlier this month my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, reported that a college student had been expelled from art school here for submitting a story "rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust" to his creative writing class. The instructor, a poet named Jan Richman, subsequently found herself out of a job. The university chose not to explain its failure to renew Ms. Richman's contract, but she intimated that she was being punished for having set the tone for the class by assigning a well-regarded if disturbing short story by the MacArthur-winning novelist David Foster Wallace, "Girl with Curious Hair." Ms. Richman had been troubled enough by the student's work to report it to her superiors in the first place, in spite of the fact that it was not, according to the Chronicle, "the first serial-killer story she had read in her six semesters on the faculty at the Academy of Art University."
Homicide inspectors were called in; a criminal profiler went to work on the student. The officers found no evidence of wrongdoing. The unnamed student had made no threat; his behavior was not considered suspicious. In the end, no criminal charges were brought.
The column is written by Michael Chabon, who wrote a wonder collection of short stories called A Model World that I just finished reading a few days ago. The stories contain wonderful, subtle writing about simple humans caught in complicated, confusing lives--i.e., your typical human life. There was nothing too horrible, violent or disturbing in the book. But I think it's clear from Chabon's passion and arguments in this column that, like myself, he is no stranger to violent imagery flowing from his own mind. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with this, especially in adolescents.
Adolescents are fucked up. One of the problems in our society is that we tend to pretend otherwise. But strip yourself of the notion of well-adjusted adolescents--they don't exist. Teens are fucked up, they're full of hormones, they don't know what they're doing with their lives or where they're going. They can be messed up for a variety of reasons--from being abused as children to just suffering the daily events of junior or high school life.
It is par for the course for violent and disturbing imagery to manifest itself in art amongst adolescents. It happens everywhere, all the time, and sometimes it creates some incredible, impressive and beautiful art. We should not try to shun it, sweep it under the carpet or, worst of all, condemn the creator. We should accept it, examine it, and try to use it to better understand the creator. We should use it as a jumping off point, a stimulant for conversation. But to expel a student because he wrote a disturbing story? That's chilling and asinine. Unfortunately, we have seen numerous examples of this kind of persecution since the high profile school shootings a few years ago. Meanwhile, the social problems that actually create murderous children continue on, with few politicians and other officials daring to tackle them.
Our reaction to the art created by our children is a hell of lot more disturbing than the art itself.
(Originally posted on my blog, Nightmares For Sale.)