Fall 2017, I was a first-semester MFA student. Like most MFAs, I was plumped together with other students for my first grad-level poetry workshop, and our weekly duties consisted of creating poems, reading passages, and giving the best feedback we knew how to give each other’s poems every week for 15 weeks. My cohort was one with mixed backgrounds — some folks came from English, Physics, Accounting, and other backgrounds — but anyone paying attention knew that there were no more than three BIPOC in all of our classes. I was always the only Black person, and that was painfully obvious in a classroom with no ethics.

Five weeks in, it became clear to me that code-speak was the language of this workshop. “Delicacy” often took the place of honesty, and “consider changing this to be universal” was code for “slang doesn’t belong in poetry”. Often, I was tasked with “catching up” to the references to Shakespearian-era lit that went over my head, and masking anything that resembled neurodivergence.

This all came to a head midway through the workshop.

A colleague came in with a poem that had three characters: one Black girl, one white girl, and one latina. The crux of its stanzas was the latina telling us the story of their relationship from their perspective, and how, in hindsight, they felt guilty for bullying the Black girl alongside her white friend. It was unsettling to me, to say the absolute least. When I got to the workshop, I let it be known through asking questions around ethics.

“Why does this poem need to exist?”

“From what gaze are we allowed to speak from, as writers and people?”

“I notice that the Black girl in this story has no lines. Why is that?”

The energy of the workshop completely shifted. When we were let out for break, it was my colleague who was checked on by the teacher. It was then and there that I knew, deep down, I would not finish that program. My poems and life depended on it.

And here, six years later, I still have the same questions.

***

On October 11, 2021, the New York Times started the literary discourse topic of the week with their exposé, Bad Art Friend. This was three months after Cat Person and Me, and three months before That Ploughshares Poem. It seems that literary America is having a discussion that keeps emerging around ethics. Who gets to write an elegy? And to whom? And what morals do we uphold as writers in the public sphere?

Six years later, and we don’t have answers. That is why we need ethics.

Before you say “no”, I want to clarify that it’s true: you can definitely write about anything. Your break ups, your loves, your trauma, your internal battles and frustrations — writewritewrite about it all. For some of us, that is the only way we can process our feelings. For some of us, writing pairs well with speaking to friends, family, or licensed mental health professionals. For most of us, how we write is how we get to know ourselves and the people around us, but do all of those things mean that you should share it publicly?

When you make the choice to share writing publicly, you are making a choice that requires intention. Intention requires ethics, so that means we need ethics.

There is no world where any discipline that is in the public sphere does not require ethics. The private sphere of a writer — journals, diaries, finstas, and group chats (unless they’re subpoenaed) — is where you can say *almost* anything, and not suffer repercussions outside of your little network of friends. The internet is endless, though, and that means we have to care about how our writing affects other people. How do we enter literary conversations? How do we preserve the dignity, humanness, and authenticity of our literary thoughts and imagination? I think it starts with the workshop, and having a shared understanding of what is and isn’t okay to say/do. Contrary to the internet’s belief, not all emotions are valid. Because writing is an emotion and feelings-filled field (see that alliteration, hehe), not all writings are supposed to be in the public sphere, I believe. In any field of writing, we can’t escape our contexts. Our contexts are often riddled with white supremacy culture and capitalism. Those things can’t, unfortunately, be cast away because we are writers. We have to interrogate, and make boundaries around what is morally right and wrong.

***

Your next question might be something like “but how do we create ethics?”. I don’t have an answer, but I do have multiple offerings. First, there is some merit to having ethics that are made by the conduit (classroom, event, etc) of the space. After all, we don’t have a capital L Literary Institution in the same way that, say, Social Work has the National Association of Social Workers. However, there is also merit to having a national conduit that creates community-made ethics that all teachers, presses, magazines, and other literary entities agree to use. For instance, all of us should agree that it is Not Okay to take intimate details from someone’s life and not let them (or their family members if they are deceased) know. We also should agree that it is Not Okay to stalk someone for the sake of fiction, or call folks out when you haven’t even attempted to have a private conversation with them. IN THEORY, it would be cool to have that written down somewhere, so the Cat Persons and Bad Art Friends cease to exist.

Both of those paths, however, still leave behind a number of questions. Is deregulated ethics enough? We SHOULD be able to agree on the above assertions, but can we? If so, who would be the conduit of those literary ethics? Would ethics be a book, and if it is a book, would it have multiple contributors? Would it be a PDF free and available online? How will we get that book/PDF embraced by literary spaces? What does “regulation” mean for literary spaces? How do we ensure that regulation doesn’t turn into policing? How do we make ethics accessible?

Maybe those questions don’t get answered right now. In the interim of the long-game, we can teach ethics (and publishing, while we’re at it) in MFAs. We can acknowledge the white gaze, and how we don’t need to center it in conversations around BIPOC. We can continue to diversify staff, editors, and board members in literary spaces; even when we have “free BIPOC submission rounds” and “anonymous reading”, the people reading those submissions are white, so the white gaze will be centered. We can accept that some folks’ ethics, and opinions in general, will be different than ours, and so long as it's not harmful, we can cease the ungenerous comments. We can define how we as individual writers show up ethically to public literary spheres.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that we need ethics. And quickly.