Thar She Blows!
An essay, Captain, one of yours! Cited off the port bow! (So shoot me. It’s a Friday and I’m a bit frazzled.)
In the wake of yesterday’s Great Copyright Hissyfit, I ran a Google search for my own name, just to see what came up. Somewhere around page five I saw a link to Google Books, a footnote in a published book. There was my name, under footnote forty-nine, complete with the name and URL of one of my old essays, “Chaos Dogma”.
I haven’t thought much about the essays on that site in a while. I’d probably cringe if I read them now, considering the amount I didn’t know about craft when I was writing to material for my own site.
And now I find out someone cited it in a published book: Magia sexualis: sex, magic, and liberation in modern Western esotericism, by Hugh B. Urban. This is pretty cool. It’s almost like I’m an authority on something.
I was discussing this with my nonfiction workshop professor, Ana Maria Spagna, and the conversation evolved to the question of what happens to our writing once it’s written. I personally think that choosing to write means accepting that the reader might get something very different from my writing than I intend to put into it. The reader might be having a bad day, or might have an ex- with the name of one of my characters, or might simply disagree with me on a fundamental level.
There’s no way to predict or plan for reader reactions. The best one can do is write as well and as clearly as possible, and hope that the reader enjoys the work.
So was the essay cited to prove a point I’d agree with? Was it taken out of context and abused? Was it used as a launching point for a different essay?
No way to know unless I contact him. I think I will.
Submissions update: I’ve been so busy this semester I haven’t submitted anything outside my classes. I want to do something about that before the year’s end.
