viz.

Dear Anonymous,

Thanks for posting and engaging me in conversation. I think I hear where you’re coming from and I’d like to clarify my position. When I refer to the questions asked in Q&As with contemporary writers, and specifically the questions asked of Junot Díaz during his talk on race, I put myself in the same category as the series of students at the talk who posed different versions of what I think is the same question: how do you write? I think that our relationships with authors we admire are always complex: we want to talk to them and be heard, we want to be like them, and we want to have their guts to speak our own truths all at once. But I definitely don't presume to tell anyone how to feel--these are one woman's opinions.

I hope that you’ll give it a second read and see that I place myself among those with raised hands, and perhaps consider the possibility that you don’t know my story. If you’re interested in talking about this further, feel free to email me at jenn.shapland@utexas.edu.