Ian Post #8

What most struck me about Brian Goedde's essay was an instance in which Goedde himself falls prey to the very stereotyping he encourages Lorraine to explore and critique in her essay scene. Specifically, Goedde writes, "'the most profound' offense comes when [Lorraine's] small-town boyfriend says he doesn't want his family to meet her because she's Mexican."

To be clear, I'm not defending the comment made by Lorraine's boyfriend. The boyfriend's comment is, obviously, disgusting and racist. He sounds like the WORST. But I do want to point out how Goedde's strategy to critique the boyfriend seems hypocritical, as he criticizes the boyfriend for his small-minded assumption by himself making a small-minded assumption about the boyfriend (I'm talking about Goedde's casual association of the boyfriend's racism with his "small-town" upbringing). Even if I recognize that regions of the country are in fact more steeped in racism than others, I think now, particularly in the America of today, it feels really reductive to attach issues as omnipresent and permeating as racism to specific regions of the country. Just as I can find a racist individual in, say, small-town Kentucky, I can find a racist, NYU-educated attorney living in Manhattan.

Maybe this feels like a weird part of Goedde's essay to dwell on, but I think it's important because it speaks to two crucial components of the creative process: first, the need, as author, to extensively contemplate every implication in your writing; to prosecute each of your lines thoroughly to ensure you aren't intimating something you don't mean, or imitating the very thing you're supposed to be critiquing. Secondly, I think this moment in the essay gestures at how narrators get to be characters in creative writing in ways they're rarely allowed to be in academic writing, and how this characterization of narrator can create a rich, two-pronged reading experience: the experience of the delivered content and also the experience of the filter through which the content is being delivered. Or, to use Goedde's own words, the story and the telling.

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