12th Street’s Model Literary Citizenship Survey is back!
Back in December, we put together a short list of our most burning questions about what it means to be a “literary citizen” and sent it off to some of our favorite writers/model citizens in the New York City literary community.
Being the supportive, generous, and just plain rad people that they are, our respondents replied with passion and enthusiasm, sharing their hard-won wisdom with us to cultivate responsibility and mentorship in our literary community at The New School and beyond.
And trust us: the second installment of our Model Literary Citizenship Survey does just that. So read on!
Meet Alison Kinney.
Alison Kinney is an author and teacher whose nonfiction writing covers topics like history, music, social justice, and culture. In 2016, Kinney published her first book of cultural history, HOOD, as part of Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series. For the past four years, The Best American Essays named four of Alison’s essays as Notable.
But there’s more: Kinney’s online and print bylines include The New Yorker, Lapham’s Quarterly, Longreads, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, L.A. Review of Books, Avidly, New Republic, The New Inquiry, Hyperallergic, VAN Magazine, and Lit Hub. Kinney writes a column on the art and artifacts of opera fandom at The Paris Review Daily, too.
12TH STREET: How do you define literary citizenship?
ALISON KINNEY: I think that literary citizenship offers the same benefits—and barriers—as civic citizenship, so it’s a fraught term; “community” is loaded too, but maybe less so. What’s interesting about these terms is how, when we use them, we tacitly modify them with “good.” So a good literary community is respectful, attentive, supportive, welcoming, diverse, and oriented toward equity, justice, and fulfilling our creative potentials. This also involves respecting each other’s time and capabilities.
STREET: Why is it important for writers to practice good literary citizenship?
KINNEY: For the same reasons it’s important to be good community members at all; this is a choice people can make or not make, out of feelings of self-interest and/or mutual obligation. No aspects of these decisions are ethically or aesthetically neutral.
STREET: What can writers do to become better literary citizens?
KINNEY: This is something I tried to practice when I was starting out as a student and then emerging writer; you make the communities you want to flourish in. And you need to do it with each other because the work is continual, exhausting, and always demands more of us. We can read each other and share each other’s work. We can mentor and support each other along the way—people started wanting my mentoring before I’d gotten my MFA or published anything, but people didn’t always want to give back to me. We can ensure that our platforms, groups, readings, events, and communities are diverse, inclusive, and, most importantly, feature leadership by members of diverse communities.
STREET: Who are your favorite literary citizens?
KINNEY: A lot of good literary citizens are people whose names you might not recognize, because they’re building communities rather than self-promoting. But Jennifer Baker comes to mind, easily, as a writer who’s done tremendous good for community, through creating events, editing, promoting other writers, and showing up to do the work.
STREET: Where can writers who are interested in practicing good literary citizenship go to connect with like-minded individuals and communities? Online and IRL?
KINNEY: You start with each other, in classes, forming cohorts. Together, you form groups and go looking for other groups; you connect people you meet, you have writers’ meetups, you go to readings together. You do this labor together, using the internet, having conversations. Part of being a good literary citizen is doing the homework and acknowledging that other writers have done that work for you, to make it easier for you, and mostly they didn’t get paid to volunteer their time to help you. A lot of emerging writers tend to think that they need to latch onto a star writer who’s going to make their careers for them. That’s mostly not how it works. Most of my contacts have come from basic friendliness, and being a person who was happy to talk to anybody at a party, no matter how awkward we all felt about it.