For those of you on social media, or for readers of The Daily Mail or The Scotsman; or those of you being sent various articles for private discussion that you’d rather eat your own thumbs off than speak about publicly, you will know that it has been a BIT OF A WEEK for me. I’ll not rehash it all here, it’s merely a continuation of the hounding I’ve banged on about already, and is just a repeat of the pattern of all houndings that my book assesses. I fully expected to have to deal with it all kicking off again as soon as the book was announced in June (how can you be SILENCED if we can still hear you TALKING gurngurngurn), but, in common with other writers who have chosen to attempt to tackle the gender wars head-on, you always have some nasty shocks and surprises that it’s impossible to fully prepare for. An attempt at economic sabotage from a Literature Officer was one of them. I tried to deal with it privately, but it’s a story, etc, etc, and freedom of the press is yet another of those democratic principles I’m pretty darn keen on. I certainly owe nobody any loyalties who has attempted harm against me. I am no longer immersed in the Scottish poetry world where such masochism might be viewed as a necessity. So, when approached for corroboration, I wasn’t going to lie. Why should I? Cue an absolutely manky flat, the destruction of an attempted keto diet, and two pissed-off kitties who have not been entertained as much this week as they should have been.
But, you do get used to it, you know. I’ve been considering trying to write a How To guide, to help you should you find yourself in the eye of the storm in the gender wars. I think it may be transferable to houndings over other things, and, while I have most certainly not always coped with things the way I’d like to at times, there are some strategies that can help keep yourself steady, should you remember to do them. I could include a How NOT To guide too, though, as I am not so arrogant to think I’ve always come out of things smelling of roses. Only yesterday, idly scrolling Facebook, I saw my own name alongside that of the aforementioned Literary Officer, in a call for us all to come together in compassion and reconciliation, made by someone who seemed to have barely the slightest clue what an idiotic and actively abusive thing that was to call for. (See Chapter 2 of Hounded for why.) Cue yet more anger, and being sent screenshots of people comparing me to a Holocaust denier. Be kind, over there in Scottish litertwatti circles. Lovely “scene” you’re creating.
If you want to be compassionate to the Literary Officer, give her a hug, a cup of tea, and tell her it will be ok. It will be. While I know full well how appalling and stressful it is to be plastered all over the internet and the arts pages with strangers calling you toxic and awful, I’ve not had anywhere near the empathy for me from some now calling for it from me, and I’m afraid keeping my own heid has to be a top priority, given I’m being plastered all over the same fora. When I say you get used to it, yes, of course, one has to really, but it’s never an easy experience.
If you want to be compassionate to me? Stop asking me to do the work of reconciliation. I’ve no interest in that. Not with hounders or those who think any of this is a nice, good, joyous way to live together, trying to get people’s livelihoods destroyed and repeatedly smashing their mental health into the toilet. I feel no link, sense of community, or loyalty whatsoever to the “scene” these people from my former life keep talking about. Fill yer boots, I got out a long time ago. I’d appreciate people not trying to drag me back into it when I’ve said this repeatedly.
My good friend Hannah has a very useful saying, one I try to abide by but do not always manage: don’t let other people’s monkeys scratch you. Obviously, one can feel at times pulled this way and that, as people’s competing monkeys reach out to grab your story and use it for their own agendas - both perfectly good ones and more malign. All you can do, all you must do, is control yer ain monkeys. And one of those monkeys, a very nice monkey indeed, is saying, have some lunch now, go for a walk, take in the sunshine, don’t look for the wee chitterers calling you various flavours of satan. Let. Go. Of. Poetry. Masochism.
I’ll save any How To or How Not To Guide for another time (maybe I should apply for Creative Scotland funding to write it, given that online houndings are such a burgeoning new dramatic art-form in the nation.) But I think one of the main coping strategies always has to be: accept that you do not control the story. It is easier to deal with when you accept that, rather than trying to react to everything, correct every untruth, battle every single smear. You control your own way of sharing your story, but once you speak out publicly, various competing agendas will run with it, for good and ill. And, unless you are telling the story yourself, and are doing so truthfully and honestly, it is unlikely to be the whole story, or might focus on one thing rather than another. Parti avec le vent. Off out into the wind with it. It is no longer yours.
Coping with an ever-spiralling hounding, where social media pile-ons compete with private hectorings; where professionalism collides with emotional horror, collides with wild accusations and constant recriminations, is something that has also been experienced by the poetry educator and author Kate Clanchy.
Kate’s story, which kicked off in 2022, like all houndings, is complex. Subsequently, it has been written about extensively across numerous competing news outlets and Twitter accounts, so for brevity, I recommend taking the time to watch this interview from when she was very much still in the eye of the storm. I am more than aware that Kate’s main tormentors feel themselves victimised too, but Kate is centred here, which, as the person who lost her entire life’s work for a time, seems a more than reasonable person to focus on. Additionally, I’ve seen no evidence that Kate is responsible for the actions of others who may have responded to the three main accusers badly. Parti avec le vent. She can’t be held accountable for anything but her own actions, not one of which was unforgivable where they were even questionable. I’d challenge anyone to deal with an attempt to smear you as something you are not and destroy your entire reputation, without getting a little scratchy-bitey at times. In fact, as a bystander to the burgeoning horror of what she went through, she was, in my humble opinion, rather overly generous towards her often deeply cruel tormentors, something I saw a little uncomfortably repeated in the UnHerd interview with Freddie Sayers. She wouldn’t have deserved what happened even if she had gone in all guns-blazing. But to target a woman so flipping reasonable was - and is - quite something.
Kate’s feeling, expressed in the interview, that her entire life’s work was being destroyed in front of her eyes, for reasons that felt foundationally baffling, is one I know very well. Similarly, that sense that you cannot do anything that will make it stop. Again, too, that the online wildness was far from the only thing she was going through at the time. And, of course, the utter lack of empathy at all for her situation by the popcorn-munchers and the mocking, jeering bystanders and spirallers. Of course, what is worst in all of it - as in my own hounding - was that this attack was led not by anonymous social media trolls, but by peers. Colleagues. Her own publisher. There’s an extra level of directionless fight-or-flight response when you realise the only way to actually escape from it entirely is to give up your entire vocation and livelihood, delete your entire presence from the internet, and never say a word again. And that is the only way to escape it, frankly. It does not stop once it is set in motion, not entirely, and certainly not in our current climate.
As per the usual call of the houndling that ‘you aren’t cancelled if you’re still BREATHING, bigot!’ every time Kate was written about by others, she was blamed for continuing the situation, even though, by jove, was her story newsworthy. Similarly, any time that Kate wrote anything, she got precisely what we’ve all had, those of us who’ve attempted to write our way through this shit. I paraphrase, though you’ll have seen similar to this: '‘Oh look! Crying cis white lady making money weaponising her trauma! Typical cancellation tour stuff coming up in UnHerd, the Spectator, etcetera!’
I can only say to such people that, if they want to be writers, they’re going to have to accept that, well, writer’s write things. It’s what writers do, and not just for a living, though payment for doing so is always welcome. If you don’t want us to keep writing about these topics, you could perhaps consider stopping hounding people who are writers who will write about it.
As any true writer would respond when faced with a call to shut the hell up and never say a word about injustice, screw that. Ok, you might need to spend some time doing very badly paid work like I have been for five years, or take up a job in the haulage industry like Gillian Philip did, but like hell are you going to stop writing or speaking entirely. It’s a vocation as well as a livelihood. Incidentally, this is precisely why literary and artistic houndings are so awful. You can’t easily replace anything that is lost. What is gone, either temporarily or permanently, is far more than financial.
At the time of Kate’s hounding we did not know each other at all. We were mutual followers; both poets and poetry-educators, but we had never met. I’d long appreciated her enormously generous willingness to share her techniques, a rarity in poetry circles, for getting the best poetry out of her students. She was clearly a passionate poetry-educator, extremely talented at teaching, and also admitted to her flaws - again, a rarity in some parts of the literary world these days - in her Orwell Prizewinning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. This excellent memoir’s success was, in my humble but astute opinion, what was in the mix of what led to the delayed rage when her tormentors seized the chance, a year after its publication, to stick the boot in to a far superior writer and educator. (Look, I can miaow on Kate’s behalf, frankly. I thought she was spoken about at times with a rage and cruelty formerly reserved for child-murderers. It was extremely disturbing.)
As I sat, in 2022, still bruised and confused by what to do about my own hounding, I was bystander to Kate’s cancellation. The lies, smears, recriminations, misframings, escalations, the waving of a white flag that was mocked and belittled, as her situation spiralled into the monstrous mess that it all became. I had such an incredibly visceral reaction to it that I responded by writing one of the only poems I’ve been able to write this last few years. It is titled Mercy’s Antithesis, and can be read in my last (possibly final, unsure) poetry collection This Script, available here. It is named after the description of ‘cancel culture’ by songwriter Nick Cave. (NB: Obviously I also responded to Kate’s disturbing hounding by sending her a private message to introduce myself properly, and to check in on her welfare, which felt the very least I could do as someone who recognised the emotional and psychological hell she must be in.)
I could have done nothing, of course. Jeeeeeez, why get involved, right? It’s not as though we even knew each other, other than online. But, as was noted at the time by one of her hounders, feminist women were some of the most prominent people publicly defending Kate. They, of course, framed this as ‘Scratch a TERF find a racist’, then going on to accuse Kate of probably being one of those evil Terven witches due to who was defending her, even though she has never said a single word on the gender wars at all. (For more such tactics, make sure to read Hounded when it comes out! This is a common tactic called ‘guilt-by-association’ and it works well if you want to make someone both toxic, ostracised, and unsupportable, and are in a sector characterised by intellectual and moral cowardice.)
The reason for many feminists looking on horrified, and feeling compelled to say something, though, is obvious. We understand the pattern of hell Kate was being put through, as we have all been being put through it for bloody years now. It is simply not ok to mock a woman who has said she is suicidal and is coping with a massive bereavement, particularly when she has waved a white flag, said she feels terrible, that she feels she is a bad person, and who should never, ever have been made to feel that way for what even she admitted was a bit of an overreaction to some online commentary. The accusations of racism, entirely refuted by the very students that these eejits were claiming to be concerned about, were dismissed by people high on their own supply and their inability to self-reflect. You had a situation where Kate was apologising for things that didn’t require one, said apologies being mocked anyway by righteous fury, and those who should be apologising to her acting like puritanical crusaders. If they’d genuinely wanted to address ‘systemic racism’ in publishing, they’d have picked a bloody better target than an amazing poetry-educator who has helped countless refugee children get published.
It is not known to me the background issues that led to the utterly absurd situation where Kate was so unsupported by her publishing team that she had to jump ship, and I am sure she will tell that story in time. But as a bystander I was pretty horrified by the craven capitulation to online bullying. Such things only work if those with power give in to it.
It can be like watching an accident in slow-motion at times, knowing what is coming, when you follow a hounding from start to… well, has it finished? Perhaps Kate will discuss this soon because I am delighted to say that, after our online correspondence we will finally be meeting in person!
Being based in Ayr, and seriously under-employed, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to have a London launch. I was speaking about this with Jan Macvarish of the Free Speech Union, and I am delighted to say that she has arranged a way to make it happen!
On Monday 14th October, I will be launching Hounded, speaking about the very specific nature of the harms being perpetuated against vocal women in the gender wars. It is important to set these out first, before any specific discussion about publishing. Hounded includes testimony from women nobody has ever heard of as well as headline names, and there is a very specific pattern that is unique to that war, across many sectors, not just publishing. But, of course, if the publishing world goes batshit, how are such stories to be told, and told well? I’ll use my speech to lead in to an open discussion about that.
There will be books for sale, I am sure I can sign a bunch, and mine is a very large gin and tonic, thanks! I am enormously grateful to Jan for pulling this together, and for doing so within 24 hours of me mentioning it.
On The Free Speech Union, as I know full well that my work with them has raised eyebrows, even amongst my supporters: they’ve been extremely useful to me in Scotland as a freelancer, providing advice about contracts, taking an interest in the obvious problems in the arts and culture here, as well as looking over the legality of Codes of Conduct and other things literature freelancers are battling with. More broadly, they have defended numerous people who have been losing their livelihoods, in the most egregious of circumstances often.
Of course, when I was asked to join their Advisory Panel, it was a real test, was it not, of my commitment to freedom of expression. I knew I was going to get absolute hell for it, on top of the merry hell I was already getting for being slapped with the Terven label. I could not have politics more different from its founders, and a number of feminist women have simply not wanted to break their own boundaries of association by joining or supporting the FSU, which is absolutely and utterly understandable. For me, I feel a deep connection with feminist principles, which will be demonstrable in my book. However, as a writer, I also feel a foundational connection with freedom of expression movements, even where it makes for sometimes uncomfortable bedfellows. The foundational connection I feel here, sometimes with centre-right men or women, is not to do with feminism, it is to do with us all agreeing that we must get back to a place where we can disagree well. Just as I would have given a D to any student of mine who responded in a debate with ad hominem insult rather than engagement with their opponent’s anger, I am sick to the back teeth of the ‘It’s in the Mail I’m not reading it!’ ‘She’s a Tory, I’m not listening to her!’ style of argument of very mediocre people who are going to do absolutely nothing to get us back to democratic first principles. Feminist disagreement is not of this flavour, I hasten to add. It is grounded in deep feminist principles about feminist organising, and I am totally in support of those efforts, as I said. While I’d be extremely unlikely to ask the FSU for assistance setting up a feminist literary festival, therefore, I feel no qualms about approaching them for assistance on launching a book that foundationally aligns with their clear opposition to illiberalism. Plus, Jan’s amazing. So there.
Given that there are harms being enacted against women who have been hounded in the gender wars by right-wing men, many of whom claim women’s victories and work as their own; or, as I am getting seriously miffed about, tweeting psychologically abusive tweets accusing feminists of being nowhere in this fight, or that we do not care enough about women internationally, I will not be shy about making those points where I can. But elsewhere. The book launch event, which will start with a short speech by me to launch Hounded, will then focus on the problems in publishing in terms of freedom of expression, rather than any other problems with ‘movements’ and strategies generally.
And who better to be on the panel than Kate Clanchy, with her extraordinary experiences? Joining us will be the literary agent Matthew Hamilton, to provide an insider’s perspective on the problems across publishing.
Please do buy your tickets here, and come and join the discussion, either in person in London or online! I have a rather splendid fox-print dress for it, and, as a total bumpkin, I look forward to me and my idiotic sense-of-direction navigating London for the first time in what feels like a decade! I, er, havenae been oot the hoose much, eh. It is really nice to feel that life is becoming less small than it has been. If I can keep other people’s monkeys in the rearview as far as possible, I’m starting to think I might just jolly well get through this, chaps.
Houndings of all kinds can shrink your world so tightly that it feels you might implode, or else explode as the dark side of the human condition is spat and spewed at you by people who seem to want to cause you serious destruction. We do not need to live in that type of world. I’m interested in speaking with anyone willing to stop it, and who wants to find ways to tell these important stories. See you there, hopefully! xx
Online ticket bought, already looking forward HUGELY to the event and contorting all crossable digits and limbs in the hope that there will be a Scottish one too. Your Substack postings are things of beauty, wit, courage - thank you.
A female friend of mine, who has also been hounded and cancelled, advises me when looking for new friends to "avoid artists". (And she's an artist ... but she's just wisely playing the percentages).
Regarding Kate Clanchy and others: it is very apparent to me that something that is prevalent in our current time is that quite evidently kind people are being attacked, at least in part simply because they are kind. (See also Nina Power). "No good deed goes unpunished": I am seeing it time and time again. I see it as a kind of dark spiritual force in play.
I, too, hope for a Glasgow/Scottish launch!