Breaking into the holy spaces

On being an outsider writer cast out of her lineage

Bookstores are holy places to me. After the water and the trees, the open spaces of silence filled with the noisy sounds of bugs and birds, bookstores are my most holy places. The practice of browsing, picking up books that call to me, flipping through pages to find worlds upon worlds. The shiver of recognition down my spine when I read something true. Stacking piles of unknown authors into my arms, searching like I’m searching for something. Finding a writer whose work I know, but something I haven’t read yet. Knowing that I won’t leave empty handed, knowing that something I’m seeking, something I can’t recognize yet, is here.

I was a child when I first understood that this was a conversation, a long one, a grand one, happening across time and space. All those voices didn’t overwhelm me — they exhilerated me. And I didn’t feel out of place there because I always sought out, and found, the writers on the margins, the ones who snuck their way into the conversation even though they clearly weren’t welcome. I come from a long tradition of outsider writers, who found their way, little by little, into the holy spaces of bookstores. I come from a tradition of devalued writing, writing that snuck its way in. That didn’t bother me and it didn’t scare me, because I managed to find these writers and I knew that my readers would find me.

I always had the audacity and the tenacity to be a writer. I never wondered if my words mattered because I knew that they did. I knew that my human experience and my capacity to make meaning from it were precious and irreplaceable gifts. I knew that I had to give these gifts to the world, out of love for myself and out of love for the world. And no matter the odds stacked against me I have always found a way. I have never stopped. Through sheer perseverance and grit I got my writing into the world. Photocopying zines and putting them in envelopes and sending them to strangers. Leaving zines on the bus. Trading them and lugging boxes to zine fairs. And then eventually, breaking into the holy spaces themselves, walking up to the cashier at the bookstore and telling them they needed to carry my zines.

It wasn’t instagram clout that got me into bookstores. I was a nobody with a little photocopied booklet in my hand. But the writing spoke for itself and the cashier took them. On consignment at first, only a few copies. But after a few years the cash register would open and they’d be giving me hundreds of dollars up front, for my writing. Yes the money was welcome because I was poor. Yes the recognition was delicious. But what mattered more is that my writing was situated in context. I had broken into the holy spaces. My words existed alongside the other writers, the writers who came before me. And my words would be found by other seekers who were looking for something true.

Now I am more successful than I could ever have dreamed. My writing moves through the world like water. Passed hand to hand from one seeker to another. Like secrets shared with those who need them, my words find their way. My writing is read all over the world. It is translated into multiple languages, not by presses with money, but by my readers who want their language communities to have access to my words. It is a labour of love, these translations — a testament to the fact that my writing is important. My writing does things in the world. It gives people something they need.

I don’t think people drunk on dreams of capital (whether financial or social) can understand that this is holy work, driven by something much deeper and older than capital is. I don’t think those who have not found their way into that long and grand conversation can understand that it is its own reward. I write because I have to. I write because it would be selfish of me to steal from the world this gift I have been given. I write because people need my words the way that I need the words of other people. I am part of a lineage and humanity speaks collectively through these lineages. It matters so deeply and it is so much more important than money or clout.

Here are some things I have read recently that made me burst into tears:

“I came at [Joanna] Russ sideways, through Riot Grrl and AK Press distro and those hideously ugly Grove Press Kathy Acker paperbacks, seeing her name-checked by the punk rock chicks who created their own culture through zines and mix tapes when they failed to see themselves in the wider culture. And so her very legitimate lineage, in my eyes, also includes all those girls who gave themselves purposely bad haircuts, who spent hours copying their manifestos at Kinkos on hot pink paper, who sharpied Sleater-Kinney lyrics onto their jeans, who were really into Livejournal for a while. This unofficial passing down of women’s writing from girl to girl, from woman to woman, is something Russ notes here as an antidote to women missing from the academy. If the official history neglects to tell you where you came from, you can always create those pathways yourself.” — Jessa Crispin in the introduction to Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing.

“Legacies, influences, are fragile and disappearing things, like silken threads. The sunlight slants one way, and you can see them just barely. The light slants another way, and they disappear…. One July morning, I woke up to an email from Chris Kraus. She began telling me about Ann Rower, a writer she had long known. “Ann is eighty-five and homebound in a NY apartment,” she told me. She hadn't written anything in twenty years, since the suicide of her partner, Heather Lewis. But when Chris told Ann that she wanted to reissue her collection If You’re a Girl, which was the first book Chris published in her Native Agents series in 1991, the opportunity “unlocked something,” in Ann, and she sat down and wrote eight new stories…. “If You’re a Girl perfectly captured an attitude and pitch of NY bohemian life,” Chris said. “Ann’s an incredible writer, and for me a powerful influence.” I was dead curious. I had to read this writer! In some corner of my memory I’d heard of Ann Rower. I didn’t think I’d read her, but I knew I must. For me, it was Chris Kraus who had been a “powerful influence.” In 2008, when I was writing my book How Should a Person Be?, I came across I Love Dick in a summer sublet in New York (at the home of two young academics) and consumed it in a fever. Chris’s fearlessness, her nakedness, the strange way her life had given birth to her book, gave me direction and strength. I asked Chris to send me Ann’s book right away. I wanted to hear this other voice behind Chris’s own voice. I sensed the precarity of female literary history in receiving Chris’s email, and the necessity of independent publishing, where the only concern is how badly the editor needs the book in the world. I saw that in publishing Ann Rower now, Chris was slamming this writer into the soil, so that other writers might grow from her, the same way Chris had, and the same way I had grown from Chris. Chris is doing this with Ann in 2023, as she did it before, in 1991. I don’t mean to suggest we only grow from one writer, but each writer we grow from adds something unique.” — Sheila Heti in the introduction to Ann Rower’s If You’re a Girl.

“When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it before, if no woman was ever that socially sacred creature, “a great writer,” why do we think we can succeed now? The specter of “If women can, why haven’t they?” is as potent as it was in Margaret Cavendish’s time. A (possibly) genuine singularity has become a manufactured one and still has the power to discourage. For example, in A Room of One's Own, [Virginia] Woolf writes of her fictitious novelist, Mary Carmichael: “She will be a poet . .. in another hundred years’ time.” A hundred years’ time? Good heavens (we might Woolfianly write), is it possible that this snobbish member of the upper classes, too introverted to leave her study, a believer in no great cause, bound by the limitations of being a lady (we have E. M. Forster’s word for it) was too lazy or too uneducated to know that her poet had already occurred not one hundred years in the future but sixty-odd years in the past? Can it be that Virginia Woolf, that omnivorous reader who read old diaries and wrote about people nobody ever heard of (like Miss Pilkington and Miss Ormerod) never read Emily Dickinson? Probably she did not, for A Room of One's Own was published in 1929. The first comprehensive collection of Dickinson’s work, heavily edited and extensively bowdlerized, was published in 1914 by a relative, Martha Dickinson Bianchi. The more complete Bolts of Melody appeared after Woolf’s death, in 1945; the complete, unbowdlerized, collected poems did not appear until 1955.” — Joanna Russ in How to Suppress Women’s Writing.

Reading these words again has me absolutely sobbing. I know that I am reading something true. I know how tenuous these lineages are, the way that the human conversation through time and space that is literature is stretched to breaking, and fractured, for women, and racialized people, and queers, and the poor, and the crazy, and other outsiders who have been forced to the margins of the conversation. Whose contributions to the conversation are there, but we might not find them. And then we might not know something we need to know, something only they could tell us.

It is not arrogant or conceited of me to acknowledge that my writing is a part of this conversation. Of course it is. I too am a voracious reader. I too have sought and sought for writers who could show me something of the world and something of myself. I too have felt the shiver, the expansion, the recognition. I have folded down the corners of pages. I have changed the entire course of my life based on something I read in a book. And I have seen my words at work in others. I have seen the look on their faces when the writing hits the place inside they had abandoned. I have seen the gratitude and the challenge and the change. I have been told, over and over again, that my writing has saved lives and changed lives. I have watched my words change the culture. And I’m not surprised, because that is what writing is meant to do.

Despite all my success, I remain an outsider writer without institutional backing or support. I have to work a million times harder than other writers because I don’t just write, I do everything myself from production to distribution to promotion. I don’t have the legitimizing stamp of approval of a press or fancy awards. This gives those who want to dismiss me permission to dismiss me. Yet what it really proves is that my writing is so powerful it moves through the world without the permission or support of those with power.

Since being cancelled for no reason and having an international campaign of harassment, slander, and dehumanization leveraged against me, I have self-actualized into the most powerful version of myself I have ever been. I finally gave my entire self to my writing. I was brave enough to tell the truths I was afraid to tell when cancel culture waited for me like a stake on which I had watched others burn. Being cancelled made me a better writer because it made me a braver writer. But it also gave those who wish to dismiss me even more legitimacy in doing so.

One of the things I lost in my cancellation was the working relationships I had with my local indie bookstores, relationships I earned through the audacity of showing up and putting my outsider writing into their hands, relationships I earned through the sheer power of my writing. After I was cancelled I was quietly iced out. There was no more requests for restocks. My emails weren’t replied to. And I couldn’t bear the pain of facing my ejection from the holy spaces I had managed to break into. So I did my work without them. I refused to stop writing. I continued to be prolific. I sold my zines through the mail. And I am even more successful now than I was before I was cancelled. Because my writing is powerful and it speaks to people and I don’t give up on it no matter the odds stacked against me.

After my warm welcome in Barcelona and Toulouse, after stopping by Quimby’s in Brooklyn to drop off more zines and remind them to pay me the money they owe me, the grief I feel at being iced out of the literary spaces in my own city turned into an ache. I have been trying, over the last year, to reestablish connections, to live my life as if I’m a famous important writer because I am. I was cancelled almost 5 years ago and no one can give a clear answer as to why exactly I’m “problematic” so I hoped that maybe people would move on and let me break my way back into the holy spaces. But I have been met with evasions, a lack of response, and dismissals without explanations.

Today I did something crazy and brave and wrote to my local indie bookstore demanding an explanation. Writing this email felt extremely painful. It is extremely painful to be treated the way I am treated. On the one had my mother threatens to sue me for writing about the incest in my family, on the other hand “anarchists” destroy my writing and slash my tires because I am allegedly an “abuse apologist” (citation needed). In my own city I am treated with contempt and iced out of literary spaces despite being one of the most widely read writers working in this city. It is painful. And what is most painful about it is my barring from the holy spaces, the way I am cut off from and cut out of the context and lineage to which I belong.

I felt so sad writing this email. Sad and scared and humiliated. And then I considered how the outsider writers I love and cherish have also probably written many similar letters. I considered how they too had to crawl and scrape and break their way into the literary tradition. I considered that even if I haven’t seen them, many writers I love and admire have probably written letters defending their right to take part in the great, long, human conversation that is literature, and these acts of self-defence matter. I considered that this email, this attempt to defend my own dignity and right to belong to the traditions to which I belong, is in fact a part of my body of work. It is a part of my writing. And so I have decided to share the email here, to archive it, to include it in the larger conversation. So that other outsider writers know they are not the only ones who are barred from entrance, not the only ones trying to find a way inside.

Here it is:

“Request for dialogue

I am a local writer with a very large following doing work that is similar to the writing you sell at your store. You used to carry my zines and books in the past. I live in XXXXXX, I’m a member of your local literary community, and I regularly support your store as a customer. My writing is in alignment with the values of your store. I write about trauma recovery, queer sexuality, and opposing domination and dehumanization of all kinds. My work is literary and read by over a hundred thousand people internationally. 

I have been in touch recently about the possibility of starting a writing group through XXXXXX. I spoke to one of the staff about it in store and was told I would need a way for this to make money for the store. I have an idea to combine a writing group with a reading list of literary nonfiction and memoir. I could curate a beautiful list out of the many books I order from XXXXXX. The group could be half writing, half reading, and help writers locate themselves in a deep tradition of liberatory nonfiction. I would have no problem creating interest for a group like this. I haven’t heard back about this proposal. 

I also recently submitted my zines for consideration to be sold at the store. XXXXXX used to sell my zines and they sold well. My best selling zine has sold over 11 000 copies internationally. I live completely on the sale of my writing. I am definitely one of the most (if not the most) widely read zine makers working in Montreal. There is no question that my zines will sell. And they are definitely in alignment with the values of the store. I am a leftist and my work represents a fierce defence of the dignity of all people. In particular my work is of interest to survivors, queer people, abolitionists, and feminists. Yet I received a short response saying that the store declines my submission with no further explanation. I replied asking for more information and have received no reply. 

I have a new zine project which is a memoir in essays on the topic of surviving child sexual abuse / incest which just had successful, well attended launches in Barcelona and Toulouse (my writing is frequently translated into Spanish and French). I want to have a launch in Montreal, and XXXXXX would be perfect for this. I would also love to be able to sell this important political work on surviving and preventing child abuse here in my home city. I frequently receive requests from my readers for places where they can purchase my zines locally. But my zines have seemingly been completely rejected without explanation. 

Perhaps I should speak to the elephant in the room: I have detractors who believe I should not be allowed to do my work, due to a campaign of gossip and slander against me, and due to political disagreements with my abolitionist stances that no one is disposable, including those who have abused, and that all people should have the right to defend themselves against accusations made against them. I have been the victim of stalking and intimidation as the result of my political ideas: my tires were slashed and shit was poured on my car, coffee was poured over $500 worth of my writing at a zine fair. I am also treated with quiet contempt by many who ice me out of the literary, political, and community spaces that I belong to, and that my work belongs in. Yet despite all this my work is extremely successful and read primarily by survivors, queers, and other marginalized and oppressed communities. 

It’s absolutely welcome for anyone to have political disagreements with my work. I think disagreement is fundamental to the development of ideas, to collective discourse, and to political struggle. I would never try to censor people who express disagreement with my ideas. What is happening to me is not disagreement. It is political censure, ostracization, and in some cases outright violence and intimidation. Those who quietly dismiss my work by ignoring me and not acknowledging my place in literary and leftist communities are taking part in the political censure of my ideas just as those who use outright intimidation and violence are. The tactics are different but the goal is the same: to make me disappear.  

If XXXXXX has made a decision not to work with me based on rumours you’ve heard about me or because of political disagreements with my work, I would appreciate it if I could be told this directly. The quiet dismissal of my work and the lack of acknowledgement that I am an important contemporary thinker who is extremely widely read and literally lives in the same neighbourhood is irresponsible and insulting. It is bizarre to me that in Barcelona I was contacted by a queer/feminist bookstore excited to host my launch and I had a sold out launch where people were standing at the back and sitting on the floor — but the equivalent indie bookstore a few blocks from my home responds with “we decline but wish you luck.” There is no reason why your store wouldn’t carry my work, unless of course, there is a reason. In which case I’d appreciate you just come out and say it. Then I will stop requesting opportunities to collaborate. 

It is normal for indie bookstores to be swamped and slow to reply. It is difficult for me to know, when I am ignored and not responded to, whether this is happening because people are busy or my emails have fallen through the cracks, or because a decision has been made to exclude me. This wastes a lot of my time. So I’m asking you to be clear with me. If you have decided to exclude me, I think it is irresponsible not to tell me this directly. 

If the decision to reject my zine submission was made by one person and not the whole team, or if my communications have fallen through the cracks, I hope this email will open up an opportunity for discussion at the store about whether or not my work should be included. If you would like any more information from me or have any questions, I am happy to be in dialogue. I am also happy to bring in copies of any of my work for you to review. You can also read a lot of my writing online at clementinemorrigan.com or view my Instagram at instagram.com/clementinemorrigan or @clementinemorrigan to get an idea of what my political stances are and what my writing is like. If you would like more information about the various accusations made against me in the gossip mill, I have written about that here: clementinemorrigan.com/p/people-also-search-for-why-was-clementine Here is a recent French language article about my work and my recent launch in Toulouse: tomcatbipan.fr/2024/10/23/lautrice-bisexuelle-clementine-morrigan-de-passage-a-toulouse-pour-parler-de-ses-textes-sur-linceste/

I am a part of the Montreal literary community. My ideas are an important part of contemporary independent leftist, queer, abolitionist, and feminist thought. I deserve to be acknowledged and treated as such. I recently read Joanna Russ’s classic How to Suppress Women’s Writing (which I ordered from XXXXXX) and I cried from how seen I felt. 

Thank you very much for your time, and for all your work making important writing available to the world. I look forward to your response. 

Clementine”

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Clementine Morrigan is an independent writer, cultural change maker, truth teller, and moral philosopher. She writes essays and literary nonfiction about ethics, politics, relationships, sexuality, violence, trauma, and unconditional compassion. Her cult classic zine, Love Without Emergency, has sold more than 11,000 copies (that’s a lot of stapling). Her podcast, Fucking Cancelled, independently toured the United States. Her readers have created and disseminated amateur translations of her work in several languages. If you have spent time in a punk house or queer collective house in the last 20 years, you have probably flipped through one of her zines in the bathroom.

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