Hi Kate. As one allegedly ‘white supremacist’ poet to another, I am enjoying watching your old
‘colleagues’ float down the river from afar. I was canceled by the Australian literary scene in 2020 and remember watching in dismay as you and Don Share went through similar trials. What a nasty few years. Always the poets! Well done to you on speaking up.
That would be wonderful, Kate. After they knifed him, Don slipped from public view so quietly. I had the pleasure of chatting with him over a dinner celebrating the Australian issue of Poetry Mag during the 2016 Sydney Writers Festival. He struck me as humble and sincere in his desire to share the largesse of the journal with the world. He mentioned that he read EVERY submission to Poetry because he didn’t want to risk anything wonderful slipping through his fingers. When I expressed disbelief, he said it was possible if you only slept four hours a night! He seemed sincerely motivated to open the doors of the magazine as widely as possible during his time as editor. It must have been devastating for him to see so many of the poets whose careers he’d fostered turn against him. The whole saga was a disgraceful power grab :(
I am extremely glad you've written this and kept such brilliant accounts of it all. What a terrific writer you are. I may have to rethink my use of the phrase 'poetry educator' though, haha! That one sort of slipped into my vocabulary. As a former secondary school teacher (of politics) my teaching qualification, which so many of the 'poetry educators' do not have, meant I was in really high demand for performance poetry work in schools, particularly with 'difficult to reach' groups. I specialised in working with 'school refusers' and teenage girls. The performance side of what I did was a real skill - helping total wallflowers find confidence an aim, as much as developing a love of poetry, an ability to look differently at the world and express it in tight verse.
It remains sore to me that all of that work disappeared, and not just for financial reasons, though that hardly helped my own mental health when this all kicked off six years ago. I was good at it, and I loved it, and so did my students. It was the final thing to go for me. Events went overnight, bookings within a year, but I only lost my last, regular education client last year - a charity that had become tired of defending me from appalling poets emailing them to complain about them hiring me.
It is a horrible, envious world they've created, isn't it? I feel such affinity with you - in no small part due to our sharing some rather boring, terrifying, and very annoying people. I remember when the Toby Martinez de las Rivas hounding kicked off in 2018, I was on holiday, so couldn't quite grasp what on earth was happening. As he would for me, however, Gerry Cambridge of The Dark Horse had his eye on it all, and when Rob Mackenzie's piece on it was published in the journal it was clear something really awful was fomenting, and the Edinburgh poets were central to it. A year later? My turn! Different reasons: race/ gender identity. But entirely the same central 'cancellers' and hounders. I've always maintained that these houndings say far more about the utter state of our political discourse and the wider problem of a literary world incapable of holding actual power to account, than they do about the individual targeted. But being the person at the centre is utterly insane-making. Totally life-changing.
Jenny I am so sorry. I can imagine what a hilarious, creative inspiring but also thorough and scrupulous poetry teacher you were. It is a rare combination in schools- someone who can side both with the students and staff, someone who knows how manage a whole classroom but also how to run a creative workshop. It’s a huge loss to schools.
But also a loss to you. Teaching is a commitment like medicine- it goes to the core of you. It’s appalling to be accused of being a bad teacher, of violating those core values.
It’s not a loss that can be repaired, either, but one we have to bear.
I’m really glad you wrote this. It’s horrible to see such vindictive jealousy played out but it’s imperative that people see just how corrosive cancel culture is. Those people should be ashamed of themselves, I’m really glad you named them and kept the receipts. I hope this coming year will offer you some relief from the pain you must have gone through.
Anthony, though friendly and chatty with me the two times I met him, publicly labelled me and “classist” and a “misogynist” in response to me questioning his business practises and behaviour in my newsletter. The way he behaves on social media is a disgrace- I’m surprised he’s allowed to get away with it without repercussions….but I expect that this is just start of the wave. 👋
I am not going to provide you with a link. The whole thing was disingenuous and upsetting. Although Anthony was much worse to Kate, and I can’t really work out his motivation for these attacks.
I took one look at that Instagram photo and I’m afraid I have an instant suspicion of the kind of man who would want to pose like that in public.
Not with caring about physique - I’ve spent time with a bench press and weights - but in terms of ‘this is how you want to present yourself to the world’.
For what its worth from someone coming to this for the first time, I'm so sorry this has happened to you and the children. The world these people live in to think they are the victims in all this is truly breath taking. You've outmanoeuvred them as best as you can and now I hope you find happiness again.
Your two former students who came to hold workshops for my students were so inspiring. You had filled them with a great love for poetry and its creation.
Some people want to write. Other people want to be “writers.” This may be part of the core reason for online mob attacks on people who allegedly wrote WrongSay.
It’s an important point. People who want to be poets often don’t like poems, whereas people who would not dare aspire to be poets love reading them and write good poems too.
A stalker, a much older man, emailed me for three decades from workplace to workplace, sending me hate. I kept his emails and kept an eye on him. He was so angry that I worked as a staff reviewer, news columnist, etc., that I was published when he, a man, was not. And then a few years ago he wrote one of those Rueful Wisdom type columns (about his lawn and raccoons rolling back turf to eat maggots) that newspapers now urge people to send in. It was published. He stopped emailing me, I presume because he had been published, after a lifetime.
Yesterday I read by accident a Substack post by a failed (she said she saw herself that way) reviewer and commentator who wrote of her utter hate for me and for my writing history. It went on at length about the injustice of me having been employed to write as a journalist when she never was. She also implied I was lying about having long Covid. I was really taken aback.
She has just emailed me asking me out for a drink. She wants to talk to me for hours about journalism, she said. (As my favourite union rep once advised me, "Do not engage. Do NOT engage.")
I am about to start writing my own Substack because I think of it as a place for gentler more literary types. But maybe I shouldn't. The level of anger on social media is extraordinary. I left TwiX for Bluesky, where I'm much more happy. But maybe Substack is changing for the worse with Notes? What is the best course?
You must keep writing, and writing at length. So Substack is good. But these envious characters are to be avoided. Just say you are too busy with the clematis!
I don't think that can be the case, the caption specifically says "Clockwise from top left" and lists four people, none of which are named Ceridwen Ball.
Tbh it is normal in other walks of life. I was given a significant position in the local church shortly after moving where I live and pretty much all the other new arrivals got busy making sure I wouldn’t have that position subsequently. Their loss of course…
All of the people who gleefully strategized to cancel you leave as their lasting public legacy…. Having participated in your cancellation. That is what they will always be known for. What a fucking booby prize in life.
You will never be old. My old friend Mike Rosen was very ill with COVID and his blood pressure became alarmingly low. “Just show me a copy of the “Daily Mail” he said. “That’ll get it back up!”
We went to see that Breughel picture Auden wrote about so well! I use exclamation marks a lot these days which may be a sign of approaching senility. Work like yours keeps me young. I will send you my new comic novel deemed unacceptable by my oldest and best friend. It is called “The Hunchback of Palmers Green.”
For years, I was viciously pilloried by a series of self-fashioned activists responding to an outstanding, Emmy winning project I completed on the cusp of 2020. The emotional work required to set up the story defeated me anytime I tried to speak up and everyone I knew in the industry appeared hamstrung in terror of succumbing to a similar fate. I always felt confident stronger voices would begin to speak up. Thanks for sharing,
Written, yes, published, no: with respect to the chief ‘accusers’ whose insanity actually moves my heart. They remain totally disconnected from reality, steeped in a hero’s journey over ‘decentering’ whiteness, etc. Heavy social media presence. And here’s the thing, their brand identity pivots on evading accountability because they were orphaned and trafficked as a child. Say no more. This was new information that was used to pillory me. I had replied sincerely to a series of direct questions because my dad is a local official who was shouldering the burden of steering a small city through a global pandemic as state and federal leadership were flailing. Many people were asking me direct questions on social media. So when a nominally progressive local influencer directly tagged my profile to berate me for not sharing enough BLM content, with some frustration, I indulged her game for about three and a half hours before I unwittingly used the word ‘perverse’ as a pejorative to describe their provocations. And that was sufficient to justify tearing me apart. My photo went viral. People threatened my dog, a rescue. Three nights later, around 9:30 on a Saturday, the local influencer’s friend, a local journalist, a white lady staged a ‘call out’ to hash up a news story, because there was not enough ‘there’ to cancel me. At the time I was housing the unhoused in my living room and living check to check. Local journalist was a bougie type popular food critic who had apparently pivoted to ‘social justice’ reporting while restaurants were shutdown. She proceeded to put me on blast, tagging about three thousand people in a post implying I had committed en egregious act which she declined to spell out. 72 hours later, my life felt over.
The fall out constitutes so many anecdotes, an infinitude of ironies just screaming for expression. Anyone who sidled up to me was faced with intimidation and harassment. Once as I built a social rapport at a local pub, a retinue of social justice warriors showed up to alert the community of my misdeeds. My personal data and private message histories were shared in chats and culled for problematics, evidence of perversion, racism, fraudulent activity, involvement with the occult, membership in the communist party… Prospective clients lost my number. Second dates ghosted without asking what happened: what actually happened never mattered.
A remarkable thing happened. The people who were loudest and strongest in embracing me, were all Black. My credit’s as good as theirs in this town.
Three years later, the same writers produced a sweepingly slanderous campaign of gratuitously racist content meant to profile my dad as an inveterate racist. Their media campaign so profoundly offended the city’s Black constituents that it backfired and he was re-elected by a landslide.
And I suppose I’m doing ok. Appreciate you asking! Congrats on your success, btw. World needs courageous teachers. Orwell would love your story.
I was thinking as I read Kate’s story, that anyone who uses artspeak grant application language like ‘decentering’ and ‘decolonialising the curriculum’ is part of an academic class who regular people - whether they’re white kids in Bolton or Black kids in Brixton - recognise as ‘elite’.
In much of modern Britain, and London especially, class, accent and language are more marginalising than ethnicity.
I’d compare it to the trend in the 90s for perfectly middle class kids to big up their working class roots . . . even if by the time they were born, their parents had climbed up to the lower middle class.
Also old enough to remember that with the anti-racist and gay rights movements in 80s, or encountering Lemn Sissay’s work in Manchester in the early 90s - or even the cancellation of ‘politically incorrect’ / racist comics like Bernard Manning - all thrived without any of this structuralist speak.
I think a lot of people instinctively recognise what it is - phoney - and react agaisnt it. But there’s also a class of people who are vulnerable to it, which are the next rung up gatekeepers in arts organisations and publishers. The kind who might mistake 10000 people on Twitter for representing ‘what young people think today’.
Hi Kate. As one allegedly ‘white supremacist’ poet to another, I am enjoying watching your old
‘colleagues’ float down the river from afar. I was canceled by the Australian literary scene in 2020 and remember watching in dismay as you and Don Share went through similar trials. What a nasty few years. Always the poets! Well done to you on speaking up.
I want to write about Don Share next
That would be wonderful, Kate. After they knifed him, Don slipped from public view so quietly. I had the pleasure of chatting with him over a dinner celebrating the Australian issue of Poetry Mag during the 2016 Sydney Writers Festival. He struck me as humble and sincere in his desire to share the largesse of the journal with the world. He mentioned that he read EVERY submission to Poetry because he didn’t want to risk anything wonderful slipping through his fingers. When I expressed disbelief, he said it was possible if you only slept four hours a night! He seemed sincerely motivated to open the doors of the magazine as widely as possible during his time as editor. It must have been devastating for him to see so many of the poets whose careers he’d fostered turn against him. The whole saga was a disgraceful power grab :(
I am extremely glad you've written this and kept such brilliant accounts of it all. What a terrific writer you are. I may have to rethink my use of the phrase 'poetry educator' though, haha! That one sort of slipped into my vocabulary. As a former secondary school teacher (of politics) my teaching qualification, which so many of the 'poetry educators' do not have, meant I was in really high demand for performance poetry work in schools, particularly with 'difficult to reach' groups. I specialised in working with 'school refusers' and teenage girls. The performance side of what I did was a real skill - helping total wallflowers find confidence an aim, as much as developing a love of poetry, an ability to look differently at the world and express it in tight verse.
It remains sore to me that all of that work disappeared, and not just for financial reasons, though that hardly helped my own mental health when this all kicked off six years ago. I was good at it, and I loved it, and so did my students. It was the final thing to go for me. Events went overnight, bookings within a year, but I only lost my last, regular education client last year - a charity that had become tired of defending me from appalling poets emailing them to complain about them hiring me.
It is a horrible, envious world they've created, isn't it? I feel such affinity with you - in no small part due to our sharing some rather boring, terrifying, and very annoying people. I remember when the Toby Martinez de las Rivas hounding kicked off in 2018, I was on holiday, so couldn't quite grasp what on earth was happening. As he would for me, however, Gerry Cambridge of The Dark Horse had his eye on it all, and when Rob Mackenzie's piece on it was published in the journal it was clear something really awful was fomenting, and the Edinburgh poets were central to it. A year later? My turn! Different reasons: race/ gender identity. But entirely the same central 'cancellers' and hounders. I've always maintained that these houndings say far more about the utter state of our political discourse and the wider problem of a literary world incapable of holding actual power to account, than they do about the individual targeted. But being the person at the centre is utterly insane-making. Totally life-changing.
This is a brilliantly written piece, Kate. For anyone intrigued, here is Rob Mackenzie's great piece on Dave Coates and the ugly literary assassination of de las Rivas: https://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/Featured/poetry-and-fascism
Jenny I am so sorry. I can imagine what a hilarious, creative inspiring but also thorough and scrupulous poetry teacher you were. It is a rare combination in schools- someone who can side both with the students and staff, someone who knows how manage a whole classroom but also how to run a creative workshop. It’s a huge loss to schools.
But also a loss to you. Teaching is a commitment like medicine- it goes to the core of you. It’s appalling to be accused of being a bad teacher, of violating those core values.
It’s not a loss that can be repaired, either, but one we have to bear.
Love and solidarity
Well as usual Kate I’m reading these pieces and wondering where the animosity towards you has come from.
I can only conclude that it is the result of people envying your talent, and your success in using it to encourage others to succeed.
I’m really glad you wrote this. It’s horrible to see such vindictive jealousy played out but it’s imperative that people see just how corrosive cancel culture is. Those people should be ashamed of themselves, I’m really glad you named them and kept the receipts. I hope this coming year will offer you some relief from the pain you must have gone through.
It’s not a pleasant thing to do. But I think that a lot of damage through anonymity. It’s very corrosive. So the names.
Also I can do this because I have nothing left to lose in poetry. Maybe it can help other people .
Wow words are taught in primary schools I'm afraid!
Maybe this post helps you understand the excessive and disturbing fuss that was made around your measured and mild comments on Facebook at the time.
Anthony, though friendly and chatty with me the two times I met him, publicly labelled me and “classist” and a “misogynist” in response to me questioning his business practises and behaviour in my newsletter. The way he behaves on social media is a disgrace- I’m surprised he’s allowed to get away with it without repercussions….but I expect that this is just start of the wave. 👋
Did he? Where?
Instagram. There’s a thread on the out-spoken press page.
Can’t see anything
I am not going to provide you with a link. The whole thing was disingenuous and upsetting. Although Anthony was much worse to Kate, and I can’t really work out his motivation for these attacks.
Aye I see
I took one look at that Instagram photo and I’m afraid I have an instant suspicion of the kind of man who would want to pose like that in public.
Not with caring about physique - I’ve spent time with a bench press and weights - but in terms of ‘this is how you want to present yourself to the world’.
For what its worth from someone coming to this for the first time, I'm so sorry this has happened to you and the children. The world these people live in to think they are the victims in all this is truly breath taking. You've outmanoeuvred them as best as you can and now I hope you find happiness again.
Never, ever, give up.
Your two former students who came to hold workshops for my students were so inspiring. You had filled them with a great love for poetry and its creation.
Some people want to write. Other people want to be “writers.” This may be part of the core reason for online mob attacks on people who allegedly wrote WrongSay.
It’s an important point. People who want to be poets often don’t like poems, whereas people who would not dare aspire to be poets love reading them and write good poems too.
A stalker, a much older man, emailed me for three decades from workplace to workplace, sending me hate. I kept his emails and kept an eye on him. He was so angry that I worked as a staff reviewer, news columnist, etc., that I was published when he, a man, was not. And then a few years ago he wrote one of those Rueful Wisdom type columns (about his lawn and raccoons rolling back turf to eat maggots) that newspapers now urge people to send in. It was published. He stopped emailing me, I presume because he had been published, after a lifetime.
Yesterday I read by accident a Substack post by a failed (she said she saw herself that way) reviewer and commentator who wrote of her utter hate for me and for my writing history. It went on at length about the injustice of me having been employed to write as a journalist when she never was. She also implied I was lying about having long Covid. I was really taken aback.
She has just emailed me asking me out for a drink. She wants to talk to me for hours about journalism, she said. (As my favourite union rep once advised me, "Do not engage. Do NOT engage.")
I am about to start writing my own Substack because I think of it as a place for gentler more literary types. But maybe I shouldn't. The level of anger on social media is extraordinary. I left TwiX for Bluesky, where I'm much more happy. But maybe Substack is changing for the worse with Notes? What is the best course?
You must keep writing, and writing at length. So Substack is good. But these envious characters are to be avoided. Just say you are too busy with the clematis!
I am out pruning clematis vine in the Toronto snow. It's delicate. It's harsh. It really calms my thinking.
that's just the captions moving round.
I don't think that can be the case, the caption specifically says "Clockwise from top left" and lists four people, none of which are named Ceridwen Ball.
Tbh it is normal in other walks of life. I was given a significant position in the local church shortly after moving where I live and pretty much all the other new arrivals got busy making sure I wouldn’t have that position subsequently. Their loss of course…
Wisest advice I ever read:
“When you dig a hole for somebody, dig two”
All of the people who gleefully strategized to cancel you leave as their lasting public legacy…. Having participated in your cancellation. That is what they will always be known for. What a fucking booby prize in life.
Once upon a time, there was a clique of poets who declared that there was a 'witch' in their midst.
Glad you told your story. May it make waves!
These people are evil and smug! Great piece! Outing Anaxa whatever his name is excellent!
You will never be old. My old friend Mike Rosen was very ill with COVID and his blood pressure became alarmingly low. “Just show me a copy of the “Daily Mail” he said. “That’ll get it back up!”
We went to see that Breughel picture Auden wrote about so well! I use exclamation marks a lot these days which may be a sign of approaching senility. Work like yours keeps me young. I will send you my new comic novel deemed unacceptable by my oldest and best friend. It is called “The Hunchback of Palmers Green.”
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters:
Novel sounds terrifying. I am definitely now old myself.
Hi Nigel! This is the Nigel I once went to Brussels with I hope? So glad you are enjoying the substack. Pass it on.
What a wretched revenge drama this is on a talented teacher and writer.
For years, I was viciously pilloried by a series of self-fashioned activists responding to an outstanding, Emmy winning project I completed on the cusp of 2020. The emotional work required to set up the story defeated me anytime I tried to speak up and everyone I knew in the industry appeared hamstrung in terror of succumbing to a similar fate. I always felt confident stronger voices would begin to speak up. Thanks for sharing,
Have you written about it somewhere? I’d like to see.
Written, yes, published, no: with respect to the chief ‘accusers’ whose insanity actually moves my heart. They remain totally disconnected from reality, steeped in a hero’s journey over ‘decentering’ whiteness, etc. Heavy social media presence. And here’s the thing, their brand identity pivots on evading accountability because they were orphaned and trafficked as a child. Say no more. This was new information that was used to pillory me. I had replied sincerely to a series of direct questions because my dad is a local official who was shouldering the burden of steering a small city through a global pandemic as state and federal leadership were flailing. Many people were asking me direct questions on social media. So when a nominally progressive local influencer directly tagged my profile to berate me for not sharing enough BLM content, with some frustration, I indulged her game for about three and a half hours before I unwittingly used the word ‘perverse’ as a pejorative to describe their provocations. And that was sufficient to justify tearing me apart. My photo went viral. People threatened my dog, a rescue. Three nights later, around 9:30 on a Saturday, the local influencer’s friend, a local journalist, a white lady staged a ‘call out’ to hash up a news story, because there was not enough ‘there’ to cancel me. At the time I was housing the unhoused in my living room and living check to check. Local journalist was a bougie type popular food critic who had apparently pivoted to ‘social justice’ reporting while restaurants were shutdown. She proceeded to put me on blast, tagging about three thousand people in a post implying I had committed en egregious act which she declined to spell out. 72 hours later, my life felt over.
The fall out constitutes so many anecdotes, an infinitude of ironies just screaming for expression. Anyone who sidled up to me was faced with intimidation and harassment. Once as I built a social rapport at a local pub, a retinue of social justice warriors showed up to alert the community of my misdeeds. My personal data and private message histories were shared in chats and culled for problematics, evidence of perversion, racism, fraudulent activity, involvement with the occult, membership in the communist party… Prospective clients lost my number. Second dates ghosted without asking what happened: what actually happened never mattered.
A remarkable thing happened. The people who were loudest and strongest in embracing me, were all Black. My credit’s as good as theirs in this town.
Three years later, the same writers produced a sweepingly slanderous campaign of gratuitously racist content meant to profile my dad as an inveterate racist. Their media campaign so profoundly offended the city’s Black constituents that it backfired and he was re-elected by a landslide.
And I suppose I’m doing ok. Appreciate you asking! Congrats on your success, btw. World needs courageous teachers. Orwell would love your story.
Thank you I am reading this
I was thinking as I read Kate’s story, that anyone who uses artspeak grant application language like ‘decentering’ and ‘decolonialising the curriculum’ is part of an academic class who regular people - whether they’re white kids in Bolton or Black kids in Brixton - recognise as ‘elite’.
In much of modern Britain, and London especially, class, accent and language are more marginalising than ethnicity.
I’d compare it to the trend in the 90s for perfectly middle class kids to big up their working class roots . . . even if by the time they were born, their parents had climbed up to the lower middle class.
Also old enough to remember that with the anti-racist and gay rights movements in 80s, or encountering Lemn Sissay’s work in Manchester in the early 90s - or even the cancellation of ‘politically incorrect’ / racist comics like Bernard Manning - all thrived without any of this structuralist speak.
I think a lot of people instinctively recognise what it is - phoney - and react agaisnt it. But there’s also a class of people who are vulnerable to it, which are the next rung up gatekeepers in arts organisations and publishers. The kind who might mistake 10000 people on Twitter for representing ‘what young people think today’.