In this episode of A Special Place in Hell, the girls/women wade through the sorry details of last week’s scandale littéraire involving Hobart, a literary magazine no one had ever heard of until last Wednesday. Meghan is a veteran of the literary world and it turns out it’s her job to educate Sarah about how things work. They discuss the phenomenon of “white Brooklyn ladies of the publishing business,” as coined by the writer Alex Perez, a Cuban American writer and Iowa Writers Workshop alum who is Sick Of The Wokeness™. Meghan talks about her own experience in an MFA program, her bouts of self-loathing about it in recent years and the vagaries of the literary “community”.
They then move on to the lighter topic of assisted suicide and consider the ways in which Canadian programs for the benefit of the terminally ill might actually be a slippery slope. Meghan deathsplains to Sarah about the phenomenon of death cafes and death doulas. (She’s a fan!).
In the subscriber-only BONUS content, Sarah reveals the truth behind her affinity for taking Twitter polls. (Spoiler: it’s not feminist). The ladies then return to one of their favorite questions: why do so many otherwise smart people go along with idiotic nonsense? Are Sarah and Meghan smarter than everyone else? Or do they just have better bullshit detectors?
Relavant links:
Hobart Interview with Alex Perez
Who Killed Creative Writing? Meghan’s Substack article about the Hobart saga
Scheduled to Die: The Rise of Canada's Assisted Suicide Program
Sarah’s Free Inquiry article
