Some years ago, the literary world was shocked when
a recipient of the annual Flannery O’Connor Award
for Short Fiction, Brad Vice, was accused of
plagiarizing in his winning collection,
The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.
The story of Vice’s rise and fall, which echoes the
life of charming con artist and swindler, Frank
Abagnale (Catch
Me if You Can),
is intriguing. Why would a bright and talented
writer take this risk? In his article for New York
Press, Robert Clark Young deplored Vice’s history of
plagiarism, starting with his dissertation and
continuing through stories published in various
literary magazines before receiving the award (later
rescinded). Young also wrote, however, “...one can
begin to feel the fever of the kleptomaniac’s joy in
stealing, the exhilarating fear of detection, the
thrill of not getting caught...” As a young writer
Vice started attending the Sewanee Writer’s
Conference where, according to Young, “many of the
South's leading writers will... decide which of the
conference's attendees should be considered for
future scholarships to the conference, which writers
should receive letters of recommendation to graduate
programs, which hot new novelists should receive
blurbs, which conference attendees should be
nominated for inclusion in
New Stories From the South,
and which book-length manuscripts might make good
candidates for next year's Flannery O'Connor Award
in Short Fiction.”
Young’s analysis is probably the best clue to Vice’s
Enneagram style: “A few minutes of Googling Vice's
name next to the name of virtually any published
author who's ever eaten barbecue at Sewanee will
call up pit stop after pit stop of Vice's campaign
to become the best-adored, best-appreciated and
best-deserving young fiction writer in the history
of Southern letters.” From this description, it
appears Vice
might be showing the low side of Enneagram style Three.
Now the plot thickens. Pursuing the likelihood that
Vice did plagiarize, I searched for more information
about Robert Clark Young, the author of the
above-mentioned exposé. The Atlantic Monthly’s C.
Michael Curtis, who edited and published the story
by Vice which Young claimed proved an additional
case of plagiarism, refuted Young’s claim...
"Commentators mentioned that Young had previously had
a run in with Hannah and Vice at the Sewanee
Conference and suggested that his article about Vice
was possibly an attempt at revenge.”
Whoa! This is interesting. Did Young have an axe to grind?
What clues do we have about his own Enneagram style?
Recurring themes in Young's own writing “include the
relation between alcoholism, the abuse of power, and
institutional dysfunction in American life.”
Further, “when not writing, Young has been active in
the anti-war movement and was arrested twice in 2003
for nonviolent protest of the Iraq War.” Possibly
style Six? Ready to draw attention to
the misuse of power by the
Sewanee literary elite? If so, Young is showing the
high side of the Six, acting from the courage of his
convictions and challenging others to be accountable
for their actions. Vice, on the other hand, seems
trapped in having to "look good" no matter what the
cost to his soul.
All of us, I, you, our clients, face the important
task of being mindful so we don’t play out outmoded
personality patterns thoughtlessly. We need to
identify and learn from our automatic responses,
release their hold on us, and consciously choose who
we want to be in the world.
Reading about
Vice led me to ask how true I've been to myself in
my own writing.
Inspired by a
friend who’s published almost 30 short stories and
averaged 15 rejections for each acceptance, I
engaged several years ago in the business of getting
published. I created a master list,
cross-referencing journals with poems or stories and
color-coding acceptances, rejections, and multiple
submissions; bookmarked web pages with contributor’s
guidelines; and started noting the type of writing
various magazines seemed to prefer. Then one day I
caught myself writing in a style I thought a
particular magazine might accept. As a
Nine I have,
in my life, too easily slipped into what other
people want. Realizing the need to
absent myself from temptation, I deleted all my
Internet bookmarks for literary magazines, threw out
my submissions list, and did some soul-searching
about my own 'voice' and how/who I want to be as a
writer. In the past few years I've finally let
go of appearances, of worrying, "What will the
neighbors think?"
