I Was One of Blake Bailey’s Graduate Students
Thoughts on Karma, Verbal Abuse, and the Cancellation of a Magnum Opus
There’s a sort of cosmic satisfaction in seeing a foe go down. We’re hardwired to appreciate karma.
I haven’t decided yet, in the 24 hours since I started getting texts and emails from friends who know about my experience in Blake Bailey’s graduate workshop at Old Dominion University, if this is fair or right. I think, perhaps, it just is.
It’s simply a fact, a corollary to the truism that says when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
The Blake Bailey I knew was cocky and brash with a head so big you marveled that he didn’t topple beneath the weight. At his best he was charismatic, with an easy brand of jocular humor I initially enjoyed. I once bragged on social media about sharing a hummus plate with him.
It was March 2014 and Bailey was beginning to bask in an aura of success: Yeats in his rearview mirror, his memoir hot off the press, and the beginnings of the Roth manuscript already on his hard drive. The day of the hummus he was reveling in the afterglow of an NPR interview — he was the closest thing our program had to a literary star. Rubbing elbows with Bailey meant proximity to New York, to interviews with national outlets, book contracts — making me willing to overlook, then, the fact that the hummus only happened because the mostly grown women in our workshop — including a public school principal and a high school English teacher — insisted that we move to a coffee shop. The hope was the public location might encourage better, more professional behavior — because our workshop was turning toxic, and fast. Critiques became contentious, the feedback devolving into goading nitpicking.
Looking back at our early emails, I see easy banter, even solid literary advice. Then there’s the shift, the incident — the moment it became personal.
I’d submitted a piece for workshop and Bailey decided to make it — and me — his target. The evening turned what seemed a concentrated effort on his part to not allow a single kudo on my work to stand. Someone would say a line was funny and he’d say “was it?” and list reasons it wasn’t humorous. Another person would point to something that worked and he would convince them that it didn’t. It was like the evening became sport for Bailey with the end goal of making me feel very, very small.
Days later I was summoned to his office for what turned into a secondary verbal thrashing. Bailey suggested that I quit being funny and turn my lens to “the darker elements of life.” The lecture ended with Bailey reading a scene from Splendid which detailed his brother’s suicide and the subsequent tumble his mom took from the toilet upon hearing the news. Finished, he slammed the book shut. The unspoken message that filled the awkward silence was: this is the way it’s done. See how I did it? I’m good; you’re a hack. What he said was “you need to up your game.”
The “volcanic fury” and voice that slid into something “fierce and tyrannical” Edward Champion mentions in his now-infamous report? Yeah. I saw some of that.
I can also say that the “write your trauma” assignment Champion mentions was the same exercise Bailey used to begin our class. Go-to pedagogy or something sinister? I don’t know. It’s just a fact.
What’s also a fact is that I reported Bailey to the chair of the MFA program and I was told, simply, “we’re hoping he moves on soon.”
I said, then, in 2014, that Bailey had no business in a classroom. When I learned he taught 8th grade, I wondered how he treated those kids, what impact his brash, explosive personality had on them. And now we know.
Now, in 2021, we know who Blake Bailey is. We know how he operates. Is verbal abuse and bullying behavior grounds for a cancelled magnum opus? Probably not.
But the behavior Bailey’s former middle school students report? That seems a sufficient career-ender…and I have every reason to believe to believe them.
And Karma? We know who she is…it’s just a fact.
