How Not to Respond to A Rewrite Request, Particularly if You Don’t Want to Look Like an Anti-Semite

This is one of the rare moments on my blog where I get serious. Dead serious.

Under the name John Skylar, I am a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Under my legal name, I do other things—science, publishing, and other behind the scenes work.

One of the things I do under my legal name (which I would appreciate if people didn’t look up, thanks, but I’ll note that it’s super Jewish) is help out with a small publishing company called Old Timey Hedgehog. As John Skylar, I write for them also. I’m writing this about an experience I had while working with them, but I’m not representing them in writing this. This is all my own.

Recently, my boss, a rather nice woman with a rather Irish name, asked me to help out with a slight communication issue we were having with a writer, Mr. Robin Wyatt Dunn, whose story we’d contracted to publish. One of my skills is writing polite-but-firm business communications.

Unfortunately, polite-but-firm didn’t work out, and the reason for it, well…is horrifying. To avoid cluttering tumblr dashboards, find the rest under the cut.

The problem with this author is that his story contained a handful of words referencing a swastika. The symbol itself is old, and we figured that the writer was trying to point that out, but we couldn’t be sure. When my boss asked him to explain, he said he didn’t have “time,” but he didn’t use it to “glorify fascism.” Note that he responded to the Irish lady with at least the barest kindness.

Now, that’s all well and good, but when we publish something controversial, we want to be able to explain that choice to our audience. I was asked to get that explanation since he’d already refused, or to ask him if we could remove the swastika references from the story.

But the moment I asked, I received a reply full of such vitriol that I was shocked. He told me to “fuck” my mother, my “stupid daddy,” and if I had a wife, “that dumb bitch too.” I was, of course, shocked. What was I supposed to think? We’d put in a simple request: either explain the use of the swastika, or let us remove it.

I wanted to give this fellow the benefit of the doubt, I really, really did. I’m a writer, and I know what it can be like to feel pressured to change your work. That’s why we offered him the opportunity to just give us an explanation to pass along. This response, though? Well, it was only the beginning of the rabbit hole.

I don’t want to belabor our later correspondence, but I got further emails from Mr. Dunn. One began with “Dear Jew,” and that was about the nicest phrase he used. I’d like to note here that referring to someone as “Jew” rather than “Jewish person” or “a Jew” is a traditionally anti-Semitic method of address. I’ve put our conversation into a separate post that you may view if you would like proof of what was said by Mr. Dunn and by me. Online, I found he has a history of writing articles that are critical of minority writers and of intimidating people he disagrees with. I found one article written by the Mad Reviewer reporting that Mr. Dunn had told her to kill herself after she refused to review his book. He’d used the same language in an email to my boss at OTH.

A post containing a full record of my correspondence with Mr. Dunn, so you can judge for yourself, lives here.

I also found that Mr. Dunn had, for some reason, decided to sue several prominent Hollywood Jews (Natalie Portman among them) for copyright infringement in 2011, though the case was ultimately dismissed in 2012 because Mr. Dunn stopped communicating with the court.

Seeing the pattern of abusive emails against people in the industry, combined with his litigious nature, made me scared. Still, the way that he acted was something I knew I couldn’t allow to intimidate me.

The fact is, if this had happened in a workplace, Mr. Dunn might have been fired. At the very least, I would have the ability to show a pattern of abusive behavior and harassment.

Except, I don’t work with Mr. Dunn. We’re both writers, and there’s no boss to complain to. The only employers that a writer has are the people who read his or her work.

Normally, I wouldn’t be interested in publicly shaming someone, but in this case, when someone has come after me so aggressively and with such abusive anger, I feel it’s necessary to do something. Particularly after the SWFA flap this past summer regarding author Theodore Beale, I feel it’s important for the writing community to speak up when people do reprehensible things. I don’t want anyone to go after Mr. Dunn vindictively, but I do want this post to become a living record of what he did to me, so that others will know he has a history of mistreating others professionally.

The fact is, there are a lot of writers who write honestly and work hard and who don’t act this way, and if we reward the ones who behave badly we send a message that being polite isn’t valued. I don’t want the professional community that I live in to be that way, and I doubt that my fellow writers, readers, and editors want it to be that way either.

Posting about things like this when they happen is my way to improve the community. I hope you can find your own way.