Via Dennis Jerz, a story about high school student who was arrested for something he wrote in class:
Told to express emotion for a creative-writing class, high-school senior Allen Lee penned an essay so disturbing to his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct, officials said Wednesday.
Lee, 18, a straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School in Cary, Ill., was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with the misdemeanor for an essay that police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.
The police and school aren’t releasing the assignment, nor saying if Lee had any previous disciplinary problems, but I’m failing to see how a piece of writing could lead to an arrest if there weren’t any direct threats. I’m in line with the student’s father right now: “The teen’s father said he understood concerns about violence but not why a creative-writing exercise resulted in charges against his son.”
This raises all sorts of questions about acts of writing, though, regarding freedom of speech, what types of writing are public, how performative writing is as conduct, what counts as disorderly…
The police chief said disorderly conduct can be when writing disturbs someone, but this seems to be a fairly subjective definition with very little clarity on implementation: Whose writing is it that disturbs someone? Who is being disturbed? Certainly the racist things I read in OSU’s student newspaper disturb me (and many others here). Every time I read something by or about Paul Cameron, I’m disturbed. And I can’t help but relate this back to our current political climate and our administration: Weren’t their writings/compositions disturbing when they lied about the reasons to start escalate the war in Iraq?
Obviously, there are a lot of issues about who is writing and who is reading and their subject and power positions at play here.
EDIT: Johndan Johnson-Eilola writes something funny, which makes a good point:
This just in: Warrants issued for the arrests of Quentin Tarrantino, Clive Barker, Eddie Vedder, Gus Van Sant, and the corpses of Kathy Acker and William S Burroughs.
EDIT: An excerpt of his essay with his commentary is now up on the Chicago Sun-Times. Disturbing? Perhaps. Worth arresting the student over? Probably not, from my perspective. Worth talking to him about? Oh, isn’t that an original idea…
And Florida State creative writing teacher Diane Roberts discusses violence in creative writing on NPR in regards to the Virginia Tech shootings and Cho’s violent creative writing.
