on plagiarism, again
Happy Tuesday evening, all.
I offered my typical ~round up~ this morning, so I know that you’re probably already sick of me, but now I have a more serious post for you. I’m writing (once again—I know) about plagiarism—because, for creative writers, it’s a reality of our culture & seemingly inescapable.
Tonight, I’d like specifically to talk about Johanna Berkman’s “Under the Influence” (which is free to read if you agree to get emails from Air Mail)—and I’d like to talk about it with all the grace I have in me.
&, yes, I know that this case has been maybe talked-out, but a lot of the commentary on it feels more hot-take and less nuance, and I believe in the nuance.
I think we can hold people accountable for their actions without deciding that they’re irredeemable. Let’s try now.
I recommend reading the article for the full picture but—in case you don’t want to—it basically boils down to:
Writer Jumi Bello has a problematic history of plagiarizing, and maybe this problematic behavior is suggestive of wider issues within the publishing world.
That’s the abstract of this post, too.
There are so many things to unpack within Beckman’s article, and some may be specific to Bello & other young writers while others are more endemic—part of the broader culture of publishing, for better or worse.
Throughout the profile, and also within her mea culpa in Literary Hub, Bello makes a lot of justifications and psychoanalyzes why she made the choice to plagiarize time & time again. & I recognize the truths within the larger contexts Bello addresses.
But I think, first and foremost, we should look at Bello’s writing process.
Her process is clearly flawed—and Berkman dedicates an entire section to this flawed process within her profile (emphasis mine):
The next day, when I finally [open the document containing Bello’s now-canceled debut], I see that the magnitude of Bello’s plagiarism is on a scale worse than I imagined.
In a nearly 300-page manuscript, approximately 30 separate instances of plagiarism have been flagged. Bello copied passages from Carole Maso’s 2000 memoir, The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth. Descriptions of mental illness, and other writing, she took from French author Marie Cardinal’s autobiographical novel, The Words to Say It, which chronicles a woman’s descent into psychosis. Bello also copied part of a letter from James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues,” about a math teacher coping with his brother’s drug addiction and arrest, editing the letter so that it could now be sent from Sumatra to her sister. (x)
Beckman later adds:
As I make my way through the annotated manuscript, I now see that, in addition to plagiarizing from Maso, Cardinal, and Baldwin, Bello has also taken several lines from Matthew Olzmann’s poem “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised As a Love Poem,” and a passage from Marin Sardy’s 2019 nonfiction book, The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia. Even a line on the last page of Bello’s book—“because what is a girl but a body of water, what is a woman but an attempt to return”—closely echoes the title of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s 2020 novel, A Girl Is a Body of Water. (x)
& again:
I then read Bello a line I had liked from the last paragraph of The Leaving’s first chapter—“I didn’t just show up in this life already destroyed”—and then a nearly identical line from Nigerian-American writer Bassey Ikpi’s 2019 memoir called, of all things, I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying. (x)
& again:
I then go back and re-read the opening pages of The Leaving and am struck by a sentence that neither Bello nor Morgan had flagged: “To be young, to be black, to be a woman is to face your own destruction in innumerable ways, or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.” The first time I read it, I had thought it felt familiar in the way that good writing often does.
But now I’m not so sure. I google it, and the first result is a link to Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence, a 2020 memoir that contains this line: “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.” When I read Bello her line, and then Solnit’s right after it, she sighs. “I have a flaw in my writing process.” (x)
Jonathan Bailey, an expert on plagiarism & copyright (and someone who was plagiarized by Bello), writes:
I believe that Bello has a fundamental misunderstanding of the writing process. (x)
& also writes (again, emphases are mine):
She describes copying and pasting “literary descriptions of pregnancy.” Since she has never been pregnant, she wanted to lean on other experiences she could find.
However, according to her, she failed to go back to fix those sections. At the time, she told herself, “I’m just borrowing and changing the language. I will rewrite these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make this story mine again.”
This is a deeply problematic approach and, as I recently highlighted in my article on How to Actually Avoid Plagiarism, the way you avoid plagiarism isn’t to “change the language” but to never have that language in your original work in the first place. Furthermore, the editorial process is not the time to paraphrase or add citations, that needs to be part of the writing process.
In short, Bello has, by her own description, a deeply flawed writing process. One that makes plagiarism not only likely, but inevitable. (x)
A few people on Twitter weighed in about Bello’s writing process, too:
&:
Beckman’s profile reiterates Jonathan Bailey’s point:
[He] says the kind of plagiarism that Bello committed against him is “not the kind that should necessarily end her career.” More concerning, he says, was her habit of literally copying the work of others into her manuscript and “changing the language,” with the goal of re-writing it later. “That’s not how creating original content works,” Bailey says, noting that Bello’s flawed process is all too common among younger authors. “It became normal to write in order to evade or avoid [plagiarism] software, rather than learning how to write true or original work.” (x)
& later adds:
Bello told me that while she had initially thought her novel was 10 percent plagiarized, she heard from her second agent, Rayhané Sanders—who placed her Lit Hub essay, and who is now, like her first agent, no longer representing her—that Riverhead put the figure at 30 percent, which now makes more sense. (x)
#2: Bello has had this flawed writing process for a long time.
That is, she has plagiarized—and been confronted about it—before. Beckman offers readers some history:
One night, off one of Beijing’s old narrow lanes, or hutong, in front of an audience of about 50 at a bar called Hot Cat, Bello performed two poems. The first was an “I Am” poem (I am this / I am that); in the other poem, called “Dogs!,” Bello spoke about dogs as a metaphor for racism, occasionally even barking. About eight writers performed in total, and Bello won the competition.
But soon after, someone e-mailed Spittoon to tell them that Bello had plagiarized “dogs!,” by Danez Smith. “At first she was upset,” recalls her friend Jamaal Pemberton, who put together the competition, and who was dispatched to break the news to Bello that her title was being rescinded. “She was saying, ‘It’s my words, it was my words.’” But eventually, he says, she relented. “‘I didn’t mean to do it,’” Pemberton recalls her saying. “‘I’ll try [to be] better next time.’”
[…]
Bello says she used to watch Button Poetry videos and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and would “write down the passage or rewind the video to listen to a passage over and over again because it felt like my truth.” A line from one poem described how “the birth of [the poet’s] baby brother was the first taste of heaven he’d ever experienced. It was beautiful,” she says, “and it captured my own feelings toward my own brother.” And so she put it in her “I Am” poem. (x)
& Santiago Jose Sanchez reiterates this history:
Jumi isn’t a victim of the stress or pressure of publishing. It’s an open secret that she had a history of plagiarism at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and no one did anything about it. (x)
Someone on Twitter, too, was overwhelmed by the number of times Bello had plagiarized:
#3: As flawed as Bello’s process is, she also appears to have a flawed view of plagiarism itself.
In response to the negative press about her plagiarizing Jonathan Bailey’s history of plagiarism, Bello says:
“That was a mistake I made in not citing. I’m sorry to the guy I plagiarized. [But] I didn’t plagiarize his personal feelings or his story or his way of looking at the world. It was the history of plagiarism.” (x)
What’s interesting here is the distinction Bello makes between her history of plagiarizing writers’ creative work versus this instance of plagiarizing a factual history—as if it’s a lesser crime. I understand the instinct to think of it as such—the notion maybe it’s less of a violation to plagiarize, say, a textbook, as opposed to an hybrid memoir that catalogues one’s trauma.
That doesn’t change the fact, though, that—in practice, and within a legal context—both habits are equally problematic. As such, the caveat (“But…”) comes off as an attempt to excuse (or at the very least minimize) a harmful behavior.
In responding to Bello’s now-deleted publication on Lit Hub, Jonathan Bailey calls the article a “Non Explanation,” and I’m inclined to agree. (x)
According to the profile, Roxane Gay gave Bello the following advice:
It’s in your best interest to own up to what you did, without trying to justify it because running from it will only make things worse. (x)
It doesn’t feel like Bello fully follows Gay’s advice, though—that she doesn’t fully own up to this problematic pattern.
In reference to Bello’s Literary Hub essay, Beckman writes (emphasis mine):
Bello’s essay did not specify which authors she had copied from, nor say to what extent. Bello also seemed to be pinning at least part of the blame for her plagiarism on the pressures of publishing, noting that Riverhead had asked her to finish revising her manuscript in two months instead of the originally agreed-upon eight. (x)
Later, Bello says (emphasis mine):
Two things that are opposite can be true. Someone can be a monster and also be the victim. I feel like someone who has made mistakes, who has hurt people terribly—Amy, Cal, Riverhead. They all believed in me, and I let them all down.
But I’m someone who suffered under a lot of pressures, and I combusted, as any person would. Getting married, starting a Ph.D. program, moving across the country, trying to find a new psychiatrist, trying to get access to medication, revising my manuscript for the end of August, being a good stepmother.
Once again, we get that “But.” It was the wrong thing to do, but. I made mistakes, but.
In Bello’s mind, she isn’t entirely at fault.
#4: And maybe she’s right.
Maybe she isn’t entirely at fault. Maybe she’s only found herself here because of a broader culture that enabled this behavior.
Is it possible that the toxicity within the Iowa program led to Bello’s decisions?
The profile offers the following paragraphs about Bello’s graduate school:
Per a former Iowa student:
People expected Jumi to be more progressive because she was a Black woman. But she often went off script, and I think people wanted to punish her for that, even people who claim they had progressive politics. It was all virtue signaling. (x)
About Iowa’s program:
As one Black M.F.A. student who is currently in the program tells me, “It’s sort of like a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality.” When this student was accepted into Iowa, a professor called to proudly promise, “‘You’re going to be with a bunch of really supportive writers. You’re going to have people read and love your work. And you’re going to grow so much as a writer.’ And then,” the student says, “you come here, and you’re just with a bunch of people who are really awful to you.” (x)
& again, per a current MFA student:
“I saw a lot of second years laughing. For someone to feel comfortable making fun of Jumi in front of Sam Chang, who worked with Jumi and who I believe mentored her? I think it speaks to the culture of professors not doing anything to make this a safe space. (x)
Maybe Bello got some bad advice:
& maybe the University failed by not teaching Bello about citations:
Or maybe not—
Bello suggests, too, that Iowa is partially responsible because the program doesn’t give writers sufficient information about the business of writing:
[She] was […] outspoken, particularly in her belief that practical matters such as how to get an agent should be openly discussed in the program. But Lan Samantha Chang, the first woman, and Asian-American, to serve as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, saw things differently. She “wanted to do as much as she could to protect this time that we had,” says a former student.
Bello felt that by keeping the publishing process shrouded in mystery, Chang, under whose leadership the program had become more diverse, was inadvertently “replicating the inequity in the system she was trying to combat.” (x)
Carmen Maria Machado
who, it’s worth noting:
…subtly defends Iowa:
It’s true that keeping professional information a secret absolutely can reinforce existing power structures. But keeping it a secret is not the same as not letting it dominate a space. (x)
I, too, have a small defense of Iowa:
A lot of this profile addresses Bello’s experience at Iowa & how it wasn’t conducive to her mental health or writing process.
And, yeah, Iowa is a hoity-toity mostly-white program & aspects of it are toxic. However:
I don’t think that this example is part of said toxicity:
On March 10, 2021, an e-mail chain in which the university’s nonfiction-writing faculty were discussing how best to make the case to get Bello a fellowship was accidentally sent to all nonfiction-writing graduate students in the program.
“Jumi Bello is a star,” wrote […] Meenakshi Gigi Durham, “and when her book is published, it is sure to get a lot of attention. (She has already been approached by 10 literary agents, and the project is still in process.) She has had offers from other M.F.A. programs. She is one of few applicants of color we have had this year.
“If we don’t fund her, and she goes somewhere else, we lose the association with her success. This has implications for fundraising, and for DEI, and for recruiting faculty and graduate students. Her work is on the level to which we aspire and upon which we’ve built a reputation. She is the next ‘great’ coming out of the Writers’ Workshop. (x)
Beckman then cites a former Iowa student who says:
“To be reduced in that way?” says a former Iowa student. “And to see that it’s not about you as a person or you as a writer, but what credibility you can give to the program? It’s very dehumanizing. ‘She will make us look good.’ That’s so much pressure. Why would you come into a program with that weight on your shoulders? How would you manage those expectations? It’s like setting someone up to fail.” (x)
This quotation—and the framing of this ~email-oopsie-daisy~*~ & the comments by Durham—suggests that this discussion between professors on selection, and on weighing the pros and cons of each applicant, is unique to Bello. (x)
It’s not an isolated incident, though, and it’s not inherently toxic.
I think the majority of us who have been accepted to—and later attended—an MFA/PhD program know that this is the reality of being offered a fellowship. The University is a certain kind of business and, if a program offers you full-funding plus a stipend, it’s because they want to be associated with you—because they believe that you will bring ~Good Publicity~ to the University. That’s literally just how it works. It’s a trade-off. A quid pro quo. And not at all a secret.
#5: Maybe Bello’s desperate acts are suggestive of larger issues within publishing:
For context:
Ultimately, Bello was given only two months to edit her novel.
Tessa Cheek says:
Two months to edit an entire novel? That would have been just ridiculous for anyone. Especially someone who not only has neurodiversity and mental health challenges, but had just gotten out of the hospital. She should have been given the respect and time due a serious work of literature. (x)
Faylita Hicks says:
What Bello experienced, in terms of publishing demands, is similar to what I’ve heard from dozens of marginalized writers. Plagiarism, in this case, wasn’t just a personal failing but a preventable event that more than the author is responsible for. (x)
And I think it’s true, too, that the fallout Bello experienced is on a larger scale than most of the fallouts of white authors who plagiarize:
Akwaeke Emezi tweeted:
This industry is not safe for Black neurodivergent writers and the people in power are not interested in making it safe. When it goes well, everyone and their mama was now involved, but when it goes to shit, it’s only the author who takes the fall. (x)
Roxane Gay said:
White people plagiarize all the time and they face consequences, but there is generally a path for redemption. We should be able to have that, too, but oftentimes, we don’t. (x)
Terese Marie Mailhot tweeted:
White people who are excited and happy to be cruel and judgmental towards a Black woman who’s obviously struggling—you’re showing yourself. (x)
It’s true that the broader media tends to make examples of writers of color—or marginalized writers—rather than cover instances of plagiarism (at best) by white (and often male) writers.
Bello is aware of the discrepancy, too:
I don’t think what happened to me is because I’m Black. I think what happened to me is because I committed plagiarism. [But] the reason that The New York Times and The Guardian picked it up is because I’m a Black woman. (x)
& Zeba Talkhani articulates this double-standard well:
There are so many moving parts here, so many issues at play.
Ultimately, the following reasons may have worked together to lead to the end-result (that is, plagiarizing on a large scale):
A flawed writing process
Insufficient interference in the first few instances of plagiarism (how might this have been avoided if a professor, or a friend, had intervened sooner?)
A flawed view of what constitutes plagiarism
Iowa’s competitive culture
Insufficient guidance re: contracts & timelines & the business of writing
A flawed approach to the writing itself
Carmen Maria Machado articulates that final point well & with wisdom (“A flawed approach to the writing itself”).
In her response to Beckman’s article, and Bello’s choices, she focuses on the writing itself—not the business, not the culture, not the ego, but the actual work:
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a writing career—just like there’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, or on Twitter—but when it comes at the expense of the thing, the fucking thing you’re here to do, then you’ve gone about it all backwards.
None of the trappings of literary success—which can be quick, and flashy, and very exciting—can substitute for the (singular, difficult, slow, and at times unbearable) work of writing.
…how easy it is to let the desire to be published (and by extension obsessed over by name-brand agents, editors, and publishing houses) completely outstrip the act of writing a good book. […] [Many writers] want to be published more than they want to write, or sit with what they write.
I graduated and worked at a soap store and adjuncted for practically negative dollars and cried so hard when I didn’t get a teensy tiny minor fellowship and picked away at my book. And it sucked and I was broke and scared. And then—years after graduating—it was done. The book was done. Not done as in, I’d filled it the requisite number of pages. But done as in finished.
I’m not naive. I’m aware that the question of publishing a book can feel like, or be, a matter of survival. Publishing books can open all kinds of doors. Even if the book doesn’t get a massive advance, or sell in blockbuster numbers, there is a kind of cultural cache that accompanies publishing a book that opens the door to other opportunities. Fellowships, residencies, jobs, gigs of all kinds. And people who are, say, independently wealthy are not going to feel the same time pressure as people who aren’t.
Publishing is a business. It is a business that intersects with culture, and even shapes culture. But it is still a business. And being a part of that business isn’t bad, as long as you, the writer, are clearheaded about what publishing can give you, and what it cannot. It can open doors and make careers and distribute your work. But it cannot create good art; only amplify it.
What happened with Bello, then, may have been the perfect storm, so to speak:
…a writer’s desire to do (or not do) the work, the publishing industry’s desire to rush or overlook flaws in a book if it otherwise suits some purpose, a program’s willingness (or not) to protect the creative space for its students. One of those things can fail—maybe two—but when the holes align, it all comes crashing down.
That is: Bello made some bad choices but was also in a bad situation. That is: she felt tremendous pressure but her publisher put too much pressure on her. That is: she failed to cite but was also failed by every professor who saw a citation issue in her work (likely more than once)—of borrowing too much of other writers’ work—but didn’t pull her aside, or report her, or reiterate the potential consequences of plagiarizing work.
Concluding thoughts:
Bello is not a bad person, only someone with a problematic pattern—and someone who simultaneously
courageously admitted to her mistake prior to publication, even if it meant losing her book contract3
(mostly) took responsibility & apologized to those who she harmed (something not every plagiarist does!)4
contributed to the broader community & worked to effect change5
& Bello is not the only writer who has made mistakes—
I guarantee that we all have, and more than once.
Here are some other recent & highly publicized incidents of plagiarism:
Plagiarism, ‘book-stuffing’, clickfarms ... the rotten side of self-publishing
HarperCollins Pulls Book by a Trump Pick After Plagiarism Report
The girl who stole my book: How Eilis O'Hanlon found out her crime novels were swiped by a stranger
Poet returns Stephen Spender prize after accusations of plagiarism
& further reading:
Okay, that’s all for tonight. I promise I’ll leave you alone now.
Please be safe & kind to one another—
-Despy Boutris
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She was in a great mood: not only was her literary idol, Carmen Maria Machado, herself an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, coming to Prairie Lights bookstore to give a reading that evening from her new memoir, In the Dream House, but Bello and her housemates, two women and a trans man, were throwing the after-party. (x)
Further complicating matters was the fact that just one month earlier, during the critique of her second submission to her fiction workshop, three or four students said, “‘Hey, this kind of reminds me of Carmen Maria Machado,’” as Bello recalls the exchange. “‘It’s almost word for word. You need to change it,’ and I said, ‘Oh, really? I will.’ And that was the end of it. For me, anyway.”
The passage in question was Bello’s description of the first sexual experience of Sumatra, the woman who would later become the main character in The Leaving. Bello wrote the scene in the second person: “You are nervous, excited … The feeling reminds you of a piano; someone is twisting the tuning pegs and your strings are getting tighter.” In 2013, in a story called “Inventory,” Machado wrote, “I was nervous, excited. I felt like a guitar and someone was twisting the tuning pegs and my strings were getting tighter.” (x)
In her Lit Hub essay, Bello wrote, “In December, I told my publisher of my indiscretion. I didn’t want a version of the book to come out that wasn’t true to my own work even if it meant losing the book contract.”
Bello now says that she asked Morgan, “‘Can we review this section? I think this is too close to a James Baldwin story.’ And so [Morgan] was reading my book while I was reading a passage from James Baldwin. I asked him to tell me if it was plagiarism, and he said it was. ‘This is the exact words’ is what he said.” (x)
Per William Logan, in an unrelated article:
Plagiarists rarely confess their sin, the worst a writer can commit. Almost all, when caught, make excuses. The most common are: (1) everyone does it, (2) it’s not really plagiarism, (3) any similarities are slight or irrelevant, (4) I forgot to cite the sources, (5) quotation marks and citations were accidentally removed, (6) the passages are only a small part of the book, (7) I unconsciously memorized the original, (8) my researcher is to blame, (9) drinking, drugs, or mental illness is to blame, and (10) the critic who caught me is to blame.
After I share with Bello that I have spoken with Maso, and that she says she would welcome communication from her, Bello e-mails her an apology. “Carole Maso wrote back to me,” Bello texts the next day. “I could cry.” (x)
Bello felt that by keeping the publishing process shrouded in mystery, Chang, under whose leadership the program had become more diverse, was inadvertently “replicating the inequity in the system she was trying to combat.” And so Bello went ahead and did it anyway, hosting a series of publishing talks over Zoom called Black Tea, with Black Iowa alumnae such as Dawnie Walton. (x)