Warning Signs

It’s been a crunchy couple of weeks for me, personally – crappy health and competing deadlines and all that. But I’ve managed to carve some time out to work on Spectral, so you get an update! A few weeks ago, I received the first set of official changes and suggestions from wonder-editor Harriet Evans, and managed to get some time with über-busy poetry powerhouse Bridget Hart of Burning Eye to talk about creating a content warning system for the book, so the past ten days has involved working on those two things, between bouts of illness.

Content Warnings are a touchy subject, even now. I, personally, used to be very wary of them – downright sulky about having to provide them where asked, in the past, if I’m honest – and we still don’t mandate them for the events that I run, though I do quite vehemently suggest nowadays that stronger opening topics do need a decent heads-up. Some people decry them as spoilers, or pandering, or incomprehensible – how are you to know what someone’s specific triggers are?! – but the last few years have given me some interesting insight into the value of them, and my approach has changed due to a couple of different demonstrations of best practice, and how much that contrasts with at least one demonstration of bad practice…

Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a great way to up your game (or decide that live performance art isn’t your game after all…) – the combination of pressure, reliance on yourself and others, the lack of resources and the wealth of opportunities, plus lots and LOTS of practice at honing your performance and hosting (and marketing, and networking, and quick-change costume, and hill-walking, and managing rejection) skills can be a game-changer. On top of that, you’re also witnessing how other people do it – well and badly! – and this can be really pivotal for your own work. Peering at my own hosting process these days, I notice that I’ve appropriated quite a few standards from other people that I liked: phrases and ways of expressing enthusiasm during warming a crowd up, adjusting the mic stand for people before they get there, providing a music stand so that people who read from hard copy can go hands-free, and the adaptation of Allographic’s infamous #NoApologies philosophy from people who hosted while I was recovering my voice. (I’d like to think that I’ve influenced a few others in turn re: no-kicking-down policies and checking performers’ pronouns as standard, but that’s not the point of this!) And my attitude to giving people more space in which to breathe at my events was massively altered by one friendly open mic in Edinburgh that I very nearly didn’t go to.

To Be Frank’s Edinburgh Fringe run in 2018 was produced by a group of young people from Bath, and hosted in Edinburgh’s radical bookshop. I came to show support to the featured cast and do a bit of open mic, and was blown away when a couple of lovingly pragmatic statements by the host shifted my worldview more than he could possibly know. Because I’d been to places where content warnings were encouraged/ enforced, but I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone say something like: “If you’re getting overwhelmed, please feel free to wander out into the rest of the bookshop if you need to take a moment, and then come back whenever.” It was the corollary to “you might be triggered” that I’d been missing all that time – “if you’re triggered, or potentially triggered, you can go, take care of yourself, and return, with explicit permission.” Knowing that I could leave and come back if I needed to… meant that I didn’t need to. It was quite an extraordinary experience, and I have now worked it into all my hosting duties, whether online or in person. You can come back is a huge thing to hear; you don’t have to reach fever-pitch and run away for good/ dissociate frantically while stuck in the audience. You’re welcome to practise good self-care.

And of course there was an experience of seeing it done badly which resolved me to be even stronger in my defence of content warnings. Short version: A Certain Famous Musician had a gig in Cambridge a few months before lockdown which almost had me on my knees with rage and anxiety. I started feeling quite quickly like I was the only person not signed up to the personality cult, and I left with most of my upper body in tetany from clenching my fists so hard. She sauntered through the audience, touching hands like a revivalist preacher, reached the stage, and launched into an anecdote which had immediate and graphic themes of what probably many would describe as sexual coercion and dubious consent, let alone underage activities and deeply sketchy power and age dynamics, then trilled: “Trigger warning! Hahaha!” into the somewhat stunned silence. She then told the audience that they could call out for her to play a particular riff when they were feeling sad and overwhelmed, because there was a lot of heavy stuff in the show. The third time someone asked for it, she was already cursing them and showing every sign of aggressive reluctance to comply, all the while telling us at every other turn that she practised “radical compassion”. If actual and timely trigger warnings (and actual pragmatic care) had been offered for the a) heavy, b) rambling, c) viciously self-aggrandising and seemingly endless show, I might have engaged better with the subject matter/ not binned the artist from my list of icons.

In a similar fashion, and with similar timing, I started interacting actively with fanfic in early 2018. Getting into the habit of reading – and writing – stories of sometimes graphically distressing topics turned out to be much easier to process/ avoid when feeling fragile due to the tagging system (which, to be fair, not everyone employs punctiliously). Knowing when/ how/ if to back out of something that tweaked my own personal “nope!”s didn’t lead to me having a more anodyne reading experience by any means, but it meant that (nearly) every engagement with the difficult stuff was done with informed consent, and the feeling of control I had over those situations helped me process topics that I did need to address, but which I might have just run away from entirely otherwise. It’s always jarring, by contrast, to find that book- and movie-buying is more fraught – I’m about to spend cash on this… am I going to end up chucking the thing across the room, having been ambushed for the sake of an author’s need to control my experience down to the jump-scare? or will I get my money’s worth?

Detractors of content notes and trigger warnings like to say that “life doesn’t provide trigger warnings!” Sure, but that’s wildly beside the point, in my opinion. Because, adequately informed about the potential dangers of a situation, we can choose to take precautions or avoid altogether. Besides, not only does nature provide plenty of safety warnings in the form of colouration, etc., we humans set up vast swathes of safety measures in actual, 3D life as well as art to give people that very choice: Low Bridge; Flood Warning; Falling Rocks; Oncoming Train; Construction Site; Wash Before Use; Wait For The Green Light; Contains Peanuts; Strobe Use; Foul Language; 18+; Danger: Quicksand; sirens and flashing lights; car horns and airbags; seatbelts; safety harnesses, goggles, and hard hats; lightning conductors; fire grates and tempered glass; gauntlets and sword guards; steam valves; antihistamines; steel toecaps; oxygen masks; lifeguards and buoys; red flags; Beware of the Dog; Here Be Dragons. A large part of the ongoing success of human society is its collaboration on preventing and mitigating danger – both physical and mental. Let’s face it: folklore and mythology is about 80% Don’t Talk To Strangers; Deep Waters Contain Scary Things; and Don’t Wander Off Into The Woods By Yourself, For Fuck’s Sake. (A lot of the rest of it appears to be about the dangers of jealous family members, which is interesting, but definitely a discussion for another time…)

Besides, if art is a conversation (and I strongly believe it is – or should be), then the power and control need to be equally shared between all participants, explicitly. And if art is a means to safely process the difficult things about life – a co-constructed virtual reality, if you like – it needs to practise compassion and informed consent in order for the messages artists want witnessed to be engaged with clearly. Anything else feels somewhat like bullying, to my mind.

So what’s that got to do with Spectral? you might be asking, if you’ve got this far and not been thoroughly derailed by my digressions (hi, nice to see you; thanks for persisting; please bear with me a little longer!). Well, I wanted to find a way to give common content warnings for the pieces without impinging on people’s reading experience – a way for those who wish to stay as safe as possible to do so, but also a way to not get “spoilers” if you’re feeling robust enough to handle any surprises. And, let’s face it, if you know anything about my work to date, you’ll be unsurprised to find themes of sexuality, gender, relationships, mythology, and the power that memory can hold over us popping up in the book. Talking to Bridget about it, she suggested a discreet colour code, which turned into me suggesting symbols (since internal colour was out), and together we worked out a suitable set of warnings (whittled down from a terrifyingly comprehensive 50-something to 27).

The, uh, fun thing about occasionally being so ill that you can’t sleep, is that you can find good distraction and productivity in small, low-stakes tasks. In this instance, having done a bit of research into standards for emblematic representation, and realising that I would have to draw the symbols myself where possible due to copyright restrictions/ lack of cohesive options elsewhere, I got stuck in and started ticking them off, starting with the quick wins. Having a drawing tablet and the recent practice in copying things has definitely borne fruit, as I seem to be much more able to transcribe my imagination than before. Using CorelDraw, I would scribble simple, sketchy versions, then play with the nodes to pose the figures. A lot of duplicating-and-mirroring gave some symmetry (better than relying on my current ability to draw something suitable twice reliably), and behold!

These are very much in first draft status, so I’m going to share a bunch that are either particularly common in the book, or about which I’m rather proud… or both.

In alphabetical order, the symbols above represent: bullying, childlessness, chronic pain and fatigue, conflict, death, depression, despair, implied sexual content, manipulation, mourning, regret, relationship breakup, toxic relationships, and transphobia.

Would love to hear if you can tell which is which, and what you think (bearing in mind these will probably need to be about a centimetre high each in the finished version!). They will, of course, be properly labelled in the final version!