Universal Table

STEADYING OUR GAZES AS WRITERS AND READERS

We are very pleased to invite you to read and interact with us through this new Wising Up Anthology: Cold Shoulders & Evil Eyes: Steadying Gazes & Warm Embraces. Exclusion is difficult to experience, or to re-experience even vicariously as a writer or reader, but it is also part of what makes the experience of inclusion so very valuable. These inter-related dynamics are a fact of our lives as the loving, fractious, bonding, and divisive species we are. However uncomfortable these social dynamics may be in real life, we believe you will find the anthology itself is compassionate and inviting and encourages in all of us respect for our resilience as individuals – and as groups.

My own interest in exclusion has its roots in the many moves I've made in my lifetime - for there is nothing like entering a room of strangers to let you know the physical reality of the social phenomenon and its raw power. My interest in inclusion, of course, has the same experiential source, for the delight and relief we feel at a welcoming smile, a kind question, a sweet laugh of recognition arise, in part, from our experience of the reverse condition. That my interest stems from moving - from state to state, country to country, job to job, professional discipline to professional discipline - is significant because it means that I have been able to recognize in very different cultural and social conditions very similar dynamics, dynamics that apply not just to me but to anyone else who has happened, like me, to enter stage left or right, anywhere outside this particular social frame. Experienced this way, these dynamics are simultaneously impersonal and gut-wrenchingly personal in their consequences, for to be human is to be distinctively vulnerable to both inclusion and exclusion from the most fundamental physiological level to one's ability to imagine, conceptualize, and predict, for both better and worse, your social fate and place.

When we began the process of developing this anthology, we began with an interest in inclusion, the other, far more positive side of this dynamic. Each of us, whatever our condition, has the power to include, to invite people into relationship with ourselves and into relationship with all the groups with whom we identify and in which we belong, families, neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, political parties, religions, nations, humanity itself. It is our belief that recognizing that we have this power helps ground and empower us and increases social resilience. However, we quickly found that people don't often write about it - either because they fear sounding self-congratulatory or because it doesn't make a great story (since story depends so heavily on rupture).

Because we see the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion as linked, we decided to open our call to experiences of exclusion, in part because we assumed that writing, in itself, with its ability to evoke sensory experience, create a transforming coherence of cause and effect, entertain a  multiplicity of viewpoints and responses, and tolerate ambiguity, might be a very effective way to create a safe setting for reflection on a ubiquitous and deeply painful social experience. It certainly opened a floodgate. Many writers, it seems, have an exclusion story tucked away in a drawer just waiting to be shared. Exclusion, it was clear, certainly made people want to talk, to share their side of things. Often decades after the experience. We received many stories about adolescence, when these experiences are frequent, blatant and we have fewer ways to mitigate their impact.

It was then that we realized that it takes a lot of skill to write an effective story, or poem, or memoir about exclusion. The reasons have to do with the nature of the experience itself, which is highly aversive to all of us. I'd like to review some of the effects of exclusion here because of the challenges they pose for us both as writers and readers.

Exclusion hurts us in every way: physically, emotionally, imaginatively, intellectually. It hurts us at every age and whatever we say to the contrary because this pain is faster than thought - and the body treats it as physical pain. For a very good reason. As deeply social animals with an extremely prolonged dependency period, abandonment by parents, family or tribe is one of the most profound threats to our existence. We are hard-wired to resist it. A healthy infant left alone too long cries her lungs out.

Social scientists today are exploring the hypothesis that social pain,  particularly the pain of exclusion,  may be experienced by people as identical to physical pain because it makes use of the same affective pain system as physical pain. This helps explain why people when they are excluded describe the experience in terms of physical pain - heart ache, heartbreak - and alone by themselves take on body postures similar to someone in physical pain, withdrawing, curling up, lying down, crying, feeling all over miserable. This affective pain system that is used is not the one that relays the intensity of sensation, rather the one that relays aversiveness, the one that teaches us to avoid such experiences in the future if at all possible.

Unfortunately, the responses that were so helpful to us as healthy infants, like outcry, don't help us as much later on because social exclusion as we get older is a highly nuanced, complex, often non-verbal process and requires equally fine-tuned regulation along all these parameters. Our basic, automatic kinesthetic responses are hair-trigger fast and blunt: We get angry and attack, withdraw, or appease. We go numb.  We don't think clearly. We get primed for more of the same and see exclusion everywhere we turn. These most natural of responses have implications for us as writers and also as readers, which is why I bring them up now. To read stories about exclusion with a steadying gaze, we need to be aware that even in reading we participate in these dynamics, whether we wish to or not.

Exclusion experiences are difficult to describe effectively to others for a number of reasons. One is that to describe them vividly reactivates the pain of the experience in the person writing, but it is also because these experiences aren't intellectual. They are rawly physical for us. And they can also be almost completely non-verbal, a question of looking away, refusing to answer, sneering, sighing, whispering as you leave a room. Even in retrospect, it's hard to slow down the process enough to capture the ambiguities and threat of the experience in careful scenes, words.

Another reason it is difficult to write effectively about exclusion has to do with reader response (both imagined and actual). Given the pain we recreate in ourselves trying to describe the experience of exclusion to anyone, the realization that they may not see it through our lens has the power to recreate that original sense of desolating isolation. What happens, then, years later when we sit down to write out memoirs or fiction that draw on these experiences. What is our aim in writing? Revenge? Self-justification? And who are we writing to?

This is where, as readers, we get involved. When we read, we usually engage in a process of identification with our protagonist. But what if our protagonist is an agonist?  Leads us into conflict we would rather avoid? Suffers consequences, possibly through no fault of his or her own, that we hate to imagine? What if, in a brief work, as in a short story, exclusion is the whole story? Where does that leave us?

Another deep-seated psychological dynamic rapidly comes into play in all of us if the writer isn't careful. Human beings tend to explain experiences of exclusion by blaming the victim, imputing the actions of the aggressors to qualities intrinsic to the excluded person as an individual (they didn't get out of the way fast enough, they didn't know the rules, they were clueless). For it is painful to identify with someone being excluded. That person has been, at one time or another, us. As readers we have to be given some very good reasons why we should go through this experience again, even in imagination.

Authors intuitively know that tendency on the part of the reader to withdraw, to turn against the character in their difficulties, and often try to claim the reader's loyalty by restricting point of view, insisting that we see the world through the victimized character's eyes and only through his or her eyes. But this approach can backfire. As readers, eager to make sense of our own experiences of exclusion too, we need to feel that we are safe inside a larger consciousness, one that doesn't force us to live only inside the deeply painful experience of exclusion, and our first vivid, all-consuming but simplistic responses to it.  We want to read stories that hold out real hope for us, hope that involves social nuance, multiple motives, new responses, and a resilient attachment to self that permits multiple perspectives on our own actions and intentions.

It was this observation that affected how we decided to present the anthology and what writings we ultimately decided to include. We selected for the stories, poems and memoirs where writers were able to invite multiple perspectives on the characters, to imply that other nuanced responses were possible. We decided that a web anthology, which is a more social media, rather than the intimacy of a print anthology, would work better for the topic. A web presentation allows us to make use of visual imagery and shorter reading experiences, which we believe invite more comfortable reflection. We also found that inviting authors to reflect on their own experience of writing these stories, poems, and memoirs opened windows, invited in fresh breezes. Our discussion questions also invite you as readers to take a point of view a little different from the authors, to step inside a story with your own sense of possibilities, your own experiences of inclusion as well as exclusion.

We hope that you will become part of a larger conversation on inclusion and exclusion in daily life by sharing your responses to individual works and to the collection as a whole with us as editors and with the authors. We also hope the stories and poems and memoirs published here can help you revisit your own exclusion experiences a little more compassionately, assured you are not alone, and that you may be able to use these stories as springboards for conversations with family, friends, classmates, neighbors, colleagues. To that end, we hope you will introduce the collection to others by forwarding a link to our website to groups and individuals you think will find it of interest. To share your responses write us at steadyinggazes@universaltable.org

We also invite a broader intellectual understanding of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in daily life by providing a selective bibliography of works by social scientists on different dimensions of the experiences of exclusion and also on empathy and inclusion.

Please join us!