Writing Communities: The Bad Art Friend Saga

Missing Pages S02E13 - The Bad Art Friend Saga

If you’re a writer, you know that a story can come from anywhere. I once wrote about an alcoholic society doyen after having a dream in which, I dreamed every detail down to the type of rug in her living room.

Inspiration can strike at any time, but there are moments when you’re presented with something more than just the seed of an idea. For many authors, the lives of those around them became critical parts of their books and stories. John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars'' was inspired by a teenaged girl he knew who was suffering from thyroid cancer. Emma Donaghue’s “Room” drew from the heartbreaking story of a young woman whose father held her captive for years. 

And it’s well known that “The Great Gatsby” is a fictionalized account of a real romance between F. Scott Fitzgerald and American socialite Ginevra King and the lavish parties the author attended on Long Island’s North Shore.

But for as common as it is for writers to write real life into their fiction, it’s far less common that they paint real life subjects as somewhat…unsavory characters with objectionable motives. Or maybe we just don’t know about those stories because the authors have worked hard to keep their inspiration concealed. 

Kind of like - every novel has one of those disclaimers at the front that says ‘any resemblance to characters living or dead is coincidental.’

After all, if someone found out they’d been depicted in an unflattering way for all the world to see…they might not find it so easy to brush off.

Some might even lawyer up…

Which is part of what escalated the feud that would become the case of Larson v. Perry…or as you might know them: Sonya Larson and Dawn Dorland.

(***AD BREAK***)

Welcome back to Missing Pages. I’m your host, literary critic and writer Bethanne Patrick. This is the podcast where we examine some of the most surprising, industry-shaking controversies in the literary world and try to make sense of them. 

This is an episode on the common literary practice of fictionalizing other peoples’ real lives…and the fine line between adapting tragedy and stealing it outright. We’ll explore the topics of creative liberty and ethical storytelling through the lens of the Bad Art Friend case. We’ll also try to examine the motivations and character of the two players involved… to contextualize the perspectives that gave rise to this question in the first place.

And thanks to the extensive public and legal coverage on this dispute, we can get pretty specific…down to the text message.

Chapter 1: Revisiting Bad Art Friend

‘Who's the bad art friend that's the question just about everyone is asking or has a firm opinion on after a viral new york times magazine article detailed a year's long legal battle between two local writers at least one of whom thought of the other as a friend’

In the fall of 2021, the two writers saw their half-personal, half-professional drama reported in-detail in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. The feud was all literary Twitter talked about for three whole weeks. The original article, written by Robert Kolker, was titled “Who Is The Bad Art Friend?” – a question that left many trying to answer it.

The story and subsequent lawsuit became the literature world’s fascination for weeks because it’s about inspiration – how an author draws from real life and develops a story. Because this one left everyone wondering where the line is.

In Kolker’s telling, the story began with Dawn Dorland and a line that went like this:

“There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra.”

Kolker detailed the series of events that began in 2015 when Dorland donated her kidney.

Whether or not Dorland had any personal agenda in her act of altruism – which remains to be seen – takes nothing from the fact that it was altruistic. 

At 35 years old, Dorland didn’t just donate a kidney, she did something known as a “non-directed potential donor.” The process goes like this: 

A match is found for the donated kidney, with a recipient who has a willing, but incompatible donor. That person then donates their kidney, so it can go to another recipient who has a willing, but incompatible donor. The process is known to encourage as many donations as possible before finally, it ends with a recipient who has no donor. 

The last person in the chain is typically someone who doesn’t have prospects, or whose relatives are unable to donate due to their own health conditions. In Dorland’s chain, two people donated theirs before hers found a man in Oregon, a father of 12.

That same month, Dorland also invited sixty-something friends, family members, and colleagues from her writing life to a private Facebook group– an online space where she planned to detail her experience as a kidney donor.

Writer Sonya Larson, was one of the invitees.

And when she received the notification, she accepted.

Kidney donors are encouraged to share their donor status and journey as a way to navigate their experience while also inspiring others to donate.

As much as Dorland would later get flack for her efforts to publicize her donation, this isn’t uncommon for the donor process. Her group, at 68 members, wasn’t exactly reaching the masses either.

That summer, Larson drew inspiration from the posts in Dorland’s private Facebook group to inform a short story about an insufferable kidney donor with a White Savior Complex. And while Kolker made tongue-in-cheek remarks about both subjects in the ensuing drama, he didn’t side with either as victim or villain.

At this point, in 2015, Dorland considered Larson a friend.

Though Larson didn’t feel the same, and later claimed she’d never been alone in a room with Dorland, yet the two were both longtime members of a Boston writers’ center and community known as GrubStreet. 

Grub Street is the largest creative writing center in the country, and their extensive programming in the city reaches neighborhoods that have historically had limited access to arts programming.

The center touts itself as a place for “writers and storytellers of every genre.” Larson and Dorland were no exception. They both attended classes, workshops, readings, and other events at the center.

In 2014, Dorland even delivered a craft speech on the importance of “telling” in story, as opposed to just “showing” – an interesting defiance of the “show don’t tell” approach, which advises writers to let sensory details and action lead story, over exposition. 

I digress. Dorland was giving speeches at GrubStreet. But A common misconception is that Dorland also belonged to a writing feedback group WITHIN the GrubStreet called the “Chunky Monkeys”...which Sonya Larson DID belong to.

According to Becky Tuch, an instructor at GrubStreet who also wrote with the Chunky Monkeys, that was never the case. Here’s what she had to say about Dawn:

BECKY TUCH : I believe she taught workshops at Grub Street. I know she presented at the MUSE AND THE MARKETPLACE Conference. But she was very involved in the Grub Street community. She was very much a part of the community, but she was not part of the workshop, which was a mistake that a lot of people on Twitter were making.

We all watched it unfold where when that article came out, everybody. Was, you know, Team Dawn, Team Sonya, very, you know, forming very,  quick opinions about who's right, who's wrong. And then more started coming out.

Watching the narrative shift over time as we all were probably, you know, glued to our phones to some degree and watching that take place was very interesting.

Like if you realize that's happening, that's That's not appropriate, that's not a good mojo for a writing group. There's no reason to be putting other writers down as  people, I mean, yeah, you can criticize their writing, that's, I think that's fair game, bu stomping on other writers, especially unknown…

Stomping on other writers, I mean, yeah, you can stomp on Stephen King. That's fine.  Whatever.  It's, you know, that's fine. But, um,  you know, I mean, the people in the workshop are really like accomplished, esteemed, well published, movie deal, high level writers, saying really nasty things about an unknown  woman, and. Young mom  who hasn't broken through like that's that's pretty bad.

So that tells us that while Dorland and Larson frequented a similar Boston literary community…they weren’t directly involved in giving each other regular writing feedback through the Chunky Monkeys.

And in 2014, Dorland moved to Los Angeles with her husband. So when she embarked on the journey of donating her kidney in 2015, there was some space between her and her east coast lit friends.

As Dorland recovered, she posted updates to the group…including a letter to the recipient of her kidney. In it, she pointed out that the family trauma of her childhood left her with an empathy for the suffering of others. 

She remarked, “My gift…trails no strings. You are deserving of an extended and healthy life simply for being here” and noted that while she would love to one day meet the recipient, she understood if they didn’t respond.

Larson saw this post and didn’t give it a “like.” And Dorland saw that Larson didn’t like it. In fact, Dorland noticed Larson would view each post…but never give a like.

This seed of conflict may have been a seemingly benign social media oversight on Larson’s part. But Dorland was confused why Larson, and other GrubStreet writers she considered friends, weren’t acknowledging her journey. 

At the end of July 2015, in a message exchange between Dorland and Larson, Dorland brought up that she had recently donated her kidney. 

To this, Larson replied, “Ah yes – I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!” 

Around the same time, Larson began writing a short story.

It follows a Chinese-American woman, Chuntao, who receives a kidney from a narcissistic White donor named Rose. In efforts to feel appreciation and love from the recipient of her kidney, Rose inserts herself into Chuntao’s life.

While it’s easy to see how the story amplifies Larson’s perception that Dorland was self-aggrandizing in her personal shares, it’s unclear what Larson’s initial intentions for the story were. But, in early drafts, Larson had named the kidney donor character Dawn…as in Dawn Dorland. 

And in a letter that the kidney donor writes to the recipient in the story, Larson actually took several lines from Dorland’s real life letter to her recipient…verbatim. 

In October 2015, she shared the story with her Chunky Monkeys writing group at GrubStreet, with the title “The Kindest.”

Larson now had intentions to develop the short story professionally. And everyone in the Chunky Monkeys group immediately saw Dawn Dorland in the kidney donor character. So there was a conspiratorial aspect to it as well. Their knowing it was Dorland in the story gave them a chance to affirm Larson’s perceptions of Dorland. And as Larson workshopped the story, her fellow writers gave her support and encouragement.

In late 2015, Larson submitted her polished version of “The Kindest” to Plympton – a “literary studio” that sublicensed her book to Audible – with an agreement to publish in February 2016. She submitted the story to The New Yorker and The Atlantic. 

At this point, every single time she sent this story out, she was sending out a version of the story that contained exact sentences from Dorland’s letter.

She didn’t seem to be worried about this until the Summer of 2016, when Dorland got a Facebook comment from a friend noting that Larson had done a reading of a short story about a kidney donor. The friend had innocently wondered if Dorland had inspired Larson’s character. Intrigued, Dorland reached out to Larson asking to read it.

Larson said it wasn’t ready yet. 

Keep in mind, listeners, that at this point, an early draft of Larson’s piece had already been published on Audible. 

The next day, Larson messaged Plympton and asked them to re-record the short story due to the fact that her story “include[d] a couple sentences that [she]’d excerpted from a real-life-letter” and was uncomfortable given “ethical reasons.”

The re-recorded version was published in October 2016. 

But by then, things between Dorland and Larson had soured. In a back-and-forth between the two, Dorland expressed her hurt that Larson hadn’t informed her about the story, hadn’t considered her feelings, and undermined their friendship. Larson claimed, “honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship.”

This was a little confusing, given that Larson never really considered Dorland a friend. 

Now, she was asking for Dorland’s compassion, to let her off for writing something partially inspired by Dorland’s own life event…because, according to Larson, that’s friendship. The riff between them had officially begun, but as Larson’s short story took off, Dorland reasoned that she just wouldn’t read it.

For a while, that was all there was to it. And it was a LONG WHILE. 

In fact, it wasn’t until two years later in June 2018 that Dorland finally read Larson’s story. And when she saw a very familiar-looking letter from the kidney donor to her recipient in it, Dorland suddenly felt an even bigger kind of betrayal.

Evidently, Dorland’s bigger concern seemed to be that the story painted kidney donors in a bad light…and would dissuade future donors from the cause. 

In efforts to correct the situation, Dorland hired a lawyer who in the summer of 2018 sent cease and desist letters to the Boston Book Festival, which had selected Larson’s short story as the winner of its One City One Story program. She also requested that the Boston Book Festival and Larson  add an apology in the story acknowledgments and provide resources promoting kidney donation. This action was all taken based on Dorland’s read of Larson’s later story draft…

In late July 2018, Dorland’s fury grew when she discovered Larson’s original audiobook was still available on Audible. In it was a recitation of a letter from the story’s kidney donor that was even closer to Dorland’s.

The Boston Globe released an article raising questions about the plagiarism in Larson’s letter. If Larson’s story couldn’t be published before…now it really couldn’t be. The Boston Book Festival pulled their One City One Book program that year to avoid involvement in any future litigation involving the story.

Six months later, in January 2019, Larson sued Dorland for “defamation” and “interference with business relationships.” 

It was unclear if she had a case…because Dorland’s efforts to inform Larson’s professional contacts had been based on her honest belief that Larson had stolen from her. Even if the story itself was not about Dorland, Larson created a direct link between them when she inserted bits of Dorland’s real life donor letter into her fiction.

Larson may not have gone about drawing inspiration in the right way and people in the media certainly had feelings about it.

There were arguments about it on shows like ‘Lovett or Leave It.’

“Everybody came off looking really bad.”...“See I don’t agree, I don’t agree. I think Dawn came of looking generous but [expletive] up. But Sonya got out with just a ding, it was a fender bender for Sonya. It was a car wreck for Dawn.”

It was the kind of public debate you couldn’t avoid, if you had any interest in the literary world and access to a smartphone. That’s the part of the story most of us know. Although, if you don’t, worry not! I’ll give you the recap in just a moment.

On September 14th, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts reached a decision in the case of Larson v. Perry. 

The court sided with Dawn Dorland in Sonya Larson’s suit for defamation and interference with business relationships. And they sided with Sonya Larson in Dawn Dorland’s countersuit for copyright infringement.

The verdict is the most definitive aspect of this entire story.

Coming up after a quick break, we’ll meet a writer who borrowed a real-life story for their work of fiction.

Chapter 2: The Ethics of Borrowing

I recently came across an essay by award-winning fiction writer, Rebecca Meachem.

It was titled “I Stole My Neighbors’ Tragedy to Write a Short Story.”

In it, Meachem reflects on her experience writing about two real people…who later discovered she’d written about them…or at least, about a brief glimpse into their lives. Meacham’s inspiration came in her early 20s, when she and her boyfriend were spending time with his sister and her neighbors. Suddenly, the neighbors started talking about their daughter, who had recently died.

REBECCA MEACHEM: It was the time of day where you can't see anything, the sun was going down and she got hit and killed.

have both this like awareness or frequency tuned to these stories of loss, given my own background, which is that was older than I was and he died when he was 13 and I was four.

My own sort of framing of that was usually to avoid it, or to not talk about it. So here are these people sitting in the hot tub, and they're starting to talk about a dead child. And I don't want to ask them anything because… don't know how to, like, ask them stuff, and I'm not really close to them. So I, I listened, and I couldn't believe that they were saying such frank things, because of course my own writer pers my own, like, human perspective towards this is like, don't talk about it, or you should be careful, and so I just, I mean, but what are they gonna do? So they started saying things about the autopsy report, like it just came in the mail. And they were going through their mail and they were like, I guess I didn't expect that. And I was like, you know, that happens…And then there was one moment where the Georgia mother in this story was talking about doing laundry, and that’s when it really hit me. Like, life doesn’t stop, the tasks of your household, the routines. To hear her say that and realize ‘oh my gosh you have to like put away that laundry’ or that’s going to go somewhere else. That’s her laundry, that’s your daughter’s laundry, these are the details. So that story started coming to me through those strange bits of dialog and then also the little itty bitty details in the aftermath of somebody in your family dying.

A year later Meachem was working on her Masters in Fine Arts from Bowling Green State University, and was trying to decide what to write a short story about. The moment in the hot tub came to mind.

Bethanne: So, what was it about this story, exactly, that made you want to write it?

REBECCA MEACHAM: There's drunken, you know suburban raucousness that you can hear and here these people are right in front of me dealing with the biggest worst thing you can imagine, and we're all in this hot tub together, and it was that tension between everydayness and routine, which you see in like Raymond Carver, and you see in the Anne Beattie type stories, and then you see elsewhere where it's like, things seem okay, but really something's off, and that was the offness that I was like, okay, that's what I want to do.

The story based on this moment was called “When Tom and Georgia Come Over to Swim.” The story won her a program scholarship and was later published in a small literary journal. 

And as much as it had stemmed from her experience talking to the couple who had recently lost their daughter, it was important to Meacham that the writing itself meaningfully adapted the characters…while also honoring what they went through as something more than plot. As my friend Luis Urrea has a similar ethical stance, says: “Fill your pen with compassion, or don’t pick it up.”

But frankly, not all writers agree with that…and they don’t have to. 

As it stands, writers can write whatever they want about whatever they want to write about. The hard to pill to swallow for some who *do* choose to make work out of real life is that ignoring ethical considerations, while allowed, comes with consequences. Their authorial choices might cause them to face hefty public criticism, lose relationships, and even get sued.

For Meacham, the experience of being confronted by the couple she’d written about has solidified her stance on adapting from real life.

REBECCA MEACHAM: To me, it's like starting with that place of compassion and empathy. Even still, Rebecca wasn’t without her fears. The idea of... them reading it scared me to death and I was like, I did this thing. I think I did it well, but still I did, you know, this is arguably this most horrible thing in their lives. I changed their names. I've done some distancing. And in terms of like recognizability from their end, one, I didn't ever think they'd read it, I didn't, even if it got published, at that time it was even a different story, a different version of the story that I revised later that ended up getting published and stuff, but it's mostly the same, and I didn't think they'd come across it, so, like a coward, I was like, well, I'm probably safe, but I was still feeling really badly.

This is where Rebecca Meacham’s experience appears to diverge from Sonya Larson’s. 

Because even while Rebecca was a writer in her young twenties, unpacking the ordinary grief of two people she once met in a hot tub…she reflected on who these people were, how they felt, and what it might feel like for them to one day read it.

What’s evident from the beginnings of Larson’s foray into her kidney donor story is that she never really considered how Dorland might receive it.

For Meacham, it was a line the aggrieved mother had said about still having to do laundry in the wake of her daughter’s passing…and a line about an autopsy report that came in the mail. These disturbing details that so brutally contrasted the everyday suburban life with death lent impact to the piece.

But Larson seemed to leave in lines from Dorland’s letter because of her perception that they were so self-satisfied, they advanced just how annoying the antagonist was. The whole time, she wasn’t writing with curiosity about the kidney donor’s character or a willingness to see them as a dynamic, albeit flawed human. 

Rather, the character connected to Dorland was presented as an ignorant pestilence, representing the burden of a White Savior Complex.

And Larson’s story thus became a “What if Dawn Dorland had been a donor to a person from a different racial background?” Had she not wanted to insert Dorland into the narrative, exclusion of direct quotes from Dorland’s letter would have been important. 

The fact that she left them in speaks to a vague intention to mock Dorland…something Meacham, too, sensed in the work.

REBECCA MEACHAM: I think Bad Art Friend indicates a cruelty, like as I recall about that whole situation, the story, like the, the person at the center of the whole kidney donation or whatever this all ended up being, which, and it sounds like a really interesting story. I'm not actually going to say anything about the craft or like the attraction of the writer to that, but it felt like it was very much taking a real thing and all the other stuff that goes with that story specifically with the workshopping and the community and all of these sort of things with that specific person who had that experience then turned into fiction. It felt like it was making a mockery of it or that, that writer was like, I'm going to use this to show the shallowness or, or whatever and let the writer do what they want. But that was a real person's story that was pretty public, right?

Meacham was getting at something important here.

As a coda to her own short story wherein she adapted the moment in the hot tub with the grieving couple, they wrote back to her acknowledging the piece and sharing their appreciation for the way it recorded their daughter’s life and death.

So there can be some triumph afterall for the writer who chooses to adapt from reality…at least for writers who adapt with a level of compassion.

Larson didn’t fall into that category. 

And when she lawyered up to countersue Dawn Dorland, her reputation took another blow…because all the mean group chats between her and the members of GrubStreet’s “Chunky Monkeys” were subpoenaed as evidence for her lawsuit.

Unfortunately for Larson, these communications did advance Dorland’s defense. Because as much as Larson claimed the story had nothing to do with Dorland and that Dorland was defaming her, that was a lot harder to argue when many of Larson’s communications months before she published ridiculed Dorland’s kidney donation.

Did she have the freedom of speech to send those communications? Yes, absolutely.

Freedom from consequences? Not so much.

Chapter 3: There Are No Winners in War

Though Kolker has stated it wasn’t his intention to stir up this side-picking debate, what’s clear from that outcome is that people find a lot of themselves in the story. 

Some see Larson as a shameless writer who drew inspiration from something personally-experienced by Dorland, even if it wasn’t off limits. And others see Dorland as someone who received an unnecessary display of hate from writers she’d thought were her friends…Still, those writers never knew she’d find out they loathed her. No one, that is, except Larson – who had to have considered that at some point her writing would reach Dorland.

Whether or not Larson considered the emotional impact of her work is an ironic consideration given her antagonistic portrayal of the kidney donor character, whose deepest flaw is her lack of consideration for others. 

But then, the writing is always a mirror, isn’t it?

Ultimately, as much as this case has been fuel for discourse, there really is no one answer to the question “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” 

Because both acted in ways that, while not totally kind, aren’t really illegal. I guess the hope would be that writers more deeply considered the emotional consequences of their work on the subjects they portray…and that the subjects being portrayed like themselves enough to let it go if an adaptation of them appears in a story somewhere. 

Maybe to be good art friends, writers need to take themselves a little less seriously.

In the case of Larson v. Perry, there were no winners.

Larson lost her suit for wrongful interference because there was “no evidence that she suffered an economic loss” on behalf of Dorland’s messages to the Boston Book Festival, among other collaborators. Larson lost her suit for defamation because Dorland merely provided facts underlying her opinion that Larson had plagiarized.

And Dorland lost her suit claiming copyright infringement. The letter included in Larson’s short story was revised from the form that drew specific lines from Dorland’s original letter, and even then, the letter was a small part of a greater narrative that didn’t steal anything Dorland had written.

They both incurred losses in legal fees and reputation.

In October 2021, following Robert Kolker’s New York Times article, Larson was seemingly forced to leave her leadership role at GrubStreet. Two other women who were part of Chunky Monkeys and held leadership roles at the institution also left.

The organization’s artistic director Christopher Castellani, who at one point messaged the group saying, "My mission in life is going to be to exact revenge on this pestilence of a person” referring to Dawn…did not step down. In a letter to GrubStreet members, he did acknowledge his emails as being “an admittedly hyperbolic, deliberately provocative, and highly performative way of supporting [his] friend and fellow writer.” He apologized for his actions and expressed a hope to regain the trust of his community members.

GrubStreet as a whole launched an investigation into broad complaints on the mess. It remains to be seen whether they will earn the trust of their community again, but their opening of a new literary center in Boston suggests that they’re doing just fine.

As for the ethical questions this tale has raised, there’s little to be found in the way of an answer. Personal morals will ultimately determine what a person chooses to write about. And while there may be honor among thieves, that’s not always so in the case of writers. Because life often holds the best material. So listeners, be careful or you may end up in someone’s novel.

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, Produced, mixed, and mastered by Chris Boniello with additional production and editing by Katelyn Bogucki.

This episode was produced by Claire McInerny.

This episode was written by Lauren Delisle.

Fact checking by Douglas Weissman.

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Vannessa Ullman, and Annabella Pena. 

Art by Tom Grillo. 

Produced and Hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick. 

Original music composed and performed by Hashem Assadullahi, additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate.

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Matt Keeley, Becky Tuch, and Rebecca Meacham.

You can learn more about Missing Pages at the podglomerate dot com, on twitter at miss pages pod and on Instagram at missing pages pod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to.