Content warnings for a memoir workshop

[fandomnumbergenerator]

I manage a memoir workshopping group, and a new member wants a more formal content warning policy (not because of specific triggers she wants to be warned for, but because she was an instructor at small liberal arts college for a semester and felt they were very useful). A long standing member of the group who has been a professor for decades is opposed to requiring trigger warnings (she has more of a 70s liberal take on most social issues, and also has seen trigger warnings used as a way to manipulate the administration into censuring adjunct professors).

The current policy is:

Writing presented in the group may contain references to or descriptions of death, illness, abuse, unhealthy family and relationship dynamics, sexual assault, racism, sexism, or homophobia, as well as explicit sex or drug use. We do not generally use trigger or content warnings, though specific warning requests will be taken seriously.

Elsewhere in the guidelines, it says that people need to briefly introduce their work before they start reading, so there should never be a situation where a potentially triggering topic is a total surprise. But the way the topics are addressed might be more graphic in one section than another.

I am working on a project about my boyfriend's death when I was 24, and the piece I brought to the group last week included a description of a dead body, and so I warned people in an email. Everyone appreciated the warning, but none of the people who actually attended the in-person meeting wanted to change the policy (the new member who wanted the change the policy wasn't there).

We are looking for new members and I am trying to craft policies that will work for people we don't already have a good working relationship with.

None of the workshopping classes I took included content warning requirements, so I feel like I don't really know where to start.

I also feel like triggers are incredibly personal. I usually use "Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings" on AO3 because almost every story I write has some fleeting reference to the character having sex when they were under 18 or some past traumatic experience.

And in my memoir writing, I'm still grappling with what to call things. Like what level of creepiness on my father's part requires a trigger warning? When I am still trying to come up with a stable way to frame my experiences for myself.

Comments

[lou2]

Hoo boy, i do not envy you that complication. Balancing the fairness to the writer with the triggers of the audience is such a catch 22. Though i have confidence in your decision. You always seem so in tune and thoughtful

[fandomnumbergenerator]

Thank you!

The workshop guidelines are a work in progress, so we can always go back and revise them later. But there are also the first thing that new people learn about the group, so I want them to show that we are serious and thoughtful about the work we're doing.

As I think through trigger warnings in this particular context, I'm realizing that the people I've seen drop out of workshops are always writers, usually right after a bad critique. So I feel like it's a situation where the trigger warnings need to err on the side of protecting the writer vs the reader. Which is a very different situation than a movie or a fic or a college course.

I rewrote the guidelines, and we're getting a new influx of people (because I just messaged all the people in the MeetUp group that I'm not planning on posting any more events on MeetUp and that if people want to join the listserv that I migrated the group to, they need to reach out to me). So, we'll see how it goes.

I really want these guidelines to make the group robust, even if I end up leaving to take a more formal course.