Who's story is it anyway?

When I was writing my first book, I struggled with the stories I planned to include because almost all of them included real people who I knew and loved. It became my motto to tell a "gentle truth." The night before the book was going to be real, in my hands and available for sale, I was terrified. I couldn't sleep due to the pit in my stomach and the worry about "what if I make someone mad?"

After the book was released, months went by and there were only a few minor hurt feelings. "Why didn't you talk more about when we did this?" or "That's not quite how I remember it" were the worst of my feedback. Ah, relief.

That is until almost a year after the book's publication, I opened my email to find a nasty, spitting note from a mother-in-law of one of the characters in my book. She called me terrible names and viewed me as some sort of devil. I had failed to talk about the whole person, how goos she was, how smart she was, how charitable...etc. Included with the email was a speech written by this girl that she had presented to a church group. That was to prove how much better she was than me, I think.

I was sick about it for days. I couldn't decide how to respond. I talked about it with everyone I knew. The story I had told did not paint the girl in a particularly nasty way but I alluded to the fact that her stories terrified me and I wasn't quite sure they were true. According to this email, I had called a complete saint (and a deceased one at that) a liar.

Years have gone by now and that email doesn't haunt me anymore. My choice to include that description of my friend doesn't haunt me either. I was not telling her story, I was telling my story of which she was a main player in an important lesson learned. I wasn't writing her autobiography I was writing mine and, in that effort, I had edited this person's depiction to a few pages in which she was not perfect, or smart, or particularly considerate. I had told my truth and it didn't match with the truth of her family. So, who's story was it?

For me, the bottom line here is that no one but that family cared who the person in the story was. The story was in the book for a reason. It had a purpose, a lesson to learn, and the family (who threatened to sue) could not see past their grief and anger to consider that writing is art and art is about the HUMAN experience not the INDIVIDUAL experience. Her editing may not have been a complete view of who she was but it fit the objective the art needed to express.

Frankly, I do this kind of thing all of the time. I see a talk from a doctor about healthcare and I write about what she said. Am I plagiarizing or am I sharing the experience I had as a listener? I read a blog and I share the story of the mother and child on the child's last day in my own words, without her knowing. Should I be ashamed of my lack of creativity? Should I be sued for slander? Should I be accused of stealing?

I imagine you know my answer. But before I put the answer out there, let me flip the scenario. Often, after I am done speaking in front of a group about healthcare and end of life, people will want to speak to me afterwards. These topics bring up many emotions and memories and it is common for audience members to want to share their stories with me. I consider this and honor.

It is also a fascinating psychological/philosophical study! Very often people will begin a sentence with "When you said, it made me realize..." and I will try hard to listen because I know I never said that. People hear things that never came out of my mouth. What they did hear was their own, deep internal processing as I was presenting my own deep internal processing in front of them. They heard me but their life experiences, personality, relationships (etc) caused what I was saying to enter their consciousness like light entering a prism: the concepts refracted and they became new beams of light, unique to that listener.

It's my belief that once we share something; an experience, listening to your talk, reading your blog, it becomes mine. The light goes in, I filter it in my own unique way, and what I heard becomes art based on your art. This is not plagiarizing, it is reacting to life and that's what artists do. This relates completely to Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathetic Civilization talk.

All humans have the mirror nerons he spoke about. That is, the part of our brains that show (in an mri) that when I observe your emotions, the same neurons will light up in my brain as in yours. I lived when he said "Empathy is the opposite of heaven, empathy is grounded in the knowledge of death, it’s based on the understanding of the struggle" because it is the struggle of another or the struggle another evokes in us that drive us to create the art at all.

Writing a book meant I was writing for many people who were likely on a similar journey to mine. It wasn't about judging my friend, it was all about SOLIDARITY with others who have had a like experience and needed it to have a voice. What had been interrupted as an individual attacking an individual was, in fact, an effort to broaden my sense of identity and rethink my narrative and the narrative of those in similar shoes.

It was good to see that my way of encorporating other's efforts into my own to create my art was not new or unusual. In "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" by Jonathan Lethem, we saw the this approach went back to some of the people we consider the greatest geniuses of their time. Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters and William S.Burroughs were some of the examples given in Lethem's piece. Of Muddy Waters, he states:

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”

Whew! It's not just me!

So what about all this copyright crap? Am in good company or would Th0mas Jefferson want me held accountable for violating copyright or, what now have, The Fair Use law. (I am a c-corp so not protected like a non-profit or educational institution.) Times they are a-changin' and I'm afraid all those white haired Caucasians with a personal or professional stake in copyright law may have some challenging times ahead.

Even in a conservative approach (leave the art and solidarity stuff out of it) we can see that technology is making copyright it's own enemy. In "Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy" the author warns us that this "war on privacy" might represent good values and be best for our culture but we must make sure this war doesn’t cost more than its worth. Keeping up with "The Free Appropriation Writer"(s) like German teenage author phenom, Helene Hegemann, is looking like it costs more than it's worth. Artists like Issa who share their work and only ask for voluntary donations in return make this "game of art and commerce" more complicated.

So, small artists and big corporations have a choice: continue to try and beat 'em or go ahead and join 'em. Old Spice got on the "open source" bandwagon with their popular YouTube campaign. A new website called Creative Commons has been launched to help make scientific, educational, and artistic work available to internet users while also offering alternative licensing agreements that keep up with the times.

All the while, we must strive to find new ways, such as UC San Diego's Software Studies Initiative by Lev Manovich, to house and organize the mass amounts of images and data we have at our fingertips. If that's our problem, don't we have enough content to go around? Can't we share?

Who's story is it anyway?

This isn't a new question. The Jamaican immigrants that took their music and shared it now are the fathers and mothers of a huge genre of music: rap music. Did they decide to run around and spend their lives chasing people to claim their musical property? No, they gave because of the love of music. Does the younger generation shut down and get discouraged that their blog entries are up for grabs with no real recourse if someone steals their greatest turn of phrase? No. In fact, Andrea Lunsford's study at Stanford shows this generation is the most prolific since the time of Greek civilization. We are free to share, give and take. This breeds creativity and our consciousness evolves as one, not as separate greedy silos.

I will continue to filter stories and share them in ways that seem meaningful to me. It's my conclusion that we can all take a lesson from Thich Nhat Hahn and Buddhists like him and practice non-attachment. Love, be inspired, create and let go. Be, live, act and let go. I will strive to hold myself to the same philosophy I wished the girl's family could find: let her story be hers and let my experience of her story be my story.

I can't be attached to my work because once I put it out there, it is a gift. You don't get to dictate what people do with gifts.

I can't be attached to my life because once I live it, it's up to interpretation and edits.

Once I release it, your fracturing of my light is not subject to copyright.