“You owe me” is not a believable comment by a bullying, aspiring rapist? As the reader James Brust alluded to, I was not aware that jerks who are trying to force themselves on women took the time to carefully construct dialogue which would meet the high grammatical and literary standards set by potential readers of stories which they might find their lowly selves in some day. Thanks for clarifying and for shedding truthful light on a subject that the rest of us naive, gullible and mindless readers would have been incapable of discerning if not for your gifted insight and superior detection skills.

Lastly, thanks again, Patricia, for your story and for the comment you posted following my story on December 1st. I appreciated both immensely. Peace be with you (and you, too, Jehovah — seriously).

Laurie Dawson, MA
www.lauriedawson.com

I want to thank you for your comments about the technical issues. I will go back over the punctuation with a fine tooth comb before the piece is released again, however I do feel you owe the editors of this site an apology. Elizabeth and James have worked very hard to create an enviornment that invites discussion, not just canned applause and zealous praise. You should be ashamed of yourself for the way you began your commentary as an attack on this site.

Now, as for the other comments. If you scroll back up the commentaries you will find that someone else questioned the truth of these stories. I told them, as I will tell you, these things happened. They happened over a period of 30 years, and they happened to me. I did not invent the knives, I did not intend to take a political pot-shot. I will not bemoan the fact you feel I have perverted the truth in order to wave some sort of an agenda, but I will tell you this. I am offended that you called me a liar. I am offended that you deny woman, and men, suffer from these sorts of acts every day. I can not change your attitude, but I can come to the page and say once more. I may have the Right to remain silent, but I damn sure will not be. Not ever again.

Now. As to the grammar and punctuation. I’m ashamed of myself for that. I guess, honestly, I was so wrapped up in the emotional context of the retellings that I paid little attention to them. I am ashamed because I intend to go on and teach Rhetoric and Composition. However, before you judge me too harshly, I think you should know something more about the woman behind the keyboard. In 2003 I was hit by a car. I suffered a bi-lateral hemmorhagic stroke which left me with global aphasia. This is the inability to communicate via written language. You can check it out at www.aphasia.org. I entered the creative writing program as therapy, not because I aspire to be a writer. My husband and children helped me to learn how to read and write, while I was teaching my husband how to walk. He was on the front of the motorcycle we were riding. I still suffer from anomic aphasia and I work very hard to produce coherant prose. Poetry is alot easier to hide things in, perhaps that is why I was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ultimately, J. Jones, your message has been read, considered, and dismissed. Five years ago, you would have made me cry and crawl back into a hole with my teddy bear. Today, I am not ashamed, and I will never be silenced again, especially not by someone like you. I suggest you look up the video Dreamworlds, it’s very well done.

I want to thank the rest of you for your support and share something special with you all. Your comments helped me to feel safe and confident in sharing this piece locally. When I did, it was adopted as a piece to be shared at one of the local women’s shelters and at the college. A young woman who was being beaten by the young man she was engaged to read the piece and came forward, asking for help. Each one of you had a hand in helping her. Thank you.

Patricia Jones

Patricia, I thought your story was written well. You got a good rhythm going, and I was engrossed enough that I–a reformed Grammar Nazi–didn’t give a damn about the occasional apostrophe misuse.

But in the interest of truth and reality, I’m going to make the effort anyway.

I find this story less than satisfying on a couple of levels. First, the grammar and punctuation, contrary to what everyone else here seems to believe, leaves a lo to be desired. In particular, this person needs to learn how to use an apostrophe.

(Hint: Plurals almost never get an apostrophe, and contractions or possessives almost always do. In the first paragraph, the words “cars” should have one, and under #6 the word “throats” should not have one. These are just two examples; they are literally dozens of others just like these, which shows these aren’t typos, but rather that they stem from a real misunderstanding of how the language works.)

But the grammar and punctuation mistakes are not all that makes me disagree that this is brilliant writing.

There’s the matter of the plot device of the knife; it’s way overused, and not believable as fiction, much less nonfiction, which is what the writer tells us it is. The knife used on a seven-year-old, then again almost every time she is attacked? Not believable, sorry.

Then there’s the matter of how many times the heroine victim is assaulted, and how uniformly she is re-victimized by the people who she confides in. Again, not believable as nonfiction, and even as fiction it would only work on after-school Tv specials, where the bar is lowered significantly.

Then there’s the fact that this person obviously is using this story to take political postshots, which casts even more doubt on the truth behind the story. (”Politically correct,” and ” the complaint department doesn’t operate in this direction,” are clearly the point of a good bit of the story.) Word to the wise: an overt agenda makes for a lousy story.

Then there are the abundant cliches. “You owe me,” is the most obvious; no one except a bad script writer would say that.

I guess in closing I would say this: Even when the subject is one as tear-jerking, as emotionally evocative and important as sexual abuse, we need to listen with some healthy skepticism — because melodramatic manufactured stories like this cheapen the subject.