‘Bless the Truants: A Response to Stephen Hunter’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
The only knock on ‘Bless the Truants: A Response to Stephen Hunter,’ an essay by Rosebud Ben-Oni in the Kenyon Review, is that it made me read the piece by Stephen Hunter that necessitated the response. Hunter wrote the sort of craft essay that boils down to “writing is pain and competition and if you don’t understand that you shouldn’t write.” It’s easy enough to call it bullshit and call it a day, but Ben-Oni does the good and necessary work of politely explaining why it’s bullshit. She does so not by going point for point with Hunter, but rather by exploring her own life and work.
Writing simply doesn’t have to be about pain and profits. If writing is an extension the self, then the self should be cultivated and examined with as much care and deliberation as the writing, too. She writes about love, about illness, about not writing for years. By the end, I’ve forgotten all about Hunter. Ben-Oni finishes the essay with: “I would like to end this piece in a more collective spirit of sharing the work and news of others, just a few of the many whom keeps me in dialogue with the literary worlds being created.” She writes “and this is not meant to come for Stephen Hunter’s ‘I will beat them all’” but I’m not sure I believe her. Her generosity, humility, and community is everything that Hunter’s me-against-the-world machismo is not, and it’s what I strive for in my own writing and life.