Who Is the Bad Art Friend?

Kolker's article centers around two writers and a short story, "The Kindest," published by one of them but contested by the other. Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson met some time around 2007 at Boston's Grubstreet writing center. Dorland was at first a student and later a workshop leader there, while Larson was until recently the director of Grubstreet's Muse in the Marketplace conference. Larson, who grew up in Minnesota with white father and a Chinese-American mother, has published both fiction and non-fiction, winning some awards. Dorland, who now lives in California, is at work on a novel inspired by her hardscrabble Iowa upbringing.[1]

The contested story, which Sonya Larson published in two different audio versions and in the 2017 edition of American Short Fiction, is about a working-class Chinese-American woman named Chuntao, an alcoholic who gets a kidney donation from a wealthy white woman who then feels entitled to pester Chuntao.[2] According to Larson, whose work often treats racial issues, the story is a critique of "white-savior dynamics.[1]

Kolker begins his article by describing Dawn Dorland ("openhearted and eager," although he says that some people find her "a little extra,") who gave one of her kidneys to a stranger with kidney failure. The wife of her kidney recipient (who was not a compatible donor for her husband) gave one of her kidneys to yet another person in need -- this is called a "chain donation."[3][4][5] After Dawn Dorland's surgery, she drafted a letter to the person at the end of the "chain"--that is, the person who needed a kidney but had no friend or family member willing to give one. Kolker, calling the letter "heartfelt," quotes from it at length:

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

Dorland posted the letter to a private Facebook group she had created, before her surgery, for family and friends who wanted to get updates and offer support. Even before her June 24, 2015 surgery, however, Dorland was puzzled by the behavior of one person in the group, which private-group metrics automatically showed her: one member of the group was reading with every post but not interacting. That group member was Sonya Larson. Unsure what it meant, Dorland sent her an email in August, eventually getting a reply that described her kidney donation as "a tremendous thing." Six weeks after her surgery, Dorland made her first public posting to Facebook about her kidney donation.[1][6]

In October, 2105, Sonya Larson sent out to "Chunky Monkeys" (a friend-group of successful writers working at GrubStreet) the first draft of her story "The Kindest," where a young Chinese-American woman gets a kidney transplant and later a visit from the kidney donor, a narcissistic and annoying white woman whose name is Dawn Rothario. Next day, one group member texted to say, "I'm now following Dawn Dorland's kidney posts with creepy fascination."[1] Another later remembered, "everybody in that workshop immediately recognized dawn dorland in the story…"[7]

Although the underlying story got some press in 2018, when the Boston Book Festival canceled its One City One Story event due to plagiarism concerns,[8] Kolker first learned of it in January 2021, when Dawn Dorland wrote to ask him to take a look at the ongoing legal tangle. In an email Kolker described as "straightforward," Dorland wrote:[9]

This dispute, on top of just being surreal, has cost my family a lot of money we didn’t have...And, as I am learning now through the legal discovery process, cost me my writing community back in Boston, where I cut my teeth as a writer.

According to Kolker, he pitched the story to his New York Times Magazine editor as a non-judgmental account of a complex dispute.[10] He and his editor agreed on "a story that would present both Ms. Dorland's and Ms. Larson's side faithfully, while explaining to readers how, moment by moment, all of this unfolded."[9]

Kolker worked to establish "trust and understanding" with both Dorland and Larson in off-the-record interviews, before beginning work on the story in February.[10]

On October 5, 2021, Kolker described his about-to-be published story on his Twitter account as "Plenty of plot twists in my new story in this weekend’s @NYTmag — a writing-world potboiler about inspiration and appropriation (and litigation)."[11]

The piece quickly went viral with debates breaking out over whether Larson, who was accused of plagiarism, or Dorland, who had demanded Larson's story be withdrawn from One City One Story, was more to blame. As readers became increasingly interested in the dispute, documents from the court case, including texts between Larson and friend and writer Celeste Ng in which Larson confessed to having lifted lines from the letter, went viral. A Twitter account dedicated solely to the dispute appeared under the name @kidneygate, attracting more than 3,000 followers.[12] A reddit thread discussing the contested letter got 413 upvotes and 326 Comments.[13]

Writer Becky Tuch, a former friend and colleague of both Dorland and Larson's, later took to Twitter to formally apologize to Dorland and for her role dismissing the accusations of plagiarism.[14]

On October 12, Grubstreet announced they would hire an expert to look into the ongoing dispute, saying, "Bluntly, we are appalled by the disconnect between GrubStreet's stated values and the alleged behavior by some that has come to light."[15] According to Publishers Weekly, "the involvement of so many leaders in the organization’s community—and the release of potentially disparaging emails by them—prompted an internal review."[16]

Hollywood Reporter published a column by two lawyers, "Who is the bad copyright friend?", examining Larson's claim that what Dorland called plagiarism of her letter was really "fair use."[17] Referencing a side-by-side graphic of the two letters that had been posted by Twitter user "Kidneygate,"[18] the authors concluded that Larson would face "an uphill battle to convince a jury.'[17]

Copies of Larson's story The Kindest, were among the court documents. It was reviewed unfavorably by The New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman, who criticized the story's "cartoon of the donor character," adding "the prose is bad."[19]

On October 29th, 2021, Eve Bridburg announced that Larson and two of her colleagues (Alison Murphy and board member Jennifer De Leon) would leave their leadership positions at GrubStreet, but Artistic Director Christopher Castellani would remain in his role.[20][21][22]

• "Who Is the Bad Art Friend?" in The New York Times Magazine