2007

     I like to think that I can take criticism as well as the next person, especially if it’s ‘constructive’ criticism, but that’s probably not true.  In reality I’m thin-skinned and supersensitive and defensive when it comes to unsolicited criticism.  I especially take umbrage with people who blather on about my writing when they are just plain WRONG.
     Take for instance, the well-know historian who wrote in a well-known quarterly magazine a critique of my Dear Medora book shortly after it was published.  He obviously didn’t like the book and, for some reason, didn’t like me (though we have never met, thank goodness).  But what really galled me was that he said that some of my information was incorrect even though he had no basis for saying so..  He wrote that my uncle Willard Espy had said one thing about how Medora died and that I had the temerity to say something else and that I was wrong.
     Now, mind you, this man is a ‘historian.’  Yet, he assumed that Willard’s information in Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa’s Village, written 30 years previously to my Dear Medora, Child or Oysterville’s Forgotten Years, was the correct information and mine was not.  Had he never run across the concept of ‘uncovering new facts?’  Or was it that Willard was a man, Medora was his sister and I was just the next generation niece?  Could he conceive that Willard’s mention of Medora’s death was incidental to his story, while Medora was the subject of my entire book?  Could he even imagine that during my years of research I might have accessed all sorts of information about Medora that Willard had never known?  All I can say is that Mr. Historian Critic was SO wrong and I was WAY annoyed.
     So then what?  Protest?  Write a letter to the editor of the quarterly?  Say that Mr. Well-known and Well-Respected Historian is a fraud and a jerk?  Unseemly, at best.  So, I did what most unfairly treated writers do:  nothing.  But still it rankles.  And by the way.  I feel much better now…