It’s like, if you have a nightmare and you wake up and your heart’s pounding. You feel the same as if somebody was in the room when you woke up, but the consequence of you waking up and being alone, scared somebody’s in the room, versus somebody actually being in the room, are very different, and we shouldn’t pretend they’re the same, and say, ‘You have to protect me from that feeling.’ No, you don’t have to protect me from that feeling, you have to protect me from that guy, or that cop. That’s who you have to protect me from.

Both of these works, she says, specifically sought a lawsuit from the estate of Margaret Mitchell.

But what we all know about social media is that it’s designed to keep you safe from the things you don’t want to see. In real life, if you see somebody and you don’t care for them, you still have to somehow engage with them. Online, there’s a whole series of algorithms that keep it from coming to you, even on the level of advertising you’re not interested in. In many ways we’re very happy about that. We love that. We also love the little antagonisms that come up, the pile-on that will happen, the call-outs that will happen. That gets into a really interesting thing in social media which I think is new. Now, you have to say something in order to be seen. You have to like or you have to affirmatively make a comment. And if you don’t, then that can be looked at.

“[GWTW] is in part about social media, and the way social media works,” says Place. “And social media is an aesthetic medium. What happens when you have overt antagonism or antagonistic content, on social media? On the surface, it’s so much based on affinity, and liking, and following, and a sense of community. But at the same token, the only way to consistently affirm your community is by having something to rally against. And then we can find out who our friends really are. It’s predicated on [the fact that] we all think the same thing. We don’t go to social media to be confronted by things we don’t understand or don’t agree with, which is maybe why we go to museums, or conferences, or universities. Do we really want museums and galleries, especially museums, to be curating based upon what people know they already like?”

“AWP has removed Vanessa Place from the AWP Los Angeles 2016 Subcommittee. We did so after taking into consideration the controversy her Twitter feed has generated. Place has been tweeting the text of Gone with the Wind and using a photograph of Hattie McDaniel as the profile picture. The context of this and similar work is explained by a few literary theorists and advocates of conceptual poetry, such as Jacob Edmond and Brian M. Reed. AWP believes in freedom of expression. We also understand that many readers find Vanessa Place’s unmediated quotes of Margaret Mitchell’s novel to be unacceptable provocations, along with the images on her Twitter page. AWP must protect the efficacy of the conference subcommittee’s work. The group’s work must focus on the adjudication of the 1,800 submitted proposals, not upon the management of a controversy that has stirred strong objections and much ill-will toward AWP and the subcommittee. Perpetuating the controversy would not be fair to the many writers who have submitted the proposals.”