The magic in everyday life
Another woman marked out for silencing:
As a self-styled witch, Dr Alice Tarbuck offers online Tarot card readings for £50 an hour and courses in how to embrace the ‘magic’ in everyday life. Her freelance lessons run throughout the year and are described as ‘perfect for anyone with an interest in the history, ethics and practice of witchcraft’. But the rest of the time the author and poet has another role – as a ‘literature officer’ for controversial arts quango Creative Scotland, currently at the centre of a political firestorm.
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Her role was to provide backing for writers as part of Creative Scotland’s mission to help people and organisations to ‘make work of quality and ambition that enriches life in Scotland for everyone’. But Dr Tarbuck used her position for a very different purpose – an attempt to suppress a ‘gender-critical’ book, which raised concern about radical trans rights activism, and which she deemed to be transphobic – more of which later.
She contacted at least one bookshop and asked its managers not to stock the title – Hounded: Women, Harms and The Gender Wars, by Jenny Lindsay – which ‘charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights’. Ms Lindsay was alerted to Dr Tarbuck’s intervention and made a formal complaint against the literature officer – who says she enjoys ‘getting to be hands-on, helping to make authors’ work the best it could be’.
Unless, of course, the author in question has the unmitigated temerity to know that men are not women.
Some 147 people work for the organisation, including four in the public relations department plus the 24-strong board and ‘senior leadership team’ headed by Mr Munro, who is on a salary of £125,000-£130,000 with a pension pot worth £470,000. Their job is to help artists such as Ms Lindsay, the writer who penned the book that sparked such a visceral reaction from Dr Tarbuck.
Ms Lindsay is exactly the sort of artist Creative Scotland was set up to help – and she needed all the support she could get. Five years after trans rights activists led a hate campaign that destroyed her livelihood, the poet had fought back with a new book on the ‘hounding’ phenomenon. Ms Lindsay wrote in the Mail last year about her ordeal, which began after she objected to a call from a male writer for ‘violent action’ against lesbians at a Pride march.
Now why would any woman object to male writers calling for violent action against lesbians at a Pride march? Isn’t it universally acknowledged that men are allowed, indeed encouraged, to threaten uppity women with violence?
She announced this July that Hounded would be published in October. Two days later, Dr Tarbuck contacted at least one bookshop to demand that they refuse to stock it.
Ms Lindsay has learned to be stoical but admits she ‘wasn’t prepared for someone with serious gatekeeping power using her position to attempt to undermine both my ability to forge a new partnership with independent bookstores, and for this to be treated as in any way a normal thing to do for any writer, never mind one in Tarbuck’s position’.
And it’s all the more astounding given that Tarbuck herself is a woman. One woman writes a book objecting to men calling for violence against women, and another woman hastens to use her influence to tell bookstores to refuse to stock it. “Hello, bookstore? Do not stock this book that objects to men calling for violence against women. I can make things bad for you if I want to, I have power, I’m a bigwig at Creative Scotland.”
Furthermore, Creative Scotland apparently told the Mail that it had had a word with Tarbuck and informed Lindsay of the fact and Lindsay had said she was “content with the process.”
But Ms Lindsay insists that she did not know the outcome until the Mail informed her.
So Creative Scotland simply told a brazen lie? Unless you believe their account rather than hers. I’m finding it difficult to believe their account.
Creative Scotland refused to say whether Dr Tarbuck had tried to pressure any other bookshops into boycotting Ms Lindsay’s book.
Earlier this month, it emerged that an influential arts charity which told bookshops not to sell titles written by gender-critical authors had secured Creative Scotland funding. The quango awarded a grant worth more than £64,300 to Literature Alliance Scotland (LAS).
LAS, Scotland’s largest literary network, was thrown into turmoil after a statement was posted on its website claiming ‘Terfs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) – a derogatory term for those who do not believe that trans women are women – were in league with fascists and calling on venues not to offer them a public platform.
Godalmighty, it just gets worse and worse and worse. Is there something in the water in Scotland or what? They’ll be going full Taliban at this rate.
So, in Germany it’s a fine that will bankrupt you, in Scotland it’s the Morality Police (under new management but still Presbyterian at heart) who will do everything to destroy your livelihood. Trans ideology really has become the everything ideology – a fundamentally meaningless piece of double-speak that can be used to justify every nasty, regressive human impulse under the guise of kindness.
My mother was an eccentric but in many ways conservative Catholic who often talked about how “the pendulum would swing back”. Turns out, she was right but I don’t think she could have recognised the form it would take. I suspect she would have been both pleased and horrified.
Thanks for the heads up. I just put the book on pre-order!
Always a pleasure!
During the Edinburgh Festival I saw Jenny Lindsay in a talk with a guy called Darren McGarvey. McGarvey was host of a series of talks on the Industrial Trauma Complex, i.e. how people frame their traumas, and the dangers of airing them (see a quote below about the lived experience and how airing it can harm the sufferer). McGarvey is from a very tough Glasgow background (and looks it) and a recovering addict. He got known as a rapper and then as writer and talker on social issues eg The Poverty Safari and The Social Distance Between Us, about class poverty and class differences.
The talk was well attended, almost all women including the former MP Joanna Cherry, who is known in these parts for her doughtiness on the gender issue. I don’t remember much about the substance of what was said – Jenny repeated the story of her hounding and the general shoddiness of her fellow creatives. What got me was McGarvey, who is known as a fearless commentator on social affairs, was so tentative in introducing Jenny, who in comparison to his rough guy’s looks and scruffy clothes, was smartly dressed and well groomed. He wanted to assure us that no offence was meant, that if anyone felt vulnerable they should be careful. He was full of trigger warnings.
Christ, I thought, we have bought a ticket and this is the Edinburgh Fringe, supposedly the arts festival where you think outside the envelope and push the box, and we are supposed to react like a bunch of Morningside Matrons circa 1972 at the flash of a breast at an experimental theatre.
As it was, Jenny was warmly received and I hope she made some money after the crappy time she’s been having. I think her book will do well and she should get some more gigs.
Concerning lived experience… I think this is very good. As an offshoot of this how much of the creative arts are about supposedly authentic autobiography. In one form it’s sharing the trauma, in another it’s where influencers create an instagrammable life and can never enjoy an experience for its own sake, but must submit it to an saudience.
https://twitter.com/lokiscottishrap/status/1747761528743325850
“I am one of those people often referred to as having ‘lived experience’ – a label given to those of us who are not professionally qualified to assert the things we do who are instead authenticated by the adversities we have suffered. If you spend enough time online, you’re sure to encounter someone like me.
We have strong opinions which we often express with passion and conviction. We believe our experiences are important. That they may shed light on certain social and cultural challenges, backfilling the knowledge gaps so evident among a well-meaning managerial class. From addiction, to homelessness, criminal justice, gender-based violence, racism, housing, mental health and trauma, our lived experiences, which take the form of stories, are regarded by many (and by ourselves) as the solutions to a complex puzzle.
Missing pieces which, when truly grasped by decision makers and wider society, could help shape a more compassionate, informed, and inclusive future. But that’s not the whole story. Our lived experience is also a commodity. One which adds immeasurable value to workplaces, academic research, and media enterprises dominated by middle class professionals.
Every day lived experience permeates culture, driving engagement on social media platforms, generating millions of views, clicks and comments. Posts and status updates, online think-pieces, video essays, news segments and shortform clips online are disseminated, debated, and deconstructed.
In a free market, our willingness to eagerly supply the rapacious demand for authenticity and social realism can certainly leave us with a sense that we are making waves. That we are having an impact and making a difference. Regrettably, the allure of presenting ourselves as recovered (because that’s the nice little bow most people want their affirming lived experience testimonies wrapped up in) may pull us further from the truth of who we are and what we suffer from. In essence, by falsely portraying ourselves as the finished article, our vulnerability increases.
We may be prompted onto a platform to air our trauma publicly by others who’ve done no such thing, and are therefore ill-equipped to provide the necessary insight, support, or aftercare we might require. Our expectations may inadvertently rise, sensing we are on the cusp of some breakthrough which has previously eluded us, only to be dealt a crushing blow upon the realisation that people we thought were friends and allies (because we often attach intensely to anyone who gives us the time of day), were simply associates engaged in a transaction of some kind. And we may experience the nip of negative consequences, when our stories reach a level of prominence we did not foresee, provoking unpleasant reactions in others, be they strangers we’ll never meet or friends and family members who share neither our recollections of what happened, nor our desire to make a public display of it.
This lived experience movement ought to come with some caveats, not simply for the benefit those of us putting it all out there, but also to people on the lower slopes of their own recovery from trauma, who look those of us with a platform for an examples to follow, like we did our favourite artists.
There is a darker side to this lived experience moment, which must be articulated with great care, so as not to stoke unnecessary tumult. Though I suspect those currently riding the wave will find some of what I am going to say extremely challenging, no matter how delicately its put.
So let me first say this: I do not believe people with lived experience are being deliberately exploited by anyone; we have agency and participate willingly in most cases. I wish to cast no aspersions on organisations which have in recent years sought to platform, collaborate with, or even employ the lived experienced.
My concern is that we, the individuals being invited to share intimate details of our lives, are often not as well as we believe. We are often not as firm in our footing in life as we appear. Indeed, the demons of childhood trauma we’d all like to think long banished, wait patiently. We worry that showing vulnerability may result in a withdrawal of interest – abandonment.
We are afraid to assert ourselves and our needs, so make commitments we are unsure we can fulfil while accepting terms and conditions we often sense are unfair – conflict averse and overly compliant. And we often don’t understand the fullness of the consequences that may lie ahead when we agree to sing for our suppers – impulsivity.
Our desire to help others, to participate, to be seen to be achieving, and, yes, to gain affection and security and love, is often so overwhelming that we push aside any lingering doubt as to our fitness to engage in the risky public exhibitionism which may come to define us.
And let’s not forget, we decant our traumas into a rowdy and unforgiving public square where, once disclosed, they cannot be un-disclosed. “
[…] a comment by KBPlayer on The magic in everyday […]
Good comment, KB Player. To add a little: one thing they don’t bother about is remembering that we ALL have ‘lived experience’ (unless we are in fact not living. For those of us who identify as shoe boxes, we might be said not to have a lived experience since by extension of the logic used, we must be shoe boxes, and therefore inanimate).
My lived experience is as traumatic as any I’ve seen from the TiMs’ whines. I don’t imagine that makes me an expert. And I don’t throw it out there in people’s faces as though I am one of a special group who has a ‘lived experience’. We all do. Ophelia has a lived experience. Rob, Latsot, Sackbut, Skeletor, Sastra, twilighter, all have a lived experience. My lived experience includes events that make it impossible for me to be in a public bathroom with a man I do not know; I can barely handle with women, and will frequently sit in there until all the others clear out. So why should their lived experience override mine? Why should it override JK’s? Or Julie Bindel’s?
Some experiences are more equal than others.
See also “Non-binary.”
Swingeing piece in The Scotsman.
Artists should be demanding the closure of Creative Scotland
By Euan McColm
The scandals swirling around Creative Scotland are many and bleak.
Dr Alice Tarbuck describes herself as a poet in much the same way as I might describe myself as a sprinter if I caught the 66 before it pulled away from the bus stop by the chippy.
By this, I mean I have a rough idea of the mechanics and, from a distance, it might even appear the run isn’t killing me but, look closely, and you’ll see I’m not really a sprinter. And Dr Tarbuck’s not really a poet.
In common with many people who work in the arts sector, Dr Tarbuck is not a serious creative person but a hobbyist, interested in her subject but not, herself, talented enough to practice it to any significantly interesting degree. The little work she has had published lacks rhythm, originality and, crucially, profundity. It’s squiggly nonsense for people who want the physical feeling of reading poetry without the associated complicated emotions.
Dr Alice Tarbuck is part-time Literature Officer at Creative Scotland
Since she is an enthusiast with time on her hands, Tarbuck’s decision to seek employment with the arts quango Creative Scotland as a literature officer made sense. Her role in supporting and assisting writers was surely tailor-made.
Jenny Lindsay is not only a poet and prose-writer of some talent, she is currently the most significant figure in Scottish cultural life. Each and every one of us who makes a living by engaging with the world as we see it and trying to make some sense of it all owes Lindsay a debt of gratitude. In fact, if freedom of speech matters to you, then Jenny Lindsay is a figure of importance.
We have Tarbuck to thank for drawing sharp focus to this truth.
A series of often dumbfounding reports over recent days about the crisis in Creative Scotland included a revelation that shows why the organisation must be closed, immediately.
In June, Lindsay announced the forthcoming publication of her book Hounded, which examines the troubling modern phenomena of women being bullied out of jobs and public life for expressing views about gender and sex that don’t align with voguish opinion.
Five years ago, Lindsay – then one of the country’s leading performance poets – publicly called out a trans-identifying male writer for urging attacks on lesbians at a Pride march. Thanks to the bestupiding effects of trans ideology, Lindsay was swiftly identified among her peers as the villain of this bleak piece. She lost her career, all of her “friends”, and had to move back from Edinburgh to the Ayrshire town where she was raised.
Among those who turned on Lindsay were friends of Tarbuck.
Lindsay stood strong, refusing to compromise in the face of horrific abuse. She defended a precious right her tormentors don’t value at all.
So Lindsay was understandably shocked to discover – after every damned thing – that two days after announcing the publication of her book, Tarbuck had called a bookshop, urging them not to stock it.
Tarbuck, a quango employee whose sole responsibility is the nurturing and support of writers, abused her position to try to harm the career of a writer. Not only that, her behaviour was identical to that of her friends who’d terrorised the same writer back in 2019. One novelist friend asked me whether Tarbuck was stupid or sadistic, to which my reply was that she appears to be both. Perhaps this is the way in which Tarbuck, who (of course) identifies as a witch, contains multitudes.
Personal shame should see Tarbuck remove herself from the literary scene. And her behaviour should prevent any serious agent or publisher ever dealing with her. In the world of literature, Tarbuck should consider herself cancelled. And if she feels hard done by, she should promptly take the matter up with herself.
The scenario I describe would surely merit instant dismissal, wouldn’t you think? How could any writer ever trust her? How can anyone so overcome by a deranged ideology be allowed near any decisions involving public money?
Dr Alice Tarbuck doesn’t love writing. She may like certain writers (she’s very enthusiastic about her friends’ woeful poetry, for example) but she doesn’t even understand what writing is. She sought employment in a field where freedom of speech is first principles stuff and then tried to censor and cancel a writer with whom she personally disagreed.
Naturally, Creative Scotland tried to cover it all up.
The organisation went through a “disciplinary” procedure and allowed Tarbuck to remain in post. Not only that, it was agreed she would not deal with “gender critical” writers to avoid a “conflict of interest”.
That is deranged. Tarbuck is a living, breathing conflict of interest. Not only was she protected, her bosses made life more comfortable for her, removing from her the triggering duty of reading and thinking about things that made her unhappy, and allowing her to stay, a malevolent presence, a schoolyard bully given legitimacy, and then protected, by cowardly and amoral philistines.
The scandals swirling around Creative Scotland are many and bleak. The cumulative effect should be the humiliation of those senior executives who protected their six-figure pay and pension packages, while ignoring their responsibilities to the public purse, and then cut funding for new artists.
It would not, however, matter if Creative Scotland was in perfect financial health. The simple fact that an organisation established to support artists protected an employee who tried to cancel an artist is all we need to know. What happened was not merely an offence against Jenny Lindsay, it was an offence against art.
Naive artists, writers and musicians have spent much of the past week urging the Government to step in with a financial boost for Creative Scotland. It’s time for them to wise up.
Our national arts quango now exists only to employ those who work for it.
If you’re an artist with hopes for the future, you should be demanding Creative Scotland’s closure, not begging like a fool for it to be given a lifeline.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/artists-should-be-