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On Frank Sherlock and Redemption
At a recent writing conference, I attended one of the many similarly titled panel discussions that revolved around what “we” are supposed to do with the work/art of people/men who have behaved badly. During the question and answer session, a man in the audience stood up and introduced himself as a teacher in the prison system, teaching creative writing mostly to convicted sex offenders. He mentioned how he now regularly faces questions from his students about whether they should even bother writing or aspiring to be a writer, a new line of questioning that he’s only had to recently address. For his students — aware that much of society wouldn’t hesitate to file them under the category of “bad people” — hope is a crucial motivator for rehabilitation, and art an important vehicle; but what they perceive as a heightened sense of unforgiveness and an eagerness of our culture and media to assert punitive erasure to badly behaving artists, has led them to wonder whether their past misdeeds have already closed the door to whatever could be gained in a creative writing class.
The teacher received a struggling mix of responses from the panel, from a few of the panelists you could almost smell the faint burning of fried circuits as they attempted to reconcile the more recent leftist trend of radical lack of sympathy for the accused against the…