"Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher"
About this Quote
Simmons is picking a fight with the most polite enemy imaginable: the well-meaning teacher handing out gold stars. By framing writing as "subversive" and ideally "frowned on by the authorities", he’s not romanticizing delinquency so much as insisting that real literature has teeth. Good writing, in this view, doesn’t exist to validate the system that sponsors it; it exists to irritate it, to expose its seams, to say the thing you’re not supposed to say in the voice you’re not supposed to use.
The quote works because it drags two institutions into the frame - authority and education - and treats their approval as a suspicious commodity. "Cooed over" is the knife twist: praise becomes infantilizing, a kind of domestication. Simmons isn’t anti-learning; he’s anti-tameness. He’s wary of how quickly writing can be converted from risky expression into a school-sanctioned performance: tidy theme, acceptable politics, correct feelings, graded and filed.
Context matters: Simmons came up in a late-20th-century American literary culture where MFA-ification and workshop norms could turn art into product, craft into compliance. His provocation is a corrective to that drift. Subtextually, he’s arguing that the writer’s job isn’t to earn permission but to test boundaries - not because rebellion is cool, but because power hates being narrated honestly. When authority stops frowning, Simmons implies, it may be because the work has stopped mattering.
The quote works because it drags two institutions into the frame - authority and education - and treats their approval as a suspicious commodity. "Cooed over" is the knife twist: praise becomes infantilizing, a kind of domestication. Simmons isn’t anti-learning; he’s anti-tameness. He’s wary of how quickly writing can be converted from risky expression into a school-sanctioned performance: tidy theme, acceptable politics, correct feelings, graded and filed.
Context matters: Simmons came up in a late-20th-century American literary culture where MFA-ification and workshop norms could turn art into product, craft into compliance. His provocation is a corrective to that drift. Subtextually, he’s arguing that the writer’s job isn’t to earn permission but to test boundaries - not because rebellion is cool, but because power hates being narrated honestly. When authority stops frowning, Simmons implies, it may be because the work has stopped mattering.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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