article/archive sites not working on their stupid faggot website
What you’re about to read is a poem. Its title is unmentionable, but I can tell you it was nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award, which is meant to bring attention to up-and-coming writers in the indie lit scene. Behold:
If you’re worried that I’m about to tell you why this poem is good, and imply you’re a bumpkin for thinking otherwise, don’t be. The poem isn’t good. It’s bad, and it’s meant to be.
The author told me so.
This poem was originally published, with a very crude title, in the online magazine Jake, under the name b.h. fein (pronouns: “it’s/complicated”). But b.h. fein does not exist. It is one of the many pen names of a straight, white Canadian man, who recently told me he’s spent the last few years inventing minority identities, then publishing terrible poems under these pseudonyms.
He has pretended, he said, to be Dirt Hogg Sauvage Respectfully, author of poems such as “non-b god or: what deity would be a TERF?,” as well as Adele Nwankwo, a “gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,” who has published dozens of comically bad poems in a wide array of indie literary magazines across the Anglosphere in the past three years, including one about a lesbian WWE-style wrestler that features lines such as:
His name, he wrote, was actually Jasper Ceylon. When I first spoke to him, a couple of months back, he laughed when I insisted that this name must be fake, too—It’s like calling yourself Jared Sri Lanka or something. He told me that, yes, it was another pseudonym, a tongue-in-cheek homage to some very distant Sri Lankan ancestry on his mother’s side. His voice was young, friendly, Canadian; he said that he is white, though his camera was off. I was talking to a profile picture of a cartoon elephant, with the name Adele Nwankwo in the corner: Ceylon told me he’d created online accounts to match all the identities he’d invented, to maintain the illusion.
Why’d he go to such lengths?
Mostly, because he was mad. Several years ago, the man calling himself “Jasper Ceylon” was trying to break out as a poet, writing under his real name—which I’ll share in due course—and he noticed that certain journals had what he described as “really weird, and quite specific requirements”:
In 2015, Michael Derrick Hudson, a middle-aged white librarian in Indiana, saw his poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” rejected by publishers 40 times. This inspired him to try submitting it under the pen name Yi-Fen Chou. After that, his poem was promptly published and included in that year’s annual Best American Poetry anthology. When he was found out, Hudson was accused of “yellowface.”
Yellowface is also the name of R.F. Kuang’s award-winning satirical 2023 novel, which follows a white plagiarist who steals the work, and Asian identity, of a Chinese author whose book she is editing. (Many reviewers noted the parallels between Kuang’s novel and Hudson’s story, although there’s no evidence the latter plagiarized.)
According to Ceylon, this preference for minority voices disadvantages those who society sees as most privileged—namely, white men. Statistics are hard to come by, but anecdotes are plentiful. As novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted in 2022:
“The first poem to ever get picked up was the ‘yah jah gah hah’ one,” Ceylon told me, when we first spoke. He was referring to one of two poems he published under the name Adele Nwankwo in a print edition of Tofu Ink Arts Press, a publication dedicated to “amplifying the voices of the under-represented and marginalized.”
Ceylon was shocked that the poem—which begins with a Toni Morrison quote about “navigating a white male world” and contains lines like “voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip”—was accepted. “It was very obviously nonsense,” he laughed. “Just fake bad Creole.” (Tofu Ink Arts Press didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Ceylon told me he was inspired by various literary hoaxes, including the 1943 Ern Malley hoax, where conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart published many, many parodies of modernist poetry, to make fun of a genre they found superficial and stupid. He also mentioned the more recent so-called Grievance Studies Affair, where the academics Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose published a number of bogus papers in academic journals between 2017 and 2018—including one that claimed dogs engage in rape culture, and another that included passages from Mein Kampf rewritten in modern jargon. They, like Ceylon, were trying to prove that in their intellectual sphere, you could get anything published if its politics were progressive, even if it was bad.
He was shocked that the poem was accepted. “It was very obviously nonsense,” he laughed. “Just fake bad Creole.”
Ceylon walked me through his process of creating elaborate characters with over-the-top biographies and terrible writing styles. According to him, whenever editors asked to meet on Zoom or record his voice for readings of the poems, he could just brush them off with comments like, “Oh, I don’t like the sound of my own voice.” When they asked for pictures, it was easy to just decline.
In April, Ceylon decided it was time to reveal his hoax. He wanted to promote Echolalia Review, a 168-page book filled with his prank poetry that he independently published earlier this year. So, he wrote the “big reveal” Substack post and, to drive traffic to it, wrote an email to one of the people he’d tricked. (This person uses they/them pronouns.) Their name is Chris Talbot, and they are a freelance editor and DEI consultant. Talbot’s website states that they charge “white, cis, and abled” authors $10 per page for freelance editing services, while they only charge black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), gender variant, or disabled authors $5. For their DEI consulting work, Talbot charges different rates based on the demographic makeup of a company’s C-suite: Organizations whose leadership is more than 50 percent BIPOC, gender variant, or disabled get a steep discount.
Talbot is also editor of The B’K Magazine, which published one of Adele Nwankwo’s poems in 2024; Ceylon figured they’d be sure to make some noise, were they to find out Nwankwo wasn’t real. So, he said, he posed as a fictional Vancouver-based poet called “Luna” who was emailing Talbot to say that she’d seen Ceylon being kicked out of a poetry meet-up for bragging about tricking poetry magazines.
Soon, there were posts on B’K Magazine’s various social media accounts denouncing him for taking a $10 token payment reserved for “marginalized creatives only.” Per its submission guidelines, white men do not qualify to be paid for their work, because the magazine doesn’t “make enough cash” to pay everyone, so the $10 is reserved for “racially and ethnically marginalized,” “gender variant, and disabled” submitters, “because these creatives are the least likely to be paid for their published works or equitably for their day jobs.” Ceylon told me he donated the $10 Talbot gave him to a charity. B’K Magazine did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Ceylon, this preference for minority voices disadvantages those who society sees as most privileged—namely, white men.
Ceylon’s strategy worked. Talbot’s complaints on social media brought attention to his work. Within two weeks this controversy inside the indie literary scene was being discussed outside of it, including on popular podcasts like Blocked and Reported. But Ceylon’s elaborate marketing campaign wasn’t over. He told me he’d written two novels, both under another pen name. One had just come out; the other was due to be published later this year, and to promote it, he wanted to merge his vast web of identities with his real name: a big, bombastic reveal and a launch-party dream.
I suggested he reveal his real name sooner, and preferably to me. He said he’d think about it.
The next day, he sent me an email. “I spoke to the head editor at the publishing house for the [first] novel, and they dropped the project because I was a white male author,” Jasper wrote. “I’ll give you the exclusive on my real name and past credentials. I’ve got nothing to hide now.”
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...b290d-0e61-4388-b857-dc41920dbf30_1320x30.png
I looked into the camera on my phone, and he looked into his. At last, the man with a million names had a face—a pale, boyish one that looked younger than it was. He was clean-shaven, with a tuft of curly brown hair, sitting in a cramped, slightly disheveled bedroom. A guitar hung on the wall. His name, he told me, is Aaron Barry, and he’s my age, 29. (To prove this, he sent me his ID.) He explained that he is an English-language tutor from Vancouver who began writing contemporary haiku in 2018, when he was in his early twenties and recovering from an illness. “I didn’t have much stamina for anything else,” he said.
Shortly thereafter, he went on, he dropped out of college at Simon Fraser University to become a writer, publishing in various haiku magazines under his real name, winning a local award, and integrating himself with the Vancouver poetry scene. In addition to his poetry, Barry also published a series of comedic-prompt books for writers that included challenges like “Brokeback Mountain. But Ennis and Jack are both insecure about their masculinity, so the camping trip is just plain uncomfortable.”
Barry’s work—at least, the work published under his own name—culminated with his self-published debut collection, eggplants & teardrops, in 2022. The book received an honorable mention at the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards a year later, but by then, Barry said, he was ready to write other kinds of poetry—rather than just haikus—and he felt locked out of certain publications on account of his race and gender. Hence the poetry prank.
Barry claims he’s concerned for the future of poetry. “People can’t engage with it,” he said. “They’re almost intimidated by it, or they’re just confused by it. And this exclusionary attitude only contributes to that further. It’s a shame.”
He turned his attention to novels. During his years of hoaxing, he said he wrote two, under the pen name “S.A.B. Marcie”—an amalgamation of his name and his then-girlfriend’s. Both novels were accepted for publication, and the first, Femoid, came out May 15, with indie publisher Calamari Archive. Barry told me he didn’t receive an advance but, rather, had an informal agreement to receive royalties. (I’ve seen emails that confirm this.)
Femoid follows the tumultuous inner life of the internet-addicted Savoy, a biracial woman loosely based on Barry’s ex-girlfriend. Throughout the editing process—which was all done over email—Barry maintained that the book was based on his experiences. He justified this to himself (and me) by maintaining that a fictionalized version of himself, called Avery, does appear in the book. But he told me his editor, Derek White, clearly thought the author’s identity was closer to the biracial, female character’s.
At last, the man with a million names had a face—a pale, boyish one that looked younger than it was.
Barry’s second novel, £, flesh, will now be published under his real name later this summer by McBussy Publishing, a small indie publisher; it’s about a group of college students who murder their economics professor.
After he and I first spoke, Barry came clean about his straight, white male identity to both publishers, because he knew this story was going to be coming out. He told me the editor of his upcoming second novel, Maxwell Rosenbloom, didn’t care.
Rosenbloom confirmed this: Yes, he said, Barry had written to him “as the Marcie persona”—”writing like his characters, using emojis, etc.” But when Rosenbloom found out Barry’s real identity, he said, “I didn’t care. I thought it was funny. The work is very good. That’s what’s important to me.”
“Artists are always putting on a persona,” he added.
But White, who’d edited Barry’s debut novel, pulled Femoid off the shelves. “He told me I was a terrible person,” Barry said. “He said, ‘I haven’t published a white male author for two years because I don’t want to deal with you guys, and if I had known you were a white male author I would not have accepted the book.’ ”
White’s anger was audible through the phone when I called him. “No, it’s not that I don’t deal with straight white men,” he said, “but if you looked at the context of the book, for a white man to write this book is absolutely wrong, and it would be unethical for me to publish it.”
White noted that the book makes use of the N-word (when I asked Barry about this, he said: “It was used ironically. It was necessary for the authenticity of the story”), and said he’d felt deceived by Barry—who had told him, over email, that the pseudonym “S.A.B. Marcie” was necessary in case of doxxing.
When I asked White if he was under the impression that Barry’s biracial ex-girlfriend had written the book, he snapped: “I wasn’t under the impression, this is what he told me outright. He completely lied to me about his identity.” (In response to this allegation, Barry said: “Yeah, I essentially had to operate under this persona—that’s what having a pen name is, and I thought someone who championed running a press that published pseudo-anonymous works would be okay with that.”)
White also claimed that Barry “couldn’t even write” and that he’d agreed to edit the book “under the assumption that [the author] was like the character in the book: an uneducated black woman from Vancouver. So, I was trying to help her write this book, right? And wasted three months of my life.”
When I asked White if he thought it was harder for white men to get published than it was 20 years ago, he told me: “I don’t think so. If you look at my catalog, I’ve published plenty of white guys, so I don’t know why he needs to. . .,” White paused.
As for the black woman who inspired the novel, White said: “This actual Marcie—his girlfriend—he’s exploiting her. If she even exists.”
To this allegation, Barry responded: “She gave me permission to do this.”
For the record, the “actual Marcie” is real, and I was able to confirm her identity via a WhatsApp conversation that included a “proof-of-life” video. She is indeed a black woman from Vancouver, although she didn’t strike me as “uneducated.”
She told me that she’d received a copy of Femoid before it was removed from circulation, adding, “I haven’t actually finished reading the entire book.”
“But from what I have read, I would say that the parts that are genuinely my experience are written respectfully,” she said. “Of course, there’s plenty of content that isn’t quite me or mine, but that’s just how fiction works.”
In our penultimate conversation, I asked Barry if he felt he had to take on the persona of a biracial woman in order to get a novel about one published.
“Absolutely,” he said, adding that White had “confirmed it” by pulling Femoid after learning the author’s true identity.
But what has he achieved?
Australian writer Matthew Sini, who interviewed Barry in the guise of Jasper Ceylon on his literature podcast Getting Lit, told me: “Ceylon’s project reveals a growing rot at the heart of publishing.”
“Vogueish privileging of increasingly arcane identity categories,” he said, “not only hurts the arts in general terms, it hurts budding artists, especially those who are from ‘marginalized’ groups . . . The soft bigotry of low expectations quite often cosigns these writers to an embarrassing spectacle of publishing undercooked and poorly constructed work. The Echolia Review project has proven that identity fetishization in the poetry world literally comes at the expense of the art form.”
Others aren’t as enthused. Alex Perez, associate editor at the publishing imprint Panamerica, would be a natural ally for Barry; he has criticized the state of identity politics in the publishing industry, and has been lamenting “the lack of masculine fiction” for years. But when I asked Perez what he makes of Barry’s prank, he said:
While researching this piece I found myself thinking about a 20-year-old book: Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, about a black classics professor who, in order to get a book deal, pretends to be a white liberal’s idea of an oppressed minority: an African American vernacular-speaking man from a drug-and-violence-ridden broken home. (A few years ago, Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction.)
I emailed Everett, with a link to the Substack Barry wrote under the pen name Jasper Ceylon, and asked what he thought of this real-life literary hoax.
“I feel bad for Jasper Ceylon that her/his peak career achievement is a gotcha moment,” he wrote. “Pranks are funny sometimes, but that’s all they are. Perhaps Jasper Ceylon can start a journal and publish poets with ‘regular’ names. It should be good as she/he is clearly a judge of fine poetry.”
Yesterday, I called Barry and told him this piece was about to come out. There was excitement in his voice. The fictitious web he’d spun for himself over the past two years was about to be completely unraveled. “I think every writer who uses pen names gets at least one great chance to—let’s say—reconcile your personas and re-emerge as yourself,” Barry told me. “I choose to have the web unravel. I’d like to be myself again.”
What you’re about to read is a poem. Its title is unmentionable, but I can tell you it was nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award, which is meant to bring attention to up-and-coming writers in the indie lit scene. Behold:
If you’re worried that I’m about to tell you why this poem is good, and imply you’re a bumpkin for thinking otherwise, don’t be. The poem isn’t good. It’s bad, and it’s meant to be.
The author told me so.
This poem was originally published, with a very crude title, in the online magazine Jake, under the name b.h. fein (pronouns: “it’s/complicated”). But b.h. fein does not exist. It is one of the many pen names of a straight, white Canadian man, who recently told me he’s spent the last few years inventing minority identities, then publishing terrible poems under these pseudonyms.
He has pretended, he said, to be Dirt Hogg Sauvage Respectfully, author of poems such as “non-b god or: what deity would be a TERF?,” as well as Adele Nwankwo, a “gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,” who has published dozens of comically bad poems in a wide array of indie literary magazines across the Anglosphere in the past three years, including one about a lesbian WWE-style wrestler that features lines such as:
In April, the man behind these identities came clean, writing on Substack that he’d “assumed a series of ‘attractive’ pen names” to “test the limits of the poetry industry and just how much buffoonery it was willing to permit in the present day.” He claimed he’d spent two years tricking editors into thinking that his pronouns or skin color were less “regular” than they actually are; and in that time, he said 47 of his intentionally bad poems had been published in numerous indie literary magazines.
His name, he wrote, was actually Jasper Ceylon. When I first spoke to him, a couple of months back, he laughed when I insisted that this name must be fake, too—It’s like calling yourself Jared Sri Lanka or something. He told me that, yes, it was another pseudonym, a tongue-in-cheek homage to some very distant Sri Lankan ancestry on his mother’s side. His voice was young, friendly, Canadian; he said that he is white, though his camera was off. I was talking to a profile picture of a cartoon elephant, with the name Adele Nwankwo in the corner: Ceylon told me he’d created online accounts to match all the identities he’d invented, to maintain the illusion.
Why’d he go to such lengths?
Mostly, because he was mad. Several years ago, the man calling himself “Jasper Ceylon” was trying to break out as a poet, writing under his real name—which I’ll share in due course—and he noticed that certain journals had what he described as “really weird, and quite specific requirements”:
Ceylon is far from the first person to argue that English-language publishing is overrun with what my colleague Coleman Hughes calls “the new racism”—that is, instead of giving everyone equal opportunities, regardless of the color of their skin, editors actively perceive certain races as worthier than others. (This view of the publishing industry has been disputed.) Nor is he the first person who’s attempted to expose it.
In 2015, Michael Derrick Hudson, a middle-aged white librarian in Indiana, saw his poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” rejected by publishers 40 times. This inspired him to try submitting it under the pen name Yi-Fen Chou. After that, his poem was promptly published and included in that year’s annual Best American Poetry anthology. When he was found out, Hudson was accused of “yellowface.”
Yellowface is also the name of R.F. Kuang’s award-winning satirical 2023 novel, which follows a white plagiarist who steals the work, and Asian identity, of a Chinese author whose book she is editing. (Many reviewers noted the parallels between Kuang’s novel and Hudson’s story, although there’s no evidence the latter plagiarized.)
According to Ceylon, this preference for minority voices disadvantages those who society sees as most privileged—namely, white men. Statistics are hard to come by, but anecdotes are plentiful. As novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted in 2022:
Now, three years later, we have a president who has declared that DEI mandates are over and white men deserve civil rights protections, but it’s much harder to change an industry, and a culture, than it is to change the occupant of the White House. For now, there are still plenty of young, straight, white men who feel publishing’s obsession with identity politics has kept them boxed out—and they’re angry about it. This is the story of one of these men, whose obsessive quest to expose what he saw as the absurdities of the publishing industry quickly spiraled out of control.
“The first poem to ever get picked up was the ‘yah jah gah hah’ one,” Ceylon told me, when we first spoke. He was referring to one of two poems he published under the name Adele Nwankwo in a print edition of Tofu Ink Arts Press, a publication dedicated to “amplifying the voices of the under-represented and marginalized.”
Ceylon was shocked that the poem—which begins with a Toni Morrison quote about “navigating a white male world” and contains lines like “voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip”—was accepted. “It was very obviously nonsense,” he laughed. “Just fake bad Creole.” (Tofu Ink Arts Press didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Ceylon told me he was inspired by various literary hoaxes, including the 1943 Ern Malley hoax, where conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart published many, many parodies of modernist poetry, to make fun of a genre they found superficial and stupid. He also mentioned the more recent so-called Grievance Studies Affair, where the academics Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose published a number of bogus papers in academic journals between 2017 and 2018—including one that claimed dogs engage in rape culture, and another that included passages from Mein Kampf rewritten in modern jargon. They, like Ceylon, were trying to prove that in their intellectual sphere, you could get anything published if its politics were progressive, even if it was bad.
He was shocked that the poem was accepted. “It was very obviously nonsense,” he laughed. “Just fake bad Creole.”
Ceylon walked me through his process of creating elaborate characters with over-the-top biographies and terrible writing styles. According to him, whenever editors asked to meet on Zoom or record his voice for readings of the poems, he could just brush them off with comments like, “Oh, I don’t like the sound of my own voice.” When they asked for pictures, it was easy to just decline.
In April, Ceylon decided it was time to reveal his hoax. He wanted to promote Echolalia Review, a 168-page book filled with his prank poetry that he independently published earlier this year. So, he wrote the “big reveal” Substack post and, to drive traffic to it, wrote an email to one of the people he’d tricked. (This person uses they/them pronouns.) Their name is Chris Talbot, and they are a freelance editor and DEI consultant. Talbot’s website states that they charge “white, cis, and abled” authors $10 per page for freelance editing services, while they only charge black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), gender variant, or disabled authors $5. For their DEI consulting work, Talbot charges different rates based on the demographic makeup of a company’s C-suite: Organizations whose leadership is more than 50 percent BIPOC, gender variant, or disabled get a steep discount.
Talbot is also editor of The B’K Magazine, which published one of Adele Nwankwo’s poems in 2024; Ceylon figured they’d be sure to make some noise, were they to find out Nwankwo wasn’t real. So, he said, he posed as a fictional Vancouver-based poet called “Luna” who was emailing Talbot to say that she’d seen Ceylon being kicked out of a poetry meet-up for bragging about tricking poetry magazines.
Soon, there were posts on B’K Magazine’s various social media accounts denouncing him for taking a $10 token payment reserved for “marginalized creatives only.” Per its submission guidelines, white men do not qualify to be paid for their work, because the magazine doesn’t “make enough cash” to pay everyone, so the $10 is reserved for “racially and ethnically marginalized,” “gender variant, and disabled” submitters, “because these creatives are the least likely to be paid for their published works or equitably for their day jobs.” Ceylon told me he donated the $10 Talbot gave him to a charity. B’K Magazine did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Ceylon, this preference for minority voices disadvantages those who society sees as most privileged—namely, white men.
Ceylon’s strategy worked. Talbot’s complaints on social media brought attention to his work. Within two weeks this controversy inside the indie literary scene was being discussed outside of it, including on popular podcasts like Blocked and Reported. But Ceylon’s elaborate marketing campaign wasn’t over. He told me he’d written two novels, both under another pen name. One had just come out; the other was due to be published later this year, and to promote it, he wanted to merge his vast web of identities with his real name: a big, bombastic reveal and a launch-party dream.
I suggested he reveal his real name sooner, and preferably to me. He said he’d think about it.
The next day, he sent me an email. “I spoke to the head editor at the publishing house for the [first] novel, and they dropped the project because I was a white male author,” Jasper wrote. “I’ll give you the exclusive on my real name and past credentials. I’ve got nothing to hide now.”
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...b290d-0e61-4388-b857-dc41920dbf30_1320x30.png
I looked into the camera on my phone, and he looked into his. At last, the man with a million names had a face—a pale, boyish one that looked younger than it was. He was clean-shaven, with a tuft of curly brown hair, sitting in a cramped, slightly disheveled bedroom. A guitar hung on the wall. His name, he told me, is Aaron Barry, and he’s my age, 29. (To prove this, he sent me his ID.) He explained that he is an English-language tutor from Vancouver who began writing contemporary haiku in 2018, when he was in his early twenties and recovering from an illness. “I didn’t have much stamina for anything else,” he said.
Shortly thereafter, he went on, he dropped out of college at Simon Fraser University to become a writer, publishing in various haiku magazines under his real name, winning a local award, and integrating himself with the Vancouver poetry scene. In addition to his poetry, Barry also published a series of comedic-prompt books for writers that included challenges like “Brokeback Mountain. But Ennis and Jack are both insecure about their masculinity, so the camping trip is just plain uncomfortable.”
Barry’s work—at least, the work published under his own name—culminated with his self-published debut collection, eggplants & teardrops, in 2022. The book received an honorable mention at the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards a year later, but by then, Barry said, he was ready to write other kinds of poetry—rather than just haikus—and he felt locked out of certain publications on account of his race and gender. Hence the poetry prank.
Barry claims he’s concerned for the future of poetry. “People can’t engage with it,” he said. “They’re almost intimidated by it, or they’re just confused by it. And this exclusionary attitude only contributes to that further. It’s a shame.”
He turned his attention to novels. During his years of hoaxing, he said he wrote two, under the pen name “S.A.B. Marcie”—an amalgamation of his name and his then-girlfriend’s. Both novels were accepted for publication, and the first, Femoid, came out May 15, with indie publisher Calamari Archive. Barry told me he didn’t receive an advance but, rather, had an informal agreement to receive royalties. (I’ve seen emails that confirm this.)
Femoid follows the tumultuous inner life of the internet-addicted Savoy, a biracial woman loosely based on Barry’s ex-girlfriend. Throughout the editing process—which was all done over email—Barry maintained that the book was based on his experiences. He justified this to himself (and me) by maintaining that a fictionalized version of himself, called Avery, does appear in the book. But he told me his editor, Derek White, clearly thought the author’s identity was closer to the biracial, female character’s.
At last, the man with a million names had a face—a pale, boyish one that looked younger than it was.
Barry’s second novel, £, flesh, will now be published under his real name later this summer by McBussy Publishing, a small indie publisher; it’s about a group of college students who murder their economics professor.
After he and I first spoke, Barry came clean about his straight, white male identity to both publishers, because he knew this story was going to be coming out. He told me the editor of his upcoming second novel, Maxwell Rosenbloom, didn’t care.
Rosenbloom confirmed this: Yes, he said, Barry had written to him “as the Marcie persona”—”writing like his characters, using emojis, etc.” But when Rosenbloom found out Barry’s real identity, he said, “I didn’t care. I thought it was funny. The work is very good. That’s what’s important to me.”
“Artists are always putting on a persona,” he added.
But White, who’d edited Barry’s debut novel, pulled Femoid off the shelves. “He told me I was a terrible person,” Barry said. “He said, ‘I haven’t published a white male author for two years because I don’t want to deal with you guys, and if I had known you were a white male author I would not have accepted the book.’ ”
White’s anger was audible through the phone when I called him. “No, it’s not that I don’t deal with straight white men,” he said, “but if you looked at the context of the book, for a white man to write this book is absolutely wrong, and it would be unethical for me to publish it.”
White noted that the book makes use of the N-word (when I asked Barry about this, he said: “It was used ironically. It was necessary for the authenticity of the story”), and said he’d felt deceived by Barry—who had told him, over email, that the pseudonym “S.A.B. Marcie” was necessary in case of doxxing.
When I asked White if he was under the impression that Barry’s biracial ex-girlfriend had written the book, he snapped: “I wasn’t under the impression, this is what he told me outright. He completely lied to me about his identity.” (In response to this allegation, Barry said: “Yeah, I essentially had to operate under this persona—that’s what having a pen name is, and I thought someone who championed running a press that published pseudo-anonymous works would be okay with that.”)
White also claimed that Barry “couldn’t even write” and that he’d agreed to edit the book “under the assumption that [the author] was like the character in the book: an uneducated black woman from Vancouver. So, I was trying to help her write this book, right? And wasted three months of my life.”
When I asked White if he thought it was harder for white men to get published than it was 20 years ago, he told me: “I don’t think so. If you look at my catalog, I’ve published plenty of white guys, so I don’t know why he needs to. . .,” White paused.
He added: “You can call it affirmative action. You can call it what you want. I was trying to give someone a chance. I think it’s harder for black women to get published.”
As for the black woman who inspired the novel, White said: “This actual Marcie—his girlfriend—he’s exploiting her. If she even exists.”
To this allegation, Barry responded: “She gave me permission to do this.”
For the record, the “actual Marcie” is real, and I was able to confirm her identity via a WhatsApp conversation that included a “proof-of-life” video. She is indeed a black woman from Vancouver, although she didn’t strike me as “uneducated.”
She told me that she’d received a copy of Femoid before it was removed from circulation, adding, “I haven’t actually finished reading the entire book.”
“But from what I have read, I would say that the parts that are genuinely my experience are written respectfully,” she said. “Of course, there’s plenty of content that isn’t quite me or mine, but that’s just how fiction works.”
In our penultimate conversation, I asked Barry if he felt he had to take on the persona of a biracial woman in order to get a novel about one published.
“Absolutely,” he said, adding that White had “confirmed it” by pulling Femoid after learning the author’s true identity.
But what has he achieved?
Australian writer Matthew Sini, who interviewed Barry in the guise of Jasper Ceylon on his literature podcast Getting Lit, told me: “Ceylon’s project reveals a growing rot at the heart of publishing.”
“Vogueish privileging of increasingly arcane identity categories,” he said, “not only hurts the arts in general terms, it hurts budding artists, especially those who are from ‘marginalized’ groups . . . The soft bigotry of low expectations quite often cosigns these writers to an embarrassing spectacle of publishing undercooked and poorly constructed work. The Echolia Review project has proven that identity fetishization in the poetry world literally comes at the expense of the art form.”
Others aren’t as enthused. Alex Perez, associate editor at the publishing imprint Panamerica, would be a natural ally for Barry; he has criticized the state of identity politics in the publishing industry, and has been lamenting “the lack of masculine fiction” for years. But when I asked Perez what he makes of Barry’s prank, he said:
In other words, the culture war never ends.
While researching this piece I found myself thinking about a 20-year-old book: Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, about a black classics professor who, in order to get a book deal, pretends to be a white liberal’s idea of an oppressed minority: an African American vernacular-speaking man from a drug-and-violence-ridden broken home. (A few years ago, Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction.)
I emailed Everett, with a link to the Substack Barry wrote under the pen name Jasper Ceylon, and asked what he thought of this real-life literary hoax.
“I feel bad for Jasper Ceylon that her/his peak career achievement is a gotcha moment,” he wrote. “Pranks are funny sometimes, but that’s all they are. Perhaps Jasper Ceylon can start a journal and publish poets with ‘regular’ names. It should be good as she/he is clearly a judge of fine poetry.”
Yesterday, I called Barry and told him this piece was about to come out. There was excitement in his voice. The fictitious web he’d spun for himself over the past two years was about to be completely unraveled. “I think every writer who uses pen names gets at least one great chance to—let’s say—reconcile your personas and re-emerge as yourself,” Barry told me. “I choose to have the web unravel. I’d like to be myself again.”
