May 23, 2025

I. NEWS

• Praise for Heresy Press’s inaugural non-fiction book The War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail:

“Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff are two of the fiercest defenders of free speech and the first amendment alive today. The War On Words is a must read for anybody who cares about freedom of speech.”
— Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation

“Anyone who is opposed to shutting people up by force is bound to be faced with arguments that suppressing speech isn’t so bad after all. But these arguments were considered and rejected decades ago, and The War On Words is a perfect handy guide on how to answer them, by a hero and heroine of free expression.”
— Steven Pinker, author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…

“In a time of rising polarization, The War On Words is a vital reminder that free speech protects democracy itself. Lukianoff and Strossen make a compelling, principled, and timely case.”
— Ro Khanna, Member of Congress

“Freedom of speech is sorely in need of special protection these days, and this book guides any reader to support it in clear, forthright, and powerful fashion.”
— Floyd Abrams, author of The Soul of the First Amendment

➡️ The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail by Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen will be published on July 1^st, 2025. Pre-order it here.

➡️ An extremely useful resource page associated with the book can be accessed on FIRE’s website:

• Heresy Press will have a booth at the upcoming Heterodox Academy Conference in Brooklyn, June 23-25, 2025.

If you plan to attend the conference, please stop by the Heresy Press booth.

➡️ We will be promoting The War On Words, as well as all other books from the press’s list.

• Nothing Sacred: Outspoken Voices in Contemporary Fiction now available in a handsome hardcover edition.

Heresy Press’s audacious short-story anthology is being re-published in cloth. Nothing Sacred: Outspoken Voices in Contemporary Fiction contains eleven tales as diverse in theme as they are rich in exuberance and unconventional wisdom.

➡️ Order the book here.

• Richard Walter’s novel Deadpan featured prominently in The Jewish Journal.

️ ➡️ Read the whole article here.

• Upcoming meeting of the Heresy Press book club!

On June 3rd, 2025, 8 pm EST the members of Heresy Press’s book club will meet on zoom for the second meeting of “Speakeasy.” The roughly two-hour meeting, conducted on zoom, will be moderated by writer and literary educator Britton Buttrill.

The book club selection for the upcoming discussion is Katerina Grishakova’s novel The Hermit. The author herself will join in the second hour for an open Q&A.

➡️ Sign up for the Speakeasy book club here.

II. Heresy Press’s International Presence

• Animal: Notas De Um Labirinto, the Portuguese translation of Alan Fishbone’s novel Animal: Notes from a Labyrinth, goes to print.

➡️ Here’s the fabulous cover of the Brazilian edition, which will be published by Sétimo Selo in August.

• Heresy Press author Tom Casey to attend Listowel Writer’s Week Literary Festival in Ireland, May 30, hosted by Mercier Press.

➡️ Tom will promote his mystery/crime novel Unsettled States, the first Heresy Press book to be published by Mercier Press in Ireland and the UK.

• Exploratory talks are currently underway for a Czech translation of The War On Words.

➡️ Defending free expression and fighting censorship are not just US concerns but an ongoing global challenge. Stay tuned for further developments from the international rights front. Hopefully, more foreign translations will follow from the Director’s attendance at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

III. Guest Essay

“The Pen Name Revolution”

Jasper Ceylon

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.”
— Anatole France

Pen names have been a part of the literary tradition since antiquity, with writers in Ancient Greece and Rome borrowing from the prestige of figures like Homer and Pliny, respectively; those of Ancient India adopting the names of deities such as Ganesha and Saraswati out of a sense of self-effacement; and even authors of parts of the Bible using the names of Jesus’s disciples for entries, such as with the New Testament’s Second Epistle of Peter. And in the centuries since, many esteemed writers, from Dodgson (Carroll) to Blair (Orwell), have furthered this custom through their varied use of pseudonyms.

But pen names, while historically useful for the act of concealment, protection, or mere amusement, now offer in an age of moral panics and identity politics more potential than perhaps ever before.

It’s no secret that today’s publishing industry favors certain artists’ identities over others. Throw a proverbial stone (or submission query) in any direction and you’ll inevitably hit a publisher mission statement about commitments to “historically marginalized voices” or “writers from X, Y, or Z” backgrounds. Magazines do this. Contests. Publishers. Top to bottom. (See: the mission statements of indie publishers such as ANMLY and those of Megalodon-sized establishment publishers such Penguin Random House. And while very few would make the argument that championing the historically disenfranchised is a bad thing, it’s become clear that the industry has overcompensated in its attempts to balance the literary playing field. This has led to a slew of recent articles about the “vanishing white male writer” phenomenon. Jacob Savage’s article of a similar title does a somewhat adequate job of going to bat for white male writers (its particular strengths lie in its highlighting how the most prestigious portions of the industry have forsaken aspiring white male writers), and it’s no surprise Savage’s observations have inspired ten-fold vituperative rebuttals from those who would insist that everything’s just fine within the publishing world—that, in fact, things have never been better! (And I’m only being half-ironic here.)

As a poet, novelist, and editor, I’ve had to witness time and again those who would broach this subject be laughed or, in more extreme cases, strong-armed out of the room. When Joyce Carol Oates remarked back in 2022 that editors aren’t interested in white male perspectives right now, the entire media apparatus, including completely fair and objective outlets like CNN, mobilized against her to reaffirm that white males were doing just fine in publishing. Nothing to see here! Whether it’s her or James Patterson or anyone else, we simply see a rinse-and-repeat reaction of denial and outrage every time. And I myself had noticed that, while I was having some success as a young white male writer, it seemed many opportunities in publishing were, by virtue of direct identificatory exclusion, off limits to me. I couldn’t enter certain contests; I couldn’t submit to large swaths of indie poetry journals; I couldn’t, according to poets I knew who’d “made it,” expect a push within the industry when there was still such an urgent need to amplify underrepresented voices.

This could have caused me to quit writing. And, indeed, I’ve encountered many excellent writers and poets who have exited the industry because of this exact issue. But I’m something of a stubborn guy, and I like to amuse myself and others, so I instead hatched a plan to shed some light on the bizarre situation that contemporary publishing and its writers find themselves in. And central to this plan was the extensive use of pen names.

I’d read about the Ern Malley Hoax that James McAuley and Harold Stewart had perpetuated back in 1944 in an attempt to lambast modernist poetry. I’d heard of the Michael Derrick Hudson fiasco, in which he’d sent out his infamous “Bees” poem as himself first, then as Yi-Fen Chou, and ended up having Sherman Alexie anthologize it as one of the best of the year in 2015. (To his credit, Alexie has acknowledged since that his selection did rely on Hudson’s perceived Asian identity, and he’s even, if you’ll permit a bit of bragging on my part, read about my ruse and offered praise recently.) I’d also heard of the Grievance Studies Affair, in which James A. Lindsay and company managed to fool academia into accepting nonsense papers on clearly bogus topics, such as queer performativity at dog parks. To me, these three phenomena had in common the use of pen names as a vehicle for both satire and worthwhile critical exploration.

Without going into too much detail, here’s the gist of my experiment: Over the course of 2023 and 2024, I assumed several pen names that represented frequently endorsed identities within the poetry world and sent out intentionally deficient (weak, offensive, pandering, and/or nonsensical) poems as a member of these identity groups. In the end, I was able to fool over thirty literary journals with approximately fifty pieces, receiving payment (which was donated to charity) and even an award nomination in the process. And to demonstrate that these editors and institutions had noticeable biases, I first sent several of these “bad” poems out under a white male name, racking up nothing but rejections for them. I then sent the exact same poems out under the pen names that suggested certain currently “desirable” identities, and the pieces were scooped up almost immediately. (The most extreme case was “tiktok stoic man,” which was rejected twenty-six times under the white-male name and was never published, but was rapidly accepted under the “B. H. Fein” pen name.) I later encapsulated the entirety of this experiment in my Echolalia Review: An Anti-Poetry Collection (Pere Ube).

One of the primary lessons I learned from this experiment, and what I would like to impress upon the disheartened writers in my demographic, is the sheer power and influence of aliases in changing the fate of one’s career. Of course, I am not suggesting that writers adopt the alias of a “marketable” literary minority in order to publish second-rate or nonsensical poems, as I have done to prove a point. What I’m suggesting is that, given the current condition of contemporary publishing, a pseudonym can be adopted to have your best work considered in the first place, rather than shunted aside for sociopolitical reasons. Let’s fool the identity-mongers while striving for literary excellence!

If you’re frustrated with how things are, ready to throw in the towel on your writing career, I urge you to reinvent yourself. Even just temporarily. Become the disabled Nigerian healthcare worker, as I did with “Adele Nwankwo.” Become that plucky Polynesian romance novelist. Turn into a female Chilean recluse poet known only by a mononym. Take control of your creative fate and invent the narrative of your career. Generating and maintaining a persona is the easiest it’s ever been, with the immediacy of internet-based communication. Throw up a Substack account for them while you’re at it. An X account. Give this persona your extant content, or write new content for them. Go crazy and pull a Daniel Théron and invent multiple personas for your different career phases. Obviously, the point is not to spread malice or harm, but, rather, to expedite careers and to guarantee the continued survival of a truly diverse set of perspectives and artists in writing.

Join the Pen Name Revolution. Join the storied lineage of creatives who’ve used alternative identities to forge their own destinies, and let your skill and determination pay off in the ways they were meant to all along. For those of us who love writing, this goes beyond politics, quotas, superficial irony—this is a statement of self-commitment, a statement of love for an art that must endure at its full strength, despite itself

See you in the trenches.

The 21st-Century Ern Malley, Jasper Ceylon

Bio:
Jasper Ceylon’s poetry has appeared in magazines worldwide under his own name and under many pen names, including “Adele Nwankwo,” “B. H. Fein,” and “Dirt Hogg Sauvage Respectfully.” He’s the author of Echolalia Review: An Anti-Poetry Collection, and he has also been traditionally published as a novelist and critic.

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Response from Sherman Alexie:

“One of the reasons why Michael Hudson D. fooled me with his false Asian identity is that I wanted to publish poets in Best American Poetry (BAP) that I didn't know. And I did indeed want to publish more Asian American poets since they had been dramatically underrepresented in previous collections. And I was very successful. I had personal and/or professional relationships with less than 10% of the poets in that year's Best American Poetry. And, last time I checked, I published more actual Asian American poets than BAP has published in any issue before or since. I'm still proud of my work. I thought I'd published a new and good Asian American poet! I'm also proud that I admitted to being fooled. I kept the poem in the anthology even after Hudson came clean about his ruse. He was honest. But here's the big news: Hudson's poem is good, regardless of his motives. He's a good poet. His poem remains good. He tried to write something bad and failed. Unnoticed is the fact that he was also published that year in Best New Poets, an annual anthology that solicts work from the MFA programs and prestigious literary magazines. Hudson, the white guy, had already been published in major places as himself. He'd still be getting published these days in major places because he's good. Ten years later, after much embarrassment, I'm amused by Hudson's experiment just like I'm amused by Jasper Ceylon's experiment. And here's another big thing: Ceylon's parodies have big interesting energy. As an editor, I'm fairly certain that I would've read them as satires. I'm surprised that some editors didn't assume they're satires written by a BIPOC poet satirizing BIPOC poetry. And, yes, they're good satires. I will argue, however, that Hudson and Ceylon miss a key point: white editors also choose white poets because of their race/culture. Logrolling is a multiracial activity. I'm betting there's gotta be a BIPOC free verse poet who's been publishing for years as a white guy formalist using meter and rhyme and Classical Greek themes in satirical ways to mock 21st Century America.”

IV. Director’s Recommended Reading & Listening:

• The Certainty Trap: Why We Need To Question Ourselves More—And How We Can Judge Others Less by Ilana Redstone (Pitchstone Publishing, 2024)
The Certainty Trap is an essential book for our times. With remarkable clarity, Ilana Redstone identifies the cognitive bias called “viewpoint attribution asymmetry,” i.e. the principle that leads people to think that those believing in viewpoints opposed to their own must be intellectually and morally deficient. This partisan principle is behind much of our current social and political dysfunction, and The Certainty Trap not only astutely analyzes this phenomenon but also offers practical steps to overcome it, by showing us how to question the infallibility of our own ideas.

• Michael Mohr’s Substack article: “Are Women Preventing Men From Publishing Novels?”
This is a nuanced, data driven, dispassionate, and ACCURATE description of the conundrum of mainstream publishing’s gender imbalance.

• Quillette Interview with Andrew Doyle: “The Scourge of the Woke Right”
First of all, just to hear Andrew Doyle’s fluent delivery of clear and persuasive ideas is a joy. Second, his take on the Woke Right is first-rate and insightful, especially as he puts it in perspective with regard to the Woke Left (and how much the two movements really share a common ground in terms of their methods and attitudes).