workplace ethics... already?

I took a big corporate job with a non-profit research organization. I did this, after taking 3 years to complete an MFA in creative writing, instead of pursuing my writing, teaching, publishing as is the frequent (though, certainly not required) trajectory of your average MFA grad. I did this because, by the end of my three years torturing myself for 3-10 hours a day in front of my laptop screen, trying to conjure or wrench free or elucidate or surgically remove poetic things from my little brain, because I had no intention of really trying to write seriously for publication again. "Writer's Block" is a pretty amorphous and dubious affliction. I never wanted to claim it as my own-- but, it's the most convenient term for the rampant demoralization, the miserable boredom-at-myself, the complete crippling of my artistic confidence that I felt while trying to compose what turned out to be a puny 25-page little manuscript.

Now, I don't think my manuscript totally sucks. There are moments when I approached my aspirations-- and there are moments that I think failed to get so close-- but, all in all, it's not the worst piece of junk out there... But the extreme discomfort I felt during my writing process-- the paralyzing fear of failing, of stepping into some political blindspot or other, of not being able to live up to various previous teachers' praises-- well, you might have gathered by this point in this post that writing had stopped being any fun for me at all. And so, I took this job, assuming that no one would ever ask me to write anything that wasn't informative or essayistic (I mean, I can write a mean research memo... and blogging doesn't count as I just plain don't edit this stuff) again.

But here I am, a month in, and my boss tells me that the state for which I'm working right now (which I won't mention b/c I don't know how deep our confidentiality goes around here yet) wants to commission "us" to write a 3rd-grade-reading-level piece of fiction for their assessment. First off, I've never been able to write fiction. I read a ton of fiction and I love it but constructing a character? A linear plot? I'm pretty sure my brain doesn't operate in that fashion. Even if my blockage weren't part of the picture, I just don't think in those terms. I can't get past the tearing apart of meaning, the breakdown of basic sentence structure, the minutia of poetry-writing. A bigger context? Even on a 3rd grade level, well, I just plain don't know how to do that. But my boss says, "Hey, you've got a writing degree... surely you can come up with something!"

And then she adds that, to fulfill the state's requests for diversity, that it should be about an African American child from the state in question. Now, this is where my real ethical quandary begins. Now, a good chunk of my manuscript is about coming to terms with being a white girl from the American South. I've thought long and hard about what that means and have found absolutely no alternative to owning that that's part of my identity. Acknowledging and attempting to understand my racial and socio-economic privalege has been an important part of my learning-to-be-grown-up process, and my writing process, too-- and NOT appropriating the story or diction or perspective of another race is pretty fundamental to my being able to sleep at night.

Now, in recent posts, I've talked about how interesting I find debates about authorial authenticity. I'm beyond reluctant to condemn or even question, really, anyone who attempts to step out of the bounds of his or her own narrow indentity and frame of reference in his or her writing--but I am loathe to do so myself. Partly, this is because I lack the chops. But, I feel this way, also in part, because I'm just not comfortable skirting this particular moral boundary. I've talked a lot about my fascination with transgressors of all stripes in this blog-- and I see writers like J.T. LeRoy-- or Laura Albert, his likely alterego-- as just so many more envelope-pushers. And, oh, I suppose they make me prickle to a degree-- but I also applaud their ability to break the rules and get famous for it. But I am not so audacious. Far from it.

So when put in a position in my workplace in which I'm asked to transgress my own ethical delineations, well, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Likely, I'm going to attempt to sidestep this issue as politely as possible. I'm not aiming to ruffle feathers just yet as I'm still very new around here. But I selling my soul just ain't where it's at, either. Ugh. This is what they get for hiring the artistic sort, right? So then, am I saying my conviction here is more important than my paycheck? Oh, god, how scared am I?