I and several other bloggers, including Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers Network, have been very critical of Robert Clark Young’s stink piece about Sewanee in the New York Press. But here’s a better source than I’ll ever be: Richard Bausch. In an email to the New York Press, Bausch states that he does not know Vice, that there are no private rooms from which certain participants in the conference are barred, and that Young sounds like someone with a bad case of paranoia.

I must say that it sounds like Mr. Young must have attended the conference and assumed he wasn’t invited somewhere or other, and then turned that into a plot against him. Either that, or he has listened uncritically and without checking his source to someone who did feel that way……It sounds, in fact, as if Mr. Young was IN a workshop, and people had critical things to say about his work. As EVERYONE knows, criticism takes place in a workshop. And also, as anyone who has ever taught one or taken part in one knows, there are sometimes people who attend them not to learn anything in particular but to have their own conviction that they are geniuses validated. These people often assume there is some ‘coordinated workshop attack.’)

Bausch also states, quite rightly in my opinion, that Young is “not fit to tie” Barry Hannah’s “literary shoes,” challenging anyone to “read the work of Mr. Hannah and the work of Mr. Young and see.” Sheri Joseph, currently an editor at Five Points, the magazine in which “Tuscaloosa Knights” was first published also weighs in eloquently.