An interview with Alisson Wood, creative writing student and NYT published writer

At the end of last semester in December, The Tab sat down with Alisson Wood to talk about her article in the New York Times. Wood bravely published her piece as an honest and detailed account of her experience of being raped by her boss at a diner she worked in whilst still in college and how she coped and moved on after the traumatic experience.

Wood grew up in Connecticut and is now studying in the McGhee program doing a  double major creative writing and literature through the NYU School of Professional studies. She said, “it’s the same but I’m never the oldest one in my class, which is nice.” Wood is also working on a memoir right now. We caught up with her to find out what’s next for her in the world of writing.

So we have all ready your piece in the New York Times. It is incredible. What compelled you to write about the experience?

It was an assignment. It was Said Sayrafiezadeh’s , “Masterclass in memoir”. Our final assignment was to write a trauma piece, a 1500-1800 word piece about a trauma. It was actually not on the list of the things that I would ever write about. He encouraged me to write about this subject, he knew that I hadn’t written about it before. He has been incredibly supportive. I submitted the piece on Friday, two Fridays ago, he read it on Wednesday, loved it, then asked for my permission to submit it to his editor at the New York Times since he writes for the New York Times a lot. I said yes of course. I heard back from the New York Times by the middle of Thursday, that the New York Times wanted it and they wanted it for that week’s Sunday’s edition. Then all day Friday I was back and forth with the New York Times Editor, making some edits. Then it went live online that Saturday afternoon and was in the print edition on Sunday. It all happened really quickly last weekend (December 12th 2015).

What was the scariest part or the part you were most worried about?

The scariest part is that from now on anyone who Googles, which realistically is a lot of people, can read about it.  I don’t want to be defined as the girl who wrote about rape in the New York Times. You go on a first date, you know you meet someone, job interviews, whatever, they Google me and the first thing that will come up, for the rest of my life is that article. And that’s a very vulnerable thing to have there.

And it’s not something that I have talked about much. I mean I think that the majority of the people who were close to me knew about it but it’s not something that I would talk about openly. But, obviously I have no reason to be ashamed. This happened to me. It’s important that women tell their story. And that these stories are heard, but it doesn’t make it any less scary to actually do it.

And what has been the type of feedback that you have received so far?

I probably received about a hundred emails from strangers within minutes. I got my first stranger email not even five minutes after the article went live. Smallest group of all responses were the crazy mean people.

Wait so there was hate mail?

Oh certainly. There were people saying, well you are lying, you didn’t get a rape kit. One person wrote saying something about how I was just crazy and I must be a compulsive liar. Very mean stuff. But that’s the smallest group.

Why do you think that people automatically assume that if a woman says she was raped she is lying? 

It’s a complicated issue that’s very clearly linked to feminist issue and the issue of living in a society where women are not to be trusted. We teach women that they can’t be trusted. Think about abortion issues. Women cannot be trusted to read a situation to make decisions. Women are not trusted with their own bodies, to be in power, anything. We’ve never even had a woman Vice president. We still don’t have a fair division of genders in the Supreme Court, or Congress or any of our leadership positions. I mean look at Hillary Clinton, she is being attacked for being a shrew, she is a grandmother and can’t be a president. All the stuff that a man will never have to deal with.

It’s the larger issue and then it trickles down. It’s funny to me because I have friends, who don’t understand the connection between the personal and the political. And I’m like this, right here. This is a perfect example it’s all the same issues. Deep rooted Western patriarchy and sexism, that’s my answer, that’s a terrible answer.

What leads to sexual assault do you think?

I firmly believe that rape isn’t about sex, rape is about power. It’s about power. It’s not about the fact that men or whoever the perpetrator is, can’t control their desire or ‘oh you’re just too sexy’. It’s a power issue. It’s about violence and power. That’s why you see it happen a lot of times in war with things like that.

Do you think that on some level writing this piece was cathartic?

I actually didn’t find it cathartic at all. If anything, it was really hard to go back to that and to really think about it and be very careful in my memory. It was exhausting emotionally to try and get it down on one page in a way that was both accurate to the facts and also was creative in the way it told the story to the reader. Definitely not cathartic. I think that if I was still at the point of writing it as being cathartic it would not have been the piece that it was.

What was the attitude of the police towards you when you filed your report?

I don’t want to mischaracterize it and say that they didn’t care but I think that there was a general sense of, “well there is not a whole lot we can do for you”. Just because this was also 10 years ago and 10 years ago technically what happened to me wasn’t considered rape. It was considered “forceful touching” because he did not ejaculate and there was no anal or vaginal penetration so it wasn’t considered rape. It’s pretty fucked up.

What do you think are some things that could be done to minimize sexual assault?

It’s terrible because some of the tips you see to minimize rape are all things that women have to do, like, “don’t get too drunk, don’t wear revealing clothes walk around in pairs”. Where is the “men don’t rape” training? And at the heart of that is consent training. There have been some really interesting studies done when they ask men, although not to discount queer male victims of rape, “well have you ever raped a woman?” and they say no. OK then, “well have you ever had sex with someone who is too drunk, asleep or whatever? Who didn’t give consent?” then the answer is yes. So there is a disconnect between men saying, and society saying, “well yes that’s rape” and “well I didn’t get consent but it’s OK it’s not rape.” It’s great that that’s being done on campus I think that it should be done in high schools or even middle schools.

Thank you so much for this. One last question, what are you working on next?

Well I am currently shopping around for a literary agent, and I hopefully will have a book proposal by mid-next year.