Like most nosy bloggers, we have been following the story of Brad Vice and assertions of plagiarism with great interest. Plagiarism is bad. Heck, we might even admit to a moment or two of schadenfreude — what’s the point of having a bad reputation if you don’t live up to it? Then came the niggling doubts, that need to know all, see all, understand all.
In the end, however, we simply felt like the kid who’d done a bang up job on putting together the lower left quadrant of the puzzle before realizing someone had walked away with the rest of the pieces and the picture on the box. Did Vice plagiarize the work of others? Possibly. Is he a serial plagiarist? That’s not for us to decide. Is there is a serious impact to his professional life here? Absolutely.
Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network has taken another look at this story, weaving together multiple threads to create a more cohesive piece (what? you expected us to continue with the puzzle analogy? Hello — no caffeine in the bloodstream.). Like us, he doesn’t know the whole story; unlike us, he knows much more than most:
Each reader, as they pick up details, must make their own determination about Brad Vice’s abilities and intentions. Personally, I think he made a huge error in not fighting for the epigraph to appear in his collection, and for not having an acknowledgements page that mentioned both Carmer, Dent, and any other Bear Bryant source books he may have read while writing his stories. I’m still not sure the University of Georgia Press needed to pulp this book so quickly, but I understand that the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction is a huge deal to them, and is not something they want tainted in any shape or form. What Mr. Young has given each reader is another bit of information to possibly help them form their own opinions.
Again, it is up to each reader to make a determination as to the credibility of Mr. Young’s article. Based on the above details, I’m going to take this piece the New York Press felt fine to run with a grain of salt about as big as my head.
