At the time Zinzi Clemmons was confronting Junot Díaz at the Sydney Writers’ Festival about his past mistreatment of her, I was elsewhere in the same building attending a writing workshop on literary nonfiction. At that exact moment we were engaged in a vigorous discussion of one of the chief concerns of writing in any genre: ethics. Writing literary nonfiction involves high stakes, said our workshop facilitator Maria Tumarkin. Otherwise, it’s probably not worth writing about. Prior to the workshop she’d asked us to send in our burning questions for her to address. One of mine was how to write well about certain kinds of traumatic events from my past without going into unnecessary details because, as I wrote in my email to her, these are not my stories only.

Reading the stories of Clemmons and others on Twitter the next day, it was all too easy to imagine how Díaz could have operated with apparent impunity in the literary world, no doubt in part due to his elevated status as a champion of marginalised voices. The situation felt uncomfortably familiar. Why has it been so difficult to speak up against someone like Díaz, and why is it so difficult to speak up against similar figures we might think of in Australia? In cases where race is involved, it’s a high stakes situation, and race can be a shield to hide behind, concealing dysfunctional behaviour. But the other difficulty preventing transparency is that when you’re part of a group that might be subsumed within a larger battle—war metaphors, it seems, are inescapable—there’s a lot more at stake than just you and your experiences and thoughts.