Letter of the Week: Stolen Word--Biodun Iginla, BBC News in Paris, France

by Biodun Iginla, BBC News, Paris ____________________________________________________________________
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Letter of the Week

Stolen word

I am the Kevin McGee referred to in Ed Park's plagiarism piece "Mehta Fiction" [Voice Literary Supplement, May 24–30]. In my senior year of high school I submitted three stolen pieces of literature to Ed's magazine for reasons that I don't understand—it wasn't for a grade and certainly wasn't for money. Regardless, the legacy of those pieces affected both my writing and work ethic in years to come for one simple reason: They meant nothing to me. I did not create them. They weren't my ideas, and therefore I experienced no pride or growth from their creation. The irony is that my writing improved. I've since written and published professional and recreational work as well as written several hundreds of pages of creative work that I never show anyone. I actually enjoy writing and, as a consequence, have never felt the urge to repeat the hollow process of copying. The frightening aspect is that this might not be the case today, had my 18-year-old brain been rewarded with a large sum of money from those works instead of self-induced meditation on the value of wasted time.

Kevin McGee
Healdsburg, California

Park's article is by far the best cultural commentary on and analysis of the sad and pathetic affair of Kaavya Viswanathan. My own two cents: The titles of the two plagiarized Megan McCafferty novels are also revealing, in the sense of the practice itself of plagiarizing: Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. Everyone who has written about this affair has missed this.

Biodun Iginla
Minneapolis, Minnesota