Brian Evenson in Full Stop

On the one hand, I do understand that people have very difficult things that happen to them, and I think those things should be acknowledged and addressed. But also, in something like a fiction workshop, I kind of think that at the beginning of the class you should give a blanket trigger warning that you may be reading things that are disturbing. I also don’t really think it’s necessarily good to tell people in advance what they’re going to face, partly because it makes them tense up against it and have a different response to the story. I also don’t know that trigger warnings are all that helpful. If you have something that’s a really serious issue, you probably need to talk to a professional about it rather than just being warned that it’s going to appear in a story so that you can avoid it.