Our favorite Literary Twitter moments: Jessie Gaynor on Joyce Carol Oates

Pulling together the 64 original Literary Twitter moments and incidents to create our winter game, What Was Literary Twitter? The Bracket, required the vast institutional memory of the entire Lit Hub team, who each had their personal favorite e-dramas to add to the list.

From Senior Editor Jessie Gaynor, who highlighted not one Tweet, but an entire body of work from one of the best to ever do it:

A thorough accounting of Joyce Carol Oates’ viral tweets is a task better suited to her extremely lucky future biographer than to a dilettante like me. Though her recent Elon Musk evisceration launched her Twitter work out of the very online literary world and into the wider consciousness, Lit Hub has been on the JCO Tweet Beat since 2016. (My personal favorite is her po-faced rebuke of Halloween decorations, but I could probably draw the horrifying poison ivy foot pic from memory.) The real magic of JCO Twitter is twofold: the astonishing range of takes, and the seeming total lack of calibration. She has never, as far as I can tell, made any attempt to figure out what the internet wants from her Twitter presence and do more of that.

Most of the time, a famous person described as not giving a fuck will later be revealed, once popular opinion on their non-fuck-giving has turned from admiration to disgust, to have care a lot, actually. But I genuinely believe JCO would continue tweeting even if the only accounts left on Twitter were porn bots. She remains the only writer whose Twitter presence makes me more interested in reading their non-Twitter work. She is giving both everything and nothing.

JCO’s Twitter is a distillation not only of the best of literary Twitter, but of the early promise of the entire platform. She is an entire town square unto herself.

And here’s Jessie’s entire bracket, with the bad art friend saga taking the crown:

[Click to enlarge]