Now Robbi and I can add miseducation to the list of our crimes. We met a very nice woman named Jessica at this year’s AWP, who bought a copy of our Six Degrees of Francis Bacon poster and hung it in her kitchen. We know, because she wrote to tell us. We wrote back, begging her to send us a photo. Which she did.

But now we wish we hadn’t. While perfectly suitable for enjoyment by educated adults, Francis Bacon is a scourge to developing minds, so full of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies. As it turns out, Jessica’s kids have taken an interest in the poster, looking at it and pointing at it and such.

It troubles us to think that these small people might grow up thinking that Dostoevsky actually did have a beard growing competition with God or that Poe and Chaucer were drinking buddies (Amontillado being their grog of choice, of course).

Perhaps we should gracefully surrender our guilt. It is, after all, Jessica’s own fault that her children are thus exposed to our nonsense. But we can’t help feeling some responsibility, wondering if someday these deliberate errors will surface on an AP Literature essay. We can see it now, a young man getting back his D- paper and defending his work to his skeptical teacher: “Thomas Pynchon did have weekly sleepovers with J.D. Salinger, I swear! I read it on a poster!”

Such are the liabilities of satire.