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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: meg_evonne on March 01, 2010, 04:06:12 PM
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This was e-mailed to me this AM from shewrites.com. Very nice supportive site for women writers. I'm not sure they are genre friendly but this really bugs the heck out of me. E-mail if your bras just hit the fire.
And men...stop gawking and e-mail also!
A message to all members of She Writes
As the old saying goes, "almost" only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades, and it really gets you nowhere with email addresses. A few days ago I got all fired up about the 2010 "Best American" anthology editors being all white dudes, and asked everyone on the network to send an email to Lori Glazer, head of publicity at HMH, nominating some of those oh-so-hard-to-find women writers and writers of color for the jobs in 2011. (If you want to get up to speed on the action, check out my blog, as well as the NYT article and awesome comment thread that resulted from it.) But the email address I had for Lori was just a tiny bit wrong, and that means that HMH has not gotten any of your emails! And they need to get them, because they need to know that we are paying attention, and that saying that the all-white-dudeness of these editorships is simply a "coincidence" is not good enough. They also need to know that women writers and writers of color are not, in fact, hard to find, and (in fact!) that if you piss them off they will flood your inbox but good.
So please, if you got a bounce back, try again. And if you didn't send an email to Lori already, do it now.
lori.glazer@hmhpub.com
edited for their site and did I just say 'supportive site' right after that title. You guys you know my mind doesn't work that way, well yeah it does, but its unconscious mind connections of some sort. Anyway leaving it for the ha ha moment. Meg
http://www.shewrites.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network
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So, it being a coincidence isn't good enough? So her whole argument here is even if these white dudes really WERE the best, they should throw a chick or a black dude up there just because? Even if they weren't the best?
Sorry. I'll support her righteous indignation if she has something substantive to go on, not just "OMG no chicks".
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My fault. Go to the site and you'll get the connections to the NYT article etc. I's a lousy poster when in a steam. Kali do you really believe that the top writers of 2010 were all male and white?
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So, it being a coincidence isn't good enough? So her whole argument here is even if these white dudes really WERE the best, they should throw a chick or a black dude up there just because? Even if they weren't the best?
It would seem to me that the failure mode of that would be never being able to tell if one were being included on the actual quality of one's work or just as a token.
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uhm tough crowd. Let it rest a bit and let me know what you think.
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The problem is we have no idea how Houghton Mifflin selects the authors to edit the anthologies. All we know, from reading the articles, is that each selection is made without knowledge of the other selections. Meaning, at no point until all selections were made could someone have said, "Y'know what? These are all white dudes. Let's ditch Neil Gaiman and pick some chick."
And wouldn't you think it's MORE insulting to be picked just because you happened to be a female than because you really were regarded as the best in a given year? "Yeah, we were going to go with Gaiman, but we had to pick a woman so you're it." Sure, they don't have to SAY that, but if that's the truth, how offensive is that? I'd just rather they went with the white guy.
I certainly can't argue that the men they chose aren't deserving of the honor. I don't know all of them, but I do know Gaiman, Lee Child, David Eggers, and Bill Buford. They're giants in their fields, and men I deeply respect as authors. So it's not like they passed over a woman or a person of color to pick some schlub.
As a final thought, in prior years women and people of color have been editors. Three last year were female (and Amy Tan's a 'double dip'). As this "all white guy" thing is not a persistent pattern, I am indeed inclined to dismiss it as a coincidence and get on with my life, bra unsinged.