At this point it feels unsporting to bring up anything related to xoJane, an online women's mag that Time Inc. shut down a decade ago after buying it at a fire sale price. But the Tempest Challenge recently floated back into my brain, so I need to vent.
Speculative fiction writer K. Tempest Bradford issued a challenge to her readers, and I quote, “I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year”. Does cutting all meat out of your diet make you more pliable to stuff like this?
Another writer online soon defended the idea in the following terms:
It’s only a year
It doesn’t have to start and end on any particular date.
In the grand scheme of publishing, it’s extremely unlikely that a large enough group of people will be avoiding white straight cis male authors to ruin anyone’s career. If I don’t read a book by John Scalzi (or some relatively unknown white straight cis male) within a particular span, nothing says I can’t read it once the year is up. There are unlikely to be a ton of people doing it the exact same time as I, so White Guy will still sell pretty close to the same number of books within a given year as he would have otherwise.
These things are true as far as they go, but miss a couple of important points. For one thing, if you follow through with this kind of thing, it tends to overwrite the things you'd ordinarily look for in a book―writing you enjoy, a topic you're interested in―with matters like the race of the author, or whether they agree with their original birth certificate on what gender they are. This is, I assume, the whole point.
And you have to wonder if this actually helped any "diverse" writer. The "challenge to avoid books by whitey" has a quality of "eat your veggies." Would you really want to be the veggies everyone is supposed to eat? The truth is that voluntary return readers only become return readers out of love. It can't be forced.
Anyway, I just started reading Erasure, a 2001 novel by Percival Everett. Everett is a seeming rarity in that he's a substantial literary writer of the 21st century, but he's also enjoyable to read. He doesn't need any more justification than that.
1 comment:
You won't be surprised to know that I never heard of xoJane or K. Tempest Bradford either. As for the magazine it sounds like Time Inc. regretted having invested in the site well before they abandoned it. In fact, after all this time the idea of removing male writers from being published seems dated. Then again it also seems likely that all those female graduates with liberal arts degrees are now the ones who work in the industry either writing themselves or directly in publishing and marketing, largely YA and erotica.
I've read pretty widely over a number of years including John Scalzi and a number of male writers of greater and lesser fame. I've enjoyed many books books written by women. Fictional stories and characters explore the human condition who face very real problems in different historical periods and situations. It also enables me to experience immense beauty; reading a book by someone who truly knows their craft is almost incomparable to anything else, and just because it's fiction doesn't mean there's no practical information to be absorbed.
The idea that someone happens to be among a small minority who feels their personal history is worthy of your interest isn't necessarily correct. The artistry comes from the ability to make us understand a character very different from ourselves.
I did have a look at some samples and reviews of Erasure. It's a wonderful premise of a so far unpublished writer dismayed that a middle class black woman who had visited Harlem had written a popular book that he wrote a parody of it that brought him even more success.. that he was likely not ready for.
It's likely the pendulum will swing back as it always does. Just keep writing.
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