B.R. Sanders's Blog, page 19

It’s My Birthday, But I Have Presents For *You*!

read about caravaner elves and assassin elves and pirate elves!

Hi friends!

I turn 31 today, and I’m feeling generous! I’m running a sweepstakes for all my published Aerdh universe books: Ariah, Resistance, and Cargo. Here’s the deal:

The Prize:

One entrant–the lucky winner–will receive paperback copies of Ariah, Resistance, and Cargo shipped to them free of cost. Also included in the mailing will be a handwritten postcard from me, which will probably have some dorky drawing on it. You can even request what you want me to draw for you.

Consolation Prizes:

Oh, hey, but that’s not all! Everyone who enters will get the following just for entering:

ecopies of all Aerdh-set short stories whose rights have reverted to me. This includes:

“Blue Flowers”
“The Other Side of Town”


If you provide your address, you too will receive a handwritten postcard, likely with a dorky drawing. Because we’re all winners here you, too, can request what you want me to draw for you.

Sweepstakes Info:

Sweepstakes open at 9:00am MST on this, my birthday, 9/19/2015
Sweepstakes end at midnight MST on Wednesday, 9/23/2015
Entrants will be contacted to request physical addresses (in case they want the postcards) and winner will be randomly drawn on Thursday, 9/24/2015
Winner will be announced on Friday, 9/25/2015
Prizes will be mailed out the following week
Everyone rejoices

Enter here!

Guest Review: THE SCORPION RULES

Amazon | Goodreads

I’m happy to have Julia O’Connell here as a guest review today! Julia’s reviewing The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow.

Julia is a blogger and book-lover, mostly devoted to genres dark and dismal. She runs a gothic book blog called The Gothic Library (www.thegothiclibrary.com) and can also occasionally be found writing for the geeky feminist website, The Daily Geekette (https://dailygeekette.wordpress.com/). You can follow her on Twitter: @gothic_library; Facebook: www.facebook.com/thegothiclibrary; and Tumblr: http://thegothiclibrary.tumblr.com/. 

I was lucky enough to receive an advanced reader’s copy of an exciting new YA dystopia novel called The Scorpion Rules. If you’re a fan of diverse dystopia and you like my review below, look for The Scorpion Rules in stores starting September 22nd!

Notes on Diversity:

As much fun as The Hunger Games was, it’s always nice to have a dystopian novel that acknowledges a world beyond America. The Scorpion Rules features a cast of characters that each come from a different country, and as a result represent different races, religions, and backgrounds. One of the most important characters is an Asian princess from the Chinese province of Yunnan. Another is a “racially indeterminate” Jewish boy from the Great Lakes region of what was formally America. One of the side characters is a girl from Africa whose hobbies include pointing out the Eurocentrism in their history lessons. In fact, a global perspective is essential to the premise of this book. However, this doesn’t stop all of the action from being focused on the America/Canada area. With one character from each region literally serving as a representative for those people, this book occasionally toes the line of tokenism and stereotyping, but for the most part, The Scorpion Rules is a largely successful example of a racially diverse dystopia.

Where this book most excels in terms of diversity, however, is in its inclusion of LGBT characters. This is one of the best examples I have read of literature with queer characters that is not “queer literature.” The main character, Greta, comes to understand her sexuality as the book goes on, in stolen moments when she can escape from the threat of war, torture, and death. Likely either lesbian or bisexual, it is unclear exactly how Greta identifies by the end of the book. What is clear, though, is that she is in love with (**minor spoiler**) a bisexual woman of color.

Review:

What really drew me into this book was its premise: after global disasters and nearly apocalyptic levels of warfare, a snarky and irreverent artificial intelligence named Talis decides to take over the world for its own good. Inspired by the practices of medieval warfare, Talis implements a hostage system in which a child is taken from each of the world’s leaders as surety against future wars (think Theon Greyjoy from Game of Thrones). The Scorpion Rules tells the story of Greta Gustafsen Stuart, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, and the other hostages in her age cohort at the prison/school/work camp known as the Precepture. Greta is just months away from turning 18 and being set free, however, the odds are not looking good that she will last that long. Talis’s rules are clear: for any country that engages in an act of war, regardless of who is the aggressor, the children of all involved leaders will be killed. And the situation at the Pan Polar border is looking pretty shaky.

Life at the Precepture becomes even more unsettling when a new Child of the Peace is brought in–Elian Palnik of the Cumberland Alliance, a newly formed country on the Pan Polar Border. Unlike Greta and her classmates, Elian has not accepted his role as hostage and is willing to fight every day for his freedom. Elian’s actions and his punishments open Greta’s eyes to the negative aspects of the Precepture. Elian’s arrival triggers a series of events that change Greta’s life forever.

One thing I really appreciated about this book was its non-traditional love triangle, or almost lack thereof. One would think from reading the premise that this is all a set-up for a star-crossed love between Greta and Elian. And at times, the story seems to head that way. However, the author chooses instead to explore not only other sexualities, but also how a deep and meaningful friendship can exist in the midst of sexual tension.

The Scorpion Rules also delves into big questions about what it means to be human and where the boundaries exist between human and machine. It raises philosophical questions of morality and whether it is truly good to sacrifice an individual’s life to save thousands. Whether you’re interested in romance, global politics, or science fiction, this book has a little something for everyone. Overall, the plot is compelling and the characters focused on are nuanced and complex, though I think a few of the side characters could have used more screen time and fleshing out. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars for originality, depth, and the ability to keep me turning the pages late into the night.

Want posts like this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for my newsletter!

A Response to John Scalzi Giving People Quarters

In the same vein as my response to my response to Maggie Stiefvater and Colten Hibbs a couple of weeks ago I want to state right up front and in bold letters that this while this is a response to Scalzi’s post, this is mostly a reflection on issues of power and privilege. I’m using Scalzi’s post as a handy example to interrogate larger contextual issues  mostly because it’s there. 

So. John Scalzi wrote a post where, for much of it, he advocates kindness and respect and listening to others and trying to solve problems. That’s wonderful! He also, says this, and actually, names his post for it:

But I also believe that after a certain point, it may become obvious that some people just want to complain, or to be angry, or to be an asshole, or whatever, and that nothing a reasonable person can do will ever make those people happy or satisfied. So you give them a quarter, metaphorically or otherwise, and tell them to call someone who cares. Because you have other things to do. And then you go on doing those things you need to do.

And, to some extent, this is true. I’m sure we can all think of times we have felt this has happened to us.

But this is key: I’m sure we can all think of times we have felt this has happened to us.

This is where I bounced off his post. Scalzi has an enormous amount of structural privilege–along axes of race, gender (both in terms of being male and cis), in terms of education and the veneer of class higher education bestows especially for white people.1 I believe he identifies as straight, which adds more privilege to his social position.

Look, as Scalzi himself said, he’s playing on the lowest difficulty setting. But what does that really mean? Like, in practice? It means things that people are more likely to listen to him than someone with far less accumulated or intersectional privilege, say a woman of color (WOC). It means Scalzi’s personal experiences are more likely to be affirmed as right and just and sane and reasonable than a WOC’s. It means that when he dismisses someone as unable to be satisfied because they are just unreasonably angry other people will, too.

He says that when someone “just wants to complain,” you should, essentially, wash your hands of them:

They won’t be happy, but then they were never going to be happy, and it’s not your responsibility to fix their problem — “their problem” not being whatever specific complaint or grievance they might have, but a worldview that requires them to always have a complaint or grievance, and/or to believe that the root of that complaint is somehow about you.

But again, this is more an issue of felt rather than actual truth. Because people in power have always said exactly this kind of thing about people they have oppressed who have spoken out.

Here’s an example of this happening that doesn’t involve Scalzi at all so you know for sure I’m not just picking on him. I used to be a member of a socialist organization which was led almost exclusively by white men.2 Eventually leadership started asking why there weren’t more women in the organization, and I wound up on the women’s caucus3, which worked on possible causes and solutions to this issue. Nothing we presented was ever really implemented. At a party, a drunk leader of the group, a middle-aged man, told me he understood that we were angry–of course we were! sexism! it was part of capitalism!–but that he had personally worked through his internalized misogyny so he shouldn’t be held responsible for our complaints. Which is what they were: complaints, not real issues. And after all, it wasn’t his fault that women just got less…committed, or whatever, after they had kids. It just happened.

That guy just felt that we were complaining for the sake of complaining, that he was not complicit, and nothing we could do could really make him see otherwise. So he wrote us off.

This is my issue with handing out quarters. I don’t trust myself to do it because it’s been done to me one too many times by people in power–by people who wrote me off as crazy because it was more convenient than addressing structural inequities, by people who thought me unprofessional me because I brought issues to bear too impolitely for their tastes, by people who just plain don’t want to be bothered.

I will give quarters to people with more structural power than me, but I won’t do it to people with less structural power than me.

Oppressed people are allowed to be angry. They are allowed to express it. And if they are expressing it at me, I probably did something to cause it. I want to dismantle all the isms, and to do that, I have to constantly check myself. It’s fucking hard work. It sometimes takes getting snapped at by wounded, wary people if I step on toes and microaggress them.

I’m not obtuse. I understand where Scalzi was going with his post. It was about the service industry and about the draining emotional labor embedded in that kind of work. But, still, the messages in that post raised red flags for me because it was flippant. Scalzi has a large platform, and he’s talked on it before about race and social justice. But if he’s really serious about that kind of work then it is incumbent upon him to think about how his words–all his words–are taken in the context of his relative and comparative privilege

Nothing is ever written in a vaccum. Not his post; not mine.

1I don’t know his class deal, but I do know from personal experience that a white person with enough degrees can pass as suitably middle class in most spaces, or, at the very least, look like they’ve “made good.” These things are often not available for people of color, for whom college degrees are harder to obtain in the first place, and when they are obtained, are ignored or minimized or qualified until they don’t actually matter.

2Brocialists, mostly.

3This was back before I came out as trans/non-binary.

Parenting While Genderqueer

purchase the entire extremely great issue here

This article first appeared in HOAX zine #7: Feminisms and Change.



Parenthood has fundamentally and radically changed the way I relate to my body and what my body means to me. The process of becoming a parent made me engage with my body on its terms for the first time in years. It made me think about what my body and what my biological sex means to me, and it led me to question my gender identity. I chose to get pregnant, I wanted to do it. I had a pregnancy free of medical issues and a birth that went well. My kid is awesome. I found pregnancy and I am finding parenthood to be a very affirming Now, at 271, I’ve finally reclaimed my body. It is more than mine again; it’s me. I’m it. We’re the same entity. It’s a respite now, and a comfort. It’s like it was in the good parts of my childhood. I’m glad for the reunion. I feel more whole now, and more connected to the world. The reunion was hard-earned, though, and came unexpected. I am more comfortable now in my body than I have been since the age of twelve because I got pregnant and had a kid.

When I was young, before I hit puberty, I ran wild. I climbed trees. I climbed onto the roofs of houses and jumped off, fearless. I wrestled with boys on my street and beat them because I was strong and wiry. My memory of my childhood is strange – mostly a handful of memories so vivid they feel like flashbacks, seemingly disconnected from each other. There is no clear narrative, but there is a physicality to them that still remains. I feel my childhood more than I remember it: sweat, strain, euphoric bursts of energy. The rush of wind squealing past my ears as I sprinted impossibly fast down the street. The harsh quiet sound of skin on asphalt when I fell off a bike. My childhood, both the best and the worst of it, was lived through my body. I was my body, then.

Puberty changed everything. Breasts and hips came. Suddenly I was chubby and round instead of whip-thin. I moved differently, couldn’t run the same way. And I was looked at. Wrestling with the boys on my street turned tentative and threatening in ways I didn’t fully understand. My parents started monitoring what I did, what I wore. I hadn’t realized until they started discouraging me from cutting my hair short and wearing boy’s clothes that my rowdy rugged tomboyishness from the year or two before had been merely tolerated. It was a profoundly confusing and troubling thing to me. My memories of adolescence are clearer than of childhood, but mostly because they are more cerebral, and they are more cerebral because puberty made my body a site of conflict, and confusion, and danger. There was a lot of not-so-great stuff going on at home, too. I didn’t have the resources or support to grapple with the newfound strangeness of my body, so I retreated from it. I pushed it aside. I made it not really me. I trained myself not to pay attention to what my body wanted. I stopped running wild and grew mouthy and sharp-tongued instead.

For years my body has been an inconvenience more than anything else. I kept thinking of it as this grossly inefficient mechanism. Like, really, I have to eat four times a day? It struck me as a design flaw. I avoided mirrors; all I saw when I looked in them were expectations I knew I wasn’t living up to. Sometimes when I saw a picture of myself I found the contours of my body and face surprising. In a very real sense I had forgotten what I looked like. I barely explored my sexuality. I kept everyone at arm’s length in high school out of fear of a life-derailing pregnancy (they were common where I grew up and I really, really, had to get out of there). But in college it wasn’t all that different. I had tried so hard not to pay attention to my physical wants and preferences that I have spent most of my adult life going through the motions in sex rather than actually enjoying it. I fell into sex and relationships without much thought about what I wanted from them. Mostly I just wanted to impress my partner by making them feel good.

Before I got pregnant, I’d never had much contact with pregnant people or babies. I had gotten to a place where I felt mentally and emotionally ready to be a parent, but I grossly underestimated the physical toll pregnancy takes on you. I spent my adult life working too hard, exhausting myself and depleting myself to the point where I would get one nasty cold after another. I sometimes went twelve hours working straight in grad school without even stopping to eat. I wasn’t denying myself, I was just so disconnected from my bodily needs that I didn’t actually realize I was hungry until I was done with just this one last set of analyses. Getting pregnant threw me for a loop because pregnancy has a physical urgency to it that demands that you listen to your body. The first trimester fatigue was brutal. I missed deadline after deadline. Somewhere around the third or fourth important deadline, the importance of the deadlines lost their sting. For the first time in my life, my body was in charge and I was along for the ride. Everything else had to wait. Pregnancy was absolutely fascinating to me. It was incredibly anxiety producing too, what with the specter of all the thing that could possibly go wrong, but mostly I sat on my couch just feeling it. Feeling tired for no reason, or hungry again, or having to pee but not wanting to haul myself upright. I would count the fetus kicking when they got big enough to feel.

Pregnancy was all-consuming, and it felt like a very private thing: not even my partner knew what it felt like because it wasn’t his body doing all this work. It was mine. It was me.

But the thing about female bodies is they’re never private. There were constant well-meaning but intrusive questions: morning sickness? Weight gain? Can I touch your belly? I hated that everyone loved that I was pregnant. I hated how visible it made me, and I hate the visibility because it was so gendered. The constant chatter of mommyhood viscerally rubbed me the wrong way, and it got worse when we found out I was carrying a female fetus. The moment someone referred to my unborn child as a princess I regretted having told anyone I was even pregnant. Like puberty, it was a moment in life where all I anyone saw of me was the changes my body went through, changes that signaled gendered expectations and roles. It was a strange time, because I was enthralled with myself and the pregnancy but at the same time I was deeply unsettled by how people reacted to my body. The thing is, my old strategy of just pretending my body didn’t exist wasn’t an option. Pregnancy is too demanding. It’s not the sort of thing you can ignore. And beyond that, this time around I really wanted to take of my body. I wanted to indulge it and revel in it and treat it well.

The link between the way my body was objectified and the way that objectification gendered it is incredibly obvious in hindsight, but when you’ve spent your entire adult life ignoring something it takes awhile to learn to pay attention to it. It is clear to me now that the reason it felt profoundly violating when people touched me and cooed and talked about mothers and daughters and the special connections they have was because society inevitably reads a pregnant body as a woman’s body. And the reason that is violating to me is because I am not a woman. When you are that viscerally uncomfortable with the assumptions society makes about you, you have two choices: find a way to convince yourself nothing is going on or tell society to go fuck itself. Being misgendered was ubiquitous. It was so entrenched and so unrelenting that I did not for years realize that it was even happening. In some dark little corner of my mind I convinced myself that if I didn’t have a notable body to gender that I wouldn’t be gendered as a person, so if I ignored my body maybe everyone else would too and I could just be me. But being pregnant made my body inherently important to me. My relationship to my body was no longer something I was willing to sacrifice.

The change wasn’t that I became genderqueer. The change was that the immediacy of my connection to my body made it possible for me to reconsider what gender meant to me. It was important for me to find a way to be visibly pregnant and feel masculine at the same time. These days, now that my kid is out and about in the world, it’s sometimes important for me to be visibly masculine and feel like a particularly tender and feminine parent at the same time. Realizing that my body doesn’t determine my gender has liberated me to like my body. Now that one doesn’t determine the other they’re no longer at war. I am just me.

What’s especially peculiar about all this is that pregnancy does indeed change your body. I have stretch marks now. I went up a whole cup size, and my hips broadened. My waist shrank. I am curvier, more conventionally womanly in appearance than I ever was before. But the comfort in my own skin is paradoxically unshakeable now.

1I’m turning 31 this week, FYI, but on re-reading this every word still rings true.

Interview with Westword!

Hi friends!

I talked with Cory Casciato about Ariah, queerness, writing, epic fantasy and other fun stuff. The interview is up at Westword! Stop by, read, and maybe even leave a comment!

-B

Disrupting Publishing Linkspam: 9/15/2015

Last week I collected and curated articles about racism in publishing by writers of color. Anyone who follows my twitter probably knows that disrupting oppressive cycles in publishing is something I’m all in on. I think these linkspams will probably be a regular thing going forward, but I wanted to broaden the scope because there are multiple axes at play here. Race is a major one, and a predominant one given how visible race often is, but it’s not the only way voices can be silenced, so here I’m aggregated as many marginalized voices as possible from as many vectors as possible, and the more intersectional the better. As always if you’ve read something I missed please link it in the comments.

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js“They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist” by Jenny Zhang for Buzzfeed

White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.

Malinda Lo’s tumblr post in response to Jenny Zhang’s piece

Women who write literary/realistic fiction about women are often asked about how their fiction is autobiographical, even if it is clearly not. I don’t believe that men are asked this “is your work autobiographical?” question nearly as often. I wonder if writers of color are asked this question even more than white women, because the white majority has a hard time understanding that writers of color could imagine stories about characters of color who are not them. It’s a weird, slippery, erasing state of belief about writers of color.

“Regarding the Yellowface Poet” by Franny Choi

i confess. i am greedy. i think i deserve to be seen

for what i am: a boundless, burning wick.

a stone house. i confess: if someone has looked

at my crooked spine and called it elmwood,

i’ve accepted. if someone has loved me more

for my gook name, for my saint name,

for my good vocabulary & bad joints,

i’ve welcomed them into this house.

“On Visibility in Diversity That Isn’t Race” by Kayla Whaley

I’m very VERY visibly disabled. There is literally no way to look at me and mistake me for abled. Less than zero chance.

— Kayla Whaley (@PunkinOnWheels) September 9, 2015

Speak Up!: A Graphic Account of Roxane Gay and Erica Jong’s Uncomfortable Conversation by Mari Naomi for Electric Literature

An interview with Ursula K. LeGuin by Choire Sicha

It worked very much against women, because they were likely to have the nine-to-five job and really be responsible for the household. Doing two jobs is hard enough, but doing three is just impossible. And that’s essentially what an awful lot of women who wanted to write were being asked to do: support themselves, keep the family and household going, and write.

“Encouraging Diversity: An Editor’s Perspective” by Rose Lemberg in Strange Horizons

When I founded Stone Telling, I knew I wanted the market to be diverse. I talked to both poets and editors before founding the magazine and heard from quite a few that there just weren’t that many PoC poets in the field, and that very few poets write queer content. I was planning to solicit, but heard back from a few folks that I should expect to quickly run out of PoC poets from whom I could solicit.

That did not happen. What happened was that the field grew in response to a welcoming market.

Roundup: September 7-13, 2015

sirens conference swag!

Wanderings on the Internet

Hey! Do you like interactive stories? Little wee prose games? That’s something I’m exploring now in my newsletters. You can check Book and Scripture, the first Aerdh interactive storylet, here.
SIRENS CON IS NIGH! Check it out, I made some swag ^^. If you’re going to be in Denver 10/6-10/11, come by the con and you can get a button!
Also, check out the #DiverseFantasyChat that happened on Twitter last night! Excellent and thoughtful convo all around!

Writing Update

The Search keeps sprawling. 5k more words were added to the draft this past week, putting the manuscript up over 100k words. Both Sorcha and Shayat made big personal discoveries.
I wrote an interactive fantasy/horror story called “Lullabies and Moss” that I’m currently shopping around, too.

Want posts like this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for my newsletter!

Short Story Rec: “Dustbaby” by Alix E. Harrow in Shimmer #27

The whole story is free to read here.

Grief, in my experience, is a lot like dust. It turns food gritty and sour, it sifts onto your pillow as you sleep and burrows into every pore of skin, and you can never truly be rid of it.

I am only thirty, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about grief. I’ve grieved in a lot of different ways, but I’ve (so far, and thank god) never lost a child. I also have a fascination with the Dust Bowl. These two interests are not miles apart. The Dust Bowl was a time of horrific grief for many. It was a time where the earth itself revolted in an unexpected carnage so blistering and total that no one knew what to do to survive it, and many didn’t. The dust literally ate people alive, or it starved them out. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true.

I have a book I’ve been working on periodically for the last couple of years about pregnancy. It’s a sort-of body-horror book where I’m trying to capture the utter weirdness of pregnancy, the way it makes your own body alien to you while at the same time connecting you to its intricacies in a new and haunting way.

Harrow’s story brought all of these odd little thoughts and interests of mine together in her story about a lonely, heartbroken woman on a dying farm who finds a mysterious baby in the dust. The story’s style reminds me of Flannery O’Connor or Steinbeck–plain-voiced and gothic at once. Like O’Connor there is in Harrow’s story a current of destruction and a current of resurrection undergirding the story.

It’s brutal and sad and sweet. I loved it. You might, too.

Even More Further Reading on Racism by People of Color

Maybe I’ll just make this my blog from now on. I’m pulling out quotes here but, y’all, read the whole damn shebangs if you can because the whole things are excellent and important.

Cindy Pon’s Big Idea at John Scalzi’s Blog

I fell in love with books, and fantasy was one of my favorite genres. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized I had never seen a character who looked like me in any of the fantasy novels I had read. That’s why I wrote Silver Phoenix.

It was incredibly disheartening to be told by the first professional editor I’d met as a budding writer: Don’t bother. No one wants this.

“On The Visibly Marginalized” by Justina Ireland

I had two panels at AWP. After each one people of color came up to me and said “I’m so glad you’re on this panel.  I didn’t know if I could actually get published. Now I know I can do it. Thanks.”  And…I died a little inside.  Because these folks hadn’t read my books.  They have no idea how good or bad of a writer I am.

But my skin color, that was validating.

I’ve been thinking about racial representation.  A lot.  A lotta lot.  Because we talk about diversity and we talk about the importance of those hidden marginalizations also being talked about (and Yes! They are important) but at the same time it takes the focus off of what is happening in the diversity discussion to some degree.

Namely: people would rather talk about ANYTHING but race and what race and racism means in the context of publishing.

“Letters to Best American Poetry” by Craig Santos Perez

Dear Sherman Alexie,

I am disappointed in you. You spent so much time creating inane editorial rules that you forgot the most important rule of being an editor of color:

Do Not Allow Acts of Literary Racism to Occur on Your Watch.

“The Occidental Other” by Benjanun Sriduankaew

I don’t like to be referred to as ‘the Other’. I dislike it intensely, with a real passion. I know the function this term serves – ‘writing the Other’ urges the privileged to take some care when writing those of color, those queer or non-binary or trans, those disabled or neurodiverse – but though it’s a convenient shorthand, it also centralizes the assumed default: white, cis, het, western.

Further Reading on Racism in Publishing by People of Color

It’s so easy to get me riled up about things that both my family and my day job colleagues basically have made a game of it at this point. I could write endless blog posts about this topic. I am deeply passionate. But I am white, and it’s time to take a step back. Here are the words and voices of people of color who have better, more informed things to say than I do. If you have read other articles by people of color I’ve missed please leave links in the comments and I’ll add to this list.

“No More Diversity Panels; It’s Time to Move On” by L.E.H. Light at BlackNerdProblems

These panels easily turn into bitch sessions, in which all of the audience members, basically all of the People of Color who are in attendance at the con, join the panelists in enumerating their most egregious experiences with racism in the fandom. Alternatively, and just as annoyingly, they become Diversity 101 classes, where the panelists spend an hour educating the White audience on why diversity in fandom is important and why they should try reading one book by a non-White author. This is great, the first time. After the fourth or fifth time, it is all exactly as fun as it sounds.

Lyla N. Lee’s response to Maggie Stiefvater over on Tumblr 

We need BOTH better representation of POC characters in white, established writers’ books AND newer, actually POC voices. This balance hasn’t been reached yet–which is why, I think, all this was a big outrage–but it is my hope that it will be reached soon and the children of today and tomorrow will grow up reading more diverse books that DO NOT TELL THEM THAT THEY ARE AN OTHER.

Justina Ireland:  An Unpopular Opinion about Diversity Panels

Diversity panels do not help further the cause of diversity.  They just don’t.  They are nice and I love hearing marginalized folks share their experiences.  But they suffer from an echo chamber effect that diversified panels, panels where a member happens to be from a marginalized group, do not face.  Diversity panels make conference organizers feel like they’re doing their part to further diversity, but all they really do is further ghettoize diverse authors and marginalized voices because the audience for those panels are the people who are ALREADY LISTENING.

Sherman Alexie Speaks Out on The Best American Poetry 2015

  And, of course, I know many of you poets are pissed at me. I know many of you are screaming out a simple question: “Sherman, why did you keep that poetry colonist in the anthology even after you learned of his deception?”

Listen, I was so angry that I stormed and cursed around the room. I felt like punching the wall.

And, of course, there was no doubt that I would pull that fucking poem because of that deceitful pseudonym.

But I realized that I would primarily be jettisoning the poem because of my own sense of embarrassment. I would have pulled it because I didn’t want to hear people say, “Oh, look at the big Indian writer conned by the white guy.” I would have dumped the poem because of my vanity.

“From the Editors: The Politics of ‘Blind Submissions’ Policies” by staff at Apogee Lit Journal

By reading diversely, we come to see that it is not only content that is affected by perspective and identity, but voice, perspective, tone, diction, syntax, mood, and rhythm.

Blind submissions don’t actually protect writers from the existing prejudices of editors, and they alone do not contribute to editors reading inclusively.

“Diversity Is Not Enough: Race, Power, Publishing” by Daniel Jose Older for Buzzfeed

Diversity is not enough.

We’re right to push for diversity, we have to, but it is only step one of a long journey. Lack of racial diversity is a symptom. The underlying illness is institutional racism. It walks hand in hand with sexism, cissexism, homophobia, and classism. To go beyond this same conversation we keep having, again and again, beyond tokens and quick fixes, requires us to look the illness in the face and destroy it. This is work for white people and people of color to do, sometimes together, sometimes apart. It’s work for writers, agents, editors, artists, fans, executives, interns, directors, and publicists. It’s work for reviewers, educators, administrators. It means taking courageous, real-world steps, not just changing mission statements or submissions guidelines.

“Deborah Wiles, Debbie Reese, and Choosing a Revolution” by Debbie Reese at American Indians in Children’s Literature

One reason, I think, is the lack of diversity within the major publishing houses. I think there’s a savior mentality in the big publishing houses and a tendency to view other as less-than. For some it is conscious; for others it is unconscious. All of it can–and should be–characterized as well-intentioned, but it is also unexamined and as such, reflects institutional racism.

“Diversity Panels Are the Beginning, Not the End” by Michi Trota at Uncanny Magazine

To put it bluntly, too many cons are resting on the laurels of having diversity–themed panels and treating them as the endpoint of creating programming that accurately represents fandom and geek culture, when in fact having diversity–themed panels is just the beginning. Yes, highlighting the need for better representation and pushing back against stereotypes are worthwhile discussions, but that is not all marginalized people are capable of talking about.

“Dear Publishing Industry: Fix Your Own Racism Before You Beg for Diverse Books” by Anonymous at SC Writes for #WriteInclusively

Agents are subjective, but subjectivity doesn’t just spring up. White agents, generally, will not be attracted to race issues as much as agents of color would be, because race is not a big part of the white life. White privilege is being able to live life not thinking about color. White privilege is being colorblind. When theentire publishing industry is based around the idea of ‘subjectivity,’ and when the entire publishing industry is so very white, race-related novels are left aside.

That’s why #WeNeedDiverseBooks makes me angry and why I can’t fully support it. I still love it, and the campaign has done some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in terms of anti-racism work. That’s where the mixed feelings come in: I love it, but I feel it has distracted from institutional change.

Nalo Hopkinson’s advice to anthology editors looking for diverse voices

Your list should include the non- (or not as) marginalized writers, but make sure you have 2-5 times more marginalized writers. Because of all the current and historical barriers to our participation, it’s going to take at least that many to get a representative sample of submissions.

Don’t know the names of that many marginalized writers? Ask around. Ask readers, other writers, editors, listserves, educators, Twitter, Facebook. People will be happy to clue you in. Get contact information for the writers they name. While you’re at it, ask them where you should be putting your call for submissions (if you’re doing a public one) in order to have a better chance of it being seen by writers from a diversity of communities. Because if you only publicize it in the usual places, you’ll only get – say it with me – the usual suspects.

N. K. Jemisin’s thoughts on anthology editors looking for diverse voices

Anthologies that solicit my work only because I’m a woman of color? Aren’t going to be good anthologies, don’t have good editors, and they aren’t going to help me. They could actually hurt me, in fact. And choosing to participate in anthologies like that, when I can see the problematic reasoning behind the invitations from a mile away, means acknowledging that reasoning as legitimate.

“The Limits of Diversity” by Jennifer Pan at Asian American Writer’s Workshop

The WNDB campaign has shone a spotlight on the deficit of non-majority perspectives both on the pages and behind the scenes in the book world. Yet the publishing industry remains a bleakly apt example of how increased representation does not necessarily confer material benefits. The same PW report that found the publishing industry to be mostly white also found that while women constituted a clear majority of the industry—74 percent of its workforce, to be precise—they continued to suffer a significant gender pay gap, earning only 70 percent of what their male colleagues did. And so it seems unlikely that increased racial diversity alone will be sufficient to ensure fair pay, equal treatment, or the dwindling of the economic barriers (such as unpaid internships and low entry-level salaries) that have long made careers in publishing available primarily to the educated and affluent.

“Where Things Stand” by Roxane Gay at The Rumpus

If women are underrepresented in certain echelons of publishing, writers of color are likely to face similar issues. As I considered this problem, I had no proof, though, and when it comes to confronting inequities in representation, people want proof. They won’t just take your word that the sky is falling. They need to see the sky shattered, on the ground. And even when you do have proof, people will try to discount your findings.