Writer’s Desk: Know Your Audience

Claire Vaye Watkins has a truly astounding piece in Tin House, where she writes with gimlet-eyed precision on not just the infinite ways female and minority writers are put in a box by a white male literary establishment, but on how to write for a particular audience.

She wasn’t shockedthat an older gentlemen came up to her at a signingand said how surprised he was that he liked her stuff. That was her intention:

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain...