Decades back, as a recent graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, I met with a committee to pick our next set of instructors. (Every year there are six different instructors for Clarion West’s six-week intensive, all writers and editors of note in the speculative genre.) Since this was a special anniversary for the workshop, I proposed that we celebrate by choosing people of color for every slot. We didn’t. There were numerous objections to my idea, but the one that has stayed with me was the heartfelt complaint that by doing this we’d “use them all up.” That is, if we filled our
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