Race and Readercon
Jul. 11th, 2009 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prusikJust a few observations:
1. One of the other writers in (this coming) Sunday's writing workshop yesterday came directly up to me and said, "You're in Sunday's writing workshop." He was quite confident of this. He actually (unintentionally, I'm sure) surprised the hell out of me as I was scrolling through the Readercon program to see what I wanted to do for the rest of the day. But, of course, he was right.
Now, it's possible that he managed to read my name tag from across the room. (Hey, it's a SF convention. Someone must have telescopic, X-ray, light wave bending vision.) It's possible that I'm the only Chinese male at the con, or at least the only one he saw all day. (Ted Chiang isn't at Readercon this year. Where's Tony Pi when you need him?) It's also possible that there's some entirely different explanation which didn't occur to me at the time. I didn't ask.
2. At the obligatory race panel, K Tempest Bradford made the point that Nisi Shawl's work wasn't aimed at the mainstream audience. i.e., the white and male audience. She continued that the mainstream audience wasn't accustomed to reading works not aimed at them. That might explain why it's taken her work a while to become accepted.
One (white, male) audience member reflected this back to her as Nisi Shawl writing works that white readers don't want to read, then asked if this was counterproductive to producing diversity in genre (as opposed to creating segregated genre). K Tempest Bradford handled the question beautifully by re-iterating her point, and Eileen Gunn supported her by saying Nisi wasn't writing for black people, she was writing for all people.
What I find interesting is that a member of the mainstream heard "not aimed at the mainstream audience" as "something I don't want to read." I'm not exactly surprised. (We all like it when we see ourselves on the page.) But if female fans, fans of color, fans of alternate sexuality find value in works not aimed at them, surely it can work the other way around?
3. This doesn't actually have anything to do with Readercon. I just realized it as I was getting something to eat for dinner yesterday. Most of my work deals with race issues or sexuality issues in one way or another. For my 2009 Clarion application though, I managed to pick the two stories that didn't. (No, not just "two stories", but "the two stories".) Of course I'm not saying that everything I write must deal with race or sexuality, or that I'm incapable of writing well outside those areas. It's an interesting coincidence though.
This is coming as quite the late realization considering I applied in January and was rejected at the end of March. Whether they actually were my best work at the time or not, I could have picked more representative stories.
One of those stories, I totally don't regret sending to Clarion. I think that absolutely was my best work to date. I also think I'm writing better now.
1. One of the other writers in (this coming) Sunday's writing workshop yesterday came directly up to me and said, "You're in Sunday's writing workshop." He was quite confident of this. He actually (unintentionally, I'm sure) surprised the hell out of me as I was scrolling through the Readercon program to see what I wanted to do for the rest of the day. But, of course, he was right.
Now, it's possible that he managed to read my name tag from across the room. (Hey, it's a SF convention. Someone must have telescopic, X-ray, light wave bending vision.) It's possible that I'm the only Chinese male at the con, or at least the only one he saw all day. (Ted Chiang isn't at Readercon this year. Where's Tony Pi when you need him?) It's also possible that there's some entirely different explanation which didn't occur to me at the time. I didn't ask.
2. At the obligatory race panel, K Tempest Bradford made the point that Nisi Shawl's work wasn't aimed at the mainstream audience. i.e., the white and male audience. She continued that the mainstream audience wasn't accustomed to reading works not aimed at them. That might explain why it's taken her work a while to become accepted.
One (white, male) audience member reflected this back to her as Nisi Shawl writing works that white readers don't want to read, then asked if this was counterproductive to producing diversity in genre (as opposed to creating segregated genre). K Tempest Bradford handled the question beautifully by re-iterating her point, and Eileen Gunn supported her by saying Nisi wasn't writing for black people, she was writing for all people.
What I find interesting is that a member of the mainstream heard "not aimed at the mainstream audience" as "something I don't want to read." I'm not exactly surprised. (We all like it when we see ourselves on the page.) But if female fans, fans of color, fans of alternate sexuality find value in works not aimed at them, surely it can work the other way around?
3. This doesn't actually have anything to do with Readercon. I just realized it as I was getting something to eat for dinner yesterday. Most of my work deals with race issues or sexuality issues in one way or another. For my 2009 Clarion application though, I managed to pick the two stories that didn't. (No, not just "two stories", but "the two stories".) Of course I'm not saying that everything I write must deal with race or sexuality, or that I'm incapable of writing well outside those areas. It's an interesting coincidence though.
This is coming as quite the late realization considering I applied in January and was rejected at the end of March. Whether they actually were my best work at the time or not, I could have picked more representative stories.
One of those stories, I totally don't regret sending to Clarion. I think that absolutely was my best work to date. I also think I'm writing better now.
