Cat Rambo’s Follow-Up to “Learning From Fireside Fiction’s #BlackSpecFic Reports”

SFWA President Cat Rambo follows yesterday’s roundtable with notes and action items in “Talking About Fireside Fiction’s #BlackSpecFic Report, Part 2 of 2”.

What’s Happened So Far

When the original 2015 report came out, we discussed it on the SFWA Board but little conclusive was achieved. I wrote about some of that discussion as well as my own thoughts.

….There is a fine line between asking for help from black writers in fixing the issue and expecting them to fix it. I still try to navigate this in addressing the issue, and with the podcast, my hope was to a) facilitate discussion that promoted awareness of the issue and b) gather information that helps me — and the rest of the SFWA Board — figure out what SFWA can/could/should best do.

… One of my core beliefs is that if I’m leading an organization, I need to make sure that organization is doing what I believe to be the right thing. So what can I help SFWA do? Here are my notes.

Nisi Shawl: Ones and Twos and Rarely Threes. Shawl mentions editor Gardner Dozois telling her Clarion West class in 1992 that writing and selling stories in a particular universe is a good path to selling a novel in that universe. She references Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing and makes the observation that the suppression of thought requires nothing more difficult than misunderstanding. For me that raises a question about how to recruit and train slush readers. She also notes that “you have to be printed to be reprinted.” In the podcast this came up again: for there to be better representation in the slushpile, there needs to be more black publishers, editors, and slush readers in the system.

Action item: Think about slush readers. How do we create systems that recruit widely and also teach those readers and editors to read without so many filters? (Reading these essays might be a pretty good start on that.) Figure that out, then figure out how to spread that knowledge via panels, podcasts, handouts. Slush readers and interns are where the majority of our editors and publishers come from; change at this level will spread upward and do so within a few years, particularly if we figure out ways to help first-time anthologists and newbie editors as well, perhaps simply with resources….

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