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Musings: Stephen King Gets Schooled on Diversity in the Media

Awards are not the end-all and be-all, but they do have meaning: libraries make purchases based on lists of award winners and recommended titles, and so do readers. When a well-regarded organization hands out an award, there is a ripple where often that book, or movie, or theater production, will also be held in high regard and rise to the top. It might even stay there decades later, after it has become dated or recognized as problematic (true of a number of early Newbery and Caldecott winners).

Many award-granting institutions have undergone upheavals in the past dozen years or so: debate over the World Fantasy Award Fantasy Award, the Sad Puppies fiasco that attempted to taint the Hugo Awards, the renaming of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the recent cancelling of the RITA Awards. There has also been a more obvious scrutiny of the Oscars, starting with the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. Any hope that public criticism of the Oscars’ lack of diversity would have an impact on judges’ considerations was dashed this year  as the Oscars failed to nominate any woman for Best Director, just three nominations for artists of color, and, despite acclaim for both Us and Midsommar, zero nominations from the horror genre (I’m also baffled that Frozen 2 didn’t get a nomination for Best Animated Feature: it is a gorgeous film).

I haven’t felt like the Oscars were worth my attention for years, but with Joker, The Irishman, 1917, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood racking up the nominations even I couldn’t escape the blinding whiteness and maleness of the slate. It has to make you question, are Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino really the only directors capable of making an Oscar-worthy movie? I know  women and people of color are making great movies, and that there are outstanding horror movies that deserve a look. There are stories out there being told from a fresh point of view that deserve to be seen and heard.

Author Stephen King is a judge, and decided this was the time to put himself out there and tell us:

 

I guess now that he’s won the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he’s become on authority on what makes quality art. Which is apparently not diversity?  Twitter does not seem to agree.

He later backtracked a little, saying everyone deserves “a fair shot”, whatever that means (marginalized people start with less than a fair shot so..?). Here we’ve got an old white guy (he comes within a day of sharing a birthday with my mom, who is in her seventies) who has locked down the bestseller lists for decades.  There can’t be too many people who haven’t heard of Stephen King, read one of his books, or watched a movie adaptation. At this point in his life, could he identify a fair shot if it walked up to him and tapped him on the nose? How many promising writers could have “New York Bestselling Author” on the cover of their books if King didn’t have a permanent place there?

Stephen King is positioned in publishing in a way that he could make a big difference in making available quality work from diverse and #OwnVoices creators, maybe not so much in the movies, but definitely in fiction. My background is mostly as a K-12 librarian, and maybe you aren’t familiar with the authors for that age group, but one of the big names is Rick Riordan, who gained his recognition writing contemporary fantasy with kids who discover they are demigods from various world mythologies. Riordan was able to use his privilege as a popular, bestselling, writer to start a publishing imprint with the specific mission of finding #OwnVoices authors who have stories to tell grounded in their own mythologies and legends. Riordan is a name, but he certainly isn’t in Stephen King’s league when it comes to name recognition, number of books written, or number of copies sold. For King to say he would never consider diversity, but only quality, is a blind spot I hope is rectified by the reaction to his tweet. Because he has the ability to find and promote #OwnVoices creators in a way that most writers do not. And it would be wonderful if he did.

Posted on January 15, 2020 by , Reply

Musings: Racism in Genre Fiction Is Everyone’s Problem

Courtney Milan

Recently, romance author Courtney Milan was censured by romance writers’ professional organization, the Romance Writers of America (RWA). Milan, who is half-Chinese, called out racist stereotypes of half-Chinese women in a romance novel by Kathryn Davis on Twitter. In return, Davis filed an ethics complaint that the criticism was unfair and caused her to lose a three-book deal. Suzan Tisdale, Davis’ employer, also filed an ethics complaint that Milan asked her how many authors of color she had published and was critical of Tisdale’s answer, and that she had called Davis a racist. Milan called Davis’ book a “racist mess,” but there’s a difference between personally attacking an author and criticizing her book (if honest reviews are important to you, I hope you can tell the difference). None of this was a violation of the RWA’s ethics code, but the board suspended her for a year and banned her from holding leadership positions. Milan has worked to increase diversity and inclusion in the romance community, which is majority white, cis, and heteronormative, and that appeared to have had a positive effect on the RWA. The lack of transparency in making this decision led to outrage from many in the romance community, and many officers, committee members, and paid members of the organization resigned. If you subscribe to any major newspaper, there has probably been a mention of this controversy in it this week (here’s the Washington Post’s take, and the New York Times).

Beyond the individual support for Milan, a larger problem has come to light, and that is institutional and systemic racism in the RWA and the romance community. Bestselling authors, such as Nora Roberts, have condemned the racism and homophobia that have come to light while all of this has been unfolding. For those people who don’t follow romance or know who Nora Roberts is, she’s close to being the romance genre’s equivalent to Stephen King.

I am writing about the out-of-control events in the romance writing community because racist, bigoted, and homophobic behavior and writing is not limited to one genre writing community. It’s everywhere. The horror genre and the people who participate in it do not get to wash our hands and say “well, what does racism there have to do with us?” Like it or not, one of the greats of the horror genre is well-known for racist, xenophobic vitriol. That is not opinion, it’s fact. Just because he wrote a century ago doesn’t mean we can’t criticize Lovecraft’s work. It’s even productive to do so. Some really great horror fiction has been published that critique his racism and xenophobia, like Victor Lavalle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, and Ruthanna Emrys’ Winter Tide.

Let’s not pretend, either, that those are things of the past and we’re too enlightened to have them appear in the horror community, or horror fiction, today. It doesn’t have to be related to your personal politics, any of us can trip over a stereotype or a dog whistle (I certainly can’t claim to know them all).  I’m pretty sure we’re all writers, reviewers, educators, librarians, or at least readers here, and that means we all know that words matter. It’s not a personal attack to point that out, it’s not being “too sensitive,” it’s an opportunity to do better for the horror genre and for ourselves.

 

Posted on December 30, 2019 by , Reply

Musings: 2020 Is Nearly Here! The Classics Are Coming!

phantom       

It’s been a big year for looking back, with the establishment of the Paperbacks from Hell imprint, Looking forward to 2020, it appears that it will be a big year for looking even further back.  The publication of several books of ghost and Gothic tales in 2019 looks like it was the beginnings of a return to the classics of the genre. 2020 will bring the first volume of HWA’s Haunted Library series that will be published in conjunction with Poisoned Pen Press, The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. In addition, Crystal Lake has just announced that they’ll be publishing Crystal Classics, dark tales from the late 19th and early 20th century,  with occasional titles that “challenge” a classic title, and the covers look lovely. Their December newsletter says the first three of these are out in paperback and will also be available as ebooks: they are The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, with an introduction by William Meikle;  Dagon Rising, a “challenge” to Lovecraft by William Meikle; and The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, with an introduction by Jasper Bark. I’ve been watching over the past several years now as some of the older or lesser-known writers are starting to be introduced to readers who may never have encountered them before, and I think we’ll continue to see this appreciation of writers from earlier times. Given the publication of books like Monster, She Wrote this year, which set a focus on lesser-known women writers (or women writers whose supernatural work was lesser-known) I think we can be sure that there will be more to uncover and appreciate! Of course, time, and literature, and our fears, move on forward, and I think we’ll see more diversity among contemporary writers in 2020 as well, if what I’m already seeing is any indication. It’s an exciting time to be a writer, publisher, librarian, researcher, and reader, and I can’t wait to see what directions the genre goes in next.

 

Posted on December 22, 2019 by , Reply
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