Home » Posts tagged "#OwnVoices" (Page 5)

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

Graphic Novel Review: Bitter Root, Volume One: Family Business by David F. Walker, Chuck Brown, and Sanford Greene, illustrated by Rico Renzi and Sanford Greene

Bitter Root, Volume One: Family Business by David F. Walker, Chuck Brown, and Sanford Greene, illustrated by Rico Renzi and Sanford Greene

Image Comics, 2019

ISBN-13: 9781534312128

Available:  Paperback, Kindle, comiXology

 

The Sangerye family combats monsters called Jinoo, people who have been infected by hate. However, a deadly tragedy struck the family, and the survivors can’t agree whether to kill or cure the monsters. With a new breed of monster stalking the streets of 1920s Harlem, the Sangeryes need to come to terms with their feud and face their new foe, or watch all of humanity lose the fight.

The characters in Bitter Root are fantastic. Ma Etta, the matriarch of the family, is a badass, protective of her family and not afraid to defend them. Berg is a poetic and gentle giant who can wield a wicked staff. Blink is a strong-willed, brave woman who desires to take a more active role in the family’s monster hunting. Cullen seems to be in training and is struggling to get his footing. Then there is Ford. He is most definitely a loner, and has his own deadly ideas of how to deal with the Jinoo.

There are so many great scenes in this book, which is a fast paced #OwnVoices read. The reader is thrown into the action when Sweet Pickin’ Jazz Club is attacked by an unseen monster. The next night sees one sect of the Sangerye family attacked by monsters, and Ma Etta telling Blink she can’t go out to help her Cullen and Berg fight a great horned beast. Blink proves herself by using a staff to beat the crap out of the monster. She is by far my favorite character in Bitter Root.

I recommend this highly for anyone looking for a great supernatural #OwnVoices graphic novel. The story is full of monster fighting, family politics, social commentary, and racists and KKK members getting their asses kicked.

Volume 1 collects Bitter Root issues 1 through 5. Also included are essays about the origin of the story, Afrofuturism, the tradition of rootwork, and more. Interspersed between the essays are variant covers and fan art.

Highly recommended

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on November 21, 2019 by , Reply

Musings: Girls As Protagonists in their Own Stories in YA Fiction

I know we just visited the topic of “where did all the boys as protagonists go”  not that long ago but a piece I just read in The Mary Sue made me want to come back and look at it from another angle. The article, which is totally not about YA horror fiction, talks about three female protagonists of vampire media franchises from the 2000s, all of which are grounded in horror fiction tropes: Elena Gilbert of The Vampire Diaries  (based on the YA series by L.J. Smith), Sookie Stackhouse of True Blood (based in the Southern Vampire Series by Charlaine Harris), and Bella Swan (from the YA series Twilight) 

So you don’t have to read the entire thing, the essence of the article was that the author saw in all three of these characters that they were defined by their romantic relationships– that their stories wouldn’t have existed without their love interests. All three of these characters are caught up in  (straight) romantic triangles (which I guess makes them more of romantic V’s)– and their role in triangles end up, for the most part, erasing the rest of their character, even though they are supposedly the protagonists,

The 2000s and early 2010s were a pretty good time for YA horror with boys as protagonists, though. Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan was very popular, and I know that here at Monster Librarian we read a lot of books where boys were, at the very least, point of view characters. Harry Potter drew a lot of those kids into a darker fantasy as well– the last book came out in 2007, just before my cousin turned eighteen. And in Harry Potter, there is a spark for change, because smart girls and passionate women save the day over and over, waiting for doofus teenage boys to get a clue about saving the world.  And girls who  grew up with Harry Potter noticed, and wanted the girls in their books to be the heroes (and villains) of their own stories.  And thus we get Jane McKeene from Dread Nation, who is strong, smart, and commonsensical; murderous Nita from Only Ashes Remain; the troubled girls of Sawkill Girls who alternate between being victims, villains, and survivors.

I don’t know why so many men turned away from writing books with boys as protagonists. But what we’re seeing now is, I think, the product of women seeing themselves erased from the types of stories they grew up loving, and wanting to see not just themselves but also a growing diversity in the kinds of protagonists we see in YA novels (or any novels, or any writing). They are hashtagging #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoices because additional voices, their voices, need to be heard. Fear is just part of girls and women’s daily lives, and I don’t think enough people realize quite how scary it can be.

But there’s a lot of fear to face in today’s world that is not exclusive to women and girls  (hello, climate change, genocidal dictators, twisted social media policies, hate crimes, cyberbullying, school shootings). Who is writing the stories that resonate with boys today? Somebody needs to open their eyes past what they’ve seen of themselves so far. Yes, male characters have taken center stage for many years, but do we really want stories written in the past that make us cringe today to be the models we give those kids?

Let’s move forward with authors coming up with great stories that will showcase original characters and engage all kinds of readers. That’s our goal in libraries, right? It’s my goal, anyway. There are so many good books coming up, and I can’t wait to see what kids of vibrant writing lies ahead.

Posted on October 12, 2019 by , Reply
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