Say you have the second sight

[sovay]

My appetite has evaporated thanks to the current medicinal cocktail, so I made myself a dessert with a can of sliced peaches boiled with coconut cream and honey in order to have something in my stomach for antibiotics and it was remarkably tasty. I will replenish my store of sliced canned peaches at the earliest opportunity. At some point in the future I will feel like making it again.

I am so very sick of not writing critically about things. That entire area of my brain appears to have gone on vacation without me (have the decency to send a postcard, you bum!) and I want it back. It's been weeks. The rest of this paragraph edited for Tiny Wittgenstein.

I left a comment on Facebook which I think I will want to remember, so with minimal edits for context:

"We were asked as part of the panel after the reading about this question of front-and-centering our own representation in fiction; when it came around to me, what I said is that prior to compiling my most recent collection, I would have said that my characters were relatively neutral sort of lens people, except that then I started reading the thirteen years of short stories and my idea of a neutral lens is apparently Jewish, queer, genderblarghy, okay; I can live with that."

Comments

[davidgillon]

There's an interestingly wider context to that question, when you consider that one of the things literature is trying to do as part of We Need Diverse Books etc is increase the percentage of own-voices authors. If people don't front-and-centre their own representation, then there's no way we can achieve that.

Clearly there's been a degree of kick-back against that shift in writing with the Puppies etc, but it's difficult to know whether the question was conscious of that resonance.

Personally I'm perfectly happy to live with "Jewish, queer, genderblarghy" as the lens on your writing, keep it up ;)

[sovay]

There's an interestingly wider context to that question, when you consider that one of the things literature is trying to do as part of We Need Diverse Books etc is increase the percentage of own-voices authors. If people don't front-and-centre their own representation, then there's no way we can achieve that.

Agreed. With lots of bullet points, like we shouldn't expect marginalized authors to write nothing but ownvoices fiction as if it's the only thing they're qualified to do and everyone should get a lot better at writing the Other including me, but agreed. When people tell their own stories, suddenly there are so many more kinds of stories to tell.

(I sent the most recent poem to Disabled People Destroy Fantasy, speaking of.)

Clearly there's been a degree of kick-back against that shift in writing with the Puppies etc, but it's difficult to know whether the question was conscious of that resonance.

I was reading as part of an event for February as Women in Horror Month, so the discussion afterward focused a lot on the idea of writing as women in horror, whether we felt conscious of it in our work, whether we felt it affected the perception of our work, whether it informed how we wrote about horror, other axes crept in.

Personally I'm perfectly happy to live with "Jewish, queer, genderblarghy" as the lens on your writing, keep it up

Thank you! I expect to.

[davidgillon]

other axes crept in.

This seems perfectly appropriate for a horror discussion ;)

[davidgillon]

And forgot to say, agree completely on your bullet points.

[asakiyume]

LOL

[sovay]

This seems perfectly appropriate for a horror discussion

I think "And then the axes crept in" is my new "And then the murders began."