Review Review Snafu
Aug. 22nd, 2014 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueWelp, looks like the piece for The Review Review is dead. The interviewer had not one but three reading comprehension fails and wound up offending basically everybody enough that none of us wanted to deal with finishing it out. I did my best, but there's only so far one can go while being asked to generalize about the demographics of a group while also being attacked for not treating every individual as a special snowflake. Here's the stuff I wrote that I thought had any value. So if somebody not me later quotes me out of context, there's this context.
It's long, though. And obviously I'm cutting out not only the questions, but anything anybody else said, some of which was more interesting than what I said. (I'm also cutting out my direct responses to that stuff.) Otherwise, this is pretty unedited (i.e. rambling). And gets more hairsplitty as it goes on, because I was asked to be increasingly hairsplitty.
[in response to a question about VIDA numbers for Strange Horizons and whether the demographics of what we publish mirror the demographics of what's submitted]
To make my life easy, I'm going to talk in rounded numbers.
Of about the last 50 poems we've accepted, I'd guess about 10 were written by male-identified authors. I say "I guess" because I've never met the majority of the poets we publish, although I can go on the pronouns they use in their bios (if they use pronouns in their bios), and I know what they sound like if they record themselves for the Strange Horizons poetry podcast, which not everyone does. It is possible that some of the people I'm counting as male-identified are only sometimes male-identified and perform femaleness offline or outside of their writing.
The reason I'm framing this in terms of "how many male-identified authors" isn't an unexamined choice to center the male experience; it's because in my personal experience female-identified authors are more likely than male-identified authors to deliberately present as gender neutral, either out of fear of discrimination or because maleness is itself treated as neutral in a way femaleness often isn't. I tend to assume gender-ambiguous authors are not-male, but categorizing them as female would be disrespectful and inaccurate. Hence I find it easier to talk about a male/not-male dichotomy than a male/female dichotomy.
So, with that out of the way, I'm seeing one in five poems we publish coming from someone who reads as male. This is something which concerns me slightly, because we're an all-female editorial staff in the poetry department and because it doesn't reflect our submissions pool, which is normally pretty evenly split - half male-identified names and half female-identified names, with maybe 1 in 50 names more like internet user IDs or hacker tags, obviously assumed names like Darkness or Jumping Cat or Blixx8. (I think I'm making up those names, but if I'm subliminally remembering an actual submitter's tag, know that I'm not referring to them mockingly and your creativity has obviously stuck with me on a deep level.)
I don't think we're overtly discriminating against men, but I worry sometimes that we have a bit of an "old girls network," because a lot of the poets we know personally are people we've met through some level of artistic volunteer work - they're running the same sorts of magazines as we are (and if anyone reading thinks most poetry editors get paid, alas not), donating to the same sorts of magazines we are, and showing up at the same kinds of events we are. It can get a bit geographically incestuous, but aside from that I think women are more used to working hard for free. [sad trombone.]
I personally try to enforce diversity in my acceptances, not through any quota system but through comparing what I'm seeing to what I have seen. We get some really, really good submissions, more poems I really love than poems we have slots to publish. So when I'm deciding what parts of my hands to cut off, which is kind of what it feels like in the last stages of picking what goes in (I get very Roy Batty "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"), part of what I'm looking at is how unusual something is - not just whether it resonates with me, but whether it will show the readership something they haven't seen much of lately. Or at all.
Which means sometimes having to figure out how to wire a payment to someone in rural Nigeria. And also means that I get very fierce about protecting the right of poets to use language that "sounds" right to them, because this is poetry and sometimes that means odd punctuation and non-prosaic grammar, and I don't want to correct out one of the voices I'm trying to include.
I've left the trans* experience out of my analysis to this point, partly because unless I'm told directly, it's hard to know. Since I have occasionally been told directly, I can estimate that around 1 in 10 of the last 50 poems we've accepted recently is by someone trans-identified. So at a guess, if you were to pick a random 10 poems from our magazine, 2 would be by cismen, 1 would be by someone trans*, 1 would be by someone gender-ambiguous, and 6 would be by ciswomen.
Speaking about making an editorial choice to seek diversity of contributors and of subject, I think Rose Lemberg has written provocatively about the subject here: http://roselemberg.net/?p=901 (which I suspect we've all already read?)
In what may be a funny coincidence, I've noticed more male-identified people sending me unsolicited attachments or asking me if it really counts that the poem has been published elsewhere (in a blog or online forum), but every instance I can think of in which I know someone has simultanously submitted (either because they've withdrawn the submission because it was published elsewhere or asked after it was accepted whether it was ok that it was going to be coming out somewhere else first) has been from someone female-identified. I don't know whether that means women do it more or just that women are more likely to tell me when it happens.
Even though I've said we publish a majority of women, I find it very hard to read a poem we publish or a poem that's been submitted and guess whether it was written by a man or woman, and I find it impossible to look at someone's name and guess what kind of poem they're going to write. I'm not doing PR spin when I say we get really good submissions. Not just good poems, but poems from people who clearly read us and get what we're doing. Which among other things has a certain playfulness to it.
I was racking my brain for poetic gender trends and the one that occured to me, which I was surprised by, is the dude haiku. I don't think of haiku as a particularly male form, but I think every haiku that's been submitted during one of my reading periods has been by a guy. Dudely haikuing.
I can't say how representative we are of speculative poetry as a whole. I'd like to think we're influential voices; we do have readers, some of whom nominate the works we publish for awards, and some of whom contribute generously to kickstarters to help us put out more stuff. But I also think we're marginal voices. People are either readers of Strange Horizons or have never heard of Strange Horizons, basically. We're not Asimov's. Our name doesn't open doors the way getting published in Asimov's does, or not the same doors, although I think we pay our writers similarly. Maybe I'm being too humble, but I don't think so.
We're internet-only; we don't have a newstand presence. We also specifically look for marginalized work, stuff we think is great but outside the dominant paradigm, and we connect with readers who don't come to us for the same thing they'd read elsewhere - they go elsewhere for that, if they want it. And I think all of us in the conversation feel deeply about the need for social justice, if that wasn't already obvious, and use every opportunity we have to affirm the experiences of submitters who are maybe less confident, whether because they're just starting out or because they've been told over and over that nobody's interested in what they have to say, no matter how well they write it.
Within that, we're also seeking to form a safe space for readers, who may similarly have not had the opportunity before to see themselves reflected back to themselves. I hate to say "safe space," because I don't believe there is such a thing, and I also don't mean to suggest a monoculture of readers or of poets - I want a big tent. But when I say "safe space" I mean that I'm not just looking for marginalized, because there are some voices I don't think we want to hear more from. We're not a soapbox for hatred, whether it's men toward women or women toward lesbians or aliens toward other aliens that sound suspiciously like Lakota.
It's here again that I nod to what Shweta has said [obviously this is missing and I'm not qualified to paraphrase] concerning overlapping axes of privilege. What I said at the beginning about looking with concern at making sure we don't bias toward women - we're obviously publishing a lot of women and I don't see that stopping anytime soon. But if I look at the poems I'm thinking about and realize they're all from American white ciswomen who have never been poor, even if some of them are on the queer spectrum, I think, hmmm, isn't it convenient they look like me? Am I replacing an old hegemony with another kind of hegemony? Does this reflect what is best, or what is easy for me?
I don't think this is a moral issue, because as noted by Adrienne and Sonya, women have still not acheived overall parity, and for instance I'm perfectly happy to buy stuff like Women Destroy Science Fiction, which is entirely written by women. I think all-women collections have value, as do all-queer collections, all-trans* collections, all African-American, all Indian diaspora, etc, etc: these aggregations work to say "look at how this experience is also universal across a group, and at the same time look at how different these writers are when you stop focusing on the way they're the same."
But at Strange Horizons specifically, well, I take our name seriously as a declaration of what we're looking for. I want something that takes me outside myself or knocks me a little off kilter. I spend a lot of time looking at ethnic and geographic diversity. I'm excited to get poems that come from traditions I'm not a part of, although that means I have to do a little more checking around to make sure I understand them.
To be clear, I am saying if I looked and thought queer white women was all we would be publishing, I would think that was a problem. It's not all we publish. What I'm describing here is me. American white ciswoman from a wealthy background who is straight-identified but on the queer spectrum, able-bodied with able-bodied parents, who grew up a non-blended and culturally mainline Protestant family.
My husband, who is a white straight man, is in many ways more marginalized than I am, because he grew up on food stamps and couldn't afford to go to college until he'd been out of high school more than 10 years, working dead end jobs, sometimes looking after a sick parent, getting turned down for jobs because of bad credit checks. He also falls into more of a "how you define whitness" category, because he's Italian and American - not Italian-American; half of his family is in Italy, and is in the south of Italy. Southern Italians are looked down on within Italy, and he has been referred to by a British functionary as a black man for that reason, although in the US he's unquestionably white. At one point, an Italian woman noticed his Southern-Italian accent and literally frowned, turned up her nose, and walked away as quickly as she could.
Nobody has ever done anything remotely like that to me; my face, gestures, and accent are so associated with the dominant culture that I can do things like walk into an opera fundraiser wearing jeans and have it be "daring" and "hi-lo" rather than a sign I don't belong there.
This is relevant to my editorship at Strange Horizons, because my husband is who got me writing poetry, many years before he became my husband. We were introduced by friends when I was 21 and he was 19, and he was at the time running an underground-prestigious open mic and was considered to be one of the rising starts of the Dallas poetry scene, so I went to check it out. I'd written some poems at that point, but I didn't think of them as poems; I thought of them as comedy bits that took the form of poems because it was funny. Ciro basically knocked me over the head and said, look, not everybody writes confessional goth-y Transcendentalist stuff and you have a distorted view because of who you happened to go to high school with. Through that, I discovered all of these poetry traditions I'd avoided because I wrongly assumed I already knew about them.
And in going to those open mics, where I suspect I was the wealthiest person (in that I had no money but only in a pretend way; I had no money but if I'd gotten in any trouble I could immediately give up being a starving artist and work in an office or call my parents) I among other things developed a sympathy for the Bukowski-poets, and the Ginsburg-poets, and the Chicano-poets++, and other groups that tend to get written off as lowbrow because they talk about the indignities of poverty (although in some cases they don't come from a place of poverty and are trying to imitate it without the necessary insight). And, yeah, sometimes I'd get some kind of "oh isn't that sweet" and "I think all women are beautiful" reactions to my work, but that didn't really change how obvious it was to me that I had a lot of institutional power.
Many years later, more than a decade later, I've had more poems published than my husband, who is the person who opened the door to me, partly because I'm more convinced of my ability to get into places. I don't think I'm a better poet than he is; I think I'm a much sloppier poet than he is. But I look at academic presses and think "yeah, obviously you'd want my stuff; obviously I'm one of you, and my weirdness is highbrow weirdness." I can name drop stuff that sounds super impressive and flash my masters degree around.
When Strange Horizons was recruiting poetry editors a couple of years ago, I noticed and said to my husband "hey, you'd be a great fit for this," and he said "no, it's a long shot for them to go with me, but they'd probably be interested in you." Even though I was somebody most of the SF poetry community had never heard of. And he was right. (Again, maybe I'm being overly humble, because I did pay my dues as an editor if someone can be said to have paid dues, but I'd be shocked if anybody heard my name and went "yes! Romie Stott! Such a fan!")
In terms of what we're seeking, as I've said, I think we're doing pretty well insofar as gender is concerned, so I'm interested in increasing our geographic and ethnic diversity. We're also interested in works in translation and bilingual works, although for financial reasons we'd have to treat works in translation the same way we treat other collaborative works - the original poet and translator (if they are different people) would both have to sign contracts with us and would have to work out between themselves how to split the payment. Although we usually buy first publication rights, we'd be flexible if this was simply the first time a work was published in English.
For further reading I suggest http://shweta-narayan.livejournal.com/204154.html
[my caveats, shared with the interviewer after the discussion derailed, to make sure my diversity generalizations were understood as generalizations, and as having limits in my specific personal experience]
When I said I've never met the majority of the people we publish, that's 100% right. And kind of inevitable, when I say I'm looking for geographic diversity. I have not met as many people who live in South Korea as I have met people who live in Boston, even though I haven't met most people who live in Boston. But when I have been in a room with SF poetry people, for instance at a con or in a roundtable, it's a room (literal or virtual) full of white women, slightly more of whom are Jewish than the general population, plus maybe two white guys (both straight) and a maximum of two non-white women, where by non-white I mean literally anybody who doesn't have skin like milk. Those women of color are most likely some combination of Shweta, Saira Ali, Sofia Samatar, and Amal El-Mohtar.
Let it be said I really, really feel for Shweta [who was involved in the roundtable], who is constantly being called upon to speak for everyone non-white in speculative poetry, which I know has to be exhausting for her particularly because she also has a very full life and projects that don't involve explaining discrimination all day every day, on top of also dealing with discrimination all day every day. I think she's a fantastic poet and fantastic thinker and I want constantly to hear more from her while also understanding why she might be tired as hell of talking. This is not an easy problem to solve and is in most ways insoluble.
[Although I'm talking here about Shweta's specifically being called upon to talk about racial issues, it should be noted that my desire to hear what Shweta's thinking and writing is not dependent on the context "as a woman of color talking about racial issues." I like to hear what she's thinking about a variety of subjects, because she's Shweta Naryan, and I can't come up with a more impressive thing to say about her, because that is enough. That is formidable. If you're not already a fan, get on that.]
But back to the dominant quality of the room. It's really female and really white. It's possible my perception of the room's whiteness is skewed by living near Boston, which is a white-ass town and which is (coincidentally, as far as I can tell) an SF poetry nexus. I'm originally from Dallas, from a majority hispanic neighborhood, and went to schools and churches which were 30-60% black. When I walk into a room and everybody's white, I'm immediately taken aback, but in Boston I can't tell whether that's just an accurate representation of who's around. I think it isn't; I think Greater Boston is really segregated; but I don't know enough to know.
Literally everybody who I'd consider Strange Horizons poetry staff lives around Boston - Me, Sonya, Adrienne, and poetry podcast readers Ciro and Julia Rios. This geographic density is purely by coincidence (except for the unsurprising fact that Ciro and I, being married, live together.) [I can't speak to the review staff; they're not my department and I don't have a lot of interactions with reviewers.]
Caveat two is that, as was already stated in the roundtable [by someone other than me, so this bit is missing], the people I meet may not represent SF poetry as a whole, but this particular subculture or clique of SF poetry in which Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delerium, and Stone Telling operate, which sometimes gets called social justice SF and sometimes gets called progressive SF.
[Recall that as I said above, our submissions feed doesn't really look like what I'm about to describe; it's about a 50/50 gender split and comes from a wider geographic area which one expects has more ethnic and racial diversity. But I can't really tell you how diverse, because when I'm looking at an e-mail I don't know what someone looks or sounds like or where they come from unless they tell me, which there is not usually a reason to do.]
So. When I'm in a room where I can actually see faces, the faces I see are white women, many of whom are Jewish, although not necessarily religiously. (I'd say the dominant religious orientation is agnostic/spiritual.)+
Stepping back from ethnicity to once again consider the group as a whole, overwhelmingly dominantly female, but with a large queer contingent. I think it would even be safe to say majority non-heteronormative, although in most cases this non-heteroness does not mean lesbian but some degree of bisexual or polyamorous or both.* We are in our 30s and maybe early 40s. We started reading and/or writing speculative poetry in the aughts.
(Notably, the aughts was a time when SF poetry really flowered and became more like what it is now. Before that, it was almost entirely doggerel verse or really clunky descriptions of star clusters that you can imagine was written by the same group of guys who say they don't "get" most poetry or abstract art and are more into computer science. A lot of which is still around, but now you have the "new" speculative poetry that is for instance still readable if you know something about poetry.)
There are two other factors which characterize this group, the group who I would call the SF poetry diehards, who don't reflect the only people we publish but which does reflect the people who talk about speculative poetry a lot and who wind up starting new magazines and collections - the people for whom poetry is in some way central, even though most of us also write other stuff, and for whom speculative poetry is the poetry we mostly write.
One: chronic illness. Usually a co-morbidity of an invisible but painful physical illness (such as migranes, fibromyalgia, MS, arthritis, endometriosis) and depression. It is not uncommon for me to be the only fully able-bodied woman in the room, or one of extremely few. Thus there is a continual sense of exhaustion, of being overwhelmed by life, of wanting to take on large projects but then immediately having to pull out because something flares up. As a fairly consistently able-bodied person, I am a minority.
Two: discomfort around the very idea of gender. There is a strong desire to identify as not really female, either as without gender or as genderqueer (which in practice tends to mean female but not femme). I have quite literally run into instances where someone born a woman, still in a woman's body, dressed in female clothes, using female pronouns, considers herself a transman and wants everyone else to respect that she's male just with a female body and in all ways female presentation.
Group her with the women and you're wrong about her self-identity. But to fail to group her with the women in discussions of access (because for instance she could still be published in women-only anthologies, and would likely be barred from men-only spaces) would also be inaccurate. And to simply say trans* would imply a physical/medical process of transitioning that she has not gone through and may not intend to go through.***
I imagine you can see how these two characteristics endemic to the community - discomfort around the idea of gender, chronic health issues which mean a constant state of feeling overwhelmed - make it impossible to get through a straightforward discussion of the gender makeup of our magazines.
We are a pretty neurotic bunch. It may even be a job requirement.
++ Obviously, the Chicano poets have proper names; I'm personally not aware of which name I could namecheck and have you say "oh yeah!" And although I've represented the poetry of my high school as being very transcendentalist/gothy, there was also a lot of Harlem Renaissance influenced stuff, which I liked but couldn't myself write for obvious reasons of being really white.
+ You're not wrong about Jewishness being a boundary case of whiteness - that in some cases, Jewish counts as white and in other cases it doesn't. The link I gave you to Shweta's journal does a pretty good job of exploring the way "centrality" works in category structure. In my experience, in SF poetry, Jewishness is in-group and mostly invisible to not-Jewish people like me, and is not a barrier to publication or inclusion. That said, it's still more common for magazines to put out a Christmas issue or take a Christmas break than it is to mark Rosh Hashana, etc. Point being that when I'm defining whiteness, that's me letting you know what I mean by whiteness as applied to this particular group, rather than saying this is how you also need to define whiteness, which you may have a different perspective on, and which may vary depending on the situation. It's not a right-answer sort of hard line.
** Clarification: as evidenced by the "both," I don't equate polyamory and bisexuality, and am aware someone can be polyamorous and unambiguously heterosexual. [Or unambiguously homosexual.] The first reason I group poly as nevertheless non-heteronormative is that in my experience straight people who identify as polyamorous are closer to queerness than people who define as swingers, people who define as having open marriages, people who identify as adulterers, and people who identify as "normal."
[I'm sure there are subcultural and regional variations, but speaking from my personal experience of the world, if I had to guess who was going to use the term "heteroflexible" out of a group of nominally straight people, or who was going to identify as a Kinsey 2 instead of 1, I'd gamble it would be the person who also used the word "polyamorous." Not all of them would, or maybe even not most of them, but that's where I'd think the odds were best.
However, I don't have to gamble here, because as you have hopefully already guessed from the context in which I introduced the term polyamorous (scroll up if you've forgotten), I am not describing all people who use the term "poly" in all ways they use it, nor am I attempting to. The group of people I'm describing when I talk about a subgroup of female queer-identifying poly-oriented speculative poets I've met in person are people who consider polyamory their sexual orientation and who identify it as part of the queer spectrum even though they are (in this case) people who bias toward straight relationships and thus are not already covered by the labels lesbian or bisexual. I find it faintly ridiculous that I have had to clearly spell out this tautology, but I have been subjected to some bullshit thanks to someone not paying attention.]
As to whether poly is a sexual orientation, I know people who continue to define as poly when they are single, i.e. not in that state of life, and do refer to it as their orientation [because they would find it impossible to achieve sexual satisfaction in a monogamous relationship and would consider attempting to do so in some way a self-betraying lie. I realize other people, some of whom are in poly relationships, just as accurately say poly is not an orientation from them, but a relationship structure in which they currently engage. When I talk about poly-oriented people having a poly orientation, that's what I mean: the poly-oriented ones who say they are poly-oriented. Not those other some other people who don't. (Again with the tautology.)]
So, when I talk about a polyamorist, even an entirely heterosexual one, as engaging in a type of queerness, one could consider it similar to the inclusion of "asexual" and "questioning" and "transgender" in QUILTBAG, all of which could be argued as "not really queer" and/or "not really sexual orientations" while completely missing the fact that someone openly identifying as trans, asexual, or questioning is more likely to find support and community in gay-rights groups than at PTA meetings, even though for instance an asexual person who wants to be asexual with someone of their opposite gender would seem not to overlap with a gay or lesbian person who wants to be extremely sexual with someone of their same gender.
Long story short, when I say "bisexual or poly," I'm trying to get at a category of people [like me but not necessarily exactly like me] who shall we say caucus with the gay people and move in social circles in which the gay population is much higher than in a randomly sampled population, who may occasionally be a target of homophobia or straight-panic, but who are in varying degrees mostly exempt from anti-gay violence and rights revocation - who, unless we say something, might pass as straight to a disinterested observer, but are not people well covered by the default definition of "straightness." That category centrality issue. There's not a simple word for this.
[*** In some cases, this is indeed part of a journey, and in other cases, this is an endpoint. And obviously this is incredibly fraught territory. One-on-one, it's obvious the correct thing to do is treat someone gender neutral or non-transitioning-trans* as they want to be treated, which often reflects a sincere feeling of alienation and marginalization. It is a careful, meaningful, and often hard-fought identity. It is "real."
On the other hand, focusing on that experience of being trans* can derail energy and resources away from a group of more category-central trans* people who are at much greater risk of being murdered, denied healthcare, denied jobs, refused access to children, etc. It could make a population look artificially diverse and cause us to miss discrimination that is taking place.
Speaking personally, I have increasingly dropped genderqueer as a label that applies to me. Even though I defy a number of gender stereotypes and view gender as a continuum rather than a binary (and a continuum on which people don't tend to remain at fixed points, with most descriptions of a thing as "masculine" or "feminine" also strongly culturally dependent), it's mostly irrelevant. For practical purposes, I look and quack like a duck, nor are most girls the kind of "girly girl" I'm not always like (but am also like some of the time). I just don't think we can define our way out of patriarchy; there is actual oppression that happens, and that hits us unequally, me way less so than I think most people in the world.]
[I have disabled all comments on this entry because based on the batshittery I just got out of, which led to me literally telling the interviewer that if she contacted me again before January, including through a third party, I would consider it harrasment, I am not interested in doing anything with this information other than dumping it here in case some sociologist is interested in my attempts to describe a difficult-to-describe population.
If you've read this and it hurt your feelings and you want to call me sexist or homophobic or transphobic or offensive to polyamorous people or racially or ethnically insensitive, maybe take a step back, get some perspective about how deeply I am probably your ally, rant to somebody who isn't me, maybe write a pissed off letter to Dan Savage about how I'm an asshole and he's an asshole and the world is full of assholes, and then if you still want to contact me in January we'll see.]
It's long, though. And obviously I'm cutting out not only the questions, but anything anybody else said, some of which was more interesting than what I said. (I'm also cutting out my direct responses to that stuff.) Otherwise, this is pretty unedited (i.e. rambling). And gets more hairsplitty as it goes on, because I was asked to be increasingly hairsplitty.
[in response to a question about VIDA numbers for Strange Horizons and whether the demographics of what we publish mirror the demographics of what's submitted]
To make my life easy, I'm going to talk in rounded numbers.
Of about the last 50 poems we've accepted, I'd guess about 10 were written by male-identified authors. I say "I guess" because I've never met the majority of the poets we publish, although I can go on the pronouns they use in their bios (if they use pronouns in their bios), and I know what they sound like if they record themselves for the Strange Horizons poetry podcast, which not everyone does. It is possible that some of the people I'm counting as male-identified are only sometimes male-identified and perform femaleness offline or outside of their writing.
The reason I'm framing this in terms of "how many male-identified authors" isn't an unexamined choice to center the male experience; it's because in my personal experience female-identified authors are more likely than male-identified authors to deliberately present as gender neutral, either out of fear of discrimination or because maleness is itself treated as neutral in a way femaleness often isn't. I tend to assume gender-ambiguous authors are not-male, but categorizing them as female would be disrespectful and inaccurate. Hence I find it easier to talk about a male/not-male dichotomy than a male/female dichotomy.
So, with that out of the way, I'm seeing one in five poems we publish coming from someone who reads as male. This is something which concerns me slightly, because we're an all-female editorial staff in the poetry department and because it doesn't reflect our submissions pool, which is normally pretty evenly split - half male-identified names and half female-identified names, with maybe 1 in 50 names more like internet user IDs or hacker tags, obviously assumed names like Darkness or Jumping Cat or Blixx8. (I think I'm making up those names, but if I'm subliminally remembering an actual submitter's tag, know that I'm not referring to them mockingly and your creativity has obviously stuck with me on a deep level.)
I don't think we're overtly discriminating against men, but I worry sometimes that we have a bit of an "old girls network," because a lot of the poets we know personally are people we've met through some level of artistic volunteer work - they're running the same sorts of magazines as we are (and if anyone reading thinks most poetry editors get paid, alas not), donating to the same sorts of magazines we are, and showing up at the same kinds of events we are. It can get a bit geographically incestuous, but aside from that I think women are more used to working hard for free. [sad trombone.]
I personally try to enforce diversity in my acceptances, not through any quota system but through comparing what I'm seeing to what I have seen. We get some really, really good submissions, more poems I really love than poems we have slots to publish. So when I'm deciding what parts of my hands to cut off, which is kind of what it feels like in the last stages of picking what goes in (I get very Roy Batty "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"), part of what I'm looking at is how unusual something is - not just whether it resonates with me, but whether it will show the readership something they haven't seen much of lately. Or at all.
Which means sometimes having to figure out how to wire a payment to someone in rural Nigeria. And also means that I get very fierce about protecting the right of poets to use language that "sounds" right to them, because this is poetry and sometimes that means odd punctuation and non-prosaic grammar, and I don't want to correct out one of the voices I'm trying to include.
I've left the trans* experience out of my analysis to this point, partly because unless I'm told directly, it's hard to know. Since I have occasionally been told directly, I can estimate that around 1 in 10 of the last 50 poems we've accepted recently is by someone trans-identified. So at a guess, if you were to pick a random 10 poems from our magazine, 2 would be by cismen, 1 would be by someone trans*, 1 would be by someone gender-ambiguous, and 6 would be by ciswomen.
Speaking about making an editorial choice to seek diversity of contributors and of subject, I think Rose Lemberg has written provocatively about the subject here: http://roselemberg.net/?p=901 (which I suspect we've all already read?)
In what may be a funny coincidence, I've noticed more male-identified people sending me unsolicited attachments or asking me if it really counts that the poem has been published elsewhere (in a blog or online forum), but every instance I can think of in which I know someone has simultanously submitted (either because they've withdrawn the submission because it was published elsewhere or asked after it was accepted whether it was ok that it was going to be coming out somewhere else first) has been from someone female-identified. I don't know whether that means women do it more or just that women are more likely to tell me when it happens.
Even though I've said we publish a majority of women, I find it very hard to read a poem we publish or a poem that's been submitted and guess whether it was written by a man or woman, and I find it impossible to look at someone's name and guess what kind of poem they're going to write. I'm not doing PR spin when I say we get really good submissions. Not just good poems, but poems from people who clearly read us and get what we're doing. Which among other things has a certain playfulness to it.
I was racking my brain for poetic gender trends and the one that occured to me, which I was surprised by, is the dude haiku. I don't think of haiku as a particularly male form, but I think every haiku that's been submitted during one of my reading periods has been by a guy. Dudely haikuing.
I can't say how representative we are of speculative poetry as a whole. I'd like to think we're influential voices; we do have readers, some of whom nominate the works we publish for awards, and some of whom contribute generously to kickstarters to help us put out more stuff. But I also think we're marginal voices. People are either readers of Strange Horizons or have never heard of Strange Horizons, basically. We're not Asimov's. Our name doesn't open doors the way getting published in Asimov's does, or not the same doors, although I think we pay our writers similarly. Maybe I'm being too humble, but I don't think so.
We're internet-only; we don't have a newstand presence. We also specifically look for marginalized work, stuff we think is great but outside the dominant paradigm, and we connect with readers who don't come to us for the same thing they'd read elsewhere - they go elsewhere for that, if they want it. And I think all of us in the conversation feel deeply about the need for social justice, if that wasn't already obvious, and use every opportunity we have to affirm the experiences of submitters who are maybe less confident, whether because they're just starting out or because they've been told over and over that nobody's interested in what they have to say, no matter how well they write it.
Within that, we're also seeking to form a safe space for readers, who may similarly have not had the opportunity before to see themselves reflected back to themselves. I hate to say "safe space," because I don't believe there is such a thing, and I also don't mean to suggest a monoculture of readers or of poets - I want a big tent. But when I say "safe space" I mean that I'm not just looking for marginalized, because there are some voices I don't think we want to hear more from. We're not a soapbox for hatred, whether it's men toward women or women toward lesbians or aliens toward other aliens that sound suspiciously like Lakota.
It's here again that I nod to what Shweta has said [obviously this is missing and I'm not qualified to paraphrase] concerning overlapping axes of privilege. What I said at the beginning about looking with concern at making sure we don't bias toward women - we're obviously publishing a lot of women and I don't see that stopping anytime soon. But if I look at the poems I'm thinking about and realize they're all from American white ciswomen who have never been poor, even if some of them are on the queer spectrum, I think, hmmm, isn't it convenient they look like me? Am I replacing an old hegemony with another kind of hegemony? Does this reflect what is best, or what is easy for me?
I don't think this is a moral issue, because as noted by Adrienne and Sonya, women have still not acheived overall parity, and for instance I'm perfectly happy to buy stuff like Women Destroy Science Fiction, which is entirely written by women. I think all-women collections have value, as do all-queer collections, all-trans* collections, all African-American, all Indian diaspora, etc, etc: these aggregations work to say "look at how this experience is also universal across a group, and at the same time look at how different these writers are when you stop focusing on the way they're the same."
But at Strange Horizons specifically, well, I take our name seriously as a declaration of what we're looking for. I want something that takes me outside myself or knocks me a little off kilter. I spend a lot of time looking at ethnic and geographic diversity. I'm excited to get poems that come from traditions I'm not a part of, although that means I have to do a little more checking around to make sure I understand them.
To be clear, I am saying if I looked and thought queer white women was all we would be publishing, I would think that was a problem. It's not all we publish. What I'm describing here is me. American white ciswoman from a wealthy background who is straight-identified but on the queer spectrum, able-bodied with able-bodied parents, who grew up a non-blended and culturally mainline Protestant family.
My husband, who is a white straight man, is in many ways more marginalized than I am, because he grew up on food stamps and couldn't afford to go to college until he'd been out of high school more than 10 years, working dead end jobs, sometimes looking after a sick parent, getting turned down for jobs because of bad credit checks. He also falls into more of a "how you define whitness" category, because he's Italian and American - not Italian-American; half of his family is in Italy, and is in the south of Italy. Southern Italians are looked down on within Italy, and he has been referred to by a British functionary as a black man for that reason, although in the US he's unquestionably white. At one point, an Italian woman noticed his Southern-Italian accent and literally frowned, turned up her nose, and walked away as quickly as she could.
Nobody has ever done anything remotely like that to me; my face, gestures, and accent are so associated with the dominant culture that I can do things like walk into an opera fundraiser wearing jeans and have it be "daring" and "hi-lo" rather than a sign I don't belong there.
This is relevant to my editorship at Strange Horizons, because my husband is who got me writing poetry, many years before he became my husband. We were introduced by friends when I was 21 and he was 19, and he was at the time running an underground-prestigious open mic and was considered to be one of the rising starts of the Dallas poetry scene, so I went to check it out. I'd written some poems at that point, but I didn't think of them as poems; I thought of them as comedy bits that took the form of poems because it was funny. Ciro basically knocked me over the head and said, look, not everybody writes confessional goth-y Transcendentalist stuff and you have a distorted view because of who you happened to go to high school with. Through that, I discovered all of these poetry traditions I'd avoided because I wrongly assumed I already knew about them.
And in going to those open mics, where I suspect I was the wealthiest person (in that I had no money but only in a pretend way; I had no money but if I'd gotten in any trouble I could immediately give up being a starving artist and work in an office or call my parents) I among other things developed a sympathy for the Bukowski-poets, and the Ginsburg-poets, and the Chicano-poets++, and other groups that tend to get written off as lowbrow because they talk about the indignities of poverty (although in some cases they don't come from a place of poverty and are trying to imitate it without the necessary insight). And, yeah, sometimes I'd get some kind of "oh isn't that sweet" and "I think all women are beautiful" reactions to my work, but that didn't really change how obvious it was to me that I had a lot of institutional power.
Many years later, more than a decade later, I've had more poems published than my husband, who is the person who opened the door to me, partly because I'm more convinced of my ability to get into places. I don't think I'm a better poet than he is; I think I'm a much sloppier poet than he is. But I look at academic presses and think "yeah, obviously you'd want my stuff; obviously I'm one of you, and my weirdness is highbrow weirdness." I can name drop stuff that sounds super impressive and flash my masters degree around.
When Strange Horizons was recruiting poetry editors a couple of years ago, I noticed and said to my husband "hey, you'd be a great fit for this," and he said "no, it's a long shot for them to go with me, but they'd probably be interested in you." Even though I was somebody most of the SF poetry community had never heard of. And he was right. (Again, maybe I'm being overly humble, because I did pay my dues as an editor if someone can be said to have paid dues, but I'd be shocked if anybody heard my name and went "yes! Romie Stott! Such a fan!")
In terms of what we're seeking, as I've said, I think we're doing pretty well insofar as gender is concerned, so I'm interested in increasing our geographic and ethnic diversity. We're also interested in works in translation and bilingual works, although for financial reasons we'd have to treat works in translation the same way we treat other collaborative works - the original poet and translator (if they are different people) would both have to sign contracts with us and would have to work out between themselves how to split the payment. Although we usually buy first publication rights, we'd be flexible if this was simply the first time a work was published in English.
For further reading I suggest http://shweta-narayan.livejournal.com/204154.html
[my caveats, shared with the interviewer after the discussion derailed, to make sure my diversity generalizations were understood as generalizations, and as having limits in my specific personal experience]
When I said I've never met the majority of the people we publish, that's 100% right. And kind of inevitable, when I say I'm looking for geographic diversity. I have not met as many people who live in South Korea as I have met people who live in Boston, even though I haven't met most people who live in Boston. But when I have been in a room with SF poetry people, for instance at a con or in a roundtable, it's a room (literal or virtual) full of white women, slightly more of whom are Jewish than the general population, plus maybe two white guys (both straight) and a maximum of two non-white women, where by non-white I mean literally anybody who doesn't have skin like milk. Those women of color are most likely some combination of Shweta, Saira Ali, Sofia Samatar, and Amal El-Mohtar.
Let it be said I really, really feel for Shweta [who was involved in the roundtable], who is constantly being called upon to speak for everyone non-white in speculative poetry, which I know has to be exhausting for her particularly because she also has a very full life and projects that don't involve explaining discrimination all day every day, on top of also dealing with discrimination all day every day. I think she's a fantastic poet and fantastic thinker and I want constantly to hear more from her while also understanding why she might be tired as hell of talking. This is not an easy problem to solve and is in most ways insoluble.
[Although I'm talking here about Shweta's specifically being called upon to talk about racial issues, it should be noted that my desire to hear what Shweta's thinking and writing is not dependent on the context "as a woman of color talking about racial issues." I like to hear what she's thinking about a variety of subjects, because she's Shweta Naryan, and I can't come up with a more impressive thing to say about her, because that is enough. That is formidable. If you're not already a fan, get on that.]
But back to the dominant quality of the room. It's really female and really white. It's possible my perception of the room's whiteness is skewed by living near Boston, which is a white-ass town and which is (coincidentally, as far as I can tell) an SF poetry nexus. I'm originally from Dallas, from a majority hispanic neighborhood, and went to schools and churches which were 30-60% black. When I walk into a room and everybody's white, I'm immediately taken aback, but in Boston I can't tell whether that's just an accurate representation of who's around. I think it isn't; I think Greater Boston is really segregated; but I don't know enough to know.
Literally everybody who I'd consider Strange Horizons poetry staff lives around Boston - Me, Sonya, Adrienne, and poetry podcast readers Ciro and Julia Rios. This geographic density is purely by coincidence (except for the unsurprising fact that Ciro and I, being married, live together.) [I can't speak to the review staff; they're not my department and I don't have a lot of interactions with reviewers.]
Caveat two is that, as was already stated in the roundtable [by someone other than me, so this bit is missing], the people I meet may not represent SF poetry as a whole, but this particular subculture or clique of SF poetry in which Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delerium, and Stone Telling operate, which sometimes gets called social justice SF and sometimes gets called progressive SF.
[Recall that as I said above, our submissions feed doesn't really look like what I'm about to describe; it's about a 50/50 gender split and comes from a wider geographic area which one expects has more ethnic and racial diversity. But I can't really tell you how diverse, because when I'm looking at an e-mail I don't know what someone looks or sounds like or where they come from unless they tell me, which there is not usually a reason to do.]
So. When I'm in a room where I can actually see faces, the faces I see are white women, many of whom are Jewish, although not necessarily religiously. (I'd say the dominant religious orientation is agnostic/spiritual.)+
Stepping back from ethnicity to once again consider the group as a whole, overwhelmingly dominantly female, but with a large queer contingent. I think it would even be safe to say majority non-heteronormative, although in most cases this non-heteroness does not mean lesbian but some degree of bisexual or polyamorous or both.* We are in our 30s and maybe early 40s. We started reading and/or writing speculative poetry in the aughts.
(Notably, the aughts was a time when SF poetry really flowered and became more like what it is now. Before that, it was almost entirely doggerel verse or really clunky descriptions of star clusters that you can imagine was written by the same group of guys who say they don't "get" most poetry or abstract art and are more into computer science. A lot of which is still around, but now you have the "new" speculative poetry that is for instance still readable if you know something about poetry.)
There are two other factors which characterize this group, the group who I would call the SF poetry diehards, who don't reflect the only people we publish but which does reflect the people who talk about speculative poetry a lot and who wind up starting new magazines and collections - the people for whom poetry is in some way central, even though most of us also write other stuff, and for whom speculative poetry is the poetry we mostly write.
One: chronic illness. Usually a co-morbidity of an invisible but painful physical illness (such as migranes, fibromyalgia, MS, arthritis, endometriosis) and depression. It is not uncommon for me to be the only fully able-bodied woman in the room, or one of extremely few. Thus there is a continual sense of exhaustion, of being overwhelmed by life, of wanting to take on large projects but then immediately having to pull out because something flares up. As a fairly consistently able-bodied person, I am a minority.
Two: discomfort around the very idea of gender. There is a strong desire to identify as not really female, either as without gender or as genderqueer (which in practice tends to mean female but not femme). I have quite literally run into instances where someone born a woman, still in a woman's body, dressed in female clothes, using female pronouns, considers herself a transman and wants everyone else to respect that she's male just with a female body and in all ways female presentation.
Group her with the women and you're wrong about her self-identity. But to fail to group her with the women in discussions of access (because for instance she could still be published in women-only anthologies, and would likely be barred from men-only spaces) would also be inaccurate. And to simply say trans* would imply a physical/medical process of transitioning that she has not gone through and may not intend to go through.***
I imagine you can see how these two characteristics endemic to the community - discomfort around the idea of gender, chronic health issues which mean a constant state of feeling overwhelmed - make it impossible to get through a straightforward discussion of the gender makeup of our magazines.
We are a pretty neurotic bunch. It may even be a job requirement.
++ Obviously, the Chicano poets have proper names; I'm personally not aware of which name I could namecheck and have you say "oh yeah!" And although I've represented the poetry of my high school as being very transcendentalist/gothy, there was also a lot of Harlem Renaissance influenced stuff, which I liked but couldn't myself write for obvious reasons of being really white.
+ You're not wrong about Jewishness being a boundary case of whiteness - that in some cases, Jewish counts as white and in other cases it doesn't. The link I gave you to Shweta's journal does a pretty good job of exploring the way "centrality" works in category structure. In my experience, in SF poetry, Jewishness is in-group and mostly invisible to not-Jewish people like me, and is not a barrier to publication or inclusion. That said, it's still more common for magazines to put out a Christmas issue or take a Christmas break than it is to mark Rosh Hashana, etc. Point being that when I'm defining whiteness, that's me letting you know what I mean by whiteness as applied to this particular group, rather than saying this is how you also need to define whiteness, which you may have a different perspective on, and which may vary depending on the situation. It's not a right-answer sort of hard line.
** Clarification: as evidenced by the "both," I don't equate polyamory and bisexuality, and am aware someone can be polyamorous and unambiguously heterosexual. [Or unambiguously homosexual.] The first reason I group poly as nevertheless non-heteronormative is that in my experience straight people who identify as polyamorous are closer to queerness than people who define as swingers, people who define as having open marriages, people who identify as adulterers, and people who identify as "normal."
[I'm sure there are subcultural and regional variations, but speaking from my personal experience of the world, if I had to guess who was going to use the term "heteroflexible" out of a group of nominally straight people, or who was going to identify as a Kinsey 2 instead of 1, I'd gamble it would be the person who also used the word "polyamorous." Not all of them would, or maybe even not most of them, but that's where I'd think the odds were best.
However, I don't have to gamble here, because as you have hopefully already guessed from the context in which I introduced the term polyamorous (scroll up if you've forgotten), I am not describing all people who use the term "poly" in all ways they use it, nor am I attempting to. The group of people I'm describing when I talk about a subgroup of female queer-identifying poly-oriented speculative poets I've met in person are people who consider polyamory their sexual orientation and who identify it as part of the queer spectrum even though they are (in this case) people who bias toward straight relationships and thus are not already covered by the labels lesbian or bisexual. I find it faintly ridiculous that I have had to clearly spell out this tautology, but I have been subjected to some bullshit thanks to someone not paying attention.]
As to whether poly is a sexual orientation, I know people who continue to define as poly when they are single, i.e. not in that state of life, and do refer to it as their orientation [because they would find it impossible to achieve sexual satisfaction in a monogamous relationship and would consider attempting to do so in some way a self-betraying lie. I realize other people, some of whom are in poly relationships, just as accurately say poly is not an orientation from them, but a relationship structure in which they currently engage. When I talk about poly-oriented people having a poly orientation, that's what I mean: the poly-oriented ones who say they are poly-oriented. Not those other some other people who don't. (Again with the tautology.)]
So, when I talk about a polyamorist, even an entirely heterosexual one, as engaging in a type of queerness, one could consider it similar to the inclusion of "asexual" and "questioning" and "transgender" in QUILTBAG, all of which could be argued as "not really queer" and/or "not really sexual orientations" while completely missing the fact that someone openly identifying as trans, asexual, or questioning is more likely to find support and community in gay-rights groups than at PTA meetings, even though for instance an asexual person who wants to be asexual with someone of their opposite gender would seem not to overlap with a gay or lesbian person who wants to be extremely sexual with someone of their same gender.
Long story short, when I say "bisexual or poly," I'm trying to get at a category of people [like me but not necessarily exactly like me] who shall we say caucus with the gay people and move in social circles in which the gay population is much higher than in a randomly sampled population, who may occasionally be a target of homophobia or straight-panic, but who are in varying degrees mostly exempt from anti-gay violence and rights revocation - who, unless we say something, might pass as straight to a disinterested observer, but are not people well covered by the default definition of "straightness." That category centrality issue. There's not a simple word for this.
[*** In some cases, this is indeed part of a journey, and in other cases, this is an endpoint. And obviously this is incredibly fraught territory. One-on-one, it's obvious the correct thing to do is treat someone gender neutral or non-transitioning-trans* as they want to be treated, which often reflects a sincere feeling of alienation and marginalization. It is a careful, meaningful, and often hard-fought identity. It is "real."
On the other hand, focusing on that experience of being trans* can derail energy and resources away from a group of more category-central trans* people who are at much greater risk of being murdered, denied healthcare, denied jobs, refused access to children, etc. It could make a population look artificially diverse and cause us to miss discrimination that is taking place.
Speaking personally, I have increasingly dropped genderqueer as a label that applies to me. Even though I defy a number of gender stereotypes and view gender as a continuum rather than a binary (and a continuum on which people don't tend to remain at fixed points, with most descriptions of a thing as "masculine" or "feminine" also strongly culturally dependent), it's mostly irrelevant. For practical purposes, I look and quack like a duck, nor are most girls the kind of "girly girl" I'm not always like (but am also like some of the time). I just don't think we can define our way out of patriarchy; there is actual oppression that happens, and that hits us unequally, me way less so than I think most people in the world.]
[I have disabled all comments on this entry because based on the batshittery I just got out of, which led to me literally telling the interviewer that if she contacted me again before January, including through a third party, I would consider it harrasment, I am not interested in doing anything with this information other than dumping it here in case some sociologist is interested in my attempts to describe a difficult-to-describe population.
If you've read this and it hurt your feelings and you want to call me sexist or homophobic or transphobic or offensive to polyamorous people or racially or ethnically insensitive, maybe take a step back, get some perspective about how deeply I am probably your ally, rant to somebody who isn't me, maybe write a pissed off letter to Dan Savage about how I'm an asshole and he's an asshole and the world is full of assholes, and then if you still want to contact me in January we'll see.]
