Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022Liked by Stacey Eskelin
You've hit so many points right on target here, Stacey. Bravo!
I'm a Midwestern white woman who grew up in Detroit in the 1950s. I remember the race riots of the 1940s, and, as terrifying as they were, I knew even then which side I was on.
I grew up in a liberal household and always wished we could forget about caste and color and just live together without those artificial barriers.
We couldn't. Not then, and, most astonishing, considering this is the 21st Century, not now. I thought the Civil Rights Movement would do it. We saw the unfairness and the inequities up close and personal, and it seemed we had turned the corner and were ready to put racism behind us.
We hadn't. There were forces against it that grew stronger, mainly in places of power, and we miscalculated their influence until it was too late.
And here we are now, still trying to uplift Black and brown voices in a culture that insists we're Christian and white and straight, and, of course, Republican.
We're not. My own feeling, maybe because I'm this old, is that we need to break those barriers by seeing ourselves together, rather than separate. Not that we look beyond color, or any other difference, but that we celebrate our differences and learn from each other.
My own background is mixed, of a sort: My mother was Finnish Lutheran and my father was Italian Catholic. I love that I'm all of those things, but I'm free to love them. Nobody is looking down at me because of my 'mixture'. Most aren't even aware of it, and it wouldn't come up if I were to appear somewhere looking for a job in publishing, or anywhere else.
My age might do it, but not my color or culture. We need that diversity. What a dull world this would be if we didn't have access to stories and songs allowing us into those other places, meeting those other people, celebrating those differences. We'll know we've arrived when we stop expecting perfection, or imperfection, and just see successes and failures as part of the human existence.
It all needs to change, and if all we can do is write about the reasons why, well, that's what we need to do.
Thank you for this. The conversation is long overdue, yet inevitable.
MAN, are you a powerful writer. I can smell a good writer within the first two sentences, and that is you, Ramona. I'm looking forward to reading more of your work.
I'm also Finnish! The name gives it away, obviously, but I have not one drop of Italian blood, which is a huge pity. And I'm right there with you--we NEED diversity. When I go to countries without diversity, I often find them sadly lacking.
I'm always a little intimidated to post some of the articles I do, especially when they go against the orthodoxy of my own clan (liberals). But these conversations need to take place. If I shed a few subscribers, which I sometimes do, that's the price one pays for speaking up.
I know you'll keep writing. You're so very good at it.
Thanks so much, Stacey. All I can say is it takes one to know one!
It's hard to go against the clan. I've done it, too, and it's far more painful than going against my enemies. But if we're doing it right, we build our reputations on honesty. It's what our readers expect of us, and if any of them are offended, there's always the door.
I've been opinionating for decades so my skin should be pretty tough by now!
"Make it the coolest, most interesting, most subversive, most cutting edge, most creative space you can. Hone your voice. Do your art. Don’t worry what anyone else thinks." Hear hear. I'm trying to do just that. I don't know if anyone will read what I have to say, much less pay for it, but I can work to improve, to become the best purveyor of the best version of my craft I can. And that will have to suffice. Whatever that brings to this world will have to be enough. I can do no more, and I can't bring myself to do less.
What I can't control is how others react to it or what they do with it. What will be will be. And I'm OK with that. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to be widely read and acclaimed, only that I don't write with that in mind. I write selfishly, but there are a few people (yes, I'm talking about you, m'dear) whose opinions are important to me. If they like what I'm doing, I figure I must be doing something right.
As for inclusiveness...hey, it's not easy being a member of the oppressing class. Being White, Northern European, and (GASP!!) male, I could be a leper and probably be better regarded. I am glad, though, to see other voices come to the fore. I just wish there was room for all of us. It would seem the pie is one-size-fits-all, though.
Ah, well...I concern myself with what I can control and try not to fret over what I can't. Life is easier that way. :-)
For what it's worth, you will always have my adoration and respect. You're my brother by another mother. Plus, I LOVE talent, and you have oodles of it, just like Gary. Also a heart. And a brain. And good common sense.
You are now and will forever be "one of the good ones."
I did a first draft of a story that, upon examination and commentary, became a trilogy. I then sat in my various computers for over 20 years. For reasons, I dug it back out, and rushed my own editing so that I could self-publish on Kindle. Fortunately, since no one has or ever will read it, I've not had to deal with the issue that would certainly come up if anyone actually did: cultural appropriation.
Now, my defense is that it is not taking place in *THIS* world, so the cultures are merely similar, with traces of common evolution, but not identical. But still, that accusation would come.
When I write fiction, I write fantasy. So the notion that I must somehow be locked into just and only those things I "know" is pretty absurd. Nobody "knows" any of this shit; I'm making it all up. I'm bound to the laws of narrative intelligibility and logical coherence; but empirical adequacy dies long before we ever get to historical accuracy. But still, I understand how it might seem as though I am trampling over marginalized peoples' stories with my own. I'm not altogether sure what to do about that, though I'm not removing the stories from Amazon.
I've heard your story about "just another white woman getting divorced," and it has always grated me. I am reminded of Robert A. Heinlein's story, "Starship Troopers": just another white boy saving the universe. I mean, it was pure Rah-Rah, John Wayne "Sands of Iwo Jima" militarist jingoism. Heinlein knew that, and did it on purpose. This was in 1960.
There was always something a bit off-putting about the central characters name, though most people called him "Johnny." It was only in the last 3 of some 250+ pages that "Johnny" looked in the mirror and described his physical features.
Turns out that Johnny was black. (By American standards of the day. He was actually dark-skinned Filipino tracing his cultural heritage back to Roger Magsaysay.)
I completely missed that part. But Samuel R. Delany did not. Delany (black, gay with a hint of bi) read that story and was, by his own account, undone and remade. A world in which race and racism were so beyond anyone's thought that no one ever imagined talking about it. He went on from that moment to become one of the leading science fiction authors of our age.
What I am resisting here, I think, is the idea that stories cannot be universal, that in order to be inclusive they must be narrow and specific. I'm not satisfied that a fantasy such as "Bridgerton" really works, since it is embedding itself in a world of colonial exploitation without ever even casting an eye in that direction. If your setting is this world, you don't get to pretend that it isn't.
I don't know. Inclusion is not, can not be, a mere matter of tokens at the table. The Supreme Court is not more inclusive because Justice Uncle Thomas sits on it.
Every. Single. Thing. You. Just. Said. I agree with so much of it, I couldn't possibly "quote and respond." I need to read more Delany. I need to read more Heinlein, for that matter. All I've tackled was Strangers in a Strange Land.
Your phrase, "undone and remade," I am totally bogarting. Fair warning.
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is probably my favorite "middle" Heinlein. (He was supposed to die like three times before he actually did. Each point marked the end of one era of his writing and the beginning of the next.) When you get to his later works, it is clear that the silly old coot was trying hard not to be a sexist dummy, even though he clearly was. But the fact that he tried so hard to be better than he was really raises my estimation of him. He was what I would describe as a "failed libertarian." When he talks about it his stories, he thinks he's a libertarian. But when he just sits back and writes his stories, it is clear that the most important thing in the world to him is love and community.
Oh: and "The Door Into Summer." The story itself is fun and inoffensive. But the story behind the story is what makes it a jewel. He and his wife lived in Colorado for some while, and every day of every winter, his cat would make this outraged demand of him to go to every single door in the house -- going inside or out -- and open it for the cat to inspect. Heinlein finally commented upon this behavior to his wife, and she replied: "Silly, he's just looking for the door into summer." Heinlein was so struck by the phrase that he wrote the book by that title in a week. My favorite of his later works is "Job: A Comedy of Justice." Quite honestly, "Stranger" never "clicked" with me the way it did with so many others.
(Oh, one of the things in "Troopers" that I've always liked was that anyone could live and work in the society at whatever level they wanted. But to be a voting *citizen* they had to engage in some form of public service. In the book, the only service he posited was military. But the idea of mandatory public service of some manner (3 -- 4 years as a hospital orderly, a hospice worker, road construction, with the same investment in training that the military gives its tech people) is a notion I rather approve of. But mandatory investment in the community. Like I said: *failed* libertarian.)
Everything Delany wrote was and is a classic. His essays are themselves must-reads. I'd call "Dhalgren" his greatest work: he takes Joyce and goes one step further. "... to wound the Autumnal city." As with "Riverrun", it begins in the middle of a sentence. But while 'Finnegan's Wake' is a circle, 'Dhalgren' is a mobius strip. By the time the story returns to the beginning, all of the characters have reversed gender and position in the tale.
That sounds INCREDIBLE. Funny, I can write damn near anything--fiction, nonfiction, any genre--but I cannot write science fiction.
One of my favorite characters in Party Down is Roman DeBoers, a self-professed science fiction writer who is SO pedantic, the only time he writes anything worthwhile is when he accidentally ingests large amounts of cannabis and trips his balls off in the bathroom.
Delany, in one of his essays, argues that SF&F is actually the primary form of fiction, all others being sub-genres. This is because SF&F enjoys the greatest liberty with modality -- possibility, potentiality -- over all of the other sub-genres which are (by definition) more restricted in how they play with those modalities.
Within the limited span of my own philosophical contacts, acquaintances, and colleagues, those who dabble in fiction always dabble in SF&F. We're already habituated to dealing (rather promiscuously) with alternative- and possible-worlds. I mean, my "&F" is all fantasy. (I had to argue that point with friends regarding the self-published trilogy. But that is still fantasy, not SF.)
You've hit so many points right on target here, Stacey. Bravo!
I'm a Midwestern white woman who grew up in Detroit in the 1950s. I remember the race riots of the 1940s, and, as terrifying as they were, I knew even then which side I was on.
I grew up in a liberal household and always wished we could forget about caste and color and just live together without those artificial barriers.
We couldn't. Not then, and, most astonishing, considering this is the 21st Century, not now. I thought the Civil Rights Movement would do it. We saw the unfairness and the inequities up close and personal, and it seemed we had turned the corner and were ready to put racism behind us.
We hadn't. There were forces against it that grew stronger, mainly in places of power, and we miscalculated their influence until it was too late.
And here we are now, still trying to uplift Black and brown voices in a culture that insists we're Christian and white and straight, and, of course, Republican.
We're not. My own feeling, maybe because I'm this old, is that we need to break those barriers by seeing ourselves together, rather than separate. Not that we look beyond color, or any other difference, but that we celebrate our differences and learn from each other.
My own background is mixed, of a sort: My mother was Finnish Lutheran and my father was Italian Catholic. I love that I'm all of those things, but I'm free to love them. Nobody is looking down at me because of my 'mixture'. Most aren't even aware of it, and it wouldn't come up if I were to appear somewhere looking for a job in publishing, or anywhere else.
My age might do it, but not my color or culture. We need that diversity. What a dull world this would be if we didn't have access to stories and songs allowing us into those other places, meeting those other people, celebrating those differences. We'll know we've arrived when we stop expecting perfection, or imperfection, and just see successes and failures as part of the human existence.
It all needs to change, and if all we can do is write about the reasons why, well, that's what we need to do.
Thank you for this. The conversation is long overdue, yet inevitable.
MAN, are you a powerful writer. I can smell a good writer within the first two sentences, and that is you, Ramona. I'm looking forward to reading more of your work.
I'm also Finnish! The name gives it away, obviously, but I have not one drop of Italian blood, which is a huge pity. And I'm right there with you--we NEED diversity. When I go to countries without diversity, I often find them sadly lacking.
I'm always a little intimidated to post some of the articles I do, especially when they go against the orthodoxy of my own clan (liberals). But these conversations need to take place. If I shed a few subscribers, which I sometimes do, that's the price one pays for speaking up.
I know you'll keep writing. You're so very good at it.
Thanks so much, Stacey. All I can say is it takes one to know one!
It's hard to go against the clan. I've done it, too, and it's far more painful than going against my enemies. But if we're doing it right, we build our reputations on honesty. It's what our readers expect of us, and if any of them are offended, there's always the door.
I've been opinionating for decades so my skin should be pretty tough by now!
"Opinionated for decades." No wonder I like you!
LOL. I've written about it a few times. This is one I reposted on Substack:
https://writereverlasting.substack.com/p/how-to-survive-writing-opinion-pieces
"Make it the coolest, most interesting, most subversive, most cutting edge, most creative space you can. Hone your voice. Do your art. Don’t worry what anyone else thinks." Hear hear. I'm trying to do just that. I don't know if anyone will read what I have to say, much less pay for it, but I can work to improve, to become the best purveyor of the best version of my craft I can. And that will have to suffice. Whatever that brings to this world will have to be enough. I can do no more, and I can't bring myself to do less.
What I can't control is how others react to it or what they do with it. What will be will be. And I'm OK with that. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to be widely read and acclaimed, only that I don't write with that in mind. I write selfishly, but there are a few people (yes, I'm talking about you, m'dear) whose opinions are important to me. If they like what I'm doing, I figure I must be doing something right.
As for inclusiveness...hey, it's not easy being a member of the oppressing class. Being White, Northern European, and (GASP!!) male, I could be a leper and probably be better regarded. I am glad, though, to see other voices come to the fore. I just wish there was room for all of us. It would seem the pie is one-size-fits-all, though.
Ah, well...I concern myself with what I can control and try not to fret over what I can't. Life is easier that way. :-)
For what it's worth, you will always have my adoration and respect. You're my brother by another mother. Plus, I LOVE talent, and you have oodles of it, just like Gary. Also a heart. And a brain. And good common sense.
You are now and will forever be "one of the good ones."
Don't think I don't know that.
Awww...if only you could see me blushing over da Interwebz....🤗❤️
I did a first draft of a story that, upon examination and commentary, became a trilogy. I then sat in my various computers for over 20 years. For reasons, I dug it back out, and rushed my own editing so that I could self-publish on Kindle. Fortunately, since no one has or ever will read it, I've not had to deal with the issue that would certainly come up if anyone actually did: cultural appropriation.
Now, my defense is that it is not taking place in *THIS* world, so the cultures are merely similar, with traces of common evolution, but not identical. But still, that accusation would come.
When I write fiction, I write fantasy. So the notion that I must somehow be locked into just and only those things I "know" is pretty absurd. Nobody "knows" any of this shit; I'm making it all up. I'm bound to the laws of narrative intelligibility and logical coherence; but empirical adequacy dies long before we ever get to historical accuracy. But still, I understand how it might seem as though I am trampling over marginalized peoples' stories with my own. I'm not altogether sure what to do about that, though I'm not removing the stories from Amazon.
I've heard your story about "just another white woman getting divorced," and it has always grated me. I am reminded of Robert A. Heinlein's story, "Starship Troopers": just another white boy saving the universe. I mean, it was pure Rah-Rah, John Wayne "Sands of Iwo Jima" militarist jingoism. Heinlein knew that, and did it on purpose. This was in 1960.
There was always something a bit off-putting about the central characters name, though most people called him "Johnny." It was only in the last 3 of some 250+ pages that "Johnny" looked in the mirror and described his physical features.
Turns out that Johnny was black. (By American standards of the day. He was actually dark-skinned Filipino tracing his cultural heritage back to Roger Magsaysay.)
I completely missed that part. But Samuel R. Delany did not. Delany (black, gay with a hint of bi) read that story and was, by his own account, undone and remade. A world in which race and racism were so beyond anyone's thought that no one ever imagined talking about it. He went on from that moment to become one of the leading science fiction authors of our age.
What I am resisting here, I think, is the idea that stories cannot be universal, that in order to be inclusive they must be narrow and specific. I'm not satisfied that a fantasy such as "Bridgerton" really works, since it is embedding itself in a world of colonial exploitation without ever even casting an eye in that direction. If your setting is this world, you don't get to pretend that it isn't.
I don't know. Inclusion is not, can not be, a mere matter of tokens at the table. The Supreme Court is not more inclusive because Justice Uncle Thomas sits on it.
Every. Single. Thing. You. Just. Said. I agree with so much of it, I couldn't possibly "quote and respond." I need to read more Delany. I need to read more Heinlein, for that matter. All I've tackled was Strangers in a Strange Land.
Your phrase, "undone and remade," I am totally bogarting. Fair warning.
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is probably my favorite "middle" Heinlein. (He was supposed to die like three times before he actually did. Each point marked the end of one era of his writing and the beginning of the next.) When you get to his later works, it is clear that the silly old coot was trying hard not to be a sexist dummy, even though he clearly was. But the fact that he tried so hard to be better than he was really raises my estimation of him. He was what I would describe as a "failed libertarian." When he talks about it his stories, he thinks he's a libertarian. But when he just sits back and writes his stories, it is clear that the most important thing in the world to him is love and community.
Oh: and "The Door Into Summer." The story itself is fun and inoffensive. But the story behind the story is what makes it a jewel. He and his wife lived in Colorado for some while, and every day of every winter, his cat would make this outraged demand of him to go to every single door in the house -- going inside or out -- and open it for the cat to inspect. Heinlein finally commented upon this behavior to his wife, and she replied: "Silly, he's just looking for the door into summer." Heinlein was so struck by the phrase that he wrote the book by that title in a week. My favorite of his later works is "Job: A Comedy of Justice." Quite honestly, "Stranger" never "clicked" with me the way it did with so many others.
(Oh, one of the things in "Troopers" that I've always liked was that anyone could live and work in the society at whatever level they wanted. But to be a voting *citizen* they had to engage in some form of public service. In the book, the only service he posited was military. But the idea of mandatory public service of some manner (3 -- 4 years as a hospital orderly, a hospice worker, road construction, with the same investment in training that the military gives its tech people) is a notion I rather approve of. But mandatory investment in the community. Like I said: *failed* libertarian.)
Everything Delany wrote was and is a classic. His essays are themselves must-reads. I'd call "Dhalgren" his greatest work: he takes Joyce and goes one step further. "... to wound the Autumnal city." As with "Riverrun", it begins in the middle of a sentence. But while 'Finnegan's Wake' is a circle, 'Dhalgren' is a mobius strip. By the time the story returns to the beginning, all of the characters have reversed gender and position in the tale.
That sounds INCREDIBLE. Funny, I can write damn near anything--fiction, nonfiction, any genre--but I cannot write science fiction.
One of my favorite characters in Party Down is Roman DeBoers, a self-professed science fiction writer who is SO pedantic, the only time he writes anything worthwhile is when he accidentally ingests large amounts of cannabis and trips his balls off in the bathroom.
Delany, in one of his essays, argues that SF&F is actually the primary form of fiction, all others being sub-genres. This is because SF&F enjoys the greatest liberty with modality -- possibility, potentiality -- over all of the other sub-genres which are (by definition) more restricted in how they play with those modalities.
Within the limited span of my own philosophical contacts, acquaintances, and colleagues, those who dabble in fiction always dabble in SF&F. We're already habituated to dealing (rather promiscuously) with alternative- and possible-worlds. I mean, my "&F" is all fantasy. (I had to argue that point with friends regarding the self-published trilogy. But that is still fantasy, not SF.)