If people organize something around any specific theme or topic--say topic A, say the topic is "A: words beginning with the letter A," should they then try to make it "inclusive" of B? There are no easy answers.
I'm writing this on a Saturday morning. I've tried to make it a rule of life that I don't go online on Saturday. The most efficient way to write these thoughts is to type them directly into my blog, and in order to do that I have to be connected to the Internet. So here I am, breaking a rule that I generally find not only convenient for organizing material but also valuable for maintaining the quality of my life and, in my particular case, even ethically right. Obviously I believe that exceptions should be made to rules.
I'm writing this while considering a different ethical dilemma. While offline I wrote a book, a fairly long book, about the practical details of living on an Internet writer's income. After writing it I tweaked it in a few different ways to fit into a few different publishers' marketing plans. Is it a funny book? It's serious, but that's no excuse for failing to be funny. Is it a Christian book? It's about being a Christian, but it's not an evangelistic book, or a theological study. Is it a feminist book? The fact that books are written by women makes some sort of feminist statement, but most of this particular book is equally applicable to men or women. Should it include recipes? The manuscript with the recipes would make a thick, economy-sized book; that may be good. Is it a feel-good book? I believe the best policy is "Fix Facts First; Feelings Follow," but for people who feel afraid of living on a reduced income, a book that says it's possible to enjoy living on a reduced income may be comforting. And so on. And so forth.
Well, "frugal" is a marketing keyword for this book. "Frugal" is a marketing keyword for Buddhist books. Possibly the biggest number of books on the frugal life in one place is in the catalogue of Thich Nhat Hanh's Parallax Press. During the past summer Parallax opened the floodgates for manuscripts from writers who feel ready to publish their first traditionally printed, bound, and marketed books. Being owned by a Zen Master, Parallax has a strong Buddhist identity. Should I try to tweak the manuscript into a version that could be published by Parallax? Shouldn't they be "inclusive"? Like many non-Buddhists, I like and recommend some things Thich Nhat Hanh wrote; why shouldn't he return the favor?
There are no absolute rules about these things. My book about the frugal life does not contain long discussions of the fine points of Christian belief. It doesn't even discuss the Christian monastic tradition of vows of poverty, except to emphasize that I've not taken such vows. It does discuss my belief that it's immoral for people who are able to support themselves, in whatever degree of poverty, to depend on handouts from anybody, and that it's especially pernicious to be sucked into the modern system of handouts from the U.S. federal government. It discusses that belief in practical rather than religious terms, not incompatible with Buddhism.
And I really don't like this year's fad, in publishing, for "commitments to diversity." Publishers are saying in so many words, "We're interested in reading new writers only if they're not White, or if they claim to belong to a 'sexual minority'." From the publishers' point of view it may make sense, I imagine. I picture a couple of editors looking at their list and exclaiming, "Do you realize that all of the writers on our regular list are White?" But the part of me that is Cherokee feels as much offended as the part that is White, by the idea that publishers have given up hope of informing or entertaining readers with actual content and are all about showing the right kind of faces on book jackets. At this time of year, at least, my face does look like "diversity." Well, it's not available for that purpose. Use the cat picture. I want my writing to be read on its own merits, regardless of my face.
Cats have enough sense to accept, reject, or (mostly) ignore other cats on their individual merits; they don't give a flip about pedigrees and seem to show only a little functional interest in color. Sometimes the amount of emotional energy some humans attach to demographics is enough to make more sensible humans want to identify as cats. In related news, a recent news item was that a school ordered teachers to accept a student's claim to identify as a cat. How the student expressed that person was making a statement of identity rather than just saying "meow" as an attempt to be funny, or obstructive, or both, was not reported. Neither was the vital question of whether other cats verified the student's engagement with the cat community.
And it should go without saying...I don't care what other writers like to do, with whom, when they're not writing, as long as they're not hurting other people. I do think that marketing your writing on the basis of a claim to belong to a "victim group" defined entirely by your voluntary discussion of your voluntary behavior, while being White and rich, is beneath contempt. I want to denounce that vile approach to publishing because I've recommended Ellen Hawley's novel about the grief process, as specifically experienced by a lesbian in Minnesota. Ellen Hawley happens to be a very good writer who wrote a well-above-average novel. I say those things because I believe they are true. I dsicovered Hawley's blog and books because other people recommended them as being witty and wise. I did not go out looking for a lesbian writer to recommend. I never have done that and never will, and I respect other people less if they do it. Because choosing books on bases other than their literary or factual content is not, actually, even much of an encouragement to writers. One reason why I'm still identifying as human, at this point, is that I don't want to start a pressure group on behalf of writers who can only get their content read by demanding representation for writers who identify as cats.
I have a little more respect for publishers that start out with a commitment not to diversity but to their specific special-interest niche. Mainstream publishers don't discriminate against, e.g., specific States, but most of the United States do have at least one publisher with a mission statement about publishing State-specific literature. Some publishers are even committed to publishing content by and about a specific city, or specific counties. I see nothing really wrong with that, possibly because those publishers aren't saying to the general public something like "We want you to buy what we publish but, this year, we're not publishing anything by or for your section of our audience," If they say "The Buffalo Press exists to publish material from, for, and to the city of Buffalo," well, it's not as if other publishers' home pages specifically said "We will not consider manuscripts from Utica." All The Buffalo Press needs to do is be consistent and, if they decide they do want to expand into publishing content about Utica, consider adding an imprint like "Beyond Buffalo" or "New York State."
So then, if a book is good, and a publisher has a chance to publish it, should the publisher's mission statement and branding be used to exclude the book? Should Parallax publish Christian books on the basis that reading a good book is a Zen experience? Should Abingdon, Paulist, and Review & Herald get into bidding wars for the rights to books by Thich Nhat Hanh on the basis that masses of Christians use his writings to control their blood pressure? Should publishers whose mission statement is "to publish the best work by Canadian writers" buy really good books by U.S. writers?
I think the mission statement should count for something. I would love to have my book on frugality endorsed by Thich Nhat Hanh. I don't think Parallax Press would be the ideal publisher for my book.
The reason why I feel a need to write and post this on a Saturday morning is that, when I logged off last night, I noticed an uptick in readers of yesterday's review of The Mother Side of Midnight. It's a relatively tepid review.
It may even be an unfair review. Observing that "mom-com" books tend to feature some of the same funny/poignant episodes in family life, I compared the bathing-the-baby and losing-the-goldfish scenes of a few different domestic comedy writers and said I thought some other books made those scenes funnier. I read The Mother Side of Midnight once, then sold it. I did not laugh out loud. Possibly I was tired; possibly if I'd returned to the book, another year, I would have laughed out loud. But a review has to mention these things and the fact is that Erma Bombeck's later books were safer to read in hospital waiting rooms than her "big four" bestsellers were, too. Teryl Zarnow's mom-coms made me smile, but not shriek with laughter.
And then I said that it was surprising that Addison-Wesley published a mom-com that mentioned the family in question being Jewish.
Well, so it is. Should Christians read books about Jewish people? Should members of denominations, for that matter, read books about members of other denominations? Obviously I think we should. But Addison-Wesley used to state that their mission was to publish Christian books. At least they didn't tie themselves down to publishing within a specific denominational ghetto. If a publisher's mission is to publish "only the best" writing within the church of God's Final Call & Warning, Inc., which is the name of an actual storefront church in Maryland, and if that publisher then steps out of its former boundaries and publishes something by a Baptist...I'm not saying that that's wrong. Changing its mission statement, broadening its vision, may be good for the publisher and its audience. But it is surprising.
Upticks of interest in a particular post sometimes come from hostile readers. I can just hear hostile readers buzzing. "She doesn't seem to like this book much" (I didn't) "and she's surprised that a writer with a name like Zarnow is Jewish. She must not like Jewish people!"
Which makes it ironic--and certainly unplanned--that the big, picture-and-link-loaded version of the long-lost story of how my home became a Cat Sanctuary went live, at the same time, on a big, multimedia blog owned by a writer who happens to be Jewish.
(Back-story: For several years I've lurked, when the devices I used allowed it, at a "conservative comedy" blog that interests me partly because it's grown huge from a small unpromising beginning. "Michelle's Mirror" started as a snarky study of Michelle Obama's influence on fashion, of which most of the U.S. didn't even know she had any, and early on it was dissed by Michelle Malkin. Nevertheless, the blogger persisted in blogging and encouraging the comment space to become a free-for-all forum, and so the blog grew into a group forum where hundreds of people really did their own blogging. This year, due to illness, the Motus blog slowed down and some of those people have started growing their own blogs. Pbird's is one of them. Commenters were invited to share self-introduction posts. I had been about to post the Cat Sanctuary story here as an extra-large Petfinder post, and then I thought, "That blog and audience can handle that amount of memory; I'm not sure about some of our own audience. I have posted things with that many pictures or that many links, before--not both--and people have complained." So the big post went on the big blog; thank you, Pbird. I did not know when it would go live; if I'd known it went live on Friday I would have been there, interacting with the commenters.)
I take, and the forum where I met Pbird takes, good will as read.
This web site has recommended books that are specifically about being Jewish--Kirk Douglas' books come to mind--as likely to be instructive for Christians to read.
This web site has linked to content by Jewish writers, and by Israeli writers, both religious and secular. (Points for being a regular reader if you noticed one being mentioned above.)
Of all the writers with whom I've worked...collaboration in writing and publishing a book is an act of love, but after Grandma Bonnie and George Peters, who were Family, my favorite writer was Zahara Heckscher. Her son, who was taught to call me "Aunt" when he was little, is in the group I call "The Nephews."
And of course Grandma Bonnie Peters did cross over the line between whole-Bible Christians and Messianic Jews, in Florida, in order to be a friend's home nurse; under the guidance of Jeff Goldstein and his community she made bas mitzvah.
The position of this web site is that Christians, specifically, ought to read books by people of other faiths. If I wanted to avoid exposure to writers different from me I would probably have paid more attention to "Zarnow" being an Eastern European name and/or the number of Eastern European names in the United States being used by Jewish people. I don't.
Some of these books are better than others. Sam Levenson, who was not a "Mom," wrote three books about family life, teaching, and the values his Jewish family shared with their Christian and non-religious neighbors. In each of those books some passages are merely earnest, and some passages are revised from the stand-up comedy routines Levenson did and are definitely not to be read while eating or drinking. Teryl Zarnow's mom-com is heartwarming and smile-inducing but, in my opinion, table-safe.
Something is deeply wrong with a society in which (a) it feels necessary to mention Levenson's hilariousness to correct any misinterpretations about my ability to appreciate Jewish comedy, and (b) it then starts to seem necessary to add that this is not a statement about male comedy writers, generally, and female comedy writers, generally, and (c) that brings to mind the nuisance value of people who I don't believe are even genuinely gender-confused so much as they are people who've formed a habit of making themselves tiresome in order to get any attention at all. Every blogger wants to feel that our blogs are "safe" and "friendly" to readers, but readers need to be sure they're not making a career of claiming their feelings are hurt. "Assume good will" is Stephen Marsh's phrase, and a good one.
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