Stella Who? The pink elephant in the AusLit living room

Or why Anna Campbell probably won't win the Stella Prize  
A reply to Louise Swinn on gender and genre bias in Australian publishing.  

I need a good editor.   

I guessed that years ago when a professor at Macquarie wrote "Prolix" on one of my English assignments. He was right. I'd gone way over word limit discussing King Lear on an undergrad essay. But I didn't learn from him. I still rave on. That might be one reason I haven't yet found a publisher.   

But bear with me. I hope the length of this post is justified.

Yesterday I posted a rant about some stats I'd discovered in Aussie publishers' Newsfeed on Facebook. I didn't mean to sound cranky, but that's how it came out. I'm still getting used to having anyone but a few friends reply to my blog posts, so when I saw a comment from Louise Swinn, editor of Sleepers Publishing and member of the Stella Prize steering committee, I was surprised. And wary. The comprehensiveness of her defence of Sleepers, and her honesty in owning their part in those statistics, gave me pause. This is a woman who, along with her colleagues, has done way more than I have in publicly championing Australian women's writing in recent years. SC Patton's follow-up comment that I was "brave" added to a feeling I might’ve offended unintentionally. 

Brave? Shades of Yes, Minister.  

So, having had - for those who know me - a better sleep than I've been having lately, I got on the computer this morning to post a reply, only to discover Blogger doesn't do prolix. Not in the comments section. But luckily my iPad can cut and paste. All to explain why, yet again, I'm making a public reply to a blog post. Here's what Blogger rejected.

"Lou, SC and Anon, thanks for your replies, particularly Lou for taking the time out of your busy schedule - especially given your personal circumstances - to address with such thoughtfulness and honesty some of the issues my post raised. 

"Lou, the fact that you (or the people who forwarded my blog post to you) saw the need to defend Sleepers and the Stella panel saddens me. It reminds me that I should be more temperate in a public forum: you never know who you'll unintentionally offend. And, as Charlotte Wood said on Twitter, a longer snapshot is necessary to see if such stats hold up, especially for publishers like Sleepers. So my apologies. But thanks for writing your defence, and particularly the reference to your own situation and the news behind the selections for the National Year of Reading 2012 and how both determined the dominance of male novelists in Sleepers' Newsfeed this week. You’re right, it’s a complex problem.  

"Please know that the last thing I wanted to do was to make anyone who has worked so hard to raise the profile of Australian women writers feel guilty about not doing more. My blog post was written out of a sense of shock and outrage, and the tone reflects that. Elsewhere, I've simply set about doing what I can to participate in the solution, not complaining about the problem. It’s an explanation, not an excuse, but, for what it's worth, I'm sorry for putting you to some trouble to reply when you're not feeling well. 

“Same goes for booksellers, if they happen to read this. The response I've had from bookshop owners and staff, male and female, from my initiative to network via the Aussie Bookshops Facebook page has been gratifying and largely very supportive. I'm convinced that's it the human touch that's missing a lot of the time, and I'm hoping my efforts will help to redress that. The odd ranting blog post aside...

"Here’s my side of things. 

"The target audience for my post wasn't the publishing industry. The ‘we’ I refer to are women writers and aspiring writers who, like me, aren't up on the Stella committee and its efforts. Women who long ago despaired that their writing would ever be taken seriously by Australian literary circles and who simply submit their well-honed manuscripts overseas. Many of these women, over the years, have become multi-award winning, bestselling authors who have a huge following in Australia and elsewhere, yet they still aren't being stocked by most booksellers or invited to local literary festivals.   

"It’s their plight I'd like to address in this reply: the pink elephant in the Auslit living room.  

"The blindingly obvious to me and a lot of people like me is the whole question of genre and literary value. It's worth teasing out some of the complexities here, as it’s heavily implicated in the gender bias debate.  

“There's a perception among writers I know, right or wrong, that writing popular fiction equates with being irrelevant - if not anathema - to the Auslit community. Yes, in recent years Australian publishers have finally begun to take notice of organisations such as Romance Writers of Australia and the massively attended annual conference it has held for twenty years. But there's still a sense that these women’s effort is seen as a cash cow, rather than professional work by talented writers who deserve to be taken seriously.  

“Lou, if I’m ludicrously out of touch with the current values of the Stella committee and it does indeed have an agenda to consider popular fiction writers eligible for its prize, or even a prize category, stop reading here.  

“If I’m not, I must ask why - after all the popular culture discussions in the academies over the years - is this still the case? Especially when both ‘gender bias’ and ‘genre bias’ serve to marginalise talented, professional and hardworking women writers. Who is questioning the aesthetic behind this? Who is pointing out the cost to women writers and readers – readers who, if recent discussions are correct - are opting to download ebooks to read on public transport rather than having others know what they are reading?  

“It's my view - and again, it's a pretty out of touch one and I'm willing to be educated and help to educate others, if I’m wrong - that the bias against ‘genre writing’ stems from a form of literary snobbery on both sides of the political divide. 

“It would be no news to you, but might be to others who read this, that the right typically advocates ‘fine writing’, as if such values are absolute and unquestionable. It’s a deeply entrenched aesthetic which historically has been championed by many years of male writers, teachers and editors, and, I’d argue, still informs the reading preferences and curriculum choices of women teachers and librarians throughout the country, including the cadre from which the Love2Read panel got their suggestions for the ‘best’ books to disseminate and laud next year as representative of "our story", a selection - in the cases of NSW, QLD, South Australia and Western Australia, at least - weighted in favour of male writers, while two of the women selected, Ruth Park and Elizabeth Jolley, are dead.  

“But the aesthetics promoted by the left, too, I contend, leave out many popular genre writers, particularly women. (Peter Temple winning the Miles Franklin shows that crime is being accepted; but Fantasy? Romance? Children’s and YA? Genres dominated by women? I don’t think so.) By championing experimental and innovative works with worthy political goals and eschewing popular genres with a strong narrative, popular appeal and the conventional hero character arc, leftist aesthetics have had a tendency to preach to the converted, and attract a smaller, politically dedicated audience - not reaching the mainstream audiences whose views most need to be challenged.  But how is that helping women? Or helping the disadvantaged with their literacy?

“And this isn’t even to touch on the ‘male’ aesthetic of both political persuasions which appears simply to prefer books written by men. (Let’s not even mention VS Naipaul.)

“When aesthetics on both sides marginalise talented women authors (of whatever political persuasion) and render them invisible, I have to ask why. Why? Why adhere to such values?

“Personally, I've yet to be convinced that popular genres - including romance and ‘women’s fiction’, as well as psychological suspense, my preferred genre - can't be both marketable page-turners as well as politically progressive. But it needs a change of perception - by talented insiders - of what comprises romance and 'women's fiction'. Here, too, the issue is complex. 

"Some of the resistance to romance, for example, touches on the 'love story' (sad ending) versus romance ('happy ever after') issue: the long-held view that happy endings are, by definition, both aesthetically dubious (stereotypical and sentimental) and politically reactionary. This ties into the - often unarticulated and unquestioned – continued perception of the necessity for a particular type of ‘moral’ dimension to literary aesthetics. Page-turning, ‘heroic’, Robert McKee and Michael Hauge type work is regarded as escapist, aspirational, 'life as I’d like it to be' not how it is - unrealistic and possibly dangerous, and therefore unworthy. Yet at the heart, don't such objections have an uncomplicated view of the importance of narrative realism? This is despite the fact that critics of fantasy, crime and science fiction have for many years found other ways of assessing literary merit. 

"In the light of comparisons with criticism of these other genres, the idea that women’s fiction and romance needs to be realistic in order to have literary merit and be ‘worthy’ of serious attention just ends up looking silly. (Thank goodness the International Assocation for the Study of Popular Romance has formed and has been addressing this.)  

“So why do such judgements persist?   

"My suspicion is that the Stella prize panel would baulk at the idea that its prize might be open to writers of romance and other popular genres. And, if that’s the case, I can guess why, and I sympathise. Your fear might be that Australian women writers of literary fiction, still struggling so hard to be taken seriously by a literary scene dominated by proponents of the above aesthetics, would be dooming themselves from the start, at their most vulnerable. The prize wouldn’t be taken seriously. But taken seriously by whom? Men? A generation of women taste-setters educated, as I was, unquestionably to reproduce a gender bias in their reading and researching preferences? Readers and educators whose tastes continue to be influenced by such prizes?  

“Why be so worried? These people will die.  

“The Stella will live on. And potentially the controversy it could create by opting to acknowledge the silent majority of women genre writers would do much to air these issues and get to the heart of what it is we value in literature and why. Such a stance would certainly have a better chance of garnering support from the women who believe they are currently irrelevant to the Stella debate.

"(For the record: having made this call for a broader acceptance of popular genres, I don't mean to say that there are no grounds for class and political suspicions of genre writing as it is currently supported and promoted in Australia. One of the reasons I stopped going to RWA conferences was how expensive the packages are and how clearly wealthy, well-fed and well-dressed many of the participants (no offence intended to my many romance writing friends); clearly the group continues to be self-selecting in terms of wealth and class in many ways - and I'm well off, comparatively: I'd just rather spend my money on books. Having now put that forward, if RWA have indeed sought to redress this by, for example, offering scholarships for attendance to indigenous and disadvantaged writers, I'll be only too happy to applaud that fact. [see below for comments on RWA's disadvantaged writers scheme]) 

“Lou, if you’ve got this far and I’m wrong in thinking Sleepers promotes books either on the left or only of those deemed to be of 'exceptional literary merit', forgive my ignorance. My only knowledge of Sleepers is through the Almanac app which I haven't fully explored. (Though as soon as I came across one of Kalinda Ashton's stories, I went straight to the library and borrowed The Danger Game and posted a review – critical, in some ways, for reasons I’m making clear here - on my review blog.)

“Again, please forgive my prolixity.

"What started out as an apology has become something else. But it’s true. Yesterday's rant wasn’t written for you or your Stella colleagues. It was addressed to those writers who have remained silent in the face of misogyny like that apparent in the comments on Tara Moss’s blog. Yet I know where they’re coming from. They’re coming from long years of having their work ignored and disregarded, judged as second-rate because of the genres they've chosen to write and become expert in. Years of being patronized by (some) bookshop owners who have refused to stock their books. 

"What would you say to the author who was asked by her publisher to busk outside a bookshop on Indigenous Literacy Day only to discover when she got there that the shop didn't stock one copy of her book - not even one brought in specially for the day - all because she writes women's fiction? If she, an avid reader and mentor of others, an unpaid editor dedicated to nurturing the next generation of writers, has been silent on the subject of gender bias, who can blame her? 

"Thanks again, Lou, for your reply. I hope you get to read this. If not, I’m still looking forward to discovering more of the work of women writers Sleepers has published – especially those ones overlooked for the Love2Read initiative. Who were those authors, I wonder? I’d like to set up an alternative ‘WeLove2Read2’ note and link it to the Australian Women Writers Facebook page and add all the books by women which the ‘select panel’ rejected. (How ironic that the NT is one of the states to have selected an even split between male and female authors. No literary cringe in Australia’s north country, it seems. But the idea of "Australia" their promoting is a whole other story.)

“There’s a huge, untapped resource of talented, knowledgeable and experienced women writers in Australia, published and aspiring. My guess is many of these writers would love to support the Stella prize and its aims to combat gender bias, and maybe even submit to Sleepers, if they could believe that their work would be taken seriously, without irony or derision or a sense of exploitation; if they could trust their work would be given editorial guidance fitting to the genre they’ve chosen; and if they had the slightest hope their best work might ultimately be considered for a prize.

“But will an author like Anna Campbell, bestselling and multi-award-winning Australian writer of romantic historical fiction set in the Regency period, ever be considered a contender for the Stella? 

"I don’t know. How brave do you want to be?”

(Book cover picture used with permission)