And Finally…
Everyone’s talking about…
This week, The Guardian reported that Romance Writers Ink had decided to cancel their “More than Magic” romantic fiction competition. The reason? They had stipulated in the rules that they would “no longer accept same-sex entries in any category”, news which sparked a furious backlash. Funny that. The strangest thing about this is that Romance Writers Ink defended their decision to place restrictions on entries by pointing out that they were also excluding YA (young adult) fiction entries. As Heidi Cullinan (president of Rainbow Romance Writers, the LGBT chapter of Romance Writers of America, of which Romance Writers Ink is the Tulsa, Oklahoma chapter) says: “The whole thing makes me sad… It’s clear the chapter felt threatened and still doesn’t fully understand that they were discriminating. The excuse of the moment seems to be that ‘same-sex romance is a genre’. No, we aren’t. I’ll buy that we’re a group, a demographic perhaps, but no more than ‘Southern women romances’ should be a genre or ‘non-Caucasians’ should be a genre.” The cancelling of the competition is a response to the outrage their rules provoked, but it looks at the moment like a way of avoiding more trouble, rather than acknowledging and addressing the discrimintatory nature of their competition rules. Well if they do decide to run the competition again, they’ll have to think carefully because at the moment it looks like vamp-werewolf romance is fine, futuristic loving is fine, erotica is fine…just not if it involves same-sex relations. Oh dear.
In case you missed it…
IT’S ALIVE! That’s right, we’ve been raising a glass (or three) to the release of Short Stack and the announcement of a live event in March to celebrate International Women’s Day. We teamed up with Pulp Press last year to find the best new pulp fiction written by women – after much deliberation, we got it down to the 10 winning stories that make up the anthology. The Kindle edition will soon be followed by the paperback, and we hope you’ll join us on March 8th!
This week saw the return of Rubyyy Jones’ monthly erotica column and our banned books series with Nancy Friday‘s Women on Top.
We also had a guest post in our Battle of the Bookshops about the excellent Page 45 in Nottingham (“The best comic book shop in the world?”), which leads quite nicely on to…
In other news…
Doing the film festival circuit this Spring will be Wonder Women: The Untold Story of American Superheroines. This documentary traces ”the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman. From the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to the blockbusters of today, WONDER WOMEN! looks at how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society’s anxieties about women’s liberation.” With promises of behind the scenes footage of Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman) and Lynda Carter (TV’s Wonder Woman herself), views on the impact of everything from Ripley’s character in Alien to riot grrrl, and interviews with ‘real life superheroines’ comic book writers and artists, we’re very much looking forward to getting our mitts on this (or at least hoping it screens somewhere near us!).
Remember when we reviewed Helen Smith’s Alison Wonderland? Well if you have a Kindle (or one of those nifty apps on your computer), you can get her new dystopian thriller The Miracle Inspector FREE today only!
Steven Watson over at ‘Reviews by Stevie’ is reading and writing about women’s books for the whole of 2012 and wants people to join the conversation. He compiled his list last year – including Mary Gaitskill and Miranda July – and is open to suggestions and comments – check out the full list here.
Happy weekend!
Alex Herod
Photo from Brit.’s Flickr photostream
Thanks so much for writing up my project! But anyone reading this should know: I didn’t compile the list. Michelle Haimoff did. Her new novel “These Days Are Ours” is our book for February. She deserves as much credit as I do for the book club.
Thanks Steven, credit to Michelle – it’s a great list. Enjoy!