The gender bias discussion initiated by the VIDA statistics, commented on by John Barber in The Globe & Mail, and then in these pages last week continues to generate comment and discussion, most recently on the antipodean airwaves.
This morning (which was yesterday evening Montreal time), the ABC Radio National Books & Arts Daily show devoted time to the topic which, from the tone of the discussion and comments on the show's website, suggest that gender bias is a mighty hot item down under, where there seem to be a larger number of vocal feminists per square mile than there are up here in Canada.
One of the panelists, Monica Dux, is a writer and a board member for the new award for Australian women's writing, the Stella Prize. She has written critically about the impact on the feminist movement of one of its Australian godmothers, Germaine Greer, but I have to say I was impressed by Greer when I first read The Female Eunuch, and I'm impressed by Dux and other Australian feminists today. The third member of the panel was Jason Steger, literary editor of The Age newspaper.
When host Michael Cathcart asked me if I thought it would be a good idea if, as literary editor of an Australian newspaper, he were to get half his reviews written by women -- and ensure that half the books reviewed were authored by women -- I said that would be a good start, and Dux agreed.
Producer Sarah L'Estrange has uploaded the cover of Joanna Russ's 1983 book How to Suppress Women's Writing on to the show's website. Beside the weighty sociological issues raised by questions of gender, I have a very practical consideration in mind as the publisher of an online literary magazine, and what I want to know is why their version is less fuzzy than the one I found on the website of the University of Texas Press and reproduced in my article.
You can hear the tape and read the lively comments on the show here.
© Linda Leith 2012
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Shirley Hazzard's book has the effect of sending us back to the novels of Greene and of Hazzard herself, but that has more do with the quality of her writing than with any literary genre. It also has something to do with her love of her subject.
Some writers will choose not to self-publish. They may prefer not to spend the time it takes to edit, publish, market and sell their own work. But if they do wish to self-publish, it is now possible to do so without losing face and without losing money. That’s the game changer.
It’s not as though we have such precise notions of the length of a novel, which has been described as a narrative fiction of “a certain length.”
Chantal Ringuet, who has written a series of Letters from Israel on this website, has just published Under the Skin of War (BuschekBooks, Ottawa), a collection of poetry inspired by the work of British photographer Don McCullin. The launch takes place this evening at Librairie Le port de tête, 6 - 8 p.m.
