This semester, I’ve been teaching a class on careers for professional writers. In addition to writing resumes, building portfolios, and editing writing samples, we’ve been reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and contemplating what she calls “a spiritual path to higher creativity.” Truth told, I inherited the course and its assigned readings from a colleague too late to make changes. Cameron’s self-help book of God-talk for writers wouldn’t have appeared on any version of the class I designed, but I’m so happy she’s a part of the seminar I might have to rethink my approach.
Its 12-step trappings aside, Cameron’s book has us thinking about the big questions of a career in writing in a way I’ve rarely done with students, and her earnest faith in spiritual solutions provokes impassioned discussions. We’ve talked about our motivations, our goals, the petty jealousies that keep us from doing our best work, and we’ve talked about our fears. Sometimes, I think fear is the primary opponent of the writer’s career, and I’ve often considered publishers a kind of anathema to that fear. Where writers hesitate to share their work, publishers announce it to the world. Where writers worry about the consequences of their choices and commitments, publishers declare their allegiance. Where writers demure, publishers support. Where I would never expect any given writer to publish, I think I’ve always taken for granted that one of the principles of ethical publishing is to stand behind the work you decide to print and promote. To publish, after all, means to make public, and we should expect our publishers to do so with pride and enthusiasm and without fear.
Of course, as ever, we live in trying times, and each new atrocity seems to demand a public statement from every individual and institution. Someone on the platform formerly known as Twitter put it wisely when they pointed out that social media has turned us all into our own little press secretaries. Fervently announcing our position on any given issue, denouncing the demons and supporting the angels. Alongside this individual growth in political PR posting, corporations, universities, and other institutions have made it a habit of regularly publishing statements in response to current events, political movements, and difficult questions. We need only consider the outpouring of LGBTQ+ “support” in June of each year, when corporate social media icons turn briefly into Pride flags, or the clumsy Black Out Tuesday of 2020 to question the efficacy of this practice, but we continue to indulge it nevertheless.
The problem is it’s easy to post, easy to share messages of support, easy to edit our social media profile pages to reflect our thoughts on the current thing. It’s much harder to follow through with real material support, to take actions that might have severe consequences like job loss or social ostracization, and it's much, much scarier when these real stakes are as tangible as they’ve been since the spread of the internet. But, if we must live in the age of social capital sustained by pledges of public commitment to particular values, issues, and ideologies, then it’s only fair we expect people, governments, and corporations to live up to their commitments. And, when it comes to publishers, who often undertake projects they seek to profit from with precisely these motivations in mind, I think that expectation goes double.
That’s why I’ve been especially disappointed to see two titans of the publishing world opt for the coward’s way out of their stated commitments to support marginalized people and contentious political positions. In the first instance, a disappointing development in a story I’ve been writing about for the last couple months, Scholastic Books recently announced that it would bundle together all its most controversial books so that educators and school districts in places where offering those books might lead to severe consequences can simply choose to leave that bundle out of the bookfair at their school. Like any good PR firm, Scholastic pitches this decision as a move to protect its customers: “Because Scholastic Book Fairs are invited into schools where books can be purchased by kids on their own, these laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted.”
Perhaps they have a point, better that kids have access to books than no books at all. But this is the same company that declares in its “Credo and Editorial Platform,” they support the “basic freedoms of all individuals” and “oppose discrimination of any kind on the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or national origin.” Further, they insist it is their mission to promote “the fair discussion of all sides of the issues of our time … in our books, classroom magazines, and education materials.” It certainly seems to me like offering a bookfair where some sides of certain issues are cordoned off in an optional bundle isn’t promoting fair discussion or opposing discrimination. When responding to this objection in their press release, Scholastic concludes, “We don’t pretend this solution is perfect—but the other option would be to not offer these books at all—which is not something we’d consider.” That, however, isn’t the only option, not even close: For a start, Scholastic could refuse to offer book fairs in places where their books might land educators in hot water, since this sort of pressure might lead schoolboards to reconsider their decisions; they could offer material support to anyone, like Katie Rinderle, punished for reading a Scholastic book; or, they could have the decency not to exploit vulnerable writers for political merit badges in the first place if they haven’t the courage to stick with them in the face of the opposition.
We’ve seen a similar story unfold this month at the famous Frankfurt Bookfair. There, Palestinian author Adania Shibli and her translator Günther Orth were scheduled to receive the 2023 LiBeraturpreis from Litprom for Shibli’s novel Minor Detail, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2020. A “searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, and memory,” the book explores “the sufferings of the Palestinian people” in the summer of 1949. Long before the despicable acts of October 7th, Shibli and her translator had been scheduled to accept the prize and participate in a public discussion of the book at this year’s fair. Much like Scholastic’s own failure to support a cause it explicitly chose to pursue, here too we see an institution turning the good work of publishing into hypocrisy. In light of the attack and the ongoing tragedy it insighted, Litprom and the Frankfurt Bookfair canceled the talk and the award ceremony, and “spontaneously decided to create additional stage moments for Israeli voices.”
Among the complicated questions of political affiliation and its place at the book fair, remains the fact that the LiBeraturpreis “is an annual award for women authors from the Global South,” with a specific, stated emphasis on supporting writers from “Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world.” The institutions that designed and awarded this prize were perfectly happy gilding their reputations as multicultural humanitarians until it started to look like taking sides in an active conflict. But it always was. Certainly, it would have been possible, necessary even, to let this book highlight the “cultural wealth” of the Palestinian people without supporting Hamas or ginning up antisemitism. Shibli herself said she would have used the opportunity to “reflect on the role of literature in these cruel and painful times.” As Shibli’s UK publisher put it, “One of the purposes of literature is to encourage understanding and dialogue between cultures. At a time of such horrific violence and heartbreak, the world’s biggest book fair has a duty to champion literary voices from Palestine and Israel.” Failing that responsibility only reveals how hollow these kinds of gestures can be, how pointless publishing a prize that the institution refuses to commit to in public.
It takes real courage to write books like Minor Detail or Maus or Gender Queer, and ethical publishing demands that publishers join these authors in supporting their causes, in defending the value of their books. To do otherwise is to reduce the writer to a commodity, to suggest that their story has value only insofar as it can be seamlessly brought to market and worn like a merit badge by a publisher concerned about striking the proper pose. To offer publication and design book series or awards meant to bolster underrepresented communities only to drop them in the face of controversy reifies the oppression such activities are meant to combat. If we offer publishing as a salve to the historic suffering of the colonized, as means of bringing light to the ignorant, as way of mourning or preventing the tragedy of war then we had damn well better mean what we say.