Kate Clanchy - poet - is 'cancelled' by her publisher

Tonnes of books go out of print daily for a variety of reasons. Not sure how that constitutes cancelling or similar.

Why does the publisher owe it to Kate to continue to publish her works? Assuming they’re not breaking terms of a contract or similar I can’t understand what they’ve done wrong

I and other posters have repeatedly said that the language Clanchy uses is hurtful to us and the groups/minorities we are part of. Why is this so hard to understand? It isn't an attack on free speech, or "tribalism". It's a plea that racist, anti-Semitic, and classist language isn't published and defended.

I see your point @loveastatementnap but if Picador really wanted to destroy the book they wouldn't have reverted the rights to the author. They'd have kept the rights for the period of time they'd bought them for (3 years? Maybe 5) and pulped the rest of their stock. As it is by reverting the rights to Clanchy she's free to offer them to another publisher and I believe she already has a new publisher. Picador appear to be trying to distance themselves from this instead.

Books fall very quickly down front lists and back list titles get little attention.

Isn't it?

Of course it isn't. Publishers terminate contracts with writers all the time. Books go out of print all the time. This is not "silencing", it is totally commonplace in the industry if a publisher no longer feels that the business relationship is profitable to them for any reason. Clanchy's books still exist. They can still be purchased, will continue to be available second hand after new copies have run out, and she is free to seek a contract for a new print run with another publisher.

Isn’t it? What purpose was there to burning books? To get rid of the thoughts contained within.

We aren’t talking about someone not being published in the first place, we are talking about someone who was published, to at least some acclaim, and then it was decided that some of the content should not be seen by the public because it didn’t fit in with a certain politic.

A publisher ending a contract is not burning a book.

@ShinyHappyPeople
The biggest con of recent years has been to pretend it's a left-leaning impulse to burn books and shut down ideas. Those actions are right-wing. They always have been and they still are.

Which displays the biggest blind spot of the current left - they're in the grip of a 'no true Scotsman' ideology. Left wingers can't possibly suggest burning books and shutting down ideas, and if they do they are 'no true left wingers'. They're 'really' right-wingers, in disguise.

My reading of history suggests that the impulse to shut down those ideas disliked by (sometimes self-created) authority is common across many ideologies and bears no relation whatsoever to 'right wing' or 'left wing'. It's simply a human impulse that intensifies whenever a group has enough power to actually do it.

You can find it in the Roman era, when the authorities tried to shut down the annoying Christians - and then when the annoying Christians were in power they tried to shut down the pagans! You can find it in Stalinist Russia and in Francoist Spain. You can find it in the Labour Party, and the Tory Party.

The biggest con of recent years has been to pretend one political grouping contains all the virtues. Which can't actually be true, because all the political groupings are made up of human beings.

I agree crosshatching that great care should be taken when an adult writes a memoir about children, especially when those children are in her care.

I read this book when it first came out, and
there was one part in particular that left an uncomfortable taste in my mouth, which was the boy with the "fine Ashkenazi nose".

I just want to mention this because some posters have suggested Clanchy uses the language she does to highlight and deconstruct her own white middle class perceptions of the Other - but I think this example illustrates there is no such deconstruction going on. She describes this boy as having an "Ashkenazi nose". She assumes he is Jewish based purely on his physical appearance - based, in fact, on an extremely pervasive and offensive stereotype of what Jewish people are supposed to look like, ie having a big hooked nose. The boy tells her he is not Jewish. Right here would be the perfect moment for some introspection, to recognise her own stereotypes and prejudices that lead her to this assumption. But she does no such thing, instead she continues to insist she must be right, that this boy is Jewish and he is either lying to her or his family have hidden his heritage from him out of some imagined shame. So self-examination whatsoever, just doubling down on big nose = Jewish.

Honestly, as a Jewish person, I found this gross, it upset me on a visceral level, that she held this anti-Semitic stereotype and then leant into it, clung to it, and even dared to justify it by inventing a narrative about a family so ashamed of their Jewishness they hid it from their own son (what exactly does she think is the source of this shame? Why does she think being Jewish is a shameful thing to a Jew?). There is no deconstruction here. It's just racism.

I was also made uncomfortable by her descriptions of working class children and of kids with ASD. I admit I wasn't so sensitive to some of the descriptions of race, but I am not a WoC and if you're not part of a minority group you don't necessarily know or recognise those particular pain points. Given my visceral reaction as a Jewish person to some of her writing, I am perfectly prepared to believe WoC describing having the same reaction to other parts of her book.

I have no doubt Clanchy is well-meaning as a person and that she has genuine affection for the pupils she's worked with but that does nothing to mitigate the harmful and offensive stereotypes she propegates. That her publishers ended her contract is not "silencing" her and honestly it sounds ridiculous to me to insist that. No one is entitled to a book contract, and most of us will never have one. Picador haven't published my memoirs, am I being silenced by this? Clanchy is still absolutely free to seek another contract, write more books, and to speak on any platform she chooses, as she has done so. If she struggles to find a new contract, or if people disagree with her or don't want to listen to her, this isn't "silencing", it's the consequences of her actions. The right to free speech doesn't guarantee you a receptive audience and it certainly doesn't guarantee you a book contract.

So on a forum where age and consent come up time and time again as a cause of concern this is fine? But other times, not fine?

Then perhaps you should respect those young people and their families. My view on Clanchy is based on the young people speaking out in support of her writing and her descriptions. It is not for a random stranger on the Internet to decide those young people's wishes should be ignored because a group of readers/writers/publishers/crusaders decided to take offence on their behalf. That's the patronising and paternalistic attitude that characterised and caused the debate.

Some of these expressed concerns about free speech being curtailed need to place these concerns alongside the fact that all the descriptions that have caused controversy are of real children and young people. Moreover highly vulnerable children and young people. Even if their identities are obscured in the text they presumably will know who they are themselves and will have to read how an authority figure thought it fit to describe them to their readership.

The trend to silence and erase isn't an imperative of the 'left'. It isn't rooted in any kind of class consciousness. It's exactly the opposite. It's top down, hierarchical and paternalistic.

The biggest con of recent years has been to pretend it's a left-leaning impulse to burn books and shut down ideas. Those actions are right-wing. They always have been and they still are.

A big part of the problem is that some of the most prominent voices who claim to be on the left, obviously aren't. They are wedded to a strongly capitalist, individualist, anti-intellectual view which is bereft of social, political and historic context. They are trying to establish different strands to close down ideas, criticism and free speech. The inroads they are making in publishing and academic institutions are frightening. All of these 'incidents' need to be viewed together.

@PaleBlueMoonlight Brilliantly put. You can’t challenge something that you have erased. Bad ideas should stand and other people will decide whether or not they are bad.

Silencing is rapidly increasing the inability to critically think. We need things to object to in order to work out what we also think is acceptable.

I can’t work out what it is people who wish to silence are trying to achieve. A microcosm where their own bullshit is parroted back to them, presumably. Up until the tables are turned and they are suddenly the ones being said they are in the wrong. They tend to change their tune rapidly then!

The book in many ways is a wonderful book, there's a reason it won the Orwell Prize. It's a compelling account of how students were encouraged to write poetry and a passionate argument for why middle class parents shouldn't be afraid to send their kids to state schools.

But it's also a book that does a lot of othering of the pupils it describes. Clanchy is honest about her own privileged, middle class perspective, but the book does expose some of the limitations or blind spots that go with that perspective. Some of the othering language I noticed when I was reading, and found it unpleasant for example, an overly simplistic view of weight and diet and how those things are connected to class. The race stuff I didn't notice until it was pointed out to me. I felt ashamed for not having noticed it that was my own blind spot, and I'm glad to have been made more aware.

So it's an imperfect book but it's still a bloody good book. I'm glad I read it and I would recommend it. If we only read and wrote books that spoke from an utterly flawless, utterly blameless ethical position, we wouldn't have much any? literature left.

I think Clanchy's very ill-judged response to the negative Goodreads review (attack and denial) was worse than the imperfections of the book itself. But when she recanted and apologised, it was too late from the point of view of the people she had angered on twitter. Twitter isn't nuancedbor forgiving or kind.

Last night I noticed that Monisha Rajesh, one of Clanchy's critics, had blocked me on twitter, presumably because I've tweeted in Clanchy's defence (my following is very small though, I'm a no one on Twitter!). I looked up Rajesh's work because I was curious about her. Interestingly her own recent travel memoir Around the world in 80 Trains has very mixed reviews on Goodreads. Several reviewers criticised the book's judgey attitude and her quickness to dismiss people she met in her travels who were not like her.

So yeah, no one is perfect. And there's a kind of irony in the fact that Clanchy is now being judged so harshly because she judged others too harshly.

When it comes to ethics , most of us fall into a vast category somewhere in between sinners and saints. I'm idealistic in that I think by reading, writing and talking about books, we can change for the better.

I don't think there is any place for demonising someone because you have decided that certain descriptions should not be used in any circumstance (or should they just not be used by certain people?).

That's the irony here, and I don't see why so many people miss it.

All this stuff about microaggressions is because of a recognition that these things are on a scale that eventually leads to a bad place.

The biggest societal danger in humans is our tribal instinct - our urge to create in-groups and out-groups and set up inter-group conflict. And combine this with authoritarianism - one group able to exert power over an outgroup, and that's the basic recipe for all human-caused disasters.

So the stuff Clanchy is accused of is maybe like 6 steps away from some tribal nightmare.

But the behaviour of those who find that "abhorrent" is a maybe mere 3 steps from a tribal nightmare. They're actively whipping up in-group/out-group hatred and trying to force the out-group into line via authoritarian measures.

So there's no contest here, for me. Maybe everyone here is "in the wrong", but I'm far less scared of the poet than I am of those denouncing a poet.

And how did the "left" end up in this place? All through the earlier part of my life freedom of expression, particularly in art, was a cornerstone of the left's beliefs. How did they pivot around to become like the moralisers, the religious fundamentalists? When artists are policed, I can assure you it's not the common people who benefit.

Because it is supposed to be a very good book.

Because describing physical reality and feelings is not inherently a problem. Any value imposed on these descriptions by the author comes from the context (and to an extent from what we otherwise know about the author). You are not interested in the context, I am.

I don't think there is any place for demonising someone because you have decided that certain descriptions should not be used in any circumstance (or should they just not be used by certain people?). You seem to think that the appropriate penalty for writing these descriptions that you don't like (without knowing the context or intent and without any desire to find out) is for that person's life work to be removed from sale. I think that is an extremely dangerous attitude and will do nothing to combat racism or ableism.

I actually agree that exploring unconscious bias is an important tool in tackling systemic racism I disagree that presence of unconscious bias (which there will always be) should be a reason to police speech. Unconscious bias is a human condition. It has a purpose in helping humans make quick decisions based on experience. Sometimes our unconscious bias is founded on skewed experiences and untruths and that can lead to negative consequences. That is best countered (I'm my view) by free speech, discussion and open cultural exchange.

I completely agree. I'm astounded at some of the views expressed by supposedly intelligent women on this thread.

Why are you so keen to read a book that refers to Afghan features, small skulls, Ashkenazi noses, fat bellies, and "annoying" autistic behaviour? Just why?

@PaleBlueMoonlight Daunt is where I grabbed it from too.

I actually find the spectacle of some of the articulate, critically-minded women I admire here trying to excuse Clanchy’s worldview primarily because she is a woman suffering consequences of her actions quite abhorrent, truth be told.

I can assure you that I find the spectacle of people trying to impose their worldview on others under the pretext of fighting some noble cause abhorrent.

It's not about "intent" - it doesn't matter how noble you think your cause is, the path you are setting out on is very, very dangerous.

Everyone calling for Clanchy to be "held to account" should be examining their biases with a self-critical eye.

To undermine the principles of liberal democracy and freedom of expression for "social justice" would do far more damage to society and its vulnerable members. And, indeed, it already is.

The only good thing is that it directs me to the essential books.