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

If you are writing about real people who were children/minors when you interacted with them, is there no duty of care? Where is the line of when you get to write whatever you want to about your students, and you don't care if they read horrible things about their teenage selves when they are older? (I'm not referring to the "almond-shaped eyes" type of thing, which is Clanchy being oh-so-descriptively-poetic. I'm talking about the long passages about specific students and the putdowns about their looks and/or personalities.)

I would have found some of the things she wrote about fine in fiction, or even fictionalised nonfiction. Some of the other stuff I would've found distasteful even in fiction.

I don't disagree that she has done a great service to those students whom she has taught and published, and she does quite a lot of "thinking aloud" in the book about both internalised prejudices and the prejudices of the wider writing community.

Some things are OK to cancel. No one is burning her books, they're just not printing them any longer.

It is a shame that it seems to have also done her students a disservice, that's the only sort of cancellation I care about.

I mean, I remember people who were uncomfortable when The Glass Castle came out, because they felt like it showed homeless and poor people in a bad light, blamed them for their circumstances, made them look trashy.

It can be difficult to find the line, especially when people are basically being trained to go through every book (especially if you are a female author) and find excerpts that could be seen to be outside of what id pol allows.

Looking at this from a wider perspective, it seems like the effect of this is that authors aren't going to make observations about anything that could possibly be considered phobic - a potentially infinite group - in ways that are very cutting or could hurt people's feelings.

Whether the observations are true or might be accurate won't be the point, it will be about being kind and keeping the reader comfortable.

Reviews and comments that say they don't like the tone are one thing, this kind of attempt to cancel is another, because it will mean that authors are afraid to write challenging material.

Is there any chance another publisher might take up the anthology of children's poems? I suppose the name Kate Clanchy is probably too toxic for any publishers to do so.

Sonia Sodha (author of the Observer article) is always very good - and she's written some excellent Terfy pieces in the last couple of years. In this piece, she absolute nails the fact that the treatment of Clanchy is part of the widespread demonisation of older white women as the repository of all that is evil.

Two other things stood out for me in that article:

1. "It is notoriously posh and white; when someone unfamiliar comes along saying that something is so offensive it should be expunged from the record, publishers assume they speak for all people of colour, as if we constitute a blob of uniform thought."

Absolutely right - and isn't there an inbuilt racism in the idea that one black person with an opinion speaks for all other black people, as if they all have identical views?

1. "Pan Macmillan’s overreaction has caused huge collateral damage – it will no longer publish a new anthology of poems by Clanchy’s students."

So all those young school students, many of them from deprived and refugee backgrounds, enormously excited at the prospect of seeing their work in print, are now to be told it isn't going to happen. Because Clanchy is a bad person.

What an achievement that is by the woke warriors who hounded Clanchy. Pissing on the dreams and aspirations of refugee children. They must be so fucking proud.

I disagree that it's a good article.

How to make sense of her ostracism? Some people are desperate to see the world cast in black and white. Clanchy’s worst crime is not to fit this mould.

As a fat, working class Jewish woman I am not desperate to see the world cast in black and white. What I want is not to see books that speak disrespectfully about people like me, people from other groups, people who genuinely don't fit the mould. Kate is a white middle class intellectual, married to an academic. That's about as "mould" as you can get.

This Observer piece this morning is one of the best on the Kate Clanchy saga I've come across.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/23/the-hounding-of-kate-clanchy-has-been-a-witch-hunt-without-mercy

20 years! Not decades. I'm not Methuselah 😂

Despite the push for diversity, publishing is still a predominantly white middle class industry in the UK. I have been part of it for the best part of 20 decades, and have yet to meet an agent or senior editor who wasn't white, oxbridge/RG educated, thin, able-bodied, and middle class.

The issues run deep, as proven by work such as Clanchy's being published with nary a consideration for how offensive some of her descriptions are.

One thing I have occasionally noticed is that best-selling, highly regarded authors sometimes seem to get away with publishing later books that are less polished and which seem to have been more carelessly edited (prose style, not spelling) than even their own earlier output. Might she fit into that category? Is it possible everyone was afraid to challenge someone considered so much a genius that they couldn’t possibly be wrong?

Regardless of what happened here, I hate what’s happening in publishing. There seems to be mass paranoia in so many areas.

But I didn't notice them when I read the book and, presumably, neither did the many people at her publisher notice them nor the people who gave the book glowing reviews and awarded her a prestigious prize. Obviously one explanation for that is that we are all privileged white people who are just not attuned to racism (this is possibly true). Another explanation is that they read differently in context. What I took from the book is that this is a woman who is devoted to her students and does everything she can to support them and nurture their talents. Very difficult to square this with the idea that this is someone who is casually racist.

I don't think it's that unusual to have a situation like this. The fact is that for someone to have both a desire to help students, and affection for them, that's actually compatible with a realistic assessment that some of them will be lucky to get on in life because of the type of upbringing they've had, or to see that they are for example obese and their habits contribute to that.

But she's said out loud what people aren't supposed to say but which they often notice, which can be powerful kind in writing. But also prone to getting people's backs up.

My main concern would be the kids reading the book, because I do think certain of those descriptions might be hard for kids to read. Though maybe it's not that kind of book. In other settings though I think that kind of very honest writing receives plaudits.

[quote whiteworldgettingwhiter]Check this out on why it's not good to describe people as if they were food - writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/post/95955707903/skin-writing-with-color-has-received-several[/quote]
This is just some person's opinion, though, it's basically made up.

The main instances I've seen of people doing this has been describing themselves or their kids, and a few years ago it was quite common in certain types of afrocentric lit.

I think the quotes sound pretty appalling. Not the almond shaped eyes one (aren't all eyes almond shaped?) But most of the rest. Why it got published without severe edits and re-writes pre-publication is baffling. Publishing is a very white middle class industry full of waifish young things so maybe the descriptions of the fat working class kids seemed perfectly reasonable to them?!?!?

How can we talk about inequality and disadvantage and privilege if we aren't allowed to mention it?

Maybe by not using racist, classist, anti-Semitic and fat phobic language to describe underprivileged pupils?

I also really disliked how Clanchy is so dismissive of the trainee teacher who complains about the boy student with an erection making inappropriate comments. That but also seemed quite tone deaf in the current climate.

BUT… I still think it’s a really important book, and beautifully written despite some really cringey bits. As a PP says, can we really dismiss Clanchy as a “white saviour” when she’s so passionately committed to doing a difficult job that many of her critics couldn’t handle, and which clearly makes a huge difference to the lives of her students? I felt the same about the Lucy Kellaway book, Re-educated, where the author’s position of privilege is an uncomfortable contrast to that of the kids she teaches, but she is at least putting her money where her mouth is and actually doing something to try and close that gap.