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

[quote DontLikeCrumpets]@EishetChayil

Sorry not sorry but that is not just Woke nonsense but also patronizing.The young woman loves her almond-shaped eyes. She herself describes them almond-shaped and supports someone using that term to describe them.[/quote]

I love my Jewish nose but that doesn't make it ok for someone else to comment on it. It isn't woke. It's the truth of coming from a persecuted minority.

’It's her publishers and the entire industry that is the problem. This book went through a major publisher RECENTLY. It won a major award. Many, many people were involved in reading it, editing it, marketing it.’

This ^ The publishers are dropping her now because some people objected to the words they chose to publish! How many people read those descriptions and didn’t flag them before that book hit the shelves?

I don’t think it’s ok to say that some of the people Clanchy described don’t find some of the descriptions offensive, so that means none of the descriptions are problematic. Those people were children. clanchy was their teacher. I don’t think it’s appropriate that they should feel pressured to defend her (I understand that she and her publisher asked them to). If I was in Clanchy’s position i like to think that I would urge them not to as I think it is an abuse of power. Quite apart from the fact that it is othering and weird to think that one marginalised person can represent all marginalised people. Maybe ‘almond eyes’ is ok in some contexts. But the young women described as fat or butch?

@EishetChayil

Sorry not sorry but that is not just Woke nonsense but also patronizing.The young woman loves her almond-shaped eyes. She herself describes them almond-shaped and supports someone using that term to describe them.

One person saying she doesn't find the comparison offensive doesn't negate the vast wealth of experience that suggests otherwise.

Couldn't the book have been reworked, conversations had?

The thing is, publishing is about people and relationships at its heart.

Her editor supported her, got dragged for it, then publicly ate humble pie.

How can Kate then work well with him?

I think it probably is ‘by mutual agreement’, in that the whole relationship between publisher and author has broken down.

She won’t remain unpublished. Someone else will take on and publish her poetry compilations.

Whether ‘Some Kids’ gets republished will be debatable.

The whole thing has been a lot of wrong moves on a lot sides. No one has come out covered in glory, frankly.

“Lianne is stuffing fig rolls, my favourite, into her pretty fat face, & it is very hard indeed not to have one. I can manage it, I think, in the same way that I can manage to finish a poem, because I am middle class. Because, since I was a tiny child, I have been taught to wait for long-term goals" and "She wasn’t a pretty girl, even by the standards of the IU, even if she wasn’t making a terrible face. She was fat, a swathe of freckly flesh bulging out from her collar, blurring her jaw line, giving her premature double chins” and "“As if refusing middle-class food along with middle-class ambition, Danielle put on weight… her new bosom protruding ever more bulbously… I was surprised how hurt I was to see it. It wasn’t the flesh so much as the loss of grace” (remember she is describing one of her pupils here).

What if that was your daughter being described?

I am halfway through Some Kids I Taught… and have found it so insightful! The language can seem othering but isn’t that kind of the point?? It’s pointing out their disadvantages and there’s a whole section about how private schools are essentially whitewashed and exclusionary. It’s the state of the country isn’t it?

It’s the right decision. The fact that the publisher originally stood by her when three women of colour were relentlessly hounded and ignored speaks volumes. If people of colour say something is racist, it is absolutely not the place of white people to tell them they’re wrong.

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

I'm quite honestly staggered that it was published in the first place. Some of those descriptions of pupils upthread are disgusting.

And she's not being 'cancelled' - the publisher has just decided to end their contract with her. She's free to seek another contract.

I'm normally not a fan of anyone being cancelled, but some of the quotes from Clanchy's book were awful, completely unacceptable.

I'm amazed the publisher, desk editor, commissioning editor, copyeditor or proofreader didn't pick up on the problems before the book was published.

[quote DontLikeCrumpets]@thinkingaboutLangCleg The girl referred to as having "almond shaped eyes" has strongly defended Clancy and saying she has always described herself as having almond-shaped eyes.[/quote]

This doesn't make it ok.

If someone said of me "she has a hooked Jewish nose", and it didn't offend me, that wouldn't automatically make it inoffensive.

I'm actually quite surprised at posters on this thread continuing to defend Clanchy even as more and more evidence for her wrongdoing is mentioned.

It's historically been used to otherise Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people.

Clanchy also referred to an "Ashkenazi nose", which cut particularly deeply for me, as a Jew.

Unless you've been on the receiving end of racist/anti-Semitic/other negative stereotypes, I suppose it's hard to see how hurtful it is to come across them in a book.

It would put me off wanting to be published by Picador more than it would put me off reading Kate Clanchy, at any rate.

She denied accurate quotes from her book were in there, and launched a coordinated attack on two women of colour who had respectfully drawn attention to them

That line about 'coordinated attack on two [three] women of colour' isn't true. She attacked a young white woman teacher who had reviewed her book on Goodreads and had condemned it as racist. And that attack was pretty cringeworthy. But once Twitter took her to task (Monisha Rajesh, Chimene Suleyman, Sunny Singh and others), she apologised. She never attacked women of colour.

Rajesh/Suleyman/Singh have said that they received racist hate mail as a result of the way they criticised Clanchy on Twitter, and that's deplorable, but it's a HUGE leap to say that Clanchy herself was somehow responsible for those attacks.

I was following the whole messy saga on Twitter very closely, and it strikes me as utterly unjust the way that Clanchy's unconscious bias in her book (which she did eventually apologise for) was equated with the awful racist messages Rajesh, Suleyman and Singh received behind the scenes from internet trolls.

I believe those three women when they say they were targeted by racists, but on Twitter, I never saw them receiving hate, I saw them receiving a huge amount of support.

I did see tweets telling Clanchy she should commit suicide because she's such an awful person.

Clanchy appealed for people to come out and say her book wasn't racist, and that move backfired spectacularly, but I haven't seen a single tweet of hers criticising women of colour. On the contrary, she apologised to women of colour.

I agree with you, OP. Picador ceasing to publish all her books, not just the book at the centre of the controversy, is complete overkill. Ironically, one of the books they've 'cancelled' is compilation of poems by the refugee pupils Clanchy taught.

This kind of intolerance and virtue-signalling is not making the world a better place.

I definitely think Picador have handled all of this badly, originally publishing the books as they were and now dropping Kate completely. It could all have been handled much better, both by Kate and her publisher. I honestly think if Kate herself hadn't drawn this to the world's attention by claiming the quotes were made up, nothing would have happened, it would have been a few negative reviews on GoodReads which she could have taken into account in her next book or not, as she chose.

I should add that the focus on "almond eyes" is quite misleading. Although that was one phrase picked out, others included a girl described as "very butch looking...with a distinct moustache", "Izzat so small & square & Afghan with his big nose & premature moustache", and numerous physical descriptions of children's bodies in relation to race- "Cypriot bosoms", "Ashkenazi nose" etc etc, plus a lot of classist/fatphobic stuff: “Lianne is stuffing fig rolls, my favourite, into her pretty fat face, & it is very hard indeed not to have one. I can manage it, I think, in the same way that I can manage to finish a poem, because I am middle class. Because, since I was a tiny child, I have been taught to wait for long-term goals" and "She wasn’t a pretty girl, even by the standards of the IU, even if she wasn’t making a terrible face. She was fat, a swathe of freckly flesh bulging out from her collar, blurring her jaw line, giving her premature double chins” and "“As if refusing middle-class food along with middle-class ambition, Danielle put on weight… her new bosom protruding ever more bulbously… I was surprised how hurt I was to see it. It wasn’t the flesh so much as the loss of grace” (remember she is describing one of her pupils here).

@ArabellaScott I think you’re right to the extent that the industry as a whole is rotten, and Clanchy is being used as a scapegoat when her behaviour is representative of the wider problem, but she is not of course wholly responsible.