Times Interview with Kate Clanchy - shared article in post

@musicismyboyfriend I work at a university in the arts - even the level 6 students are supervised and protected by ethical frameworks to protect them when working creatively on something, such as a traumatic experience, which might cause them undue harm. They are discouraged from doing so and have to provide paperwork to acknowledge this, it’s basic safeguarding.

Well, that's the most insane thing I've read on the internet for a while, and it's such a crowded and competitive field. So congratulations, I guess.

Well, Pullman resigned from the SoA and both he and Clanchy will bear the scars of this for life - from what I have heard he is still scarred by what happened and of course Kate’s life has been hugely damaged. Kate’s housing career was saved by Swift Press, but from what I can see they are a rarity.

i work in education, I’m trained to spot safeguarding flags.

enjoy!

Has she even had any teacher training? Nope

It would take you about 30 seconds to discover that this statement is untrue. She trained as a teacher in the 1980s and her memoir was about her 30+ years of teaching.

‘So many of our children had a loss to mourn. Isn’t that what poetry’s for?’ | Kate Clanchy | The Guardian

I mean, publishers are just people. The book had plenty of redeeming qualities, it was engaging and entertaining.

Adam Kay’s professional memoir had been a massive bestseller just before Kate’s was published and in that book he is humorously rude about his patients. I wonder if it’s a feature of that genre of book.

The poetry may or may not be good, but for me it is fatally contaminated, so no thank you.

Exactly - we only have what she has written, and it’s very clear.

Do you think so? I'm genuinely not sure either way. They probably built enormous twitter clout and huge followings, plus a few book deals, but Pullman is a global bestseller with plays, films, and multiples TV series under his name. Do we judge by income? Pretty sure any publisher would fall over themselves to sign Pullman over those three, and not sure where Clanchy would sit in that line up these days.

I'm fascinated by the online mobs and how very small figures can bring down much bigger people who are still bringing in plaudits and money for companies. I'll be very curious to see how those small figures do later down the line, as they try to fit into those industries where they had to violently throw people under the bus to get in.

Yes, her bullies (and they are bullies - they haven’t just bullied Kate Clanchy, you know) aren’t white. But as the article rightly points out, they are all from comfortable, middle class, educated backgrounds.

And none were as successful as Kate Clanchy, and none had done as much as her to elevate children from minority backgrounds.

Professional jealousy is an ugly thing. The disgusting Sunny Singh saying Kate was weaponising her “white woman tears” when she described feeling suicidal.

A vile trio.

Indeed.. how else could people from disadvantaged backgrounds and/ or with a history of trauma ever get ahead without our middle class saviours to lift us from the mud 🙄

And yet she has done more to raise the voices of children from minorities and marginalised communities than any of her bullies have ever done. (And outsold them all hugely.) That’s how “awful” she is, right? Using her privilege to raise up others.

The response from her publisher was appalling. You’d think she’d committed a heinous crime the way they behaved.

Interesting that they redacted their correspondence (same happened around Rachel Rooney, too - and that involved an unprofessional publicist as well) - thank goodness the external
PR company did the right thing.

Exactly - we only have what she has written, and it’s very clear.

That is not my experience at all - either as a parent with children in school, or in my workplace in education. Safeguarding in schools and all educational setting is the priority.

Do you think so? I'm genuinely not sure either way. They probably built enormous twitter clout and huge followings, plus a few book deals, but Pullman is a global bestseller with plays, films, and multiples TV series under his name. Do we judge by income? Pretty sure any publisher would fall over themselves to sign Pullman over those three, and not sure where Clanchy would sit in that line up these days.

I'm fascinated by the online mobs and how very small figures can bring down much bigger people who are still bringing in plaudits and money for companies. I'll be very curious to see how those small figures do later down the line, as they try to fit into those industries where they had to violently throw people under the bus to get in.

What I expect happens far more often than a teacher encouraging a child to express themselves, is that broken children get no help at all. No teachers offering to listen to them, no counsellors springing up out of nowhere to offer this perfectly appropriate 'support' that people like to imagine exists.

The contempt for ‘amateur reviewers’.

It feels like a positive step to stop gate-keeping things like reviewing and just printing the opinions of boring old white cis men etc etc etc, now that the internet is open access, but in practice it can mean books get spammed with bad reviews for WrongThink, or that readers with no understanding of nuance, context, or irony can post genuinely destructive reviews on sites like Goodreads. Most readers will just give a 1-5 star rating and feedback, but this reviewer went out of their way to cherry-pick quotes, tweak them ever so slightly, and remove them completely from their context to sound as inflammatory as possible.

Should Clanchy have responded? Ideally not. But if someone's reviewing my book and deliberately going out of their way to be extremely stupid and/or bait-y about it, I'd certainly question the usefulness of amateur reviewers too.

Like I've said, you have absolutely no idea what else was going on in the background and who else was involved. Why would you? It wouldnt be relevant or appropriate to the story being told and you dont know any of these people personally,

You cannot pursue a child (vulnerable or otherwise) over and over again, going against the authority of a child’s key worker/main responsible adult, just to get them to write a poem about their trauma.

If that is your take from reading that amazing account of her time with her students and their stories, I fear for your humanity. You clearly have a serious issue with her but not for good reason.

Thanks for sharing though, she writes so vividly and illuminatingly about her students - I am off to buy her book.

Also one must bear in mind that this is a book; a story that has been told. Clanchy is a writer, and we can't really know for sure that any of these children exist in exactly the way described, or whether the events were exactly as described.

Why is it a "horror" to say someone looks like they have an Ashkenazi nose? Only if you believe that it's an insult to be Jewish or look Jewish.

And Jewish people are having nose jobs (Jewish Chronicle) mainly young women. So people can't look diverse and we can't describe diversity? What a horrible world to live in. https://www.thejc.com/news/the-complex-history-of-jews-nose-jobs-and-antisemitism-cygdnrx2

As for Clanchy's other descriptions of children she quoted the children's descriptions of themselves from their own poetry.

From The Times article "She used the phrase “almond eyes”, for example, but did so because it was a term she had learnt was used by the Hazara people of Afghanistan as an “important political term and identifier” of their ethnic group. One of her old pupils had even written a poem that included the line, “In Iran where they offend because of their almond-shaped eyes.” Similarly, a pupil wrote in a poem that “the scorching sun melts my chocolate face”. "

https://www.thetimes.com/article/7681d5ec-3773-4b36-ab95-e4ab409d7899?shareToken=e76def471fd13ded750d7295fd554675

If you or those 3 twitter bullies are offended by what children wrote about themselves that doesn't make Clanchy's work offensive or her the problem.

@Ddakji And not just P&M, but the twenty-somethings that fill the junior half of those departments. A lot of noise, not a lot of life experience.