Times Interview with Kate Clanchy - shared article in post

@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.

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.

@Molto yes, the editors exist. I find, from my own publishing experience, and from cases like this and Rachel Rooney’s, that it’s all too often publicity and marketing who stick a spanner in the works, and in sales-led publishers (rather than editorially led ones) that can be a big problem - and sometimes even in ones that would consider themselves editorially led like Bloomsbury.

@ArabellaSaurus Going by the frustrations of my teaching friends at universities and schools, in many places, unfortunately yes. It's a great loss for most students, but we all know that any discomfort is to be avoided at all costs (despite the higher costs we pay further down the line for it).

@Ddakji Agreed, of course, but there are still editors who work with an ethos of "I publish to allow the public access to this work, whatever their thoughts on it" rather than "I publish to get pats on the back for being OTRSOH". Sometimes those authors become huge, like JP and JKR, sometimes they just chug along and remain in their day jobs, but those editors do exist, thank god.

Most authors aren’t as successful as them, though.

And while we all panic about the state of publishing (there's a lot to panic about), it's worth remembering that there are still plenty of editors who don't lose their heads when social media goes mad about a book or an author. Look at writers like Jordan Peterson or JKR - their editors just sign up the books, edit the books, sell the books in enormous piles and don't bother engaging with the mob. (Some are cynical and hard-headed, some genuinely principled.)

Contemporary culture tends to flatten hierarchies. This can be helpful in terms of equity and opening things up, but also has inadvertent effects like the loss of respect for experts, uneven standards, and sometimes these weirdly unequal situations where amateur input carries as much weight as that of professionals.

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.

Well, they ended up being more powerful than Kate Clanchy and even Philip Pullman.

And how many of those ‘trained professionals’ do you think those children had regular access to?

To be fair, these women were not powerful at the time. They, like Damian Barr and many others vaguely adjacent to the literary sphere, built careers off being on twitter constantly, stoking the fires for the Great Purge and jumping onto any RSOH bandwagon. Very bad actors in the whole thing, but I'd still debate now if any of them were powerful.

They're just more of the deafening loud voices on social media that become immediately drowned out when you talk to normal, offline people in the majority of the UK.

Exactly. And here, the proof seems to be in the pudding as they say. Her students recognise and value their relationships with her and that she did for them.

I wonder if the more vicious posters on this thread would put so much time and effort into working with such children.

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.

Are you in a teaching role?

It just sounds wild.

'...very carefully supervised by a professional in the field, as well as a professional student support practitioner
it is negotiated on a case by case basis, with careful risk management.'

Sounds like no art course I've ever encountered, other than ones that were specifically tailored for certain demographics, i.e. where trauma was expected and prepared for.

It sounds like students are treated as if they are terribly fragile.

To be clear - I am not discounting your experience! It just sounds very strange that arts ed is now treating students like this. I hear you that mental health has been difficult. I'm also thinking of research that suggests that our pathologising of mental health issues tends to worsen, not improve, outcomes.

Ok sure!

Hmm, I’m wondering what kind of a university course would just be for traumatised people.

the last few years of teaching in higher and further education have been very difficult- it’s well documented, not just in the UK. Mental health concerns have had a significant impact on student engagement, attainment and outcomes. As a result, we have to make more effort to monitor and protect students.

That wasn't aimed at you, sorry. Just a rhetorical question.

Crikey. And this isn't a course specifically for traumatised people? Just a straightforward arts course?

It’s about managing risk. Of course it is difficult to avoid triggers, you just don’t push the students toward them.

I have already answered this.

not hostile at all

they are very carefully supervised by a professional in the field, as well as a professional student support practitioner

it is negotiated on a case by case basis, with careful risk management. But yes, if the trauma is very recent and raw (such as your siblings being recently killed in an airstrike as in Kate’s book for example) then centering this would probably be advised against, due to the risk of a student becoming overwhelmed, further traumatised, or at least unable to submit.

These are adult students, on a degree course. Not young, inexperienced secondary or primary school children.

If this did happen in real life, a safeguarding lead would need to be involved- so hopefully they were.

This is the crucial point, I think, that many seem to skip over.

This book is fictionalised. Much will be omitted and much will be changed.

It's good to discuss the themes that it maybe provokes, but I don't know that suggesting the author be held to account for fictionalised events is reasonable.

And I'm honestly not trying to do a 'gotcha'. I think these are important questions. How do teachers handle trauma in students?

Because trauma unfortunately isn't that straightforward. I'm sure you're aware that PTSD triggers, for example, are often tied to specific details that may have been involved at the time of the event. That might be a strong smell, certain song, etc. It's almost arbitrary. How does one avoid those?