Times Interview with Kate Clanchy - shared article in post

[NorthSouthEast]

This is a sobering, thoughtful, harrowing, blood-boiling read. What Kate Clanchy went through 😡. I’ve put this in FWR as it’s yet another story of a woman being cancelled on the basis of rumour, supposition and hearsay with self-righteous people scrambling to jump on the “be kind” wagon as it rolls another human being and their career into the mud.

Kate Clanchy: I was cancelled. It made me contemplate suicide

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

@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.

@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.

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.

@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.

And yet I have witnessed myself senior staff tying themselves in knots over placating these very junior staff. It is genuinely staggering. Since when did saying “please carry on doing the job you have been hired to do and are paid to do in a professional manner” become verboten?

how ironic that my one Jewish friend who had a nose job was sefardic, not ashkenazi.

I know hundreds of Jewish people, and I am Jewish myself, very few have had nose jobs. Perhaps its common in certain circles.

Obviously when people say Jewish nose (or Ashkenazi nose) they mean a large hooked nose. Not a cute little button nose. See 'eternal Jew' Poster on this webpage. www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/visual-essay-impact-propaganda

Anyway, just finished the BBC podcast. Definitely worth a listen. Its a rollercoaster and you don't really know what to think when you have finished.

No one really comes out looking good. Kate comes off as kind but very flawed and a bit pig headed, refusing to accept her wrongdoings. You do come away feeling a bit sympathetic for her. There was a lot of online bullying of her and other people. Her publishers seemed to have dropped the ball majorly - seems Kate agreed to any changes her editor suggested before publication.

Shes very clear in the podcast that the protraits are composites of children, not actual children.

Also, am I missing something - dont we ALL have almond shaped eyes, no matter our race or ethnicity? Or is it referring to the colour? Anyway I think that was the least offensive of the examples I heard mentioned.

Enjoy!

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

Professional reviewers do exactly the same thing sometimes.

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.

Any author (except a very very few) is in a precarious position. Only as good as their last publication, and hordes more hopeful aspiring authors with mss ready to take their place (and accept a smaller advance) if they don't come up to scratch.

And an abundance of mental health support? For children, specifically? Maybe varies by area. Where we are CAHMS is apparently virtually non existent. I do take the point that a teacher isn't a counsellor, though.

Its fictionalised, though.

I remember at the time that two or three influencers/authors seemed to jump up every time it went quiet and start saying how badly it had impacted their lives. There was something uncomfortable about it, they seemed to become the loudest voices at the centre of it all. But the whole thing was also around the time of the Society of Authors debacle, interesting times on Twitter back then. I remember the patronising letter from JH to her…

But what does that have to do with whether someone you’ve never met genuinely helped some children you’ve never met?

Because you did not receive or need help from anybody means that nobody has ever received or needed help from anybody?

I remember every time she spoke or was in print at all, they would jump up to screech that she clearly hadn’t been cancelled. Yet… was the inference.

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.

It’s a fictionalised account of her teaching years — which you haven’t read. FFS a few pages back you accused her of having no teaching qualifications which is a flat out lie.