Category: Editing

Do the Right Thing: A Hugo Rant

On by in Angry, Editing, Environmental Justice, Reckoning

(This is the uncensored, uncut version of an editorial piece appearing today at Reckoning. Content warning: a lot of swearing.)

Let me begin by repeating that Reckoning is actively seeking work by marginalized writers and artists, we would love to publish more work in translation, we pay translators the same rate we pay authors (10 cents a word for prose, $50 per page for poetry and art), and though we are not currently able to review or translate work written in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and a myriad of other languages, we can and do read in English, French, Swedish, and Spanish, and we get excited every single time we encounter in our submissions a new piece of translated work, or any work from part of the world or from a perspective we’ve never encountered before. We are very lucky to be able to say we’ve now got a native Spanish speaker on staff, who will hopefully open us up to many more of those experiences and enable us to publish even more diverse work.

I perceive the dangerous potential, as daily worse things seem to come out about the behavior of the Hugo admin committee responsible for fucking over so many great authors and the entire fandom of China not to mention various individual humans in their immediate vicinity, of writing them off as irrevocably evil outliers and therefore not representative of problems in our field as a whole. But how do individual people get this shitty? They get encouraged. If they’re entitled white men, that encouragement need amount to nothing more than looking the other way, because for entitled white men, silence is consent. (Important note: it’s not. Fuck off, entitled white men.) How do individual people get encouraged to be better? By positive peer pressure. By example.

I would like to encourage you to look around at your own section of this community and ask yourself, where is this trend leading and why?

I’ve grown accustomed over the course of my very minor career as a writer and editor in this field to being dismissed by idiots as being brainwashed by “liberal guilt”, engaged in handwringing, etc, a generally write-offable extreme outlier not worth listening to. I shrug it off. It’s easy, because I’m an entitled white man. I’ve also grown accustomed, due to the very minorness of my career and my pursuant utter lack of interest in being subjected to popularity contests of any kind, to not piping up like this about the latest crisis. I don’t want a Hugo. I have no skin in this game. But the trouble, the good trouble, with publishing a magazine featuring work by people I care deeply about and want to succeed is that it makes me care on their behalf. Nobody can sell to Reckoning all the time and call it a career. Our authors go on to appear in Clarkesworld and Asimov’s and F&SF, and they’re proud and happy, and I’m proud of them and want them to be happy. Some of them even dream of winning a Hugo, I daresay. I want them to be able to dream.

I also want the latest crisis to stop overshadowing the previous, ongoing crisis and the one before that. I want reassurances that just because the Hugo committee has provided us a great honking ugly scapegoat whose clutch on the reins of power is not so steely we can’t unseat him, we’re not allowing that to be an excuse to conveniently forget that, for one glaring example, the insidious shutting-out of Palestinian voices is still going on and does not have a clear, single figurehead responsible for us to point fingers at. There are so many compounded crises going on, anyone can be forgiven for not addressing every one all the time loud enough so nobody else forgets. But we can’t forget. Individually, we can and indeed must pick an injustice flavor of the week to try to address and make traction against if we can, with our voices, our donations, our votes, because if we don’t we’ll go insane. But we can’t let the flavor of the week blot out all the other injustice.

What is the antidote to trickle-down gatekeeping, to bureaucratic power-clutching and uninterrogated fascist creep? The antidote, like the problem, is manifold. We need awards run by non-assholes. Juried awards, with juries of non-assholes empaneled by non-assholes. The Ignyte awards are such an award. So are the Shirleys. Support them, care about them, pay attention to who wins, give them money. Our fellow Detroit-based indie press Atthis Arts bent over backwards this past year rescuing an anthology of Ukrainian SFF, Embroidered Worlds, from the slag heap. Pay attention to what they’re doing. Lift them up. We need magazines like Strange Horizons (who published a Palestinian special issue in 2020), Fiyah, Clarkesworld (who have long been in the vanguard of championing translated work and translators), Omenana, and khoréo (their year 4 fundraiser ends 2/29). We need magazines whose editors and staff are actively listening to, seeking out, boosting, celebrating, paying—and translating, paying, and celebrating translators of—Chinese, Taiwanese, Palestinian, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Congolese, Nigerian, Disabled, Neurodivergent, Queer, and Trans voices. Do I, in that litany, miss anybody currently getting oppressed and shut out? Undoubtedly I do. This work is unending. I choose to keep at it. Reckoning authors, readers, and staff keep signaling to me that I’m right to.

Our contributors routinely tell us what an exceptionally relaxed, kind, professional, supportive experience it is selling us their work. I do not generally talk about this, though it is among the most rewarding things about publishing Reckoning. I tend to feel pleased but uncomfortable about it, because from my perspective, I did not do anything special. I was polite. I told them out loud how much I actually liked the work I was offering to pay them for. I paid promptly, and if obstacles got in the way of that payment due to eyeroll-inducing, ass-covering corporate or international bureaucracy, I surmounted those obstacles as best I could. I celebrated their work. I submitted it for a bunch of awards I personally do not care about. The end.

No, not quite, I realize. There’s the editing, which can get involved, and for which the decisionmaking process is not always as trivial. Reckoning staff is great at this. It feels easy, mostly. Our authors are in earnest, they care about their work, it shows, it makes us care and want them to feel satisfied and valued. We want them to get what they want out of publishing with us. It’s not like that’s not challenging work, sometimes. The world is complex, justice is many-faceted because there are so many invested parties. But really, operating on those first principles, the steps almost always feel as if they’re just falling into place.

But we look around at the rest of publishing, we hear the discourse, and it’s confusing, sometimes, how difficult this work can seem.

The Hugo admins are the current glaring example. A very few people appear to have twisted themselves all up in knots making their job seem far harder than it should for terrible reasons. You’re supposed to help the science fiction fans of earth decide among themselves equably what is the best work in our field. You’re supposed to provide an example of how the utopian principles on which this field is founded can manifest in the real world. How are we supposed to get to the united—though still bureaucratically contentious and inescapably prejudicial—planet envisioned by Gene Roddenberry? What are we meant to take away from the vast, genius life’s work of Le Guin? How do we grapple with the criticisms of human nature raised by Octavia Butler? These are big, complicated questions, in the contemplation of which we cannot avoid self-scrutiny, we cannot help employing nuance, entering gray areas, turning a critical eye on these icons as well as the institutions who are responsible for making us love this field in the first place. I cannot help feeling like too many are shying away from those questions rather than engaging them.

The Hugo admins aren’t the only ones. The PEN Awards have recently been actively lifting up pro-genocide voices and suppressing Palestinian voices. A story we published, “All We Have Left Is Ourselves” by Oyedotun Damilola Muees, won a PEN Award for emerging writers in 2021. How can you administer an award designed specifically to remedy the way the publishing establishment has systematically ignored marginalized voices and then side with imperialism? There’s an open letter from a bunch of not-assholes calling the PEN organization to task for this. Reckoning is among the non-assholes who have signed it.

Over my eight year tenure as publisher of Reckoning, I’ve heard complaints from a number of authors about a number of fiction markets which shall here remain nameless who insist on paying authors with PayPal and or not at all. PayPal recently auto-suspended Reckoning’s account because we used their service to pay a Palestinian author for their work (and then unsuspended us only after we called in the BBB and CPA, a tactic we glowingly recommend). They also have routinely shut us out from paying Mexican, Russian, Nigerian and Bangladeshi authors. Do we then throw up our hands and not pay those authors? No, we find another service, we pay the fees, we jump through the hoops until they get paid.

If you’ve been following the Hugos discussion, you’ve probably been admonished several hundred times by now not to pre-oppress yourself—wait and let the fascists do that. In other words, insofar as it is safe for you and those vulnerable around you, provoke fascists. Make them censor and oppress you by doing the right thing. Maybe you’ve noticed that the people out there at the protests chaining themselves to things and getting arrested tend to be the very young, the very old, and the very most directly vulnerable. In case you’ve wondered why: it’s because the young and old are the ones without dependents. Either they can afford the risk or they’re already so much at risk they might as well put their bodies on the line. Either way, we’re all in their debt.

I have discussed this with Reckoning staff, they have apprised me of the risks. I, an entitled white man, do hereby arrogate those risks solely unto myself in declaring these statements mine and mine alone (all use of the first person plural above is the editorial “we”, not the collective), and Reckoning open to all morally defensible points of view, up to and including that Chinese and Chinese dissident voices should not be discarded outside the gate to the field’s most popular award, Palestinian and dissident Israeli voices should not be suppressed because anyone is squeamish about genocide or the politics of wealth, English should not be the lingua franca of the future nor English speakers its arbiters, all tools at our disposal should be employed to circumvent that shit, translators should be credited and paid, figureheads and bankrupt institutions should be torn down not pandered to. Sitting quietly by is what allows these institutions to perpetuate across generations! Fuck complacency.

Grow a backbone and a conscience, my fellow gatekeepers. Thank you.

Everyone else: please send us your work.

Publisher vs Editor-in-Chief

On by in Editing, Environmental Justice, Reckoning

I am the publisher of Reckoning, not the editor-in-chief. A couple things happened recently to make me want to emphasize that distinction and talk about why it’s important.

I used to be the editor! I’m really proud of those first two issues where I got to do that work. I found it incredibly rewarding. It’s such a different, richer, more creative and collaborative experience than merely reading submissions, which I’d done for a couple of other magazines beforehand. For writers who’ve established themselves a little, if you’re at all interested, I recommend it. It crystallized what I wanted out of my own writing. It showed me how to talk about writing with writers in ways no amount of workshopping had.

But it takes up a lot of writing time. And you burn out, or at least I did.

So I pulled back from that role, both to give myself a break and to give others the chance. Reckoning has been about community-building from the start, and working closely, creatively, with others is the best and most rewarding way I’ve found to do that. I’ve learned so much, individually, from editors Danika Dinsmore, Arkady Martine, Leah Bobet, Cécile Cristofari, Aïcha Martine Thiam, Gabriele Santiago, Priya Chand, Octavia Cade, and Tim Fab-Eme, as well as long-time staff and (I hope) future editors Giselle Leeb, Johannes Punkt, Catherine Rockwood and Andrew Kozma, and all our staff. They are each, individually, brilliant. I’ve gotten to know them as people, I’ve gotten to know their work, how they work, what they love in a piece of writing, what they love in the world. Through them, I’ve expanded my understanding of what environmental justice and climate writing can be, what activism looks like, how humans can be interconnected with the rest of the natural world, who gets to be responsible for bringing about all of the above, and why. (The essay I’ve got out in Solarpunk Magazine right now has a bit more about this.)

This was part of the original idea: learning, getting shown where I’ve been wrong. And there was one other thing: I wanted Reckoning taken out of my hands.

I didn’t even know what environmental justice was not so long before I started. Quickly, though, it became obvious: the voices we need to hear aren’t mine. Everybody’s heard plenty from people who look like me, from Thoreau and John Muir down to David Attenborough. The trouble is, practically every single person directly responsible for the world’s environmental injustice looks like me, too. It kind of undermines one’s credibility.

Back in 2015 I consulted a couple of indie publishers I trusted, asking for advice. They were all white men. One said to me, if you’re going to invite a bunch of strangers to take editorial control of something you created, you have to accept the possibility that they’ll take it away from you completely, make it into something you couldn’t have foreseen, didn’t intend, something you might not even like. And I thought, not without a little trepidation: that sounds amazing. That is exactly what I want. I’ve been trying to figure out how something like that would be possible ever since.

So why didn’t I seek marginalized folks to take on Reckoning right away, instead of waiting two whole issues? I did, actually, though not terribly exhaustively. She said no. She was way ahead of me, too busy completely altering her career path to teach environmental justice thought and writing at a university level. But when she turned me down, it made me realize I wasn’t ready to go asking other folks for help. I wasn’t exactly a nobody, I’d guest-edited one environmental issue of LCRW—but out from under the auspices of Small Beer, I didn’t have a track record. There was no reason for anyone to trust that I wasn’t out to exploit them, use their identity and their work as a mask for my lazy entitlement. And I didn’t have nearly enough money to offer anyone to make that worth their while.

This is why I ended up seeking editorial staff from the pool of people I’d published. They already had my money, they’d seen the product, they knew I was serious.

Reckoning’s first editorial staff came together, and they gelled. It was amazing to see: they were joking together, caring about each other, stepping up to support each other, and arguing fiercely about what the work should be.

Once it became obvious that it had worked, that these wonderful people—wiser, more talented, different from me, with things to say that the world needed to hear—had invested in the idea of Reckoning, in evolving and improving it and learning together, I saw how I could begin to pivot away from making creative decisions towards supporting them, helping to find more people like them. We’re still in that process. It’ll be awhile, yet. I’m still the voice of the editorial “we” on twitter, for example, though I’d love that to change. I’m still doing everything I can behind the scenes, up to and including a little editing as needed, and I’ll keep doing it as long as that’s needed. “I am where the buck stops,” I keep telling everybody who wants to join us, until it begins to feel like it’s losing it’s meaning.

It’s not that I’ve got nothing to say! All my own writing has been about this for years now: trying to figure out what I can add to the conversation, to the cause, without stepping in front of the people my kind have been stepping in front of since Columbus, to the massive detriment of every life on this planet except a tiny subset of our own. But I would in no way be able to undertake that effort in good faith if I didn’t have the Reckoning community, its editors, staff, contributors and readers, to teach me. And I want to give them credit. And all the room they need to do that.

Giving Julie C. Day’s series of charity anthologies its own imprint, Essential Dreams Press, of which Julie can be both publisher and editor-in-chief, is a step in this process. The Dreams series has been entirely Julie’s idea and her work from the start—it just happened to fit in with Reckoning’s mission well enough we saw a way we could support her in it, and she was kind and appreciative enough to want to give us credit for that support. But the credit really ought to be hers.

So I’m the publisher of Reckoning Press, not the editor-in-chief. Reckoning‘s budget is still mostly my money. Maybe that’ll change? I hope so. I hope I’ll keep fading further into the background. Maybe, hopefully, others will take over the twitter, the layouts, the contracts, the budget. But I’m not trying to push those things off on anyone, because I think of them as the boring part, the work that isn’t fun or creative or transformative. I don’t mind doing those things as long as it’s needed, as long as we, Reckoning, can keep putting out beautiful, diverse, surprising, aggressively heterogeneous, mind-expanding, consensus-building creative writing and art on environmental justice.

The part I do want to keep doing—and I hope I can without getting in the way of the rest of it—is being part of the community.