A shitstorm in the making

The latest edition of the NEW WRITING anthology series sponsored by the British Council was co-edited by Toby Litt and Ali Smith, and as reported by the Guardian, their introduction to the collection is making many folks quite unhappy:

In the introduction to 13, a collection of poetry, short stories and extracts from novels, published by Picador, the authors Toby Litt and Ali Smith make a sweeping condemnation of the subject matter, writing style and preoccupations of female writers. Litt, the author of several books including Corpsing and deadkidsongs, and Smith, the Scottish writer who has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize, sifted through numerous submissions from women writers. Few impressed them.

In the introduction to the collection the authors write: “On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking – as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell.”

”“Defining domestic as dull is a complete misnomer,” said the author Kirsty Gunn. “This is where a large proportion of our [women’s] lives are spent; there is no reason why the word should be loaded with such pejorative meaning. I am a writer but at the moment I am frying fish fingers and listening to a child’s violin lesson.”

Amanda Craig, the author, accused the editors of not spreading their net wide enough for submissions. “I never knew this was happening; they didn’t come to me. I wonder how many people they did approach.”

She agreed, however, that there was some truth in their comments. “Women do focus on the domestic because that reflects the truth of their lives.”

The unsurprising controversy also ties into an earlier discussion Laura Lippman started on her blog about why she had interviewed more men than women during her journalistic career, and what implications there were, if any. In the comments section of that post, she said the following:

I’ll return to my old tired argument. As a culture, we understand and accept that “male” concerns — stories about what it means to be a man in the 21st century — have implications for every one, male and female. It’s harder to persuade some readers — note I said, “some readers,” and I’m not breaking it down by gender because I don’t think it breaks down that way — that female-centric stories can be universal. What’s at stake when a man is unhappy? If the man is prone to violence, quite a bit. What’s at stake when a woman is unhappy? Her own life, maybe her children’s. Please understand, I’m not arguing for these positions, just trying to tease out what might be going on when male writers seem to own a disproportionate share of the slots assigned at the top of any genre.

So are Litt and Smith’s criticisms valid, or are they falling into the trap of seeing “male-based stakes” (for lack of a better term) as higher value risk than those put forward by women? And considering that writing is such an individually personal task, isn’t it dangerous to generalize in the first place?