Margaret Atwood on Changes in Publishing

I love this keynote address from award-winning poet and author Margaret Atwood at the Tools of Change conference. She talks about authors being the "dead moose" of publishing and says, "Authors are a primary source. Everything else in the world of publishing depends on them." She includes libraries, schools, book reviewers/bloggers, publishers, agents, printers, book cover designers, etc. in that analogy--all of whom rely, first and foremost, on authors to write books. She also says that authors are like anchovies in the food chain, and the anchovies are getting restless. Ha! She's fun, witty and engaging, and offers some great food for thought. (No pun intended! But she does use lots of food metaphors.)

Watch live streaming video from oreillyconfs at livestream.com

Nerds Heart YA

If you're a book blogger, or just an avid reader who loves YA books, please consider going on over to the Nerds Heart YA site and nominating your favourite YA title/s for their 2010 tournament. Here is the criteria, as per their website:

1. Title can have no more than 15 reviews published throughout the book blogosphere
2. Title must be either authored by or include a character within the following category: Person(s) of Color (POC), GLBT, Disability, Mental Illness, Religious Lifestyle, Lower Socioeconomic Status or Plus Size.
3. All titles must have been published between January 1 – December 31, 2010

I just nominated my first title. LOVE it.

Jazz & Jeeves?

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!! Today, being the day that it is, I just had to share this video from UK rappers, Raxstar and Sunit. It's called "Keep it Undercover," and Jeeves could totally have written it for Jazz . . .

Blog Tour, Interviews, and a Few Guest Posts

All last month and most of this month, I've been doing interviews and guest posts. And while I love doing them, I'm going to have to impose a temporary freeze. I spend quite a bit of time and energy on these posts because I put so much of myself into them, but afterward, I am simply too exhausted to access that creative side in order to write new work. So, if you'd like to do an interview or have an idea for a guest post, please ask me a few months down the road? I would love to consider the request then :).

However, if you're not sick of me like I am, here are a few links:

An Equal Place at the Table (guest post on YA lit and representation)

The Book Smugglers' review of Jazz in Love

Review of Jazz in Love at Bibliophilia (love this blog by the very awesome, very talented 16-yr-old - Maggie Desmond-O'Brien)

This month and into next, I'll be doing a blog tour with Teen Book Scene. Click on the banner above for details, or follow the posts here. I had so much fun with these - there's even a character interview on the 28th with Deesh, Jazz's mom :D.

Ari's interview for Reading in Color will be up beginning of March and I'll link to that, as well. She asks some questions no one has asked me yet about Jazz in Love.

In the meantime, happy almost-Spring, all! (Yes, I'm very hopeful. Especially as the wind howls outside my window.) Please send lots of creative writing-y vibes this way :).

Ahmed, on Killjoys

I saw this excerpt on Leonineclaire's tumblr and wanted to share. It's an extract from Sara Ahmed's "Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)". I could see great classroom discussion/debate emerging around this one excerpt:

“Take the example of racism. It can be willful even to name racism: as if the talk about divisions is what is divisive. Given that racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who “bring it up” are bringing it into existence . . . . To recede is to go back or withdraw. To concede is to give way, to yield. People of color are often asked to concede to the recession of racism: we are asked to “give way” by letting it “go back.” Not only that: more than that. We are often asked to embody a commitment to diversity. We are asked to smile in their brochures. The smile of diversity is a way of not allowing racism to surface; it is a form of political recession.

Racism is very difficult to talk about as racism can operate to censor the very evidence of its existence. Those who talk about racism are thus heard as creating rather than describing a problem. The stakes are indeed very high: to talk about racism is to occupy a space that is saturated with tension. History is saturation. One of the findings of a research project I was involved with on diversity was that because racism saturates everyday and institutional spaces, people of color often make strategic decisions not to use the language of racism.[18] If you already pose a problem, or appear “out of place” in the institutions of whiteness, there can be “good reasons” not to exercise what is heard as a threatening vocabulary.[19] Not speaking about racism can be a way of inhabiting the spaces of racism. You minimize the threat you already are by softening your language and appearance, by keeping as much distance as you can from the figure of the angry person of color. Of course, as we know, just to walk into a room can be to lose that distance, because that figure gets there before you do.

When you use the very language of racism you are heard as “going on about it,” as “not letting it go.” It is as if talking about racism is what keeps it going. Racism thus often enters contemporary forms of representation as a representation of a past experience.”

You can read the rest of the article here.