Hi Nick.
There are relatively few non-white writers of horror or supernatural fiction in the UK, and it happened that none of the writers whom we targeted on account of their fiction were non-white. Would you have preferred us to target and include writers on the basis of their skin colour, not their writing?
Well, Joel, I suppose I'd point out that those aren't the only choices one has when editing an anthology. Either writing
or color is hardly a choice one need make because there are plenty of excellent writers of color, both famed and obscure. The UK seems to me to have a large number of wonderful writers of color—Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, etc. Helen Oyeyemi has even written a gothic already.
I do understand that the UK demographics are different than US demographics, but I wonder why, for example, the one American was Joe Lansdale and not, say, Tananarive Due. Another possibility would be Nalo Hopkinson—Jamaican-born and currently living in Canada, she has a particular connection to the UK via the Commonwealth.
Also, had we targeted black, Asian and Oriental cultural organisations in the UK to ask for stories on these themes, the book would have been very different
Sounds like that would have been a good idea to me. It would be interesting to see who could write weird fiction amongst those who aren't ordinarily invited to do so.
We would, however, ask any critic to read the book we have put together before deciding that we have failed to produce something worthwhile in literary terms.
One supposes that the same request could be made of you. You're a political sort, Joel. I'm sure you understand that community outreach is important. Is it so that there are so few writers of color of weird fiction in the UK that none were worth soliciting? Well, there are solutions to that. I hinted at a couple already and here's another possibility: open submissions to writers in general for a few weeks, with a couple months advance notice. Then you would have the opportunity to read the work of writers (of all colors) not already in your Rolodex rather than discounting the quality of their work in the first instance. Perhaps then the book would have been a more obviously complete statement, from the first page—the table of contents—on in.
