Women in Horror Roundtable Discussion [Featuring Me]

This post originally appeared on the horror blog for February's celebration of women in horror month, but I was just re-reading what we had to say and I think it is also important to post here on the general blog.

This piece is not just about horror, it is about women as characters [both protagonists and as victims], it is about women as writers of popular fiction, and it is about helping readers discover titles [because they included me in the conversation]. It is about EDI issues from all angles of the book world and it is written by smart women who navigate these questions and concerns on a daily basis.

Please take a moment to read it. Details and link below.

Also, shout out to my friend and colleague Lila Denning, who is the colleague I mention in the piece when I refer to a conversation we had about how troubling it is that many of the plots in crime and horror are predicated on violence against women, and, equally as troubling, how people don't want to really talk about the problems with that.

Here is the original post with introductions on the roundtable participants and all the links.

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Lisa Morton, horror author and editor extraordinaire asked me to be a part of her Women in Horror Roundtable Interview for Nightmare Magazine's February Issue. The web version went live yesterday. Side note, for those of you who don't know Nightmare Magazine, I have talked about it before, but quickly, it is run by John Joseph Adams, speculative fiction editor superstar.

I want to thank Lisa for including the library perspective in this article. She has a great mix of awesome people here, and I am very proud of the product we have created together.

From the intro:

To celebrate Women in Horror Month 2019, I asked four excellent female writers and horror experts to join me for a roundtable discussion. Given how the genre seems to be expanding rapidly to include more women at all levels of experience and publishing, I tried to gather a group of women with a range of talents and experience. 

Linda Addison is an accomplished short story writer and editor, but she is probably known primarily as a poet. She is a recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and is the only author with fiction in three landmark anthologies that celebrate African-American speculative writers: the award-winning anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction, Dark Dreams I and II, and Dark Thirst. 

Joanna Parypinski made her first professional sale in 2011, and her short fiction has since appeared in the magazines Nightmare, Black Static, and Vastarien, and anthologies including Haunted Nights, The Beauty of Death 2: Death by Water, and The War on Christmas. Forthcoming in 2019 is her novel Dark Carnival, and a middle grade tale in New Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. She also teaches English at Glendale Community College. 

Becky Spratford is the public library world’s most visible horror expert. She is the author of the American Library Association’s Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror (published in a second edition in 2012), and maintains the acclaimed blog RA for All: Horror at raforallhorror.blogspot.com, as well as the original RA for All blog at raforall.blogspot.com. She was a Guest of Honor at StokerCon 2017, and she travels throughout the year talking to librarians about broadening their horror collections. 

Kaaron Warren is an Australian author whose work extends through four novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, and The Grief Hole) and six short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her novella “Sky” from that collection won the Shirley Jackson Award and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. It went on to win all three of the Australian genre awards, while The Grief Hole did the same thing in 2017. She has also taught writing workshops and mentored newer writers.

Click here to read the entire piece. We do not pull any punches here.

It makes for an excellent ending to a wonderful month.

Longform.Org

I will be traveling most of today; in fact, I am sitting at the gate at O’Hare now. But before I go dark for the bulk of the day, I wanted to remind people about a Nonfiction RA resource that I use all the time, but have not blogged about in a while-- Longform.Org:

Longform.org recommends new and classic non-fiction from around the web. 

Article suggestions, including writers and magazines submitting their own work, are encouraged. Longform considers pieces over 2,000 words that are freely available online.

The site recommends the best in short nonfiction, a few articles every day. You can read on the site, in an app, send it to another service where you like to read all of your interesting articles, and/or subscribe to the podcast and listen to your nonfiction. They keep a searchable archive too.

Because they recommend both old and new articles from any topic imaginable, with editorial control [i.e. an actual human picking what is good], you can satisfy just about any nonfiction reader with this free service.

Here are some searches I have done on Longform.com for actual patrons in the last 2 years:

• Current nonfiction about the “Pope”
• Information about Edward Snowden

And when you run a search, if one of the articles received a “best” status from them at anytime, it is clearly noted.

They also create guides to topics, so you can read their accumulation on the best articles about topics as wide ranging as Hillary Clinton, Road Trips, High School, and Manhunts to name only a few.

And if that wasn’t enough, if you have a patron with a favorite author--fiction or nonfiction-- they have probably written a long from nonfiction piece that has been collected by Longform.org. Here are some examples:

• Susan Orlean
• Simon Winchester
• Jonathan Franzen
• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Colson Whitehead

And to satisfy your current event junkies who want to delve into the hottest topics as they are happening and don’t want to wait for a full book in a year or two, a daily click on the “Popular” or "Best New Articles” categories will get them what they are looking for.

If there is a hot article being talked about in the media, it is probably going to be on Longform.org, for example this week everyone is talking about the GQ article by Michael Chabon’s on his son, “The Prince of Fashion.” It’s there.

You get the gist. There is a lot of info on Longform.org for you to use to help your nonfiction patrons find leisure reading. And thanks to the University of Pittsburgh’s Writing Program, it is all free.

Try it out for yourself or use it to help a patron today.

Back from a new time zone tomorrow.

Short Nonfiction Help

I have a shortened day of work today so I can rest up for 5.5 hours of Wagner this afternoon/evening (click here for details).

This night has been on my calendar for almost a year, but the idea of sitting still for that long (with two 3o minute breaks) is what I am dreading.  The opera itself will be stunning, beautiful, and, as I have been assured by the press releases of the Lyric Opera, not at all anti-Semitic as it was when first performed.

But why do you care.  Ahh, well this thought of this long evening of got me thinking about shorter pieces.  You know, the whole reverse psychology thing.

Last February I had this post where I wrote about how many people, including myself, love long form journalism, but how hard it is to do readers' advisory work for these readers due to the dearth of resources. So, each time I find a new resource for these queries, I try to pass it on.

Thanks to RA Online, I was pointed in the direction of this article listing 102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012.  Each entry has access to the full article, plus information about the author of the piece and links to other stories by that person.  All of this is compiled on the Byliner website by this guy.

Click here for Byliner's full "About" page, but let me say that it is an impressive resource to both access and identify long-form journalism.  While a full subscription requires payment, there is quite a lot you can find for free.  And, honestly, your library is probably already getting a subscription to most of the periodicals in which these stories are appearing.  All we RAs need is a good real time index with commentary, which Byliner can be.

I hope my need to think "short" today helps you to help a reader.  Now I am off to catch a quick nap.

National Magazine Award Finalists Announced [Controversy Alert]

I have posted before about how to help long form journalism readers find their next good read, most recently here.

One of the best tools we have are the National Magazine Awards given out each year by the American Society of Magazine Editors.  Click here for this year's list of nominees.

The New York Daily News' book blog posted this article bashing this year's list for not including a single female nominee.

Yikes!  Thought I'd pass it on.

Magazine RA

In the past I have posted about providing readers' advisory service to people who enjoy long-format magazine articles.  Click here for access to those posts.

Helping these readers is difficult because of the dearth of resources, but we have to keep trying because as I saw last week in this post on Book Riot, with the popularity of tablets, the magazine format is thriving.

I can see this in my own reading.  I am a big fan of The New Yorker and have been a regular reader and subscriber for over 15 years.  Before 2011, I would only be able to read them before bed or on vacation, but now with my iPad, I get access to the tablet edition. I am able to find a lot more time to catch up on older issues.  I generally carry 1 paper issue with me in case I have some time to read, but when I have my iPad, I have access to every issue.

The study linked to in Book Riot talks about the increase in readership for all magazines with tablet editions.  More readers means more questions at the RA desk.  This is something we need to think about.

Right now, my only resource to help find readalikes for magazine essay readers is here.  Thankfully, many of these longer essays are turned into books, so we can use traditional RA tools to find readalikes.  Another place I like to point readers is to The Best American Writing series which has many nonfiction essay options, most of which were originally published in magazines in the first place.

What do you do to help these patrons?  Are you seeing more of an interest in the magazine essay at your library? I would say ours has always been a small percentage of our nonfiction RA questions, but I have yet to notice an upswing.  However, in the RA world it is all about anticipating our patrons' needs before they even know to ask.  So let's get ready!