Removing blind submissions is a terrible idea, but so is keeping them

Let’s start by acknowledging that writing literary fiction is a bad deal financially for almost everyone right now. It’s bad for privileged cis, white, male writers like me, and it’s bad for nonbinary, poor writers of color. It's bad for writers and it's bad for journals. The economics of the literary journals we need to get to accept our work in order to progress as writers are, to be blunt, a scam. If that seems harsh, consider the similarities between how the average lit mag operates and those kiosks at the mall that grab passersby, telling them they have the face for modeling, and if only they’ll invest a mere $300 in a portfolio, they might be on their way to superstardom. The only thing that differentiates literary magazines is that they typically charge a lot less than $300. However, since you have to apply to many of them to have a hope of getting published, the total cost to the victim of the scam is about the same.

The modeling scam takes advantage of people’s natural tendency to overestimate their own value. Of course someone thinks I should be a model, the victims of the scam believe, so nothing seems out of place when someone suggests that the world sees a similar value in the victims.

For literary magazines, the exploitation of the Dunning-Kruger effect is even more invidious, because most of the people submitting actually do have some talent. The last few decades of MFA programs have generated tens of thousands of graduates, each of whom has, presumably, at least some ability. To go along with all of these, there are the hundreds of thousands more whose teachers or professors recognized they had some skill and encouraged them to make use of it. So the writers submitting their stories aren’t just fooled by their own vanity. They really can write at least passably. Do they write well enough to beat the 50-to-1, 100-to-1, or a million to one odds that some journals put in front of them? Likely not. But it’s three bucks to try, kind of the same as a lottery ticket, and you can’t win if don’t play, so in the three bucks goes. Maybe once in a while, you risk the big money and enter a $20 or $30 contest.

I assume my writing is as sexy as this woman's silhouette.

The people who run literary journals aren’t greedy like the scammers at the mall. In fact, most aren’t getting paid at all. There’s not much money in selling literary fiction these days, which is why they have to resort to squeezing writers to get even the few dollars needed to keep up a website or print a few copies. Stephen March, in a piece in Lithub in 2021 on Sally Rooney, compared literature as a business to the game musical chairs: “There is less and less room. There is less nature, there is less humanism, there is less capacity for argument, there are fewer places to publish, there is less attention to go around. There is less space, generally, from which to affirm life.” There are far too many writers relative to readers, so the only money literary journals can get is from the supply side, rather than demand, giving it its scammy appearance.

It’s important to keep this in mind when discussing the idea of blind submissions, or, more accurately, ending the practice of blind submissions. If the literary ecosystem currently favors certain demographics, it doesn’t favor them that much, because the system is bad for nearly everybody. And if certain proposals might shift the balance of favor in ways that might harm the potential for success of some writers, well, it’s not like the people benefitting are going to find themselves in all that enviable a situation, either. Writers should be kind to one another and try to preserve what dignity they can, rather than let the fight for the remaining scraps get ugly. There isn't much hope for any of us, so let's die with class. 

 The argument against blind submissions

I first became aware of the trend to end blind submissions a few weeks ago when I entered a short story contest. The decision surprised me, as I suppose it has a lot of people, mostly because I thought the research on blind submissions had showed it to be effective. I thought of the success of blind auditions in orchestras, which has been proven to improve the representation of women in orchestras.  

In explaining its decision, the journal cited three articles. Since becoming aware of the practice and looking into it a little further, I've seen these same three articles quoted quite a bit by other journals moving to similar practices. They are:

• The Politics of Gatekeeping: On Reconsidering the Ethics of Blind Submissions, by Joyce Chen
• The Politics of "Blind Submissions" Policies, from the editors of Apogee Magazine
• "How Can Literary Magazines Counter Their Biases?" by Elisa Gabbert

Below, I'm going to try to summarize the main arguments they make. Just in case it's not already clear, what we're talking about is the idea that when a story or poem or essay is submitted, it should either have information identifying the author or it should not. The three essays above all argue that it should include identifying information. 

1. There is a difference between orchestra auditions and literature

Two of the three essays explicitly mention those orchestra studies, and they acknowledge them as a reason why it might seem like a good idea to do the same thing in publishing. However, they argue that there are important differences between playing music and a writing/submitting a piece of literature. One important difference is that musicians typically do not play their own, original pieces in auditions. They are playing someone else's music, and there is, perhaps, while not perfect objectivity, at least relatively more of an objective standard as to how they are to perform. Chen writes: "Blind submissions do not actually have the same effect as, say, blind auditions, which suppose that the strength of a voice or an instrumental skill is more important than the identity of the singer or musician (also, the performed piece is not always an original piece). When it comes to writing, however, acknowledging the totality of the person behind the piece is arguably just as important as the piece itself." 

Gabbert probably explains the argument a little more precisely with: "Two cellists, a man and a woman, might audition with the same Bach piece; they won’t be playing their own music. And there seem to be nearly universally agreed upon standards of what constitutes good playing of Bach, which don’t vary much by gender. If they were each playing music of their own composition, we might run into a problem of bias again: namely, that we have been trained to perceive music written by men as great music. You glimpse this thinking in the common question, “Why are there no great female composers?” (Who says there aren’t?)"

2. The illusion of objectivity within the blind submission allows editors to indulge their conscious and unconscious biases

If writing has historically favored white, cis-male, heteronormative writing, and editors either fit those categories themselves or have been heavily influenced by an academic system that emphasized them, then they will struggle to avoid bringing assumptions fed by that system into their editing about what constitutes good literature. As the editors of Apogee put it, "the problem is that white/male/cis is the assumed standard."  Chen's version of the same idea was: "...in many corners of the literary world, quality has long been judged through a largely white, male, cis, heteronormative lens, and the practice of reading submissions blind perpetuates that standard of excellence and allows it to go unchecked." 

These assumptions might mean that an editor will fail to recognize another mode of storytelling, one that doesn't follow the narrative arc brought down from Aristotle. Or editors might discount diction that doesn't meet their expectations. In short, taking names off manuscripts doesn't mean that editors don't still bring biases with that into reading that can prevent greater inclusivity. Two of the articles cite statistics that show how literary magazines are still not (or as of 2017 were still not) as diverse as they ought to be. They reason from these statistics that editors continue to hold on to biases 

Problems with their arguments

The three articles use somewhat different logic to arrive at these claims, and cite different examples in places, but those two main arguments hold. Furthermore, all three acknowledge that blind submissions are not total evils. They can serve to fight against nepotism and favoritism. The Apogee article wrote" "There are valid reasons for doing blind submissions. Our friends at The James Franco Revieware all about blind submissions in order to stop the cult of celebrity." However, they also feel that in general, the good that blind submissions can do is outweighed by the negatives. Above all, all three alike argue that whether a journal chooses blind or identity-revealing submissions, what is really important is the makeup of the editorial staff. 

Overall, I think their arguments hold a reasonable amount of weight and are hard to dismiss completely. In practical terms, I think most literary journals have never really been blind. Other than in contests, which cost more money to enter, most do want identifying information on the piece being submitted, and it's been that way for a long time. If journals are going to do this, they ought to be all-in about it. Doing it halfway--by, say, asking for the name of the author but not looking at the biography--then they're asking for trouble. They might, in the quest to be inclusive, rule out someone who actually is Chinese or Guatemalan because they were adopted or took a married name or have a white father and now don't "sound" Chinese or Guatemalan. Also, some white writers might be able to present a very convincing world set within a non-white setting. I speak three foreign languages well enough to professionally translate in them. Much of my life has been in the company of non-white people, so I end up writing stories about non-white characters. Because I've been pretty deep in their culture, down to being able to speak the language, I can write a story that will make an editor think it was written by someone sharing the identity of those characters. I might even win a blind contest this way. In fact, I know that I've done this, because one editor told me so. So if a journal wants to avoid mistakenly picking a story by a white author, they need to go all-in. I'd recommend doing what Gordon Square Review has done. Their submission practices, the last time I submitted to them, said this: "We request that no cover letter or author bio be included in your submission. Instead, please share with Gordon Square Review what the story is about, the writing process of the story, and any context you believe is important to know while reading story." That seems to split the difference between not allowing for nepotism by allowing a writer to state how successful they already are, but also allowing a writer to explain how their background contributed to the story. 

Nonetheless, I do think there are some problems with ending blind submissions, and also with the philosophy of putting the author's identity front and center when selecting stories. Because that's really what all three articles are calling for. 

1. The lack of perfect objectivity in literature doesn't mean there are no standards at all. 

All three articles demonstrated what I would consider to be a troubling casualness in dismissing the notion of objective standards in literature. Chen wrote that "there is no such thing as objective quality." Apogee put it less extremely: "However, artistic and literary aesthetics are not an algorithm, and “literary excellence” is not an infallible mathematics." Gabbert, though, echoed Chen's absolute rejection of objectivity: "There is no universal standard of goodness." 

Rejecting the notion of objective aesthetic standards has become so commonplace, it seems many critics don't feel any sense of sorrow pronouncing that there is no such thing as "good" literature. They accept that literature can be reduced to a dialectical struggle between competing political interests and don't seem to feel any sense of loss. I've never been able to understand how. "No objectivity" would seem to mean you could just randomly pick stories for a magazine and do no worse than having a team of supposedly expert editors. Ask a computer to account for identities, pick the mix you want, and ignore the stories altogether. 

I'm sure Chen and Gabbert would reject this idea, if for no other reason than because it would diminish the political power of editors, which presumably they would like to keep in order to allow their kind of editors to fight for political ends they agree with. But they'd also likely agree that just because literary standards are not based on perfect objectivity doesn't mean there is no objectivity at all. It doesn't mean that 50 Shades of Grey is as "good"--yes, I think we can use that word--as Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

In aesthetics and ethics both, we might never be able, absent the decree of the gods, to determine with perfect accuracy where "good" lies, but we can create something like a plot graph, and we will find, over time and across cultures, that most of the dots for "good" are near one another. It can be hard to describe the area they inhabit, but that's really the job of literary and cultural criticism--to try to adduce something close to objectivity in a realm where there will never be absolute standards. 

Kim Yong Ha, a Korean writer I much admire, has written much about his admiration for Aristotle's Poetics. In spite of Kim's different cultural assumptions and identity, he finds a universal applicability in many of Aristotle's principles: "Thanks to (a movie director he heard about who always carried a copy of the Poetics in his pocket), I also started reading it, and that reading had an influence on novels I wrote afterwards...of course, my novels can't be compared to (the great classics Kim had been discussing earlier) but many writers the world over have gone through a similar process and ended up writing "work that seems new, but in reality is old." (From "Reading Dangerous Books," appearing in the collection See, Read, Speak. Translation mine.) 

Speaking three foreign languages may not make me the most globally aware reader, but it does mean I can to a small degree balance Western writing against some other traditions. And those other traditions show a nearly universal preference for a standard of "good" that even a fusty white professor from the 1950s would at least somewhat recognize. Even within Western culture, there have been eras where very different assumptions went into the production of literary work, and therefore those times yielded quite different work from other times. "Western literature" of the last 3,000 years is far from homogenous, but that doesn't mean we can't find something we can call "good" in any of the surviving records. 

2. The level of diversity needed to ensure the goal is impossible 

In this year's Best American Short Stories collection, one of the entries was "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam. As I pointed out in my critique of the story, it included a lot of veiled references to the last sixty years of Ethiopian history that would have been lost on most readers. At least some critics of the story ignored it, figuring one African country is the same as another. But I recognized the references, because, as fate would have it, I spent about five years studying modern Ethiopia rather deeply. So the story read quite differently to me than it would have to other readers. 

America is the most culturally diverse country on Earth. That means a journal can and will get submissions from writers who fully qualify as "American" but who are also writing from deep within other cultural contexts. Can any board of editors be diverse enough to recognize the political bent of a Nepalese-American, how that writer might be coming down on a variety of political issues well known to Nepalese diasporic readers but invisible to others? Can they do this for all the diasporas that might be represented within the submission pool? 

If we followed the recommendations of these three editorials, we might have picked a black, female editor over someone like me in order to achieve the needed diversity to judge a story like Maya's. But white, cis-male, middle-aged, balding, upper-middle-class me would have been a better judge of Maya's story.  (I say "Maya," rather than "Binyam," because Ethiopians use their given names to identify themselves. Did you know that? I do, but some critics of her story did not.) 

All three articles hoped that they could make up for weaknesses in identity-revealed submissions by first ensuring a properly diverse team of editors. But how on Earth is the average journal supposed to do this? How would they know if they are being blown away by something that seems novel to them, when in fact the writer is simply picking some very common item from another culture, one that wouldn't impress readers from that culture at all, the way Yoon Choi did in "The Art of Losing"? (For that matter, isn't it politically problematic that so much of the literary understanding of Americans about other countries comes from diasporic writers, rather than truly foreign writers in either the original language or in translation?) 

3. The statistics cited don't always support the arguments made

All three articles used similar statistics to prove that literary journals are still in thrall to white, cis-male, straight guys. They all seem to have ignored what is very clear from one of the very studies they cite: employees in the publishing industry are about 75% female. This has been an open secret in the literary community for as long as anyone can remember. Personally, as a writer who often creates what I've termed "bro lit," I feel that it's had an effect on what kinds of male stories get published. They are often either over-the-top tales of toxic masculinity, or they feature male characters I don't really recognize. 

One might also note other anomalies in the data. A whopping 19% identify as something other than straight, although the percentage of people in the general population identifying themselves as LGBT is around 7%. As in music and film, if anything, there is an over-representation of non-straight voices, at least in terms of raw numbers. This might be because there is something about literature that tends to attract LGBT people. Indeed, I've taken personality inventories that suggested I was gay, largely based on nothing more than my self-identified love of poetry. So there's likely nothing invidious in it, but it would be hard to claim that if there's an under-representation in publishing of non-straight voices, it's owing to a lack of representation among decision makers. 

That same study from Lee & Low Books identified a number of improvements within publishing that have taken place since the first survey they took. All in all, the assumed dire situation all three share seems overstated. We are in the middle of a shift, and if the slow and steady approach hasn't yielded all the results we'd like right away, that's no reason to suddenly switch to the nuclear option.

You keep on citing those statistics. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

4. Putting the author back in the center of literary study will undo a century of important critical work

In his essay "Authorship in Contemporary American Literature," Anis Shivani traces the history of the place of the author in critical theory over the last 100 years. Once, critics viewed the mind of the author, or the author's true intent, as the transcendental signified it was the critic's duty to discover. However, after first the New Critics and then Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, not only did the author cease to be the central foucs of literary study, but actually, in the more extreme versions, the author disappeared entirely. The author was "dead," to use the title of Barthes' essay. 

However, Shivani observes that, counter to the critical preference for the decentralizing of the author, the publishing industry prefers to have the author at the center of literarture. "From technology to economics to culture, the tendency today ought to be for the supremacy of ecriture (writing), the reduction of the author to scriptor, whereas in fact the literary industry pushes hard for exactly the opposite, the transcendence of the author and the negation of the reader."

Criticism sees the death of the author as an important part of dismantling authoritarianism in general, because of the way it gives freedom to the reader, whereas authors "actively excluding creative readers from interpretation" is exactly what publishers want. The author's "own authenticity deriving in large part from the academic discourse of diversity, authors must blend into this discourse if they are to have any authority in the marketplace of texts. Authority is extracted ultimately from the community of novice writers, rather than freestanding critics, again evoking medieval conditions. Active readership, which may take interpretation in such stray directions, becomes a hindrance to the author's establishment of authenticity, which rests on constraining the possible range of interpretations."

Criticism of all sorts viewed author-centered readings with suspicion. To use one example from feminist theory, Toril Moi's criticism of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic undermines the way the book assumed a unitary and whole female author throughout its history of literature, a move that ironically reified the entire patriarchal structure it was meant to attack: "For the patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin, and meaning of the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of authority, we must take one further step and proclaim with Roland Barthes the death of the author." 

Chen claimed that "When it comes to writing... acknowledging the totality of the person behind the piece is arguably just as important as the piece itself."  What is this if not putting the author's identity at the forefront in a way even the pre-New Critical world would not have? 

My own biases and interests 

I conclude by acknowledging that I, like everyone trying to publish fiction, have my own interests that are affected by the philosophies of editing staffs. If they are to actively, rather than wistfully, push for greater diversity of story tellers--and they should--then this likely makes the odds longer for me. I don't want to write this, because it sounds like "reverse racism" nonsense, but I don't see how the math works out any other way. The majority of writers submitting to any mainstream journal are probably white. Let's say a staff makes a decision to actively pursue diversity by considering the identity of the writer, and says that of the four stories it will chose to publish in its next edition, at least two must be by writers of color. If 80% of the 500 submissions are from white writers, my odds of getting published are now 200 to 1. The odds of a writer of color are 50 to 1. Those odds are still terrible for both of us. The point is not to claim some kind of reverse racism, but I think it's dishonest gasligthing not to admit that at least in the short term, the odds for a non-established white, cis-male, straight author of breaking in through a journal are going to be longer than those of a lesbian Chinese-American woman. 

Of course, the writers of these essays would argue that the practice isn't unfair, because the writer of color had to overcome more obstacles just to get to a place where she could submit a story to a journal at all. There's certainly merit to that argument, and in the big picture of what's good for society, the practice is likely beneficial. But when I get rejections and feel like I'm worthless for a day, I may not care about what's good for society as a whole. I'm not going to argue that my feelings are a reason to keep the old policies, but editors should at least be aware that those feelings will exist. 

The big difference between what I'm saying and what a "reverse racism" proponent would say is that I'm not really arguing that it should be different. Harold Bloom complained about literary awards given out based more on the identity of the writer than on the quality, but I've found, as a close reader of short fiction award winners for the past decade, that the quality of writing of stories hasn't gone down. I would guess that what's more likely happening is that editors are getting an abundance of stories good enough--and here, I'll use "good" unproblematically--to be published. With more good stories than they can publish, they look to authorial identity as a sort of tie-breaker. It's much the way affirmative action college decisions were supposed to be made. This is a fine way to pick stories, and probably as good a way to decide between stories of relatively equal merit as there could be. 

The biggest award I've received as a writer was winning New Letters' Robert Day Award for fiction. I won a contest that was read blind. The judge was a female writer of color. I wonder if she read my story, about a North Korean defector working at a hotel in Seoul, and found it "felt" authentic enough that it likely came from an ethnically Korean writer. I wonder if that helped me win. Nobody ever said anything to me about it, and the magazine still runs this contest without identifying information on entries. That story had been a near-miss at many journals before winning the contest, and I do wonder if it would have ever been published in such a high-quality journal if it hadn't been for a blind contest. If there are no blind contests again, I might never get into such a high quality magazine again. 

If that's true, it's okay. Proponents argue that in the long run, this activist approach might actually help writers like me, because it will grow the community of readers. Ideally, it would make journals less financially strapped in the future as the literary world becomes less moribund. I'm skeptical this will happen, but I do think that of all the attempts to actively improve our society's assumptions about race, the most effective one has been the proliferation of narrative platforms to new and diverse voices. If I have to be a part of the generation of white writers whose prospects shrank for the first time in history in order to get there, then I accept that, based on utilitarian "greatest good for the greatest number" reasoning. I'd only ask that in return, I not be given assurances that things are still easier for white, male writers than they are for everyone else. This might be true for established writers, but I don't think it's true for people trying to break in. The math just doesn't support that. 

White writers and characters of color, part two

Two weeks ago, I posted some thoughts about white writers creating stories about characters of color. It was a meditation born of several things, among them the fact that I am a white writer who often writes about characters of color, the fury around American Dirt, and the recent selection by the publishing house I work for of a book of short stories by a white writer about black kids in Baltimore, stories born out of his twenty-two years of work there. 

This is just a very brief addendum to say that Adam Schwartz, the winner of our contest this year and soon-to-be author of The Rest of the World, published his own apologia for writing stories about characters of color recently. 

I'll let his commentary speak for itself for the most part, but I wanted to add something he shared with me. I wrote that he had been told by a potential editor that his book was wonderful (it is), but that she couldn't see how she could publish it "in the current climate." Adam told me this week that it was an agent, not an editor, although really, in publishing, you need one before you can get the other, usually. He also showed me a lengthy piece of the email he got from that editor. It was pretty devastating. He asked me not to share more than a short piece of it. 

Basically, she praised his book, but then said that, among other things, there is a cultural movement now to let diverse voices tell their own stories, and while this movement is important and a necessary corrective, it might overreach at times. The final line she told him was that "at this cultural moment, it’s hard for me to imagine being an effective advocate for The Rest of The World. For this reason, as much as I admire it, I think I need to step aside."

I've said this already, but I don't want to act like there is some phantom reverse racism going on in publishing. There isn't. Adam eventually got his book published with us. You could say it all worked out. But I think it's clear there is suspicion and trepidation about white writers and characters of color. Maybe that suspicion is justified, and maybe there is still space to earn your right to write those stories as a white writer, but after American Dirt, I think it's going to be even harder to earn it. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that this particular novel got the emperor's clothes treatment by one reviewer after another until someone finally called it out for being naked. There are a lot of books like Adam's that are going to have a hard time being read now because someone pushed the wrong book by the wrong white writer. 

Okay, the hell with it, I will give a wrap-up post on Best American Short Stories 2019

I said I wasn't going to do it, because I didn't think there was any way to force unifying ideas onto this year's Best American Short Stories collection. In reality, trying to summarize BASS in any year will be fraught with peril, because the stories are just individually written pieces that nobody intended to go with the other choices in the volume. As an accidental anthology, it's not unlike the Bible, and for me to pretend one story echoes or responds to another is as shaky as suggesting the author of the Epistle of James not only wasn't contradicting the author of Romans, but that the two actually work together quite nicely.

So my point isn't to try to force some unifying theme out of these twenty stories, but maybe to offer a quick observation on good and bad applications of diversity. It's been decades now since Best American Short Stories, following trends in American intellectual circles, began to see diversity as a legitimate aim of its anthologies. The stories should not just be written about a diversity of subjects, but the actual demographics of the writers themselves ought to be considered in putting it together. This can mean different things to different editors. Last year, Roxane Gay included only four cis-men in the 2018 BASS. Just under half the writers were white. She isn't the first guest editor in the Best American universe history to take this approach.

Anthony Doerr, meanwhile, took a more conventional approach. The demographics of the writers he chose is a little more in line with the demographics of America, or at least as much as that is possible with a pie that can only be sliced twenty ways. There's at least some representation from pretty much every kind of group that "ought" to be there. The only exception might be LGBTQIA+ writers. I don't look deeply into the biographies of the writers, typically, so I might be wrong, but I don't think there were any LGBTQIA+ writers this year. There might have been, and they just chose to write about something other than queer/gender identity issues. But otherwise, Doerr gave us everything we've come to expect in terms of the range of stories and the range of writer identities.

You'd think that Doerr would have produced the better collection. Since Gay had a political axe to grind and Doerr was not aiming as specifically to promote writers from traditionally neglected groups, you'd think that Doerr would have found more compelling work. That's because Doerr would have: A) Had a larger pool of work to choose from, and B) Been more interested in quality of the work than in the identity of the writer.

But it didn't work out like that at all. Gay's anthology felt fresh, with an outsider kind of angry energy. Doerr's collection felt staid and flat. It felt establishment. The stories all had artistic merit. Some were outstanding. But there wasn't much novelty in most of the stories, nothing that isn't already a prominent feature of the American literary landscape.

Posting this is possibly the most normie thing I could do, but it gets the point across

There's a term I've picked up from my son through Internet culture: normie. It's a derogatory term used by various niche cultures on the Internet to describe those who will lazily accept what is mainstream. Normies will eventually embrace elements of outsider culture as they inevitably tire of the same fare over and over, but only after they have co-modified it and homogenized it to meet mainstream tastes. Normies will never innovate. Normies will be suspicious of whatever is outside their experience up to the moment when they find a version of it they like, at which point they will ruin whatever was unique about it as they consume a bastardized version of the once-edgy thing.

That was BASS 2019. In 2018, Roxane Gay gave us a raw version of diversity, which means she explored some of the weird and unknown manifestations of diversity that truly undiscovered voices can give us. Doerr picked enough stories from non-white authors and enough stories about subjects with topics related to diversity that he wouldn't be accused of being racist or sexist.

But while the stories he chose from white authors were very strong, he didn't pick great ones from non-white writers, with the notable exception of "No More Than a Bubble" by Jamel Brinkley. And I don't think the stories from non-white writers are the kinds of stories the communities those writers come from would have picked to represent themselves. It's like if YouTube wanted to honor meme culture in a "Best of YouTube" clip and picked "Behind the Meme" as its choice. Yes, a lot of people watch that channel, but they're not the people who create the memes in the first place, the ones always pushing the envelope of the weird and the creative. Gay, in other words, picked interesting stories precisely because she was deep enough in certain outsider cultures she found something that wasn't already played out in the mainstream. Doerr picked outsider things that appealed to his mainstream perspective, which ended up feeling nearly the same as just picking mainstream things.

The concept of diversity is fantastic. It's an attempt to channel the best of democracy by ensuring we are listening to all the great ideas, not just the mainstream ones. But we have to recognize that we are several decades into diversity as a concept itself becoming mainstream. Alongside truly outsider diversity is a co-modified establishment diversity, one that isn't really revolutionary or trail-blazing or even very interesting. Like establishment religion, it can be faked, with equally tepid and unconvincing results.

I think the best way to avoid falling into establishment diversity in future volumes is for the editors to feel freer to choose what really enchants them. The diversity in stories should be a function of diversity in editors, which means some years are going to focus more on traditionally marginalized voices than others. Gay chose nearly all stories from traditionally marginalized voices, and the results were phenomenal. (Interestingly to me, the two weakest stories I thought she picked were the two stories by white men. This parallels how the weakest stories Doerr picked were those not by white people.)

Having been picked to guest edit BASS, I think editors should honestly pick what fascinates them. If you're an angry, black, bisexual woman and you pick eighteen stories by something other than white men, great. At least there's a good chance I'll be reading the best of what you love produced that year. And even your choices from traditionally heard voices will be interesting, even if they're not great. By the same token, if you're a stodgy, white guy who went to Brown and you produce a stream of 800-page novels on the hypocrisies of white middle-class America, feel free to pick seventeen stories by white men. At least those might be the best stories by white men that year.

That's not to say a white guy couldn't pick eleven stunners written by Latina feminists. It's certainly not to say Doerr knowingly made his selections cynically. But the result was similar to what a cynically chosen list would have produced. The only way to ensure that the stories any editor picks really resonate is for the editor to feel no obligation whatsoever to satisfy any sort of establishment, even an establishment that was created to support as beautiful an idea as diversity. 

What do you know about The Nellie Massacre: the problems of striving for diversity in literary publications

Pop quiz for literary gatekeepers: Without looking, what are the major political parties in South Korea, and can you trace their recent evolution? What are the three main languages of Nigeria? What can you tell me about the Nellie Massacre?

I'd be beyond impressed if there were a political science major who could rattle off all three of these answers off the top of her head. But I'd be utterly shocked if an editor of a literary journal or the people in charge of selecting the winners of a literary prize could. I'm not criticizing literary editors for lack of global awareness here; it's just really hard to know about the issues every single part of the world faces with any real depth. I don't even pretend to understand half the world, and I tend to block large parts out so I can focus on the things I'm supposed to know about. But even the things I supposedly know a thing or two about are tough to keep up with. Even though I know a lot more about question #1 above than the average person, even I would struggle to answer it without hopping online to check up a few facts first.

Impossibility of editorial responsibility for the rest of the world

If you are a writer who submits often to literary journals, as I do, you're probably used to seeing language from magazines that goes something like this:

We welcome previously unpublished work from writers of all backgrounds and identities, particularly including people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities, members of religious minorities, people outside the United States, and all others whom traditional publishing has historically excluded. We believe your stories are valid stories, and we want to consider your work!  

This is a completely legitimate editorial mindset, and not just because of the justice aspect of it. It's also an important approach aesthetically just for the simple sake of providing the most enjoyable literature. While it's certainly possible to bring a fresh take on old subject matter, there's also a lot of joy for readers just getting access to worlds they've never encountered before. Even a bad story about a culture the reader knows nothing about can at least enlighten the same way a geography textbook can. As Roxane Gay said in her introduction to the 2018 Best American Short Stories, one of the things she looked for in a story was when it "teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don't know and need to know about the lives of others." 

But there's an issue with editors picking "people outside the United States" as a focus of their literary affirmative action if the motivating factor is some kind of cultural balancing of the scales. It takes years of careful study to understand another country's political landscape enough to know whose voice there is being excluded and whose is not. Just because a voice has not been heard much in the United States yet or has not yet been heard by the editors of a particular highly exclusive journal does not mean that voice is really struggling to be heard. In reality, just the fact that this voice has reached a Western audience is a good indicator that the author might come from a group whose voice is being heard plenty. An Oromo herder getting kicked off his land for a government project in Ethiopia isn't likely to get the opportunity to write a heart-rending short story in English that will ever earn the attention of an elite American literary journal. But the Amhara child of a government official in Addis Ababa might. 

On the other hand, just because some exceptional Oromo herder managed to accomplish the impressive feat of making it to school somewhere abroad, learning English and also having the right temperament for literary fiction, does not necessarily mean the government's development project is wrong. It doesn't mean that writer's voice is a protest about something that really should be protested. Knowing which voices in Ethiopia are worthy of an audience in America is tricky, and even an Ethiopia expert would struggle with it. So isn't it somewhat irresponsible of a literary journal with no particular knowledge of Ethiopia at all to favor a story from one side or the other? 

If the point of publishing one of these stories is not merely to let American readers whet their whistles with another culture, learning a few words or foods or customs along the way, then having lay people pick which stories will represent the country outside America seems like a fairly questionable practice. It's one thing to pick art that the society itself loved, translate it, and present it to an American audience. That's letting the culture speak for itself to the greatest extent possible. When a writer from another culture who also has enough roots in ours to succeed at writing a story in English puts out fiction, that's not letting the culture speak for itself, it's appointing an ambassador from that culture to speak to an American audience, only the American audience itself is picking the ambassadors. 

It's a big responsibility to pick a story and thereby give readers the only information about, say, a Tamil kid those readers are likely to come in contact with for the next six months to a year. It's not a responsibility a guy whose expertise is in stories is maybe up to. Ideally, American audiences would form their art-based opinions about other parts of the world through a kind of triangulation between the art formed by the culture itself, art produced by that culture's diaspora, and art produced by outsiders who have learned about the culture (the sort of thing I write). But it's risky for a literary journal without any expertise in the culture it's choosing to represent in a story, because the landscape is bound to be incredibly tricky and even the editor's attempts to become grounded are likely to be the little learning that becomes a dangerous thing. 

I'm sure editors generally act in good faith. They do some research, maybe reach out to a friend who either is from that country or knows something about it, before picking a story. And I'd guess most editors would say that even a story with a voice from the dominant narrative in its country of origin is still a new and excluded voice here. Their job isn't to know which voices are right and wrong, only to know which ones move the reader and elicit empathy. They'd probably guess that just following their instincts about a good story is likely to guide them in the right direction more often than not. 

If American literary fiction produced hundreds of stories a year from Afghani-Americans, Afghan writers in translation, and Western travelers to Afghanistan, there would be no real concern with editors at a particular journal picking a story from any one of these groups. There'd be plenty of other narratives to balance whichever one they chose out. But that's not the case. Only a few stories from any of these groups get published. And it's the second group, stories from the diaspora, that tend to find the most reception. Of the three major short story anthologies from 2018, I count approximately eleven stories written with a setting in a foreign country or with characters who are first-generation immigrants in America. The best I can tell judging by the author biographical statements, all eleven were written by diaspora members from those cultures, all currently living in the West. So only the second type of stories are getting representation in the big anthologies. That's probably indicative of which types of stories are also the ones getting published in journals across the country. 

I've focused here on writing from "people outside the United States," which doesn't always mean "outside" the United States but more "from the perspective of someone whose worldview was shaped outside the United States." But you could apply these problems to the other areas of diversity editors look for. An editor may think she's promoting diverse voices if she picks a story about gay characters from an author who identifies as gay. But there are, of course, a plurality of voices within the gay community. Some of those voices are politically more advantaged than others. Does an editor have the sophistication to know where this particular voice lies on the spectrum? Or is it just a story that seemed nice and met the external criteria you've set?

The point I'm making here isn't that diversity is a stupid goal, or that editors aren't right to use it as a criteria of something they're looking for. The point is that there are problems in trying to select those kinds of stories. In all likelihood, the benefits from trying to pick these kinds of stories outweigh the problems, but only if we acknowledge the problems do exist. Choosing diversity as a goal doesn't immediately lead to paradise. In the short term, it probably causes more problems rather than less. For editors, that means expending resources to make sure stories really are providing a range of voices and not just a dominant voice most readers aren't aware is dominant because its dominance exists somewhere out of their view.