Please welcome SMFS list
member Paul A. Barra to the blog today with his perspective on an interesting
topic…
Northern bias in NYC publishing by Paul A. Barra
I finished a middle grade novel
early in the new year featuring four eleven-year-old Charlestonians who lived
in April 1861. When the smoke clears over the Battery and they realize not a
single Union soldier was killed in the CSA bombardment of Ft. Sumter, they
decide there must have been a Yankee spy who warned the fort of the imminent
attack. The rest of the story is about their adventures trying to identify the
spy. The action all occurs before the War Between the States begins in earnest,
so there is little blood and gore. One of the four is the son of a slave—excuse
me: an enslaved person—and another the daughter of a prominent Catholic family,
so there is some drama and tension over both slavery and nativism among the
children.
My agent sent the manuscript to a
Sensitivity Reader (now misnamed an Authenticity Reader) while we were editing
it. I discovered that historical accuracy is less important in publishing today
than are the sensibilities of modern-day readers, or should I say editors? If
some people were called Negroes by polite southerners then, they must be called
African Americans now; if they were colored people then, they must be people of
color now; if they were Papists then, they must be Catholics now. A Black person,
capitalized b only, can never be called boy, even if he is an eleven-year-old
male, and even if rural southern folk tend to call male children boys. It did
not matter if the historic terms I used were in narration or dialogue. They had
to go.
I caved, of course—I want the
script published—only to discover that some editors are reluctant to publish
stories from a Confederate perspective no matter how sensitive the verbiage.
Children who uncover a spy for the North and are hailed by Gen. P.G.T
Beauregard as heroes cannot be. Maybe the protagonist himself could turn out to
be the Yankee spy? He'd then become a genuine hero, a hero the upper half of
the nation can admire, even if he's a traitor to his own community. One editor
had the effrontery to suggest that actual scenario to my agent.
The publishing industry is beset
with serious problems these days, and my complaint is as a zit on the forehead
of a man infected with Monkey Pox, but I think it does relate to at least one
of those problems: sales. Editors buy what they like; their readers do not necessarily
like the same books. Ten-year-old boys and girls do not work and play on
Manhattan's Sixth Avenue, nor do they read the New York Times. They would like
to learn a little something as they are entertained by adventure novels. They
don't keep up with the current fads in language that seem to preoccupy the
lives of editors, and that is not what they want to learn. If they read an
historical novel, they expect to learn true history.
I am grateful for at least two
things that came out of my altercations with traditional NY publishers:
1. middle grade readers are apparently
too young to be concerned yet with the rather abrupt change to gender-inclusive
language that's battering the East Coast, since no one to date has requested from
me a plural pronoun joined to a singular verb form;
2. I left "Papist" in my novel and have yet to receive a complaint about it. I guess Catholics have not been victimized by the language of the past as much as I thought.
Paul A. Barra ©2022
Paul A. Barra's latest novel, WESTFARROW ISLAND, was a Silver Falchion finalist, and since one of his short stories was selected for the MWA's WHEN A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN anthology, which is in the running for an Anthony, he claims a portion of that glory road for himself also.
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