Concern re: removal of a 2017 Rhysling Award nomination

[ajodasso]

ETA, 1/25/17: Yes, what you read in the final sentence of this entry, and more explicitly in the comments, is correct.  I'm running for SFPA Treasurer.  I'd been planning on making a bid at getting involved since spring of last year.  My M.F.A. program and teaching fellowship kept me busy till June 2016, but now that I've relocated and settled into

Comments

[gwynnega]

I continue to be floored by the whole "not spec enough" thing. It's safe to say that if a poem appears in a spec journal (as this one did), it qualifies as spec enough to be nominated for a Rhysling--even if some people have a much narrower definition of what spec is supposed to mean. One or two SFPA members should not be the arbiters of what qualifies a work as speculative.

[ajodasso]

Just added a new Twitter screencap gem from (probably) F.J.; it's from the SFPA official Twitter account this time, so hard to tell, but the tone of it sounds like someone directly involved in wanting to keep Tlotlo's poem out of the anthology. Given Bryan had initially said he would likely overturn this, I'm beginning to suspect he's been overruled in that sentiment. I'm incredibly shocked that David would insist on maintaining the outcome of an error as adversely affecting as this one, so I'm beginning to assume that, given most of these offensive responses have come from F.J.'s direction, she's acting as almost the chair-behind-the-chair. It's disturbing to me that there appear to be no checks and balances in place for when things like this occur, not even for the SFPA president...

[gwynnega]

"Some things just aren't"?! That is some spectacular overstepping (and yes, I assumed it was F.J.). I wish I were surprised.

[ajodasso]

What really gets me is that I wanted to believe, for a long time, her constant insistence (when things like these happen) that it's all just errors and miscommunication - but now that I've seen a couple of blatantly cruel and exclusionary statements made IN PUBLIC (see Twitter screencaps above), it's hard to believe that there's not a truly toxic attitude in play here. I'm the person who'll give somebody the benefit of the doubt (like I did in the instance of the Elgins, i.e. that link in my first sentence of the post) even when they don't deserve it. More than a dozen stories from other people later, I'm beginning to think that if everybody's calling a spade a spade, it's just a spade. The SFPA is populated by a handful of people who really are as exclusionary as they appear to be, and they'll go to any lengths to insist that they aren't. And they don't even seem to understand that a thing can still be racist even if they don't intend it to be. Like we haven't covered that enough?

[ajodasso]

(Apologies for giving you the same response as I gave Gwynne above, but my bronchitis has relapsed so badly post-Arisia that I'm home from work and coughing my lungs raw. If this is even a pale shade of what fighting monsters with a bout of plague is like, I don't even want to knowJust added a new Twitter screencap gem from (probably) F.J.; it's from the SFPA official Twitter account this time, so hard to tell, but the tone of it sounds like someone directly involved in wanting to keep Tlotlo's poem out of the anthology. Given Bryan had initially said he would likely overturn this, I'm beginning to suspect he's been overruled in that sentiment. I'm incredibly shocked that David would insist on maintaining the outcome of an error as adversely affecting as this one, so I'm beginning to assume that, given most of these offensive responses have come from F.J.'s direction, she's acting as almost the chair-behind-the-chair. It's disturbing to me that there appear to be no checks and balances in place for when things like this occur, not

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I appreciate your efforts to diversify speculative literature. I have posted about the SFPA tampering here.

[ajodasso]

I appreciate that you passed this along; your commentary includes a lot of well-articulated points that I simply wouldn't have had the energy/wherewithal to compose in this state. Thank you.

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Go team! ;)

I have been working on ethnic issues pretty much all along. My parents had to rummage through museum gift shops and such for multicultural books when I was growing up, but they managed. By this point, I have decades of experience and a college degree in Rhetoric, which gives me an advantage not everyone has in terms of analyzing a situation like this. And yes, it helps not being in the midst of it personally. I would probably not have been anywhere near this coherent if I was too pissed to see straight.

[ajodasso]

I have degrees in English and Medieval Studies and Creative Writing; rhetoric is a mercurial thing in my hands at best, especially when I'm worked up about something. The first email on Saturday landed while I was in the audience for a panel in which two of my friends were participating. I had to step out, hide in a corner, and (mostly silently) scream. And then compose myself just marginally enough to start responding, which I only just barely managed; even then, I was so worked up I misread one of the sentences near the end of one of the first messages from David (there was a sentence, after the one citing the poem as "not spec enough," that I read as "I do not think it is a very good poem," but what it actually says is "I do think it is a very good poem"). Illness + con weekend + strong reaction to wrongness = tricky set of circumstances to navigate. I've done my best and will continue to apologize for any awkwardness in the process.