Look before you other...

[davidgillon]

Spotted a tweet last night saying that Nisi Shawl and Tempest Bradford are offering a course on "Writing Inclusive Fiction: Deep Dive Into Description - learn how to write descriptions that don't Exoticize and Other people from groups, cultures, and identities different from your own."

So I looked at their website, and tweeted back that using the phrase "paralyzed by anxiety" to describe writers who don't know how to describe and not other minorities probably wasn't the greatest idea ever (or the greatest advert for a $300 course).

Just got a response of "Care to elaborate?" from Nisi Shawl, which doesn't fill me with confidence in their general cluefulness on disability as a minority....

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I've spent some F2F time with Nisi Shawl at WisCon. She's physically disabled and I've witnessed her listening very carefully.

I am confident that if you did want to elaborate, she would pay attention.

[davidgillon]

She did indeed get back to me with a "Thank you! That makes huge amounts of sense" when I pointed out neither "paralyzed" nor "anxiety" were being used in their correct sense, and that both were being used to imply a negative.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for making the effort.

It's definitely eye-roll worthy, tho'. (Who's teaching the teachers?)

[davidgillon]

My thoughts exactly.

[davidgillon]

The course's twitter account has now retweeted my original tweet and noted it is a good point, which I thought was a pretty classy response. Don't just take the lesson on board, but note in public that you had to.