Rejection letter ethics, cont’d
Further on-topic discussions of rejection letter ethics welcome here.
Travelling tomorrow, back on-line Monday night CEST.
Further on-topic discussions of rejection letter ethics welcome here.
Travelling tomorrow, back on-line Monday night CEST.
July 13th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Always interesting to see an appeal to apparently self-evident “professional ethics” followed by an explanation that such “professional ethics” are up to the individual to interpret.
Or, guide for the perplexed: if the professional ethics you are pointing to are actually in your head — as opposed to an explicit or implicit code that emerged out of a public dialogue between stakeholders — you’re not actually making an ethics-based argument.
It’s easy enough to find codes of ethics in a variety of fields, and these codes change based on the changing norms of the fields, and the societies in which they operate. It’s also easy to find volumes describing long-term discussions of ethics in fields where the number of practitioners not part of an organization exceed those within the organizations (e.g., journalism).
Without either of those, any statement along the lines of “I would not make public the content of a rejection slip sent to me as a writer, a piece of professional business correspondence, because it would not be acting professionally” doesn’t mean anything more than “I would not do that which I would not do.”
Deson’t mean much, except that it implies that everyone from some kid who posts a rejection letter to ask what it means to Ursula K. LeGuin top every university library in the US are violators of “professional ethics.”
July 13th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Nick, I dunno about that. I think I pretty much agree with Gardner that most of the time, I’d think publically posting either a submission letter or a rejection letter, without the author’s permssion, would be unprofessional. That’s how I read what he was saying, and I actually think most writers and editors in the field would agree with that; I think we could form consensus on that pretty quickly. Some would call it slightly unprofessional (or just tacky) — some would say very unprofessional. But it’s definitely at least a bit inappropriate, I think.
Where the disagreement lies is in when you (as writer or editor) think it’s worth breaking that privacy/professional guideline for the sake of some greater good. Gardner has essentially said that he would only do so for cases where he thought bodily injury might occur. Fair enough — that’s his call to make. Others would draw the line elsewhere.
For what it’s worth, if I got a professional letter with racist/sexist material in it, I don’t think I’d post it to the internet as a first step — I’d probably contact some colleagues in the field and read them the relevant parts of the letter and ask them if it was really as offensive as I thought it was, and if so, how they thought I should proceed.
If a young writer (one of my Clarion students, say) asked me what they should do in that situation, I might, as a more established professional in the field, intervene on their behalf, writing directly to the miscreant and requesting an apology for their misconduct. I would also probably at the minimum alert other senior professionals in the field. A single instance of misconduct can perhaps be forgiven and passed by, especially if the individual responsible is suitably apologetic — but if a pattern of bad behavior emerges, that probably needs to be brought to light, and some form of group consultation may well be necessary to keep an eye on the situation.
If the initial offense was sufficiently evil, and/or the offender refused to apologize, either privately or publicly, then I might well feel the responsibility to make the issue public. Given the legal ramifications, perhaps only quoting the relevant lines — would that count as fair use?
July 13th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
I know what Gardner was saying, Mary Anne. I just don’t think that most writers and editors in the field would — under normal circumstances — claim that posting or otherwise making public a rejection letter would be a violation of professional ethics at all.
Whether it is the example of LeGuin posting a rejection letter on her website (with an undercurrent of “Ho ho, look at the silly editor who dared reject my famed book!”) or Carol Emschwiller reading aloud the entirety of a F&SF rejection letter at a panel at Wiscon in 2003, or the dozens of rejection letters I’ve seen posted in whole or in part on LJ, on the Rumormill, or this past Friday…this ethic doesn’t seem to be nearly as universal as Gardner claimed. If he said “personal ethics”, that would be fine, but there doesn’t seem to be a foundation for this being a matter of professional ethics common to the field or to the publishing trade in general.
If this provision of privacy is a matter of “professional ethics” on which we could get a consensus very quickly, why have veteran writers like LeGuin and Emshwiller and newer writers like Justine L. and Toby Buckell carried on as if there was no such ethic at all? Why, until this late controversy, have I never heard even a peep of this widespread professional ethic?
(It’s also easy enough to find people outside the field posting their letters, many of them fairly well-published authors looking to give writers some hope by showing that rejections are common.)
Sometimes only a portion of a letter is posted, but once we discount the issue of copyright, what’s the difference, ethically? After all, the very “heart” of the letter is usually what is quoted, after all. Same is so when the issue is a news story: No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov.
The claim of some sort of universal or near-universal professional ethic just doesn’t match the real-world activities of real-world writers and editors. In the absence of formal ethics — a la the sort of documents produced by and for the professionals (medical, legal, etc.), the only metric for what a professional ethic is is the daily behavior of the members of the profession.
July 14th, 2008 at 2:11 am
I’m not sure the LeGuin example holds up — she stripped the identifying info, and it really could have come from anywhere. That seems a very different case from identifying it.
And there’s certainly a tradition of reading aloud rejection letters at cons, or submission letters for that matter — although again, I think in most of those cases, the identifying markers are removed — they have been at the panels I’ve attended, anyway.
So both of those situations, I’d argue, do indicate that some aspect of privacy is being acknowledged. And I think it makes a huge difference how you quote — the effect is very different if you quote only a single word, i.e. “An editor used the word ’sheet-head” in a letter to me — do you guys think that’s offensive?” versus excerpting a few relevant sentences (maybe the heart of the letter, maybe not — sometimes it’s the casual throwaway lines that are the most damaging), versus posting the whole letter (with or without identifying marks). I think those are four different cases, with four very different effects.
I say all this in part out of personal experience — in a workshop setting in my MFA, one of the critique letters from my classmates called me racist. I talked about this in my blog — no identifying names, quoting just the relevant sentence of the letter. Someone from class read my blog, and my class went up in flames, with almost everyone certain that I’d horribly broken rules of workshop etiquette. Although of course, if I’d quoted something nice, “This is a fantastic story!”, no one would have made a peep. We actually had to get in a facilitator from counseling services to fix the class. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that anyone might object to what I’d posted, and the whole experience was a sharp lesson to me that my expectations of privacy might not reflect those of others, and it was wisest to be cautious in such matters, and consider carefully what you’re about to do.
That said, you’re certainly right that that some writers (lots of writers, maybe?) do post such letters, especially anxious newer writers; I guess I don’t know for certain what consensus is. But before all of this broke out, if you’d asked me, I think I would have said that it was generally considered professional courtesy to not make such letters public, and that experienced writers and editors understood that. Courtesy’s not quite the same as ethics, but close enough that I can understand why Gardner feels the way he does. And I probably would have assumed that most professional editors and writers felt the same way. And I would counsel my students to act that way, and to get permission before posting such a letter.
I actually think the current spate of posting rejection letters is a both a tactical mistake and professionally discourteous (although that’s dependent again on how much they choose to quote) — I disagree with it as a mode of protest. I think people are acting out of anger, and taking that anger out on the wrong targets. The letter-posting is such a minor diversion when cast against the real problem that needs addressing.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:15 am
I’m not sure the LeGuin example holds up — she stripped the identifying info, and it really could have come from anywhere. That seems a very different case from identifying it.
Of course it holds up — Gardner explicitly draws the ethical line at content, not provenance: “I would not make public the content of a rejection slip sent to me as a writer” he said. “Content” is the carefully chosen key word.
“Make public” also appears carefully chosen — the large Wiscon panel at which Emshwiller read the letter had a larger audience than many blogs. So he’s not talking about removing identifying information, and he is not just talking about posting a letter on the ‘net.
I also wouldn’t count the actions of MFA classes as an example of professional ethics — MFA students are just that, students, they are not people who *know* what is going on more or less by definition. Further, MFA students are specifically famously hysterical, and I suspect that goes double for schools in the Bay Area anyway. (The casual denunciation of you as a racist based, I presume, on a workshop story, is prima facie evidence of that!) In my own MFA program, I had students wondering why Raymond Carver’s estate didn’t sue Gordon Lish for fraud. Their understanding of what constitutes professionalism does not involve any actual traffic with the profession.
Leguin, Emshwiller, and the dozens upon dozens of other writers who have made public the content of their rejection letters are either flouting a well-founded “professional ethic” or there is no such ethics-based expectation of privacy, or at least not one considered more important than “A room full of people may find this funny” or “New writers need to see that even popular books have been rejected by pinhead editors.”
As a personal ethic, priviliging personal corespondence is great. However, it is pretty silly to object if *I*, for example, violate *your* code of ethics.
July 14th, 2008 at 11:40 am
My favorite part of this exchange is:
We actually had to get in a facilitator from counseling services to fix the class.
I love that this actually worked. Possibly one should be assigned to every critique group?
July 14th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
I’m surprised that one isn’t assigned to every Mills class, regardless of the subject matter, just in case!
July 14th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I can’t read Gardner’s mind, and I don’t know for certain what he meant by his phrasing. All I can say in support was that it seemed reasonable to me when he said it, so he was correct in his estimation of at least one other professional in the field.
As for workshop — they’re students, sure, but in grad school, there’s at least a presumption that they’re also colleagues. I think it’s a relevant situation; they’re at least as professional as some of the newbie writers we were talking about.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
I can’t read Gardner’s mind, and I don’t know for certain what he meant by his phrasing.
Me neither, that’s why I stick with the phrasing as it was written instead of suggesting that he must somehow mean anything else. (Indeed, I cannot even see a trace of what you think Gardner says in any of the comments he has left on this subject, either here or elsewhere)
As far as “newbie writers” the point I made was that writers from all across the spectrum of experience, and for all sorts of reasons (not just, not even largely, as a “mode of protest”) share their letters with the public. Indeed, even the letter under discussion wasn’t posted out of protest — the recipient didn’t seem to care at all about the “sheethead” stuff, but was more interested in the discussion of non-genre markets in the letter.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:11 am
[...] been said about William Sanders’ behaviour recently; start here, then see here, here, here, here, and here for discussion and further links. But I do want to highlight the latest iteration, which [...]
July 15th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Nick, I think we’re just not going to come to agreement on this, so maybe we should just agree to disagree.
I think you’re reading Gardner’s words in an uncharitably narrow way, being stricter that is reasonable with ordinary speech.
And despite the many examples of writers who do publish parts or wholes of rejection letters, I still think it’s generally bad behavior, behavior I wouldn’t engage in, and which I think quite a few of my professional compatriots also disapprove of — and that’s regardless of this whole Sanders mess. If the professional standard currently really isn’t to have some minimal privacy expectation on these communications, I think the standard should change.
July 15th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Just in case anyone comes into this who hasn’t read the rest of the lead-up, I want to reiterate that I do think there are some times when posting such a letter is justified. I would have felt justified doing so in the Sanders incident, personally.
July 15th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I think you’re reading Gardner’s words in an uncharitably narrow way, being stricter that is reasonable with ordinary speech.
And to be as plain, I think you are being unreasonably charitable about what Gardner must have meant to the point where you ignore what he actually said, not just here but elsewhere.
If you start with the dual premises, “Gardner Dozois can never be wrong! He just cannot!” and “Ursula Leguin can never be wrong! She just cannot!” then I can see pouring the energy you have into insisting that there is no contradiction between Gardner’s actual claims about “professional ethics” and Leguin’s actual behavior.
However, as I did not start from those premises, not being prone to hero worship, I was able to read Gardner’s sentences as he wrote them, and with the knowledge that the man has a) been a writer and editor for thirty years and is thus capable of writing what he actually meant as opposed to what Mary Anne would wish him to mean and b) given the sensitivity of the issue, that he would choose he words MORE carefully than he might in ordinary conversation. (This understanding also kept me from doing stuff like wondering aloud is Gardner’s own rejection letters had racist commentary sprinkled throughout, as others have because of his brief comments on copyright.)
I recommend reading the words of editors and writers, especially as they are written and not spoken, as they actully exist on the page or on the screen.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Nick, not going to argue this with you any more, but I actually think Gardner wrong on many an occasion, and have told him so more than once. This just doesn’t happen to be one of those occasions. And Le Guin and I have disagreed loudly, in public, twice. Which does sadden me, as I think she is brilliant, and undoubtedly one of my heroes — but unfortunately not flawless. None of us are.
July 15th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Quoting Mary Anne: I would also probably at the minimum alert other senior professionals in the field. A single instance of misconduct can perhaps be forgiven and passed by, especially if the individual responsible is suitably apologetic — but if a pattern of bad behavior emerges, that probably needs to be brought to light, and some form of group consultation may well be necessary to keep an eye on the situation.
This is a weirdly authoritarian (or do I mean hierarchical? insular? something on that axis) view of the power dynamics in this field. Taking this particular case as an example, it’s not like “senior professionals in the field” didn’t already know exactly who Will Sanders was and what he was like. (Whether any individual person had a positive or negative impression of him is of course going to vary, but his nature was known, is what I’m saying.) There’s no gatekeeper system for who gets to be an editor–it’s not like there’s some corporate entity that hired Sanders to run Helix. You and your fellow “senior professionals” can keep as many eyes on the situation as you want, but if you’re not willing to talk publicly about the problems in that situation, there’s very little you can do to affect it. You can give private warnings to the circle of new writers who happen to interact personally with your clique, but there’s still an infinite stream of -other- new writers from whom this knowledge is being withheld. In a more information-transparent model, though, the knowledge is out there. Some people will choose to not want to be associated with Sanders and his publication, and some people won’t think it’s that big a deal, but the point is, they’ll all get the benefit of knowing what everyone behind the SFWA-lounge veil of secrecy already knew.
I mean, yeah, there are limitations to this model, the biggest one being that you can’t believe everything people say on blogs. (Or in person!) I think we all have our own pet examples of one of these blog-tempests centering on something either unfair or untrue. The way you’re talking about this, though, has unfortunate parallels to all sorts of other ways that the rhetoric of politeness or good behavior has been used to keep subordinate populations in line. Don’t repeat jackass things that editors say to you, don’t name names when someone grabs your ass at a convention, don’t tell anyone your salary, don’t complain when people tell offensive jokes, etc.
July 15th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
For what it’s worth, I hadn’t run across Sanders before this Helix thing. Granted, I’m not so in touch with sf/f these days, so maybe I’m not the best example of that.
In any case, I wasn’t talking specifically about the Sanders situation — in that extreme case, I probably would have made the letter public.
But I can think of a lot of intermediate level stuff where it’s unclear how serious a problem this is going to be long-term, and where, in the past, my reaction has been to talk to Jed and/or Nalo and/or Debbie — in large part, for a reality check, i.e., is this actually a problem, or am I imagining it? And if it is a problem, what do we collectively think is the best way to handle it? Because my immediate rage reaction is not necessarily productive.
I’m all for exposing the muck when it’s actual muck. But sometimes it’s just slightly dingy, and in that case, I think there are often better (and more effective) avenues for dealing with it than throwing it out there on the internet.
While I agree that the other examples you cite are problematic, I would actually generally advocate for not ‘repeating jackass things that editors say to you’ — because jackass is not necessarily the same as overtly racist/sexist/etc., and there are degrees to all of this. Most humans are jackasses some of the time. They don’t necessarily deserve public flagellation for it.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I don’t think anyone’s denying that there are degrees, though, or that every statement one disagrees with should be trounced out into the spotlight for public comment. Sometimes people are really just getting worked up about nothing.
That said, there are, you know, degrees, and sometimes when a person is a jackass they -should- be called to account for it. I’m comfortable with this being one of those times, but if you think this is an inappropriate reaction on the part of the community, I’d be interested in hearing your reasoning.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
No, as I think I’ve said at least five or six times now, I think posting Sanders’ letter was the right thing to do.
What I was arguing with Nick about was whether it was fair to expect professionalism to generally include a reasonable expectation of privacy — barring crossing a line. Gardner draws his line in one place (danger of bodily harm), I draw mine in a different place (somewhere around damage to an individual or the community), but I think it’s entirely reasonable to have a line exist.
I think you believe that too, or else I totally misread your earlier post on the subject.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
… Given that I pretty much said that outright, MA, I think you’re safe to assume that I meant it, yeah.
I do, in fact, understand what you and Nick were discussing. I was bringing up a separate (although admittedly related) point–not a question of whether or where a line exists, but what the appropriate course of action is once that line has been crossed. Does my comment make more sense to you, in that light?
July 16th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Not really. What I tried to say earlier was that I think there are a variety of appropriate responses, depending on the severity of the incident in question. And that one appropriate response is for senior folk in the field to talk to each other about it.
I say senior in particular, because junior folk look to senior folk to say something when things are amiss. So I like to a) discuss what’s going on with other experienced folk (some with a lot more experience than me), and b) make sure they know about the incident in question, and c) encourage them to say something about it if appropriate.
Is that still not clear? Or are you saying there’s something problematic in that?
July 16th, 2008 at 1:50 am
I’m also experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance here, because usually I’m advocating for a lot more transparency than everyone else in the room. (Including in at least a few cases you, Susan, I’m pretty sure.)
Weird.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:02 am
Again, the guy who posted the letter did NOT post the letter in an attempt to blow the whistle on Sanders’s comments. That was just a happy and bizarre side effect of the whole thing.
So, when one draws the line at “harm to the community” one must acknowledge that the recipient of the Sanders letter had no interest in doing anything about the community — he was curious about non-genre markets and was essentially practicing some self-interested rejectomancy.
In this, he behaved no differently than the hundreds of writers who have shared their rejection slips for the same reasons — the only difference is that Sanders and some of his allies tried to turn this into an issue of ethics, which it was not for any of the other hundreds and hundreds of writers who did the same thing for the same reason.
That’s why it is patently hard to believe that there is any such ethic. (That the claim of this ethic is defended through textual torture is just supplementary proof of its absence.)
I have no idea why “senior professionals” are being privileged here. There’s nothing about having a job (or being one’s own boss) for an extended period that gives someone a special insight into the nature of ethics, or that makes them a proper middle-class liberal, or that even neutralizes the dynamic of SF not simply being a “community” (which has its own discontents), but also a competitive marketplace.
Susan alludes to what Laura Nader calls “harmony ideology”, which is worth Googling at least.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Talking to Kevin last night about all this, he pointed out that there are some strong generational differences at play here:
- Gardner’s generation, which privileged privacy
- my generation, which in my experience tends to try to balance privacy with transparency
- the coming generation, which has grown up living with utter lack of privacy and takes it as the default, in part because they have no other options
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of world the next generation makes for themselves. I think something will be lost in the switch to utter transparency; I think the community is often the mob, and is not necessarily the most effective (or compassionate) means of handling anti-social behavior. I think it’s important to balance the needs of the individual (offending or not) against the needs of the community.
But you don’t have to agree with me on that.
I think I’ve pretty much said what I wanted to say here, so I’m bowing out — if I kept talking, I’d just be repeating myself. Teaching Clarion is getting more and more intense, time-wise, and I need to save my energy for rasslin’ these students.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
- Gardner’s generation, which privileged privacy
Except that LeGuin, Emshwiller, and others who have shared their rejection letters for the lulz are even older than Gardner.
This is plain ol’ power politics.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:14 am
The particular view of professional ethics one adopts probably depends on which profession you are in. For example, I work in government and for me, I expect that the contents of my professional email will not be published by the recipient and will be treated with confidentiality. However, it appears that in the world of publishing, it is quite common for writers to post rejection letters and practice rejectomancy. I think editors may want their letters to be considered private and confidential, but writers don’t and so there isn’t one agreed-upon set of professional ethics.
To me, people should probably assume a degree of privacy with respect to business email, but when faced with comments like those in Luke’s email from Sanders, all bets are off. No one should protect a bigot by hiding his or her bigotry, especially when it is present in a business email. That’s not the way to make this genre appear open and inviting to all writers, whatever group to which they belong.