Reactionary writing?

I suppose we can blame Trump for the mini-shake-up in the literature world. His selective reduction of NEA grants has helped provoke an anti-woke reaction.

There's nothing very pure about the Arts. They're used as a vehicle by dictators and revolutionaries. They're used as therapy, as vanity showcases. When public funds are used for the Arts, closer scrutiny is attracted. The NEA's home page currently says that "Approximately 34 Percent ... of Arts Endowment-funded activities [are] in high-poverty communities", which may make US tax payers think that the NEA is left-wing. But stats can be misleading.

When I read a magazine I sometimes gather stats based on the bios. Some info is easier to collect than others. I like seeing how many of the contributors are Creative Writing lecturers, or have Creative Writing degrees. The old gender ratios have been replaced by more fluid categories. Age and race details are harder to determine. Even if stats can be determined, interpreting them is difficult. Why should the demographics of authors correspond to that of the general UK (or world) population? Isn't it reasonable to believe that a higher proportion of LGBTQ+ people than the general population will turn to writing?

Gender

There are disagreements about the definitions of "Male" and "Female", but I think that whatever the definitions, one would hope that roughly as many females as males appear in literary books and magazines. In this regard there has been progress. The New York Times had a piece out on December 7th 2024 entitled " The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone" about male/female statistics in literature -

• The New Yorker hasn't published a work of literary fiction by a white American man born after 1984.
• according to the job information company Zippia, 58.5% of agents are women
• According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, women authored 30% of published work in 1970 and produced the majority by 2020.

Race

This is a thornier issue than gender. There are women-only presses and literary magazines (though perhaps they're on the decline). Segregation by race is more common. There are expectations for equality of M/F representation in many countries. Perceptions of race are less clear and more regional. For example, in the UK the race ratios are very different in London (45% are White British) and amongst younger generations. If you live in London, you might expect much greater than 3% of poets to belong to black groups, but for the country as a whole, that ratio's roughly representative according to the latest census.

Push back

• Social Media is used as a means of cancelling and virtue-signalling. Campaigns against (for example) Kate Clanchy have hit the headlines. Nowadays such campaigns can provoke orchestrated reactions.
• There are stories of WASP writers getting little success until they pretend to be African/Asian LGBTQ+ people.
• Literary magazines haven't all decided to follow the crowd. In a 2019 Acumen editorial it said "I feel that [the Arts Council] are diverging from the path which Acumen wishes to follow. This is to accept all poems on merit and not be influenced by gender, ethnicity, religion, fame or anything other than the value of the poem".

For more details, see my "A guide to diversity/inclusion for writers and editors" article