Editor asks me: Will you review That Pandemic Antho?

I say: Maybe. There are a lot of disabled writers in it, right?

Editor: ............

I say: Like, obviously?

Editor: ............

[After a while] Editor: Wouldn't it still be interesting if there were NOT a lot disabled writers in it? Your review could be about that?

Me: No. That's not interesting at all b/c my ideal audience is disabled writers & readers, so that's just like gross.
[I really did say "that's just gross" lol]

Editor: Lemme send you the TOC.

Me: Okay.

Meanwhile, I'm impatient so I just look up the antho b/c it's Big and Famous and Everywhere.
Here's what The Pandemic Anthology published by @AAKnopf looks like. Now remember: disabled people are the most affected by the pandemic, eg we die the most.

How many total poets? Ok I stopped counting at 100.

How many disabled poets? Oh boy. Are you ready.
1 radical disabled activist. Name spelled incorrectly in the TOC

1 not radical at all disabled writer. Most acceptable disabled writer to nondisabled literary establishment b/c this writer "doesn't make a big deal about it," as I have been told
[Just put on the song "Once in a while" by Paul & The Tall Trees b/c this is the vibe. The Pandemic Anthology is singing to me "Have mercy, have mercy, go easy." But no. I cannot.]
"She's really nice tho," they say about this disabled writer. Oh good, I'm so glad that while she is fighting not-at-all for us she's being really nice about that.
1 disabled writer who is pretty fame and newly disabled and doesn't know anything about disability consciousness yet and needs to catch up. Like fast. If at all possible.

1 disabled writer who is only disabled in her books. Her books are like "yeah I'm totally dis." However--
She has never in any interview/anywhere said the phrase, "I am disabled." You read the book. You go "she's totally disabled!" You go to her talks. You go, Oh idk maybe she's not? Why is she hiding? She has already won most of the awards including NBCC
1 writer who uses a cane so you're like "hey buddy you're disabled, right?" but that writer also has never said, "I am disabled" so like this is very confusing. Can we say it? Or are we not saying it? Orrrrrrrrrr
1 disabled writer who doesn't know how to be out & proud disabled yet so that writer is like disabled-in-the-comments-on-FB but like not really anywhere else

1 disabled writer who is disabled I know this only b/c I published him in the NYT so definitely cheers!
So by my math -- which is admittedly sketchy AF b/c I don't like math -- we have a total of TWO out & proud disabled writers in This Pandemic Anthology. What is TWO out of ONE HUNDRED does anyone know? Percentages?

More from Book

We had a conversation on the podcast about the racialization of dog breeds, where we talked to @BronwenDickey, the author of Pitbull: The Battle Over an American Icon.


In the 1930s, Pitbulls — which, as Bronwen pointed out to me over and over, don’t constitute a dog breed but a shape — used to be seen as the trusty sidekick of the proletariat, the Honda Civic of canines. (Think of “the Little Rascals” dog.)
.

That began changing in the postwar years and the rise of the suburbs. A pedigreed dog became a status symbol for the burgeoning white middle class. And pitbulls got left behind in the cities.

Aside: USians have flitted between different “dangerous” breeds and media-fueled panics around specific dogs. (anti-German xenophobia in the late 1800s fueled extermination programs of the spitz, a little German dog that newspapers said was vicious and spread disease.)

Some previously “dangerous” dogs get rebranded over the years — German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers. But the thing their respective periods of contempt and concern had to do is that they were associated with some contemporarily undesirable group.

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