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Post by benziger on Oct 15, 2021 18:02:31 GMT
In an other tread, Mag2024 asked if authors are allowed to be political. The really left wing weekly newspaper "WOZ" wrote this week about women publishers: "This is a feminist act of empowerment". Furthermore, it wrote: Women still have a hard time in the literary business. This is not the only reason why Jil Erdmann and Katrin Sutter have founded their own publishing houses. A conversation about making books in a low-wage industry, choleric men and the need to allow as many perspectives as possible.
How do you see it? Is it more difficult to publish books as a woman? If you are a women: Do you still have a hard time, because you are a women? If you are a men: Is every thing easy going, because you are a men? Are all publishing men choleric?
(The interview in the following posts is translated by me. I added some questions.)
Jil Erdmann (27) did an apprenticeship as a bookseller. In 2020, she discovered the out-of-print book "Frauen erfahren Frauen" by Edition R + F in a second-hand bookshop. In order to reissue it, she founded Sechsundzwanzig as a "publishing house for feminist literature" and "network for writing women". The new edition was published in September 2021. The volume was expanded with works by contemporary women authors and financed through crowdfunding. It contains literary texts by Ruth Schweikert, Tabea Steiner, Laure Wyss, Ruth Mayer and Anna Stern, among others.
Katrin Sutter (47) is a publisher, filmmaker, television journalist and author. She founded Arisverlag in 2017; the publishing house's 19th publication will now appear in October. The spectrum ranges from fiction to art books to non-fiction. The decisive factor for Sutter is that a book contributes to social discussion. This year, this was achieved, among other things, with the much-discussed book "Helvetias Töchter" (Helvetia's Daughters) by Nadine A. Brügger, which retells the story of women's suffrage in Switzerland.
Personally, I like Sutter's approach much more: wanting to make a difference, to trigger something. What more could you want than for a book to contribute to social discussion? Earn money, perhaps? Does the one exclude the other?
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Post by benziger on Oct 15, 2021 18:08:35 GMT
WOZ: Katrin Sutter, Jil Erdmann, to write a woman needs money and her own room, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1929. What does a woman need today to be able to hold her own in the literary business?
Katrin Sutter: You have to be able to say, "I wrote a book, I'm cool." Men can often do that better than women. Of course, there needs to be structural change in the literary business, but you must also not be so easily deterred. Publishing a book needs a good dose of self-confidence and the will for self-empowerment. Jil Erdmann: But I would like to emphasise that that is not enough. You can see that in my example. I had a good idea, I had the self-confidence, I really wanted to re-publish this book "Women Experience Women" and I had support from well-known authors. Still, I didn't get any foundation money. I then financed the book through crowdfunding. Sutter: You even got a lot of money, in the end! Erdmann: Yes, fortunately! I don't have much in the way of savings and have to rely on outside funding. Money is still an issue. Young women are given much less money. That has been clearly proven in studies. Whether that played a role in my case, I don't know. But who gets capital and who doesn't is an essential question. Sutter: Books by women are often not perceived as art. Especially when it's about female experiences. For the book "Rendez-vous" by the Zurich photo artist Caroline Minjolle, for example, there was no money from the official side because they said: that's just a mother photographing her children, that's not art. I don't see it that way. I see a woman who rocks her life and makes the best of it: she is an artist, she has children and has to combine that. And makes great art out of it
Is this also you experience, that books by women are often not perceived as art?
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Post by benziger on Oct 15, 2021 18:16:27 GMT
Next questions: Should there be publishers only for male authors or only for women? Or should a publisher just publish good books?
WOZ: Books by women are not only less published and promoted, but also less often sold and reviewed. Nevertheless, you both specialise in books by women: both Arisverlag and Verlag Sechsundzwanzig publish books exclusively by women authors. Why is that?
Sutter: Arisverlag doesn't really have a label. It doesn't have the label "feminist publishing house" or "publishing house for women". It has developed more like that. I think it has a lot to do with who I am and how the publishing house came about. I've been working as a television journalist and filmmaker for a long time, that's what I do for a living. Then I wanted to write a book but didn't feel like looking for a publisher. As a self-employed filmmaker, I was already a publishing company, so I started a publishing company myself. It was really about self-empowerment. That is something important to me. You can also feel that in the books that are published by Arisverlag: They all come from authors who don't let themselves be deterred, but simply go for it. I think I attract people who suit me and work on topics that have something to do with me. Actually, it doesn't matter at all whether it's a man or a woman. But interestingly enough, it's all women now, although gender is not an exclusion criterion for me. I haven't published a book by a man since 2019.
Erdmann: When I founded the publishing house, I also intended to publish texts by women, without emphasising that Verlag Sechsundzwanzig is a feminist publishing house. I wanted above all to reprint Ruth Mayer's book "Frauen erfahren Frauen" (Women Experience Women) and took her as my model. Mayer founded the publishing house Edition R + F in the seventies. It was the first publishing house in Switzerland to publish exclusively texts by contemporary women authors. But she didn't market it that way, she just did it. That impressed me. The underrepresentation of women in the literary world has been an issue for me for a long time. And I've been thinking about how to communicate that, whether to communicate it at all. I don't like labels that much either. But when I see how people treat women and feminism, I think it's important to make a statement and to emphasise it explicitly: The publishing house is a feminist project.
Sutter: I think that's totally good. On the one hand as a political statement, but also from a marketing point of view I think it's good to label it that way. If I were your marketing consultant, I would recommend it to you. I myself could not label my publishing house like that.
Erdmann: I would much rather just publish great books by women and increase the quota of women unnoticed. But I see that many people are concerned to talk about the fact that women authors and women's issues are underrepresented. That's why I want to make space for that. As many aspects of feminism and womanhood as possible should be able to be negotiated. The topics in "Women Experience Women" are very different: it's about motherhood, about sexualised violence ... Not all content is feminist. What is feminist is the act itself: that I publish women and declare it as such.
Doesn't such a label exclude or scare off many people? Erdmann: I have already had such experiences. During crowdfunding, there was a man who thought the project was great and said he wanted to support it, but that the topic didn't interest him because he was a man. He said he would then give the book to his wife. Another man who came to my reading from the book said, "I would never read the book, I'm not interested in what women experience." But these are exceptions. Many interested men came to my reading.
Sutter: My books are also often ordered by men.
Erdmann: Feminism is not for women. Feminism is for all genders. My guiding principle is: as many perspectives as possible. That applies to this first book, which has just come out, but also to the series I now want to build up. If it is financially possible, novels and poetry will also be a topic in the future. The "feminist" will certainly remain, but I don't rule out publishing men as well. And I am looking at how I can also welcome nonbinary people in my publishing house. I also discuss this with LGBTIQ activists: What makes the experience of a trans woman different from that of a cis woman?
Do you also publish books for a special interest group? Should every special interest attract many people or are there also topics that find only a small audience?
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Post by benziger on Oct 15, 2021 18:30:05 GMT
WOZ: Gender roles have changed and become permeable. More and more people are resisting the binary classification and rejecting a clear identity as man or woman. Is it even contemporary to speak of female experience?
Erdmann: Yes, because the oppression of people who are perceived as women is still an issue. People often talk about there being a war against women. That sounds very harsh. But it corresponds to reality, there is a struggle against women's empowerment. The experiences I have as a young woman are partly similar to those of women from the eighties. What experience do you have in mind?
Erdmann: Experiences in the work environment, for example. I worked at a big publishing house, where things were very sexist. There were extremely choleric men, and as a young woman I was constantly reduced to my appearance. There were only men in the management, there were assaultive remarks every day, I was touched, they didn't take me seriously when I said something ... Sutter: I have not had these experiences. I know they exist, but I ask myself: What is the reason that it doesn't happen to me? Am I radiating something? Do I not notice it? I never felt that I was disadvantaged as a woman or as a girl. Or if there were obstacles, I removed them. In the sixth grade, for example, all the boys in the village were allowed to shoot crossbows. And I thought: I want that too. Even though I'm a very bad shot. But I thought: Why shouldn't I be able to do that? So I said that, and from then on, all the girls were allowed to shoot crossbow as well. Erdmann: I also resisted, I also brought it up directly. But the result was that I was excluded. For example, I was no longer invited to meetings. Such things happen. Some people can't stand up to it. In "Women Experience Women" there is a text in which the author lists in 26 points which sexisms she experiences in the literary world. A lot of what women experience today is in this book!
I do not agree to this point. Of course that happens. But why is it sexism, when a women is concerned, but not, if a man is concerned? Correct and decent behaviour has nothing to do with women or men. How many women have stroked my son's frizzy hair on the street without asking when he was little? If they were men, they would have been arrested immediately as potential paedophiles, but like this? Only nice older women who mean well. Should I now start a publishing house for literature about boys tortured by nice old women?
Are these experiences the reason why you wanted to start your own business? Erdmann: In retrospect, I think so. The igniting spark was indeed Ruth Mayer's book, which I wanted to reprint. But I also didn't like working like that any more. I have now turned the experiences from the former job into this book, which should encourage other women. Sutter: You're at a publishing house where you have bad experiences, so you start your own publishing house. That's a feminist act of self-empowerment! You can't expect every woman to do that, not every woman can do that. But the more who do it, the more others dare to do it. In literature, the quota of women is much higher than in other cultural sectors. At readings, 44 per cent of the people on stage are women, and in management positions at director level, as many as 55 per cent are women. In music, on the other hand, the quota of women in such functions tends towards zero. This is shown by a preliminary study commissioned by Pro Helvetia. Why is the literary sector a pioneer when it comes to gender equality? Sutter: It's probably because the literary industry is poorly paid. You need a good education, but you hardly earn anything. The directorship of a theatre or opera house is certainly much better paid than the directorship of a house of literature. The literary industry is determined by self-exploitation. That's probably why there are so many women. Erdmann: That's a very convincing argument. So no reason to rejoice? Erdmann / Sutter: No. We could just leave this low-wage industry to the men. Do we really need more books by women? Sutter: Yes, it needs every book that comes out in my publishing house! For example, "Helvetias Töchter" by Nadine Brügger, which stimulates a fundamentally important discussion. Namely: How do we do history? What kind of history teaching is appropriate for our times? Does history teaching need to become more female? Erdmann: There are so many people who are interested in books by women. When crowdfunding, I had a lot of support from women who are much younger than me. That made me happy! I would like young people to find themselves in the texts I publish, to find points of reference, to have some kind of identification. The fact that we are women has an influence - on our programme, on our themes. Sutter: Books have an influence! That's why you can't give up the field.
If books have an influence, they are political! That's why you can't give up the field. Do you agree? Are you political?
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Post by benziger on Oct 15, 2021 18:31:25 GMT
WOZ: What do you want from your books?
Erdmann: That as many different women authors as possible have their say and write about things they might not otherwise write about. So that a broad spectrum of human experiences becomes visible. Sutter: I want to trigger discussions with my books. They can also be controversial. A good example is the children's book "Agent Yeshi" by Gabriela Kasperski, which is about racism: parents often tell me that their children have read the book and that they discussed racism together for a long time afterwards. Such feedback is the most beautiful thing for me!
What do you want from your books?
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Post by Retread-Retired-Cameron on Oct 15, 2021 19:14:24 GMT
Interesting thread, meaning I'll make an effort to reread more diligently before the crew wakes up in the morning when I can have more distraction-free time to focus. For the moment:
"Personally, I like Sutter's approach much more: wanting to make a difference, to trigger something. What more could you want than for a book to contribute to social discussion? Earn money, perhaps? Does the one exclude the other?"
When I write it's basically recording the stories the characters tell me. If those stories get people to pause and look at the world they live in in a different way, great. If people are entertained in the process, again, great. What people take away from my writing is out of my control, and as such, I don't worry about it. When it comes to social discourse and earning money from a book, one does not exclude the other.
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Post by Ken on Oct 16, 2021 7:30:50 GMT
another viewpoint
For the life of me I can’t see why people are so angry with Sally Rooney. She may have refused to let an Israeli firm publish her work. But that’s not an insult to the Israeli people.
Quite the contrary. It’s great news for the Israeli people. Because now they won’t have to read her books.
Far from an affront, we should view what she’s done as a noble act of self-sacrifice. The Israeli people have quite enough to worry about as it is, without having to endure these insufferable, humourless, dreary, sullen, adolescent, jumped-up bonkbusters. So it’s thoughtful of Ms Rooney to spare an embattled nation from additional misery. She may not approve of the Israeli government, but for the benefit of ordinary Israelis she is willing to forgo a no doubt considerable sum in royalties. The decision does her great credit, and all supporters of Israel, and indeed lovers of literature, should applaud this principled stance.
I only wonder whether she can be persuaded to extend her boycott to British publishers. After all, she must have an opinion on the British Empire, or Oliver Cromwell, or at the very least Brexit. If not, we could easily send her a helpful summary of this country’s most grievous historic excesses, in the hope that she will take a principled stance against us. Perhaps a member of National Trust staff could be enlisted to help.
Ms Rooney is evidently a very tolerant and forgiving person, but with a little effort, I see no reason why we shouldn’t convince her to stop her books being published here, too.
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Post by potet on Oct 16, 2021 9:34:20 GMT
In France, some publishing companies were set up after WWII to publish books spreading the official doctrine that the international mafia that rules the USA and its satellites wants our minds to be brainswashed with. This is inevitable, so I don't bother about it.
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Post by potet on Oct 16, 2021 9:43:13 GMT
If I were a publisher, like most French publishers, I'd publish everything allowed to be published according to our laws. It's up to the reader to make his choice. I would just reject books written in faulty French, whatever the topic.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2021 14:12:50 GMT
If I were a publisher, like most French publishers, I'd publish everything allowed to be published according to our laws. It's up to the reader to make his choice. I would just reject books written in faulty French, whatever the topic. I wouldn't want my Jesus kid book translated into Arabic by a devout Muslim publishing company which says Christians are freaks. That puts things into perspective for me. Make it personal.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2021 14:15:36 GMT
In an other tread, Mag2024 asked if authors are allowed to be political. The really left wing weekly newspaper "WOZ" wrote this week about women publishers: "This is a feminist act of empowerment". Furthermore, it wrote: Women still have a hard time in the literary business. This is not the only reason why Jil Erdmann and Katrin Sutter have founded their own publishing houses. A conversation about making books in a low-wage industry, choleric men and the need to allow as many perspectives as possible.
How do you see it? Is it more difficult to publish books as a woman? If you are a women: Do you still have a hard time, because you are a women? If you are a men: Is every thing easy going, because you are a men? Are all publishing men choleric?
(The interview in the following posts is translated by me. I added some questions.)
Jil Erdmann (27) did an apprenticeship as a bookseller. In 2020, she discovered the out-of-print book "Frauen erfahren Frauen" by Edition R + F in a second-hand bookshop. In order to reissue it, she founded Sechsundzwanzig as a "publishing house for feminist literature" and "network for writing women". The new edition was published in September 2021. The volume was expanded with works by contemporary women authors and financed through crowdfunding. It contains literary texts by Ruth Schweikert, Tabea Steiner, Laure Wyss, Ruth Mayer and Anna Stern, among others.
Katrin Sutter (47) is a publisher, filmmaker, television journalist and author. She founded Arisverlag in 2017; the publishing house's 19th publication will now appear in October. The spectrum ranges from fiction to art books to non-fiction. The decisive factor for Sutter is that a book contributes to social discussion. This year, this was achieved, among other things, with the much-discussed book "Helvetias Töchter" (Helvetia's Daughters) by Nadine A. Brügger, which retells the story of women's suffrage in Switzerland.
Personally, I like Sutter's approach much more: wanting to make a difference, to trigger something. What more could you want than for a book to contribute to social discussion? Earn money, perhaps? Does the one exclude the other?
I read your text last night and let it simmer all through the day, with many arguments and thoughts forming my intended response. But that's all gone now, true as it was, because I read this! It says it all: ca.yahoo.com/news/putin-says-american-reporter-too-121151548.html
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2021 14:18:41 GMT
another viewpointFor the life of me I can’t see why people are so angry with Sally Rooney. She may have refused to let an Israeli firm publish her work. But that’s not an insult to the Israeli people. Quite the contrary. It’s great news for the Israeli people. Because now they won’t have to read her books. Far from an affront, we should view what she’s done as a noble act of self-sacrifice. The Israeli people have quite enough to worry about as it is, without having to endure these insufferable, humourless, dreary, sullen, adolescent, jumped-up bonkbusters. So it’s thoughtful of Ms Rooney to spare an embattled nation from additional misery. She may not approve of the Israeli government, but for the benefit of ordinary Israelis she is willing to forgo a no doubt considerable sum in royalties. The decision does her great credit, and all supporters of Israel, and indeed lovers of literature, should applaud this principled stance. I only wonder whether she can be persuaded to extend her boycott to British publishers. After all, she must have an opinion on the British Empire, or Oliver Cromwell, or at the very least Brexit. If not, we could easily send her a helpful summary of this country’s most grievous historic excesses, in the hope that she will take a principled stance against us. Perhaps a member of National Trust staff could be enlisted to help. Ms Rooney is evidently a very tolerant and forgiving person, but with a little effort, I see no reason why we shouldn’t convince her to stop her books being published here, too. Are you being sarcastic?
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Post by potet on Oct 16, 2021 22:18:43 GMT
I wouldn't want my Jesus kid book translated into Arabic by a devout Muslim publishing company which says Christians are freaks. That puts things into perspective for me. Make it personal. You are contemplating a nearly impossible situation. Anti-Christian Muslims never translate and publish Christian books. In the Arabic-speaking world only Christian Arabs would do that.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 17, 2021 6:55:55 GMT
I wouldn't want my Jesus kid book translated into Arabic by a devout Muslim publishing company which says Christians are freaks. That puts things into perspective for me. Make it personal. You are contemplating a nearly impossible situation. Anti-Christian Muslims never translate and publish Christian books. In the Arabic-speaking world only Christian Arabs would do that. Okay, if a publisher once said that women need to be beaten once a week- it makes them better human beings, I would not let them touch my books. As authors, human beings, we are allowed to say no. And I don't care if the whole world rises up. We each have our principles.
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Post by Ken on Oct 17, 2021 9:06:55 GMT
And another view…
It’s only right to now boycott Sally Rooney Jews are the only minority the Left doesn’t mind insulting in a whole variety of ways – from the repetition of your classic, Nazi-grade tropes about nefarious control, special interests and amoral money-grubbing machinations, to the subtler but hardly less unsavoury commitment to mocking Israel’s right to exist.
They may not actually mean to mock Israel’s right to exist, but among the more respectable – indeed, the arty elites – of the Left, the commitment to bashing Israel is certainly strong. Now, to be clear, being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Semitic, and it is certainly not my intention to cast aspersions on the personal views towards Jews of bestselling authors and famous film-makers. Be that as it may, many Jews who support Israel (and that is many Jews) are made uncomfortable by the sheer degree of anti-Israel sentiment that we encounter throughout society, including among the great paragons of the arts.
Last week, I was one of many who felt taken aback and indeed somewhat wounded by the decision of Sally Rooney, the bestselling global phenomenon and author, to decline to let her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, be published by an Israeli publishing house.
Rooney is committed to BDS, whose mission is to “boycott, divest from and sanction” Israel and only Israel. She believes, as do all BDS-ers, that Israel has “a system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians” that amounts to apartheid. (Never mind that a quick trip to Israel would confirm how insulting this is to those who actually survived South African apartheid.)
People are, of course, entitled to such views: it’s just wearying, as someone in favour of fair treatment of Israel, to have to sit by while they are espoused by, among dozens of other prominent people, an author considered the very zenith of millennial political morality.
Her previous novels – Conversations with Friends and Normal People – were published by Modan, the firm she has now declined. Rooney seems to have become more committed to the BDS cause since the summer, when Israel retaliated against an onslaught of Hamas rocket fire. Then, she was one of thousands of artists and authors who signed a letter demanding the end of all relations with the Jewish state. As well as demanding the cutting-off of international aid to Israel, a country home to 250,000 Palestinians (not counting the West Bank or Gaza Strip), they want all “trade, economic and cultural” relations cut, too.
Those who signed the letter, then, do not only want to boycott Israel: they want to boycott a great number of Israelis, or at least those who work in universities or the arts or sciences or pretty much anything else that might lead to “cultural” relations.
Many Jews like me who have family in, and strong feelings invested in, Israel find this position deeply hurtful – especially those who, like me, have bought and read Rooney’s previous novels. In protest, I won’t be reading this one.
Rooney and her gang of respectables do not apply their morals evenly. For instance, she publishes in China, a communist dictatorship systematically killing and torturing 10 million Uyghurs. I say this aware that even raising the objection of such double standards has, for some reason, become instantly mockable by the Left, as if it’s laughably obvious why Israel should be singled out for special and obsessive condemnation. I don’t find it so.
Following the buzz created by her announcement, Rooney magnanimously sought to clarify her position: she would be “honoured” to have the book translated into Hebrew, just not by an Israeli publishing house.
The thing is, the Hebrew-language publishing industry is concentrated in Israel, as you might expect. Israel is where Hebrew-speakers live. Saying you don’t mind a book being published in Hebrew, so long as it isn’t published by an Israeli publishing company, is like saying you don’t mind someone eating, they’re just not allowed to eat food.
As Anshel Pfeffer, a Left-wing pundit who supports the boycotts of the settlements, noted: “Sally Rooney’s book won’t be published in Hebrew because there’s no such thing as a ‘BDS-compliant’ Hebrew publisher. To be that, a publisher would have to agree to not selling its books in Israel and to Israelis, who are the overwhelming majority of the Hebrew-reading market.” Quite: Rooney no doubt means well, but her choice is deeply problematic.
Rooney is one of a great many in the arty tradition of Israel-boycotting; a list that includes Mike Leigh, Brian Eno and Arundhati Roy, all of whom are signed up to BDS. Again, boycotting Israel does not make you an anti-Semitic person. But the tried and true test for locating anti-Semitism within anti-Zionism is the “three Ds”: delegitimisation, double standards and demonisation of Israel. Regardless of the individuals e involved, BDS has been hotly debated and criticised, largely as it is considered to veer dangerously close to violating the rule of the “three Ds”.
Unlike the Enos, Roys and Leighs of the world, Rooney is no deluded oldster forged in the Swinging 60s: she’s a pale-faced, sober, rich and wily chronicler of millennial sex, and the most right-on writer of our time. She is the very summation of the millennial moral elite, and this uncomfortable business has only increased her respectability. On the upside, her novels are dreary and monochrome, so Israelis will at least be spared that.
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