Colleen: Yeah I adore all Gwyneth Jones’ work (Ann Halam)—she’s amazing. And just my kind of feminist.

Roger: Roger, Roger, Roger. Sigh.

Tricia Sullivan’s Double Vision was interesting for its portrayal of an unconventional female protagonist. Though personally I was a little disturbed by the fact that the fact that the protagonist is overweight (this isn’t the only unconventional element) and yet does not eat throughout the whole of the book; as in, is physically restrained from eating by a mystical force that I never quite understood…

I also thought Pauline Fisk did a great job with “Midnight Blue” in creating kind of a creepy alternate world where a young girl must literally leap to death in order to save the lives of those around her. (And although that sound Buffyesque, it really isn’t.) It was intense and most unusual.

seriously, cherie, 4&20 rocks. kept me diverted on an extremely ill day in mexico, after being up all night.

aimee bender is speculative, maybe? who knows whether she’d categorize herself as such. interesting suggestion, jason, i like.

justine, keep this as an ongoing conversation, will you? i’d like to see who else chips in.

Susan Vaught’s Stormwitch is about race and gender in the US South in the 60s–possibly the best YA novel I read all last year. Nnedi Okerafor-Mbachi’s Zahrah the Windseeker is another YA novel which is doing interesting things with race and gender.

Susan Palwick isn’t a new writer, but she did just publish her first new novel in a long time — and it deals with race and gender and also religious faith. I was surprised it didn’t get more attention.

I think you’ve probably heard of everyone else I have. I haven’t been reading a lot of new writers.

I’m not sure if Aimee Bender considers herself a feminist, but her latest collection, Willful Creatures, talks about how women treat each other (specifically in an adolescent setting) and how men and women treat each other. There was also a story in her first collection about a librarian who turned the tables on the men who had hot librarian fantasies to her own purposes.

“Biracial” is a pretty common term around here; or, as an old friend of mine in the dorm used to refer to herself with a smirk, “Ethnically ambiguous.”

Cherie: I think I get the general idea. There’s so much going on in a novel so hard to convey as many aspects of the world that you want that so often you have to gesture at things to give cluey readers the sense that it’s there if they just read closely, look around the corner.

D’you know I’ve not seen the term biracial before. Interesting.

In a broader sense, 4&20bb deals a fair amount with some of the issues above, though – as the POV character is biracial and living in the American south. There’s no getting around some of it, you know? But at the same time, the book isn’t *about* being biracial and living in the south.

I guess – and here I realize I’m running long-winded – I’d have to say I tried to take the “cosby” approach with my own work. Bill Cosby once said of his TV sitcom that it didn’t deal with injustice and oppression because that wasn’t what the show was about – even though it featured a minority cast, and could have ostensibly been used as a soap box pulpit for a cause. In the end, he seemed to feel that it was more effective just to portray a family, and let people get used to seeing black families as normal – not as some “different” subset of the population.

This doesn’t mean to write-pretend that bad things and discriminatory things don’t happen – but to be aware that there *are* other stories to be told about people-not-just-like-ourselves than merely discussing their mainstream marginalization in our fiction.

I’m talking around what I mean, but I hope you get the general idea.

So how about you, Ms Priest? I haven’t read your book yet. (Planning to get it when we’re back in the US of A.) Would you consider it/yourself a feminist writer?

I just finished her *BloodAngel* and it was quite good.

It’s hard to say – “yes! she talks about wommyn and stuff!” so she’s a feminist author, because that’s not it, exactly – but she portrays, strong, competent female characters as if they aren’t novelties, so I feel she counts