It's 2010 Get With the Program!
It's 2010 and I was shocked to hear that women have problems when it comes to producing and writing plays. I thought that it was just difficult to produce a play no matter who you were but after I read what happened to Theresa Rebeck I was surprised.
I was later surprised by my own surprise but I'll get to that in a moment. I think that it was terrible that the play closed due to the bad review. Thinking about this from a publicity point of view I think that they should have kept it open, promoted it as a controversial play. But from a writer's point of view, anything that I write I don't want it to be controversial, but at the same time I would like for my play to stay open!
I should not have been surprised by the negative review that the playwright received or the things that were said and done to her after wards. Hopefully no one will be crazy enough to accuse her of being an emotional woman, who's claims are unfounded because the proof is in the pudding and the emotional part will prove the point of how unbalanced the industry is. I should not be surprised because of the reactions that my father and I have gotten when we tell people what we want to do, or have been doing.
We write science fiction and we get all kinds of strange reactions. Oddly enough from other black people. Everyone else just says "Ah, what's it about?" And they either buy the book or not. But most black people have either laughed, yes I've had 'friends' laugh. Say it's silly. Kid's stuff. It'll never work out. All kinds of negative comments.
It has never stopped us, it has made us question the strength of some of our relationships. And mind you these people that we've told, we've never asked them to read the book or said that they had too, just by saying that we write science fiction we are met with negativity.
On the other hand we are met with people who, I think, see us as traitors. Because it's not black scifi. No, not all of our characters are black. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. But sometimes people try to make us feel back because we don't write stories that encompass a character who relates to them. If the character doesn't relate to you, then you don't have to read it. Then it's just not for you.
It's interesting to watch how people behave towards science fiction. Some people love all of it, from the Lovecraft, Asimov, the steampunk all the way up to The Matrix, Star Wars, and even those B-movies that the Scifi Channel runs.
But others think it's trivial, silly and nonsense, which is fine, I'm not too much in love with well, I actually do like Westerns. Well, erotica books! I don't hate them, but I don't seek them out either. I don't put people down who like to read them. Which is how some of the scifi crowd is looked at.
And now there's two black people who want to write scifi? I wonder if L.A Banks, Maurice Broaddus, Tananarive Due, or Octavia Butler were met with such reactions?
We're still sending out query letters and not once have we let anything anyone has said to us let us down. Mostly we just say, "Wow, that's really ignorant."
I'm still writing my paranormal, science fiction stories and he has his Escape 2 Earth Series someone will see the value in the story lines that we write and we can bring our own vision to the world of science fiction.
Text of Theresa Rebeck Laura Pels Keynote Address
I was later surprised by my own surprise but I'll get to that in a moment. I think that it was terrible that the play closed due to the bad review. Thinking about this from a publicity point of view I think that they should have kept it open, promoted it as a controversial play. But from a writer's point of view, anything that I write I don't want it to be controversial, but at the same time I would like for my play to stay open!
I should not have been surprised by the negative review that the playwright received or the things that were said and done to her after wards. Hopefully no one will be crazy enough to accuse her of being an emotional woman, who's claims are unfounded because the proof is in the pudding and the emotional part will prove the point of how unbalanced the industry is. I should not be surprised because of the reactions that my father and I have gotten when we tell people what we want to do, or have been doing.
We write science fiction and we get all kinds of strange reactions. Oddly enough from other black people. Everyone else just says "Ah, what's it about?" And they either buy the book or not. But most black people have either laughed, yes I've had 'friends' laugh. Say it's silly. Kid's stuff. It'll never work out. All kinds of negative comments.
It has never stopped us, it has made us question the strength of some of our relationships. And mind you these people that we've told, we've never asked them to read the book or said that they had too, just by saying that we write science fiction we are met with negativity.
On the other hand we are met with people who, I think, see us as traitors. Because it's not black scifi. No, not all of our characters are black. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. But sometimes people try to make us feel back because we don't write stories that encompass a character who relates to them. If the character doesn't relate to you, then you don't have to read it. Then it's just not for you.
It's interesting to watch how people behave towards science fiction. Some people love all of it, from the Lovecraft, Asimov, the steampunk all the way up to The Matrix, Star Wars, and even those B-movies that the Scifi Channel runs.
But others think it's trivial, silly and nonsense, which is fine, I'm not too much in love with well, I actually do like Westerns. Well, erotica books! I don't hate them, but I don't seek them out either. I don't put people down who like to read them. Which is how some of the scifi crowd is looked at.
And now there's two black people who want to write scifi? I wonder if L.A Banks, Maurice Broaddus, Tananarive Due, or Octavia Butler were met with such reactions?
We're still sending out query letters and not once have we let anything anyone has said to us let us down. Mostly we just say, "Wow, that's really ignorant."
I'm still writing my paranormal, science fiction stories and he has his Escape 2 Earth Series someone will see the value in the story lines that we write and we can bring our own vision to the world of science fiction.
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