Comments on: Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward on ROAARS and The Unmarked State

By: Cynthia Ward

Cynthia Ward — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:24:34 +0000

Thank you, Delagar, for enjoying WRITING THE OTHER and for recommending it to your students.

By: delagar

delagar — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:52:36 +0000

I love your book & recommend it to all my writing students–some of them are gay, some of them are women, most of them are white, nearly all of them are from Arkansas, and almost none of them are writing about themselves (they love to write SF). They want to know how, how, how they can write about people they aren’t. Have I got the book you need, I say, and point them to you.

Thanks so much for writing it.

By: Cynthia Ward

Cynthia Ward — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:57:53 +0000

Thank you very much for your recommendations, Todd and Tom.

Tom, I noticed that, too, about the Sotomayor hearings. There was a definite assumption that the conservative white male Supreme Court justices offered facts, whereas everyone holding another viewpoint had only opinions.

Um. Right.

By: Todd Vandemark

Todd Vandemark — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:13:56 +0000

Great book. Highly recommended.

By: Tom Marcinko

Tom Marcinko — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:57:36 +0000

Good to see the two of you here. I found WTO to be pretty eye-opening, on a topic I really didn’t think there was much new to be said about. Highly recommended.

I found myself thinking about “the unmarked state” during the Sotomayor Supreme Court confirmation debate (if we can dignify it by calling it a debate). One of her critics’ premises seemed to be that the rulings of white males was the obvious default state that every justice should aspire to, & the fear seemed to be that Justice Sotomayor would file some kind of weird otherworldly set of opinions.

Which of course the rest of the Roberts court would never do. Nothing but sane policy from that majority.