Rebuilding A Literary Canon With The Voices That Weren’t Heard In The Mainstream

“Instead of holding up a few isolated women as exceptions to the rule of male genius, we owe it to that audience to raise up a crowd: sharing, teaching, citing, and celebrating them despite their flaws and complications. Only then can we demonstrate that literary history has always contained a cacophony of female voices, diverse in their politics and outlooks, but forthright in their determination to speak in public and be heard.” – LitHub

‘When Literature Is Broken, We Rebuild It — Because We Need Shelter’: Arundhati Roy’s PEN America Lecture

“So, as we lurch into the future … what is literature’s place? What counts as literature? Who decides? Obviously, there is no single, edifying answer to these questions. So, if you will forgive me, I’m going to talk about my own experience of being a writer during these times — of grappling with the question of how to be a writer during these times, in particular in a country like India, a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously.” – The Guardian

Broken System: How Music Gets Promoted (And Who Gets Played)

“There are a lot of ways our music can come into contact with others, but there isn’t a lot of consistency in our field at large for how we evaluate works and provide opportunities for composers. (Sometimes it seems like every ensemble has their own method!) And, no matter what processes we use—from an open call-for-scores, to a competition format with specified prizes and a panel of judges, to a curatorial model that asks individual artists to build programs—we often face a series of similar challenges if we care about promoting works fairly.” – NewMusicBox

New Frontiers in Arts Research: My panel remarks at the IU Center for Cultural Affairs Symposium

I’ll let my comments speak for themselves but will leave you with this reflection — “A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.” — from Iris Murdoch which was on my mind when I wrote my remarks. – Diane Ragsdale