While I like to see articles lauding Leckie

[james_davis_nicoll]

It seems to me the author of this one hews too closely to the standard forms used when writing about successful women.

For example, the photo of John Scalzi used in this article on Ann Leckie didn't have "John Scalzi, husband and writer" under it, it had "Sci-fi blogger and author John Scalzi is a big fan of Leckie", whereas Leckie's photo got (in part) with "St. Louis mother and first-time novelist.

Passages like

The first Nebula was given to Frank Herbert's Dune in 1966. Over the next thirteen years, only two awards for Best Novel went to a woman — both to Ursula K. Le Guin. That trend began to change in the late 1980s as more and more women began publishing. Since 2000 the gender split for Nebula winners, which is also awarded for novellas and short stories, has been about 50-50. But that hardly means we've arrived at a post-sexism literary world.

suggest the author means well, despite falling short.

Comments

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

As Nick suggests above, the reporter is local and interviewed me in person, on the phone, and via email, over a couple of weeks. He'll have contacted Scalzi (and Rachel, and MRK, and Nora) by either email or phone, and for various reasons I'm guessing by phone.

The pictures were their own separate thing. And the photographer was awesome, I really enjoyed meeting her. I am assuming the captions and the headlines weren't the reporter's choice. I'm actually on the cover of the print edition of the RFT (I know it's awesome publicity, but introverted me would like to crawl under a rock now) and includes, across the bottom, the line, "Women are aliens, too!" I'm blaming an editor for that, and also headdesking forever.

The reporter really did mean well. He's also terribly young. Or I am getting old, because my daughter said, "Mom, it irritates me when you say grown up people look like they're about twelve. Nevertheless, I think he's still learning how to write articles."