Publishing is to the Big Five as Writer is to White

Could we all be more inclusive?

I didn’t mean to skip a newsletter during a week when there was *so much publishing drama,* but I was traveling and couldn’t get to a laptop. But never fear: I was ticked off and ranting as per usual.

The American Dirt brouhaha, which I wrote about last week, has been followed by another kerfuffle, this time about another highly touted, soon-to-be-released novel with a Stephen King blurb, My Dark Vanessa. Another writer, Wendy Ortiz claimed that My Dark Vanessa was plagiarized, a fictionalized version of her experience that she wrote about in her memoir, Excavation.

I was pissed as soon as I saw her accusation, primarily because, weirdly, I am a friend of a friend of Kate Elizabeth Russell, who wrote MDV, and this friend had told me, months ago, that Russell had been writing this book for decades, that it was a fictionalized version of her experience, and that Russell had written it as her dissertation, and included a copious bibliography of other books with similar themes that she…