Every so often, a voice from the back row asks the plaintive question, “In today’s publishing climate, what am I, as an [insert identify marker or lack of one here], allowed to write about?”
Okay. Here’s the deal, at least as far as the US of A goes*:
You’re allowed** to write about anything you damned well please.
And everybody else – your mom, your best friend, all the other people in your writers’ group, your editor, the New York Times Review of Books, and total random strangers on the internet – is allowed to say out loud and in public what they thought about it.
The thing about the deal, you see, is that it goes both ways. And a writer who can’t handle the deal is probably better off pulling an Emily Dickinson and keeping their stuff locked up in their dresser drawer for posterity.
*The world is a large and varied place, and I make no claim to pontificate for all of it.
**With the usual narrow exceptions involving nonexistent fires in crowded theatres, and the like.
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