Two summer deep dives

Dear friends,
It's been a summer. A public pool with good social distancing has saved my life. I hope you've found your own grace.

Two projects I've worked on for many many months came out into the world this summer. The first was a long exposé in the Washington Post Magazine about the popular Instagram account Queer Appalachia. It's a grifter story essentially, but a grifter story in which an extremely vulnerable and historically maligned community--queer Appalachians and queer Appalachians of color--are the ones who get grifted. It's about justice and accountability.

I got my book The Third Rainbow Girl fact-checked at my own expense by paying a freelance fact checker out of pocket--most nonfiction writers don't or can't spend the money (publishers do not pay for it ==> the majority of nonfiction books, even by major writers, are NOT fact-checked). My second piece this summer is a deep dive for Esquire into the state of fact-checking in nonfiction book publishing -- spoiler it's a deeply unregulated, unstandardized, and unfair process that keeps writers and fact checkers disempowered. I do get to shout out some amazing publishing imprints who ARE paying for their books to be fact checked and the ways they are finding the money and making it work. I think all readers and people invested in real truths should care about fact checking and I'll try to convince you too.

I'm looking forward to turning away from social media and the internet and turning in towards my novel (blessedly, I sold a short story collection and a novel to Hogarth/Penguin Random House earlier this summer).

I'm thinking a lot about road trips and travel and I'm reading Brittney Cooper's ELOQUENT RAGE which talks, among many other elements of Black feminism, about the ways that Black women have always and are still restricted from traveling and moving freely and without consequence. I ask also if you have the funds to join me in donating to the Milwaukee Freedom Fund.

that's all, yours,
Emma