Hello KR, I haven't been around these parts for a while because I've been busy with my new course, but I'm taking a quick break from my essay and thought I'd tell you about something you might be interested in.

The Women's Committee at my new university has put together a anthology called 'Tell' that any York student could submit a piece to, in any form they liked. It was done through a website so that everyone could retain their anonymity and has had a surprisingly large number of responses. I had a sneak preview of it the other day and it's totally fascinating; a predictably large amount of unhappy stories, some funny ones, some polemical, others poetic, a lot of women who think they're asexual. One of the entries is mine, although no-one will know which (unless they've been a very astute reader of my other writings in student media or my KR posts and can pick out my voice, I guess).

I'm really pleased with the resulting zine and hope it will get plenty of publicity around campus and be read by as many students as possible, especially since a lot of the student media here has a strong misogynist streak or spends time propagating stupid ideas about sex (see Mademoiselle or Alpha Male in the Yorker if you want proof). We are having a launch night in a few weeks and will be selling it on campus as often as possible, for a small price to cover the print costs. The only thing that's annoyed me is the Women's Officers' decisions to not edit the entries. I re-read my own and noticed a few typos and sentences that didn't quite flow, and I'd rather have had those corrected, but I do see the value in keeping the entries as raw experiences, especially when they're already presented in distanced form through being typed on a computer rather than written (what do people here think about editorialising this kind of anthology, just out of interest?)

I think we borrowed the idea off another university's women's group, maybe Edinburgh, I'm not sure, but I wanted to urge any of you who are involved with similar groups or student welfare in general to think about replicating the project. It'd be amazing to eventually build a webpage out of multiple Tell projects, but in the short term, just to know that other people are spreading this idea would be really cool.

I haven't spoken to the other women's committee members about this yet, but if there are people who would be interested in getting a copy of Tell I might be able to buy some and post them on. I immediately thought of KR when I heard about Tell because one of the functions of KR is as an outlet and a source for accounts of the many different experiences of sex and relationships, and I think this is a Really Good Thing.

I'm not sure what the exact reason for my making this thread is, but I kind of just wanted to tell you about an ally of KR that I'm really excited about and see if any of you were interested too. (I hope this thread doesn't sink like a stone, and mods, I thought about putting this in 18+ but it doesn't really have any of that sort of content, though if it develops in that direction feel free to move it.)

from what you've said about this project, i think blatant typos like "teh" should be edited, but not stuff like "sentence flow" or taking out entire sections for clarity or anything like that.

Yeah I agree, but the Women's Officers aren't English students and perhaps haven't been involved in the publishing process before, so they maybe don't understand the full nuances of editing other people's writing. Not that I'm bashing the Officers, because their rationale for doing this is understandable, or saying only English students or writers understand the important role of subtle editing for readability; mostly I'm trying to justify why they should let me alter some of the entries a tiny tiny bit.

I want someone to take out my typos...and to fix annoying ones in other people's, like 'sigur roos'. Aaagh. But other than this tiny minor niggle, Tell is really good!

This sounds like a brilliant idea, I'd be interested in reading it. The website would be a good thing, really anything that isn't porn or sex and the city is a good thing!

i agree that obvious typos (misspelling, really) should be edited just for the fact that they can be very distracting to some of us who allow that stuff to be distracting.

otherwise, I believe that the subject matter is very important as far as who we become, who we are, who we choose, who we reject, how we treat ourselves, etc. It IS a big deal. and to give it a voice is a great thing. win/win.