Why Pearlsong Press exists...

...or at least one of the reasons, is to address questions like The Rotund's "Where Are All The Fat Heroines?"

You don't have to use your fiction to tell fat jokes to reinforce that thin people are the only ones people care about. You just have to only ever write about thin people, as though thin people are the only normal people. Fat people, in fiction, are reserved to prove a point -- generally a bad one.

....As writers, if we notice something is wrong with the world, I firmly believe it is our responsibility to build our own worlds in a way that either a) shows an alternative to that wrong thing (i.e., a solution) or b) shows that the wrong thing is WRONG.

That doesn't mean I expect fiction to [be] full of political screeds....But if you have a deep conviction that the beauty standard rampaging through the ranks of women is wrong, I don't understand how that doesn't show up in your work in some way. If you are philosophically opposed to the oppression of fat people, and you turn around and your world, that you alone created, contains not a single fat person or, worse, a fat person as the butt of a joke? I don't think I can believe you anymore.

I posted, the other night, a link to a photo of a naked woman who looks like me. And I talked a little bit -- honestly, I rambled a little incoherently because I was so full of excitement and just plain old GLEE -- about how incredible it is to see a representation of a woman that LOOKS LIKE ME. This is just as important in fiction. We need representations of ourselves in all media.

....when I look at the sea of books available in any given genre and there are only heroines that are thin? That is a problem and that is not okay. A writer's choice to only write thin characters reveals something about our culture and about that writer. In our current social situation, it actually DOES do some harm by supporting the hegemony of Thin.

One reason I founded Pearlsong Press was to provide a publication outlet for books with positively written fat characters for the very reasons The Rotund mentions -- the need for fat people to see decent representations of themselves in the media.

I also wanted to provide a publication outlet for nonfiction rejected by mainstream publishers because the author is fat. Glenn Gaesser, author of Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health, has said that book's first publisher (it's now reprinted by Gurze) insisted on meeting him in person before offering a contract on the book -- and afterward told him they insisted on doing so because they wanted to make sure he wasn't fat. That, in my opinion, sucks.

The comments to The Rotund's blog post about fat characters in fiction contain some reading recommendations I look forward to checking out. If you have any other suggestions (besides Pearlsong books, of course :-), post them here as a comment.

I also welcome suggestions of any fat-positive literature in the public domain (for instance, in  Project Gutenberg) that might Pearlsong Press might consider reprinting.