Lucy Mangan is surely One of Us

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Whenever I get hold of a book about children’s literature the first thing I do is subject it to the Antonia Forest test. Is my favourite author – the most brilliant, subtle, intelligent and unjustly neglected writer of books it would be (mostly) accurate but unbearably reductive to call school stories for girls – in there? If she is, I can continue with a happy heart and a mind charitably disposed towards the editor of whatever volume it is I hold in my hands, secure in the knowledge that he or she has at least a modicum of expertise and is capable of sound artistic and moral judgment.

Review of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I've got a feeling she was at the Antonia Forest Conference, as someone - possibly tabouli mentioned meeting her there.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

'heaving, maddening masses of irrationality and prejudice, consumed by passionate loves and hatreds' - that's us! Especially when Patrick is being discussed.
If you read the comments under the review two people are discussing AF. The first is presumably not one of us.

She is indeed One of Us!

[mudkickerkicks.livejournal.com]

I tweeted Lucy Mangan a few weeks ago with a link to my AF fanfic collation - I knew from a previous piece she wrote in the Grauniad that she's an AF fan. She retweeted it so I'm pleased to say the excellent AF fanfic around should get a few more readers. She also said she's strictly canon but will 'die happy' after discovering AF LOLCAT.

Waves to Lucy if she's here...

Re: She is indeed One of Us!

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

As both a fanfic writer and an IP lawyer, I've always been a bit nervous about journalists - even sympathetic ones - and fanfic. That's always been fraught territory. That's not so much because of the legalities, though it's a grey area (less so since the law change last October to legalise parody caricature and pastiche but even so) though in practice most authors/authors estates are generally tolerant of not-for-profit fic. Mainly it's because the general journalistic assumption is to first go "Fanfic=50 Shades of Grey" and then go "Hang on, fanfic about school stories?" and it all goes hideously downhill from there.

I'm not saying Lucy Mangan's like that, but The Guardian certainly is, given half a chance; several of us were bitten by the hatchet job the Guardian's Tanya Gold did on the Harry Potter convention Accio 2005 at Reading University.

Re: She is indeed One of Us!

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Speaking solely as a member of the community here and not for the mod team:

Well, I've been kicking around the Internet for nearly twenty-five years now, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that once you've made something available publicly, you have no control over who shares it thereafter.

I'm not ashamed of fanfic. If I was I wouldn't have written so much of it. I'm glad I decided to share my AF fic with other readers and much, much gladder to have found writing in AF's universe by other people. If someone decides the best reward for sharing work with other fans is to bung a link to the work in question under the nose of a journalist with a large Twitter following, many of whom are likely to have a relationship with fanfic that's uneasy at best and at least one of whom has already been willing to publicly mock and embarrass fanfic creators (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/dec/18/fan-fiction-slash-fiction-caitlin-moran), them's the breaks.

I do however want to put it on record that I personally knew nothing about this and had nothing to do with putting fanfic in the way of people who very reasonably prefer to 'be canon-only'.

On another matter, you seem to be hosting one of my old comment fics in the comments on your fanfic summary page. Would you please link to the AO3 (http://archiveofourown.org/works/3781543) version of the story instead.

[balooky.livejournal.com]

She mentioned Lawrie in one of her columns for Stylist Magazine last year.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I don't know the Stylist magazine, but how did Lawrie get in there?

[intrepid--fox.livejournal.com]

Lucy is definitely one of us: she was at the AF conference in Bournemouth, and I chatted to her a lot. We met up a couple of times later and she showed me a couple of letters she'd exchanged with AF: I've got copies somewhere.

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

She included Autumn Term in her Building a Children's Library series a few years ago.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/31/book-corner-autumn-term

I heard her give a talk on her whole list at one of the Topsy-Turvy conferences, which turned into less of a talk and more of a mass group discussion of every book on the list. Her whole list is here.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/28/lucy-mangan-building-childrens-library

(she also includes Dimsie Goes to School, to the delight of my username)

Lucy Mangan definitely at AF conference

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed, ankaret, I did see Lucy Mangan at the AF conference. I was sitting next to her for one of the sessions, and recognised both name and face but had no idea where from. She spotted me frowning at her name tag trying to figure out where I'd seen the name and smiled. Realised weeks later that I'd read *lots* about her on my LJ Friends page...