Name: Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out.
Brand: texasmonthly.com
SKU: texasmonthly-com-80
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out.

preview

Sort ByFilter ByLocationsTypeView ResultsFiltersIf it hadn’t been for the pandemic and the near impossibility of visiting Vivian Stephens in person, I’m not sure I would have been so attuned to her voice. It is gay and mellifluous; she always sounded delighted to hear from me, a reaction most reporters are not accustomed to. But there was something else: she answers questions about herself not in sentences or paragraphs but in pages, and sometimes even chapters, as if she’s been keeping the whole story of her life in her head, just waiting for someone to ask about it.omance writing has always been easy to laugh at, at least for the uninformed. You might imagine that these stories mostly involve a castle on the Scottish Highlands, inhabited by a restless warrior wearing nothing under his kilt. Or maybe you picture the broad and bare-chested phenom Fabio, taking time out from piloting his Viking ship on the high seas to attend to a buxom and bound captive down below.But if this is your vision of the romance-writing world, you might have missed its evolution into a billion-dollar-a-year business. In 2016 romance made up 23&nbsp;percent of the overall U.S. fiction market, and the net worth of some of its writers exceeds that of John Grisham (see Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel). According to Christine Larson, a romance expert and journalism professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, 45&nbsp;percent of the romance writers she surveyed made enough to support themselves without a day job—“that is shocking for any group of writers,” she said—and thanks mainly to their embrace of digital publishing, 17&nbsp;percent make more than $100,000 a year. Not Mark Zuckerberg money, but far more than the $45,000 median income of American working women.No one knows better than Stephens that the issues that threatened to destroy the RWA go all the way back to its beginning. Of course, the inhabitants of Romancelandia, as they call their imaginary homeland, still suffer plenty of contempt at the hands of outsiders. The source of this contempt, they say, is that (1)&nbsp;women are still not taken seriously by men and, often, one another; (2)&nbsp;women writers are not taken as seriously as men writers; (3)&nbsp;women who write expressly about romance are not taken seriously unless they’re named Jane Austen; and (4) women who write about sex are really not taken seriously, because that would be way too scary for a lot of men and women.Those backward ideas help explain why, when a public scandal rocked the RWA late last year, major news outlets were only too happy to cover the story. “,” declared the New York Times. The feminist website Jezebel weighed in with “ at the Romance Writers of America.” The Houston Chronicle: “As racism scandal escalates, Romance Writers of America .” Vox: “The influential trade organization Romance Writers of America is tangled in a web of .”Koppel looked down at his desk and half sputtered, half chuckled, kind of like a Victorian gentleman who’d just caught sight of a lady’s ankle.Gliding over the fact that Lamb had just given Stephens’s trade a huge plug (the truly addictive properties of Valium were not yet widely known), Stephens countered that such reading matter “does not interrupt the daily life of the average American woman,” who, after all, “was not stupid.”“What does a heroine have to offer a worldly man if she’s not experienced in bed or on the job?” Stephens would ask. nes and say, ‘Pack me up.’ ”She headed back to Houston, alone.here is a photograph that crops up often when you research Stephens’s life. It was taken in March 2016. She is at lunch at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Houston’s Museum District with three white women: two members of the RWA’s executive staff and the then president of the organization, Diane Kelly. Everyone has their hands in their laps, and some kind of ice cream and pastry dessert sits in front of each of them. Despite their smiles, the party looks a little stressed.At that time, the racism roiling within the organization had not yet burst into public view. Stephens, who had mostly lived the life of a retiree since moving back to town, usually met with the RWA executive staff once a year or so, and the meetings were typically friendly, full of small talk. But during this lunch, Stephens told the women that she could see trouble was coming, and she had brought along the RWA magazine that featured photos of , none of whom were Black, as a visual aid.“Well, what do they want?” Stephens recalled one of the women asking.“The same as you,” was her retort.Stephens lamented that the genre had yet to produce great literature: “Jane Austen—I mean, she’s been dead for two hundred years.” Stephens had several long-standing regrets about the romance field. She lamented that the genre had yet to produce great literature: “Jane Austen—I mean, she’s been dead for two hundred years.” And she was frustrated that the RWA was more concerned with internecine squabbles than with pushing the publishing industry to be more diverse. “When you don’t have enough, you hold on to whatever you have,” Stephens told me. “You don’t even know that if you open your hand you can have more.”Stephens offered to help out as an adviser, but no one took her up on it. This experience was indicative of a leadership that seemed incapable of understanding the fury coming from members of color, who had long felt ignored and invisible while most of the white women partied on. The tension came to a head last fall, when a member of the RWA leadership incited a social media war after accusing a prominent romance editor of being racist. Pretty soon, a former RWA board member and ethics committee chair named Courtney Milan, who was herself a romance writer and—no coincidence—a former litigator, took up the gauntlet. Milan, who is Chinese American and had fought for years for diversity and inclusivity, could be abrasively blunt or bluntly abrasive. Either way, that quality put her in conflict with the old guard, who, in Southern belle fashion, stonewalled members of color by asserting that they could have equal treatment only if they asked for it nicely. (In a tweet, Milan once called a book set in the Scottish Highlands by a white romance writer “a f—ing racist mess.” And her response to a blue-eyed, half-Asian character was, “As a half-Chinese person with brown eyes, seriously f— this piece of s—.”)Within three months, Milan was suspended and permanently banned from leadership, essentially for calling out members’ racism in a not-nice way. This in turn caused mass resignations (#IStandWithCourtney) and the cancellation of the RITA awards, as well as a slew of negative publicity for the RWA. (Membership started plummeting from roughly nine thousand to some six thousand.) This February, the board hired a prestigious law firm to conduct a very expensive investigation into Milan’s expulsion that found no malicious intent but some very sloppy decision-making. The appointment of a new board followed, and Milan, who had been invited back into the fold at the height of the crisis, received a formal apology in April. She declined the invitation to return.Stephens could have declined too, when she got the May email about the Vivian award. Over the weeks when we spoke, it became clear that she still longed to be a part of the world she had created; that Stephens felt she had so much more to give that had never been acknowledged or appreciated in the past few decades, much less the months before and after the blowup. “I would tell them what they should do, but they probably wouldn’t like it,” she said. Like the women of color and their allies in the RWA, Stephens believed it was time for those long in power to step aside. “They have to remember that no banquet lasts forever,” she told me, adding, as she often did, “Everything works out the way it’s supposed to.”That was true for me too. Stephens and I had tried repeatedly to get together over Zoom or FaceTime, with the virus raging, but technology was not her strong suit. (Her cellphone broke a while back, and she never bothered to get it repaired. Getting her on Zoom with her 2007 computer would have been akin to landing a plane from an air traffic control tower.) Eventually, we agreed that I would stop by her apartment for just a minute, dutifully masked and maintaining my distance.She was waiting for me in the doorway, stooped and in pain from neuropathy, and leaning on her walker. She wouldn’t let me help her with the door. “It’s one thing about living alone: you learn to do for yourself,” she said. But when she finally sat down and took off her mask, there she was—the broad grin, the freckles, the warm but knowing gaze; still beautiful.She was also still purposeful. Stephens’s computer was open to several windows, and there were to-do notes everywhere. She had prepared a file for me, copies and originals of clippings and photographs from that time when she had been busily creating what would eventually grow into a billion-dollar industry. She handed that over and then reached into a desk drawer for something else: the silver Tiffany cuff designed by Elsa Peretti, her gift from the original RWA members in thanks for all that Stephens had done.To make sure I got the inscription correct, she had written it out for me on a separate piece of paper:Vivian StephensFounder RWA1st Annual National Conference 1981.The cuff was badly tarnished, as if it had been neglected and nearly forThis article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Texas Monthly&nbsp;with the headline “Pride and Prejudice.” .ByByByByByByGet our weekly newsletter.ByByByandByByByByByByBy

Sort ByFilter ByLocationsTypeView ResultsFiltersIf it hadn’t been for the pandemic and the near impossibility of visiting Vivian Stephens in person, I’m not sure I would have been so attuned to her voice. It is gay and mellifluous; she always sounded delighted to hear from me, a reaction most reporters are not accustomed to. But there was something else: she answers questions about herself not in sentences or paragraphs but in pages, and sometimes even chapters, as if she’s been keeping the whole story of her life in her head, just waiting for someone to ask about it.omance writing has...

public

Mimi Swartz

Covering Texas news, politics, food, culture, travel, and more. RTs not endorsements. Tweets by @tayloraprewitt. Subscribe: https://txmnth.ly/3I9Klr1

Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out.

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS