Read a Romance Month

Sarah S. G. Frantz

A woman called Bobbi Dumas, who writes for Kirkus, has done a remarkable thing this month that I think is of value to scholars. She's created Read a Romance Month. Every day for all of August, she's posted essays from three different romance authors (so, 93 authors in all) with the prompt of "Why does Romance matter?"

So you've basically got 93 romance authors all updating JAK's Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women in one place. It's an incredibly valuable resource for scholars of romance interested in what romance authors think about the genre they write.

I also think it'd be an amazing project for a linguist/critic to evaluate the different tropes of defense of romance. What's MOST fascinating to me, is that most of these posts were written from the prompt before the month started, without reference to any of the other posts. I think that makes it even more valuable, personally, especially if you're examining discourse communities.

Also, not incidentally, it's absolutely fascinating reading--getting these incredibly smart women in one place all discussing the same thing.

Finally, early on, and in some posts scattered throughout the month, Bobbi had the posting authors recommend OTHER debut or early-career authors, who were then supposed to write a RARM post at their personal blog that would get linked to from the RARM post of the author recommending them. I think the logistics of that became unwieldy very quickly, but at least for a time, the project was bigger than the 93 original authors.