Writing: Demographics of Tesseracts 17 Part II

Tesseracts 17 will be out this fall with tales from Canadian writers that spans all times and places.

Sorting out the demographics for Tesseracts 17 has been time consuming, and WordPress truly sucks when it comes to inserting a table in any format. It took me over four hours to generate the table below so if you’re curious about other breakdowns, you’ll have to pay me.

Each breakdown becomes more subjective. In this case, I had to guess at the gender of some people because names like Chris, or Terri, or initials don’t tell me if they’re male or female. I knew the names of many writers submitting so even if one had a male or female sounding name I knew where they actually belonged. The most accurate numbers are those of writers from different territories and provinces. We never received anything from Nunavut so it is the only part of Canada not represented. And while Newfoundland and Labrador prefer both names to be used to represent their province, the writers themselves indicated they were from Newfoundland, so we had no one from the Labrador part.

These numbers could be a bit different from the ones I displayed the other day because it’s difficult to accurately count a mile long spreadsheet, especially for Ontario with 193 submissions. It’s no surprise that the majority of submissions came from there, when a good part of Canada’s population also resides in the province. I was actually surprised that the Quebec numbers were so low, because that province has the other large chunk of Canadian population. I know of several Francophone speculative writers who write in English, but none of them submitted, for whatever reason. And while Claude Lalumière is Francophone he was counted under BC as that is where he is living part of the time and no longer in Montreal. I’d be interested to hear why we didn’t have more Francophone submissions.

Nova Scotia probably had more submissions due to Steve Vernon residing there and spreading the word. And while it turned out we didn’t take any of the expat stories, we have several authors whose place of birth was in another country. Not everyone listed where they were born so I didn’t really include any stats on that. As well, Steve and I pretty much read stories and poems first, and worried little about place or gender later. Only when we started to narrow down our selections did we have to pay attention to where the author was from. And last, we looked at gender, which as I mentioned before, just happened to work out with a nearly even split. If we had had 20 great pieces by women and 10 by men, we would have probably kept those pieces. As long as there was a representation of both genders, keeping it even is pretty hard.

As to the genres of the tales we received, I’m going to list those in a separate post as this one is long enough. It will be even more subjective because I didn’t list genres with the earlier ones and while some I remember or can figure out, I’m not going back to read them. I welcome any questions anyone has. It was interesting to see how Canada is represented in terms of speculative writers.

Provinces/ Countries	Total Submitted	No. of people	Accepted	Female subs/ accepted	Male subs/ accepted
Alberta	67	51	4	30/3	21/1
Arizona (Ont. born)	1	1	0	0	1
Bali (Alberta)	1	1	0	0	1
BC	65	43	4	21/3	22/1
Boston (BC)	1	1	0	1/0	0
Germany (expat)	1	2	0	0	1/0
Manitoba	17	13	1	3/0	10/1
New Brunswick	2	1	1	0	1/1
Newfoundland	7	5	2	1/0	4/2
Nova Scotia	21	17	3	9/2	8/1
NWT	1	1	1	0	1/1
Nunavut	0	0	0	0	0
Ontario	193	122*	5	49/1	74*/4
PEI	16	1	1	0	1/1
Quebec	21	17	4	10/3	7/1
S. Korea (Ontario)	1	1	0	0	1/0
Saskatchewan	16	15	1	6/0	9/1
Spain (Ontario)	1	1	0	1/0	0
Switzerland (Ontario)	1	1	0	1/0	0
Taiwan (Quebec)	1	1	0	0	1/0
Texas (Ontario)	1	1	0	0	1/0
Thailand (expat)	1	1	0	1/0	0
UK (expat)	1	1	0	1/0	0
US (3 Ontario/1 Que.)	4	2	0	1/0	1/0
Yukon	9	9	2	3/2	6/0
Total	450	309	29	138/15	171/14

NOTE: expat means they’re Canadian but they did not specify from which province. Birthplaces outside of Canada (as opposed to place of residence) included New Zealand, Israel, France, Caribbean, UK, Scotland, Mexico US, Syria, Estonia, Greece, Bulgaria, Tunisia, Germany, Singapore, Romania, Poland. *One story was a collaboration so each author is listed. In the case of the three translations, only the author’s gender was listed; the translator was female.