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Eilis Flynn has spent a large chunk of her
life working on Wall Street or in a Wall Street-related firm, so why
should she write fiction that's any more based in reality? She spends her
days aware that there is a reality beyond what we can see and tells
stories about it for Cerridwen Press. Published in other genres, she lives
in Seattle with her husband and spoiled rotten cats.
Eilis recently took part in an article
by reporter Brian Miller about the changing face of romance fiction for
the Seattle Weekly. Here's a bit of the article:
"The demographics of romance
authorship could reasonably be expected to look like those of the city:
about 69 percent white, 14 percent Asian, and 8 percent black. But when
asked to cite some nonwhite representatives from its 145-writer
membership, the GSRWA finds two.
"Notwithstanding the Irish surname (by
marriage), Eilis Flynn is Japanese-American and has puzzled over the lack
of Asian faces both at RWA conferences and GSRWA meetings for the past
dozen years. "It's still, I think, overwhelmingly white," she says. "You
see more people of color" at national conferences, she adds, but the
workshops there on multiculturalism have focused on African-American and
Latina concerns.
"So where are the daughters, so to speak,
of Amy Tan? Flynn doesn't see many, and would like to see more. The
broader problem, she speculates, is that Asian readers tend to get lumped
together with Caucasians. And if the heroine of a romance is Asian (as in
her Festival of Stars), it's shelved with the general (white)
contemporary category. What if the Asian-American heroine were more
prominent on the cover of the book? "I think that would possibly limit the
readership," concludes Flynn.
(c) 2007 The Seattle Weekly
The full article can be read here:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/2007-11-07/news/a-billion-dollar-romance-novel-industry-and-its-lonely-black-author.php?page=full
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Eilis · 
