Values Hannah Lives By

I have been haunted by a quote from DOPPELGANGER by Naomi Klein since I read it as part of one of Keri Jarvis’s study groups. Klein is talking about how, in order to exist in the world as it is now there is so much we have to choose not to look at but that the current state of the world means that more and more of us are opening our eyes to the truths that lurk in the shadows and collectively we’re starting to want to change, to ‘try to be the kind of people whose daily lives do not require the annihilation of other lives and other ways of life’.

It gets bigger every time I think about it – my choices about everything from what I eat (I’ve been mostly vegetarian since I was a child because of animal welfare concerns but never really thought about the people involved in the supply chain in any detail until recently…but now I also want to think about the businesses I buy my food from and what they’re doing – are they, for instance, funding genocide?) to how often I buy clothes, to how long I hang on to tech has ramifications for life across the globe and I try to be aware of that.

More specifically these are the values that are important to me in my work:

Integrity

By this I mean a combination of honesty and authenticity. I get a deeply uncomfortable ick feeling if either of those things is out of alignment. As a teenager someone called me a compulsive truth teller and I couldn’t argue with it – now I know that I don’t want to argue with it, or change it, but at the time it felt somehow like I was supposed to.

I have often felt I didn’t quite fit, mostly inside mainstream publishing, so I took myself out of it and started HS-LA. I will always tell you the truth about your work – whether the news is good or not. But when it’s not, I’ll be there to support with kindness.

Curiosity

I’ve been exploring lots of different ideas over the last few years and while I’ve always enjoyed learning it’s feeling increasingly important to make that an active process. This applies to the big topics linked to the polycrisis but also in my relationships (both personal and professional) where I aim to lead with kindness and seek to understand, especially in situations where there is a political disagreement. An agent author relationship needs trust to be successful, despite best intentions, sometimes things do go wrong, but I believe that trust can be maintained through that conflict when both parties are curious to work out how the issue arose and work together to overcome it.

Anti-Capitalist

As I’ve explored the damage that capitalism has done I’ve felt called to be more mindful about where and how I spend money and how I run my business. Being anti-capitalist isn’t about not being paid – we definitely want you to be paid for your work – but it is about refusing the exploitation that comes as part of the capitalist system.

I stopped using Amazon in 2010 (Billionaires have a lot to answer for generally, but specifically in publishing…you might be interested in my reaction to the news last year that Amazon were removing purchase links for all Bloomsbury Books) and instead support and buy from the types of business that I do want to see thrive…the female, global majority, intentionally disadvantaged small business owners. Rather than use Goodreads, I track my reading on (Black woman-founded) StoryGraph, instead of Amazon I shop for books at independent bookshops or Bookshop.org (which supports independent bookshops with every sale – this is also better for the authors because their royalties are higher on an independent bookshop sale than they are on an Amazon sale). This year we plan to move away from google products because their obsessive move towards AI tools mean we no-longer believe they can protect our author’s work.