I’m pretty sure most Solute readers are aware that our staff is completely volunteer. This isn’t even just “paid in exposure.” This is “the site doesn’t make any money.” And that’s fine; it is what it is. That’s why I shill my Patreon in every article (except obituaries, where it feels tacky). The thing is, though, because it is the volunteer labour of love that it is, there is an unspoken awareness that we can write about whatever we want. There is no editorial voice here; there are multitudes. We write about what interests us, and we look at things in the way that works for us.

One of the things I do to amuse myself is to pick themes for a month. I did two months of The Princess Bride. I do Horror October, of course. Next month will be M*A*S*H in Celebrating the Living. But it will only be in Celebrating the Living because most of the cast is still alive. And that’s just as well, because I would otherwise be having the same problem that I do most theme months—trying to pull an equal number of women for my columns to balance out how many men fit the same theme.

I told you all at the time how few women were involved in The Princess Bride, behind the camera as well as in front of it. And the fact is, that’s been pretty well consistent for every theme I’ve chosen. A friend’s father commended me on writing about the movie’s makeup artist, but that’s because she was a woman working on the film who’d done more than just that film. So then when I was preparing for last weekend, when I didn’t even have the benefit of a single IMDb page to scroll through for women, I was standing around saying, “What woman is connected to science fiction and fantasy and is dead?” And that, dear readers, is how I came to choose Elizabeth Montgomery.

The fact is, I don’t like Bewitched. And the reasons I don’t like Bewitched filled my article about her because she honestly didn’t have a huge career beyond it. A lot of TV movies I haven’t seen. But she was an activist, and sometimes, I choose to write about the activism because that interests me when I do my preliminary reading. Which I promise you is something I do for articles about people, even when it’s an obituary, even when it’s an obituary for someone I already knew a great deal about. Maybe there will be something in there that crystallizes an article for me.

When I wrote about Eddie Albert, mostly I talked about his activism and the interesting issues to do with his birthdate and his name. Often, my articles about well-known performers will dwell on a single obscure movie that I happened to see a lot as a kid. Half the reason I wrote about Graham Greene was to include a Red Green quote that I’m partial too, I sometimes think, and the first part of my Woody Strode article was explaining that he’s buried in the same cemetery as my dad. My articles here are personal, as is my voice.

And that is true of all of us. A couple of people helpfully took over for me for the time I was in the hospital dealing with my daughter’s birth, and their articles were different in theme and style than mine, because they weren’t me. If we had a “house style,” the site wouldn’t be as personal . . . and might have been abandoned by now, if you want my opinion. I think our readers enjoy the varying styles and points of view. And I’ll tell you what else—if we did have a house style? That style would have a point of view. It’s impossible not to.

We all see the world in ways that define us and are defined by our experiences. What we choose to write, how we choose to write about it—what movies we choose to see and not see. I am not writing in a vacuum. I am writing in a world where you do deliberately have to go out of your way to include women and minorities in columns about people worth writing about in film, because it’s far too easy not to mention them. If anything, that makes my belief that the central metaphor of Bewitched is about the oppression of women stronger.

Hey, you know that thing I said about shilling my Patreon! Down here!