Great post, Jack Preston King ! I have not paid for admittance behind The Wall for reasons I’ve expressed here , so the new Lit category is not available to me but I strongly agree with your request.

For a long time now it seems that the Medium editorial staff has maintained a strong aversion to fiction. When Aura Wilming announced that there was a new lit category I was briefly excited but when I learned that nothing will appear in that category unless it is chosen by a member of Medium’s young tech/geek editorial staff any hope I felt was immediately deflated. It is obviously just a gesture to shut up us fiction lovers.

I agree with you that Medium needs to hire someone to curate this new category and it needs to be someone who is actually a fiction-lover…. and not just a fiction-lover but someone who actually knows something about creative writing and preferably someone with a lot of experience with fiction (both reading it and writing it). It also needs to be someone dedicated to being fair and keeping the new category refreshed on a timely basis.

It is more than obvious that no one on the Medium editorial staff currently fits that bill. I realize that Medium has been laying off people and not hiring but I feel it is extremely important that if one person is going to decide what fiction or poetry shows up in that feed then it darn well better be someone who loves and understands quality fiction and poetry as much as we readers do and who has the necessary education and experience.

Of course, what I really would like is for readers to have some input. But it seems that Medium is going in the other direction.