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VIDA COUNT 2012: MIC CHECK, REDUX

In a year kicked off by the Republican party fighting the Violence Against Women Act and a nationally-broadcasted song reducing Oscar-noteworthy actresses to “boob shots,” VIDA takes our annual look back to see if this regressive tenor is reflected in the treatment of women in literature in 2012. We also eyeball how the 2012 Count stacks up beside numbers from the years preceding. As always, the charts tell their own stories, whether publishers and editors listen or not. And now their histories are showing.

While it would be incredibly easy to begin by lambasting national publications like Harpers, The Paris Review, The New Republic, New York Review Of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic and The Nation for their gross (& indecent) neglect of female writers’ work, I fear the attention we’ve already given them has either motivated their editors to disdain the mirrors we’ve held up to further neglect or encouraged them to actively turn those mirrors into funhouse parodies at costs to women writers as yet untallied. Reason hasn’t worked. The devolution among their ranks screams itself increasingly red in the VIDA comparative charts.  At this point, the publications with the “most men” simply do not win.

Instead, let’s look at a few venues that have held steady or made calculable strides towards shaping a more egalitarian literary landscape via gender.  The Boston Review, with its slightly heavier load of male reviewers, has made a dramatic improvement proportionately of who they review since we began.  Threepenny is taking a slow but steady approach with incremental yearly steps up from 29 to 34 to 36.5% women published respectively.  Poetry remains the most consistently equitable in its publishing practices, reaching a 45% height of women published in 2012:  look to the poets!

Though Granta bumped its 2011 numbers by including an “All Female” issue, the salve did not remedy into the future.  We hope their editors will take notice and figure out how to make lasting strides as they proceed with their consideration practices into the rest of 2013.

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Publishers have also begun to take it upon themselves to publicly account for their own numbers.  Places like Harvard Review, Drunken Boat and Tin House are counting their authors each year. We do not think the significant jump in female authors reviewed at Tin House is temporary; they have bared the change in their attention and practices for the public record. Readers and writers, please take note. Additionally, the scope of counting was recently broadened by Roxane Gay at The Rumpus, who initiated a count for writers of color. Poring over the minutiae of journal and magazine contents is no longer a process for VIDA alone; counting has become a call to awareness, a movement for any and every publisher to voluntarily join.

Improvements will happen with effort, not accidentally or by ignoring the glaring disparities. Astute editors and reviewers at major and small press publications are finally acknowledging the weight and responsibilities of their career-shaping roles.  They are paying attention and implementing practices that evidence conscientious decision-making. They are beginning to showcase a wider swath of the writing field and the deserving writers within.  Obviously, the not-so-astute are sitting this one out. As our frustration over the worsening numbers carries on, we might think we have little to no ability to help them along.  But we do.

We want to thank publications that work for ALL writers in a real world way.  As I noted in the intro, publishers and editors can choose to listen or ignore thinking through biased-publishing practices, but what is of more import is that we can let them know that readers and writers are listening too. We can now make informed decisions when we reach into our pockets to buy publications.  Publishers can ignore the numbers, and we can choose not to buy their publications.

We at VIDA hope to turn the conversation into reader practice. We have been heartened by your enormous encouragement as well as the strides many are making to raise awareness — and wish to return the compliment. We are going to follow along and promote the hell out of publications that give voice, and pages, to a broader range of writers. Additionally, we hope that you will help extend the conversation by contacting individual publications to let them know of your appreciation or disappointment regarding their inclusion, or lack of, female writers in their publications. Each pie includes contact info, and a quick note from you could be the voice they finally need to hear.  We thank you for listening in –and for the decisions you make and emails you send — and look forward to, however large or small, impacting the tenor of the literary landscape via those real world results.

–Amy King

** Help support publications that make a difference:  please send us your observations and updates.

The 2012 Count lives here.

The 2012 3-Year Comparison Charts, which compare all categories for which we have three years’ worth of data, live here.

COUNTING: Amy King Talks with Tin House Editor Rob Spillman

Amy King:  Thanks so much for being in touch with us here at VIDA.  It’s heartening to hear that the 2010 VIDA Count served as an impetus for change at Tin House.  Can you describe your initial reaction when you first saw the numbers?

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Rob Spillman:  I was surprised by the disparity. Before the numbers came out, we had consciously sought balance, but not in a systematic way. Not to make excuses, but 2010 was our most out of balance year. If this had been 2007, when we did a whole issue called “Fantastic Women”, featuring women who push the surreal envelope, the numbers for that year would have been skewed in the other direction, giving another limited view. I think it is important to look at all publications over time.

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AK:  How have your thoughts and responses changed since that year?  What steps have you taken to address “the numbers,” if any?

RS: The numbers were a kick in the pants, in a very good way. I’ve been editor of Tin House since the beginning, back in 1999, and the numbers spurred us to take a deep look at our submissions, from the slush to solicited manuscripts, who we are asking for work and what they are sending us. Our unsolicited submissions are nearly 50/50 consistently year to year, and our acceptance rate is also 50/50. Agented submissions average closer to 2/3 men versus 1/3 women, with acceptance rates around 60/40. Interestingly, the number of agents who are sending these submissions are 2/3 women versus 1/3 men. We were also surprised to find that although we solicited equal numbers of men and women, men were more than twice as likely to submit after being solicited. This even applies to writers I’ve previously published. Another surprise was that in our Lost & Found section, where writers champion out of print or under-appreciated writers, men and women were three times more likely to write about male writers.

What these numbers tell me is that I don’t need to solicit male writers nearly as much as female writers. I also have started pointedly asking L&F contributors “Are there any under-appreciated female writers you would like to champion?”

AK:  While we recognize that our methodology is by no means exhaustive nor complete, can you say a little bit about what you think the numbers imply?  Or what people might infer from the results of such tallying?

RS: I think the overall numbers from all of the magazines speak for themselves. There is pervasive bias, both conscious and unconscious.

AK:  What advice would you give other editors?  Any specific pointers or things to watch out for?

RS: Passivity. It is all too easy to sit back and wait for what comes in. If you don’t actively seek change, then stasis sets in and the status quo remains.

AK:  Do you consider your response to be a means of “joining the conversation,” as we have dubbed it at VIDA?

RS:   Absolutely. And conversation is and should be going in many directions—between VIDA and Tin House, but also within Tin House, and between Tin House and our contributors, and throughout the publishing world.

AK:  Can you tell us a little about your editorial vision at Tin House?

RS: To find the best voice-driven work from around the world. I want to be surprised, and to be proven wrong. If I have a pet peeve (say, second-person stories), I love when a writer makes something I generally don’t like into something I have to admit is brilliant.

AK:  Please provide a sample [include links?] of writing from Tin House or some authors you are happy to have included.

Any underrepresented writers other journals should be aware of?

RS:  I love writers who push the form. We’ve run two essays by Jo Ann Beard that I’m particularly proud of. It is always gratifying when writers we’ve published first go on to publish multiple books, writers like Nami Mun and Monica Ferrell. Recently I’ve been taken by the work of Namwali Serpell. She is originally from Zambia, now lives in California and is writing some unclassifiably interesting stories. Brittany Cavallaro is a young poet we’re all excited about.

AK:  As you know, you’re the first to grace the pages in our new series of editor interviews at “For the Record.”  Are their other ways we might go about engaging editors?

RS:  I think the conversation is important. And “the numbers” are a great place to start. Again, I think the statistics over time are most important because they will show progress or stasis or, worse yet, setbacks to equality. What I would throw out there is a challenge to ALL lit mags to publically display their numbers every year. You may say that you look at work by women and men the same, but if you are consistently publishing three quarters men, then you need to look at your methods and biases. I bet that if you put out requests for numbers, a large number of magazines would send them in.

AK:  Are there other magazines or journals you would recommend in terms of quality of writers as well as egalitarian inclusion?

RS:  Yes, numerous. Including One Story, A Public Space, BOMB, and The Common. I’m always on the lookout for new magazines, and am impressed with Gigantic and The Normal School.

AK:  Do you have any recommendations for VIDA as we proceed to deepen the conversation and continue to look at various publications and the work they put into the world?

RS: More events, conversation, and statistics over time. My hope is that other publications will not just look at their publication rates, but will also examine their submission and solicitation numbers.

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Rob Spillman is Editor and co-founder of Tin House, a fourteen-year-old bi-coastal (Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon) literary magazine. Tin House has been honored in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, O’Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and numerous other anthologies, and was nominated for the 2010 Utne Magazine Independent Press Award for Best Writing. He is also the Executive Editor of Tin House Books and co-founder of the Tin House Literary Festival, now in its tenth year. His writing has appeared in BookForum, the Boston Review, Connoisseur, Details, GQ, Nerve, the New York Times Book Review, Real Simple, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Worth, among other magazines, newspapers, and essay collections. He is also the editor of Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, which was published in 2009.

Lives Well Lived

Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde — It is impossible for me to commemorate one without the other.  The friendship and poetic bonds of these two poets stood out loudly, brashly, on my own coming-of-age landscape, which happened to be a very large predominantly-white college campus on the outskirts of Baltimore, complete with a mix of people of various faiths, ethnicities, sexualities, etc..  In the classroom, I was introduced to Adrienne Rich the same semester I found the work of Audre Lorde via my then-professor, Elaine Hedges, known for having brought “The Yellow Wallpaper” back to the public eye.  Having just graduated from a high school in which I consciously chose not to segregate myself off with the few white students, after ahem, a traditional southern upbringing, I found myself thirsting for an example, any public example of friendship that crossed racial and class divides.  The richness of both Rich’s and Lorde’s poetics and camaraderie deepened my awareness of these women as artists and helped me understand the power of such relationships as something that not only serves to validate but also pushes and challenges beyond comfort lines.   Theirs was a complex one that lasted a lifetime; they were comrades in the great crime of speaking women’s lives into public consciousness.  In Warrior Poet:  A Biography of Audre Lorde, Alexis De Veaux cites Rich’s role between Lorde and Mary Daly:

She was one of few celebrated white feminists to acknowledge racism within the movement; this position put her in disfavor with some who saw discussions of race, as well as class, as a distraction or divisive and threatening to the movement’s gender focus and cohesiveness.  Rich’s stature provided needed currency with which to engage less race-conscious feminists in a more progressive discourse.  She recognized her own development toward that discourse as one that was in process, and sought to engage other white women in ways that were constructive, if not less confrontational.

I made my way through Rich’s wreck and into more poetry and her passionate essays, found relief and surprise in Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and The Cancer Journals, and then moved further into the college’s student-run International Club, the Pride Club, and African American and Native American courses that I likely would have steered clear of lest I put foot in mouth and embarrass myself – primarily because these women’s words compelled me to push past the security of my own world.  Learning that neither Rich nor Lorde was ever perfect, that each one was perpetually becoming even as her poetics were also evolving set me on a path with the confidence to find out where I might be wrong, where I might be of use, and consciously grow evermore human, complete with flaws and uncertainties and hopes and faith. In Rich’s example, I saw that I could take that risk, grapple with the complexities of race and class intersections, and not be completely undone by my own clumsiness or ignorance. De Veaux continues, “She held firm to her belief that it was possible for white women to change …”  Despite my upbringing and the calls for family loyalty, I too could learn.

Rich says best what holds, what tethers one to another, also in the face of difference, in “A communal poetry:”

… we began a conversation that was to go on for over twenty years, a conversation between two people of vastly different temperaments and cultural premises, a conversation often balked and jolted by those differences yet sustained by our common love for poetry and respect for each others’ work.  For most of those twenty-odd years, during fourteen of which she struggled with cancer, we exchanged drafts of poems, criticizing and encouraging back and forth, not always taking each others’ advice but listening to it closely.  We also debated, sometimes painfully, the politics we shared and the experiences we didn’t share.  The women’s liberation movement was a different movement for each of us, but our common passion for its possibilities also held us in dialogue.

What I value about Rich can be seen in the recent outpouring of tributes: the personal that is so political.   What she stood for, wrote and spoke about lies in the inextricable communion between life and art.  She worked hard for a better world, forging bonds that a lesser person might have walked away from, and used poetry to speak that which has not been spoken – in an effort towards envisioning that better world.  For Rich, poetry was not the revolution but served as a means toward it.  It is a lens that allows us to focus on the larger implications of how we are in the world, and it is through the connective tissue of poetry that we are moved to action.  Rich was an advocate of empathy in the highest order.

In her work, we sense that no matter how we debate it, the public-private split is a deceptive, misleading thing.  We presumably long for an objective truth while excising and quarantining the subjective, sensing the devaluing of the feminine in this duality.  But for someone dubbed a “political poet” so often, the stories of how Rich touched the lives of people on a personal level mount and blur the inevitable devaluing of our emotional lives and their relevance on a political level that would prefer we make war without checking our consciences and emotions.  Rich’s poetry reminds us that such “business” is indeed the most personal, that anger and action have their places, and to ask questions so as to move into spaces we’ve been instructed not to occupy.  In that vein, I leave you with a way into Rich’s “poetry of witness,” taken from her essay, “The hermit’s scream,” premised on one of Lorde’s poems, “What teaches us to convert lethal anger into steady, serious attention to our own lives and those of others? … How do you deal with the things you believe?  How do I put myself on the line?  How can I destroy what needs to die in me without destroying others at random?”

–Amy King, April 4, 2012

Biting The Hand: VIDA Women Discuss Their Selection For The Best American Series

We’ve arrived with the numbers for the Best American series, interested to see how women fare on the “Best American” front. Parity has eluded us again. Moreover, your work has appeared, at some point, in these anthologies, and now you’re playing for Team VIDA! While our goals are to point out imbalances, query and explore the implied bias, I’m wondering if you all feel a little conflicted, as though you’re biting the proverbial hand that feeds or, at least, has praised you? (more…)

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY’S “BEST BOOKS OF 2010″

From Publishers Weekly: “This year we took our annual slugfest to the pub underneath our new office and came up with a list of the year’s top 100 books that could be our best ever.” VIDA takes a look at the outcome of PW’s “slugfest” and considers the results in light of last year’s breakdown. Cheers!

VIDA Interview with Anne Waldman: “From the Larynx”

A feminine academe could bring the poetry calling and practice back to the source, and explore the feminine history of this literary outrider world. And it’s happening already.

COUNTING THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS’ 2010 AWARDS

This month we take a look at the Academy Awards given between 1995 – 2010. While we were pleased to find a number of the Academy prizes reflected a gender-balance, the few that reflected what should be the “old” balance, presented new questions to consider.

Amy King Talks with Christian Teresi, Conference Director of AWP

“I talk to a lot of attendees––strangers, colleagues, and friends––about which events standout and which events they think didn’t work particularly well. Ultimately, the AWP conference has very little to do with what I think anyway; what matters is what the AWP members and the conference attendees think. Though I don’t get to see much of the conference, I feel very lucky to be able to honestly say I love my job.”

VIDA counts Publishers Weekly in 2010

This month, we counted the number of books reviewed by authors’ gender in the 2010 issues of Publishers Weekly (through the August 23 issue). We hope you’ll join us in wondering aloud what these numbers can tell us about current publishing trends.

Arielle Greenberg on “Gynocentric Anthems,” the Gurlesque, and Creative Partnerships

“I actually think there could be another kind of anthem, a more complicated and nebulous anthem that nonetheless loses none of its riot or exuberance, and I love the idea of a gynocentric anthem: I’ve been really interesting in reading and writing such poems.”