We are the 70% (or is it 17%?)

VIDA has yet to embark on an official count of the number of women playwrights whose work is staged in American theatres, but every few months a new study on gender parity reveals that approximately 17% of plays produced in the United States are written by women.  Although this percentage has increased from roughly 7% in the 1970s, the numbers have not changed much in recent years.

Last week’s announcement of the Guthrie Theatre’s 2012-13 season, a line-up written and directed almost entirely by white men (Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre, is a leading influence in the American regional theatre movement and one of the largest and most well-funded regional theatres in the country) led to an outcry in the local and national press and social media. Leah Cooper, a member of the Minnesota Theatre Alliance, in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), calls the season “insulting and degrading” to women and people of color. MPR’s Marianne Combs notes that of the 12 productions slated for the Guthrie main stages next year not one was written by a woman, and refers to American playwright Marsha Norman’s count for Theatre Communications Group in 2009, which showed that “women buy 70% of theatre tickets sold.” We at VIDA wonder what would happen if women started to wield our buying power in the direction of 70% rather than toward the 17% margins to which we are sequestered by the theatre industry.

One of the most personal responses to the Guthrie season announcement comes from a member of the theater community who has worked in new play development for decades, the brilliant Polly Carl, former producing artistic director of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis and now the editor of the journal HowlRound and Director of the Center for the Theater Commons at Emerson College in Boston. Carl’s essay—reprinted here— brings home, with tenderness and passion, the void this lack of diversity creates on the American stage. She speaks of the need for each of us to see and experience our own stories in dramatic form, and how the absence of this diversity alienates audiences from the American theatre.

 Lisa Schlesinger and Ruth Margraff,

VIDA Playwriting Genre Action Committee

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A BOY IN A MAN’S THEATER

I’ve always said that the American musical hasn’t meant much to me. I don’t really connect to most of those stories told through singing and dancing with some notable exceptions. Then I saw a workshop performance of the Lisa Kron/Jeanine Tesori musical Fun Home, adapted from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel. There I was on stage. I’ve seen a few other plays featuring gay women, and often those women have been beaten senseless (Stop Kiss) or found dead by hanging (The Children’s Hour). But here was a full-blown musical about a boyish girl, growing up with a closeted gay father, discovering her creative potential—and well, it happened. I understood the power of the musical. I memorized every song. I sang them over and over and over. I wept during every rehearsal—there was an actor on stage who looked like me (well, like me in a younger and cuter kind of way). And though it wasn’t my exact story, it was my story. And I know when this musical is finally produced, I will see it a hundred times and never be tired of it.

Clothes Make the Men

In 1987, a few days after having worn an ankle-length knit skirt, a long cream colored knit sweater, off-white hose, and black flats to a dressy dinner for Junior Parents Weekend, I went into my dorm room closet and tossed out all my girl clothes. I realized I had reached a pivotal moment. I was a year from graduating from college, and heading into adulthood. For someone of my gender, it meant I would have to embrace womanhood, and somehow after that night, I knew I wasn’t ready—that I’d never be ready.

In about 2002, my partner Lynette drove me blindfolded to a local tailor in Minneapolis for a birthday surprise and had three men’s shirts made to fit me. That moment transformed my entire universe and depended entirely on the fact that we both were working full-time and could afford such crazy excess. But between 1991 and 2002, I wandered uncomfortably through men’s clothing stores, a boy covered by too much fabric in a man’s world that I aspired to some day call my own. The problem was I was just too small. Nothing fit right. My neck was too narrow and my legs too short to ever fit in real men’s clothes. And the pain of it wasn’t just about size, but the humiliation of the search for the right outfit was more than I could bear. Once in awhile some kind gay sales clerk in Nordstrom would take pity on me and try to help me find a shirt in the smallest neck size, but often, I was ignored, refused service, or told I couldn’t try on clothes in the men’s dressing room. Women who sold men’s clothes were the worst, one refused to pull out a man’s shirt from a display case I wanted to try on saying simply, “that’s for a man.”

And I realize now, that in some ways, I’ve never grown up, because I had no choices to grow into that suited me. I don’t feel at all like a woman, and well, when someone calls me lady, I don’t know who they’re referring to. Many of my tomboy friends have taken the plunge and transitioned to manhood and I think they are brave and amazing, but I don’t feel like a man either. I’m a boy as best I can figure. I like to play video games, basketball, read graphic novels, ride my bike, and watch baseball. How can I be seen as an adult in the world if I’m not seen? I feel certain though, that I could have grown up if I simply had a gender available to grow into.

As we make our way into a very ugly and gendered political season, and as I look at the seasons of many of our regional theater stages, the most egregious being the one just announced by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, well, I am compelled to talk some truth about finding yourself “other” in a white man’s world—about the importance of insisting on being seen. I didn’t want to be the one to take this on, but as I’ve been searching for other voices to jump into this discussion, I realize I’m asking them to perhaps risk their own livelihoods down the line—I’m asking them to risk what I haven’t wanted to risk myself.

Seeing Yourself on Stage

In my career in the theater I have mostly decided not to think about this problem of my gender dysphoria. I’ve always survived my otherness through stories, through imagining I could be anyone and anything—it was Spiderman for a long time. I’ve been so lucky to work in the theater and submerge myself into the stories of others, constantly lost in the possibilities of what I could imagine versus staying stuck in the limitations of the present moment. In other words, I didn’t want to focus on some of the painful realities of my own story, but have preferred instead to dramaturg and produce many other very compelling stories.

I’ve been supportive of, but not super involved in, all the talk of women’s discrimination in the theater. I didn’t feel I was quite the right choice to be a spokeswoman for the cause, though the lack of women’s voices on our stages enrages me. I’ve kept quiet about that subject because in accentuating my otherness, I feared exacerbating it. And honestly, I didn’t want to ever be dismissed as someone with a chip on my shoulder, a victim of my own circumstances. I want to be taken seriously in this business, fit in to the degree that I can, and make good stories for the stage.

So, I’ve made my way as a boy in a man’s theater—in a theater dominated by men’s voices, predominantly white, both straight and gay. And I like men, I identify with them. They are my best friends and I like making theater with them. And had god forced me to choose, I’m certain I’d have compared wardrobe choices and decided to be a man.

But that said, I believe the transformative power of art rests in undiscovered stories, and if large not-for-profit theaters don’t lead the way in developing and producing those stories, then who will? And if we give the leaders of those theaters a pass because it might cost us something later, then we’re not being nearly imaginative enough about the possibilities for a new future for ourselves and our field.

If a young girl/boy playwright came to me for advice about how to make it in this business, I would likely suggest they run like the wind from this crazy thing we call the American theater. I’ve been wildly lucky to have found a place here, and I’ve been treated relatively well as a short, tattooed boy/girl in boy’s clothes, and I’m grateful for the artists I’ve met along the way whose imaginations and stories saved me from feeling unseen. I’ll never forget supporting Madeleine George’s workshop of The Zero Hour several years ago, and thank god Bonnie Metzger had the courage to produce both Sylvan Oswald’s Pony and Sarah Gubbins’s The Kid Thing, and rock on Basil Kreimendahl as you develop Orange Julius at the O’Neill this summer. And a quick tip of the hat to those who blazed some trail through this gender isolation—thank you Peggy Shaw, Paula Vogel, Susan Miller, Holly Hughes and others I’m sure I’ve missed.

But I decided to pass, to pass as an arts administrator who could make myself relevant by fundraising, supervising, marketing—in clothes that could be either overlooked or admired as creatively quirky. But you, my tomboy playwrights, are attempting to tell stories that could subvert the reality of our donors and subscribers—and from what I hear from many of our artistic leaders, these are stories that will never resonate with our current audiences. If women playwrights, those who are representing the stories of half of the population, and as Lauren Gunderson points out in her recent article, buying 70 percent of the seats, can’t find a place on our stages, it doesn’t bode well for those playwrights unable to comfortably embrace a single gender.

Narcissism or Art

Joe Dowling, in defending the almost entirely white male season at the Guthrie, said in a public television program that complaints about his manly white season are “self-serving.” And I couldn’t agree with him more. For those of us passing in a man’s world, we’re exhausted from serving the man. I am anyway. Everyday I serve the worldviews of others. I am forced to file my taxes as a single person although Lynette and I have been together almost fourteen years. And damn if I don’t have to serve the two-gendered party system on every form that requires me to choose a gender—that’s every form, by the way. So I’m putting myself out there in the most self-serving way. Please call me narcissistic. I want more diversity on our stages and more short, tattooed folks running our theaters because I’m selfish enough to want many more moments like I had at that Fun Home workshop in December.

Art rises from the unknown and the undiscovered. Sometimes different is better if only because it makes us stop and consider languages and cultures and ideas not our own. It forces us to engage the act of translation in the encounter with unfamiliar stories. I don’t think we shell out big money to see plays only to be comforted by stories we already know—I’ve met very few audiences who would articulate this as their reason for attending theater. If it’s self-serving to crave surprise, if it’s selfish to seek the new and the undiscovered, then I embrace my self-serving nature for the sake of the future relevance of the theater.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to write. While many of my school friends dreamed of futures as movie stars or sports heroes or rich housewives, I was dreaming of becoming a writer, of living in a small, well-worn apartment in some city-er city than my own. Before I ever had my own desk, I would pull a chair up to my white wicker dresser, spread out my pens and paper, and write: novels, poems, plays, whatever. But by twelve I stopped dreaming, stopped being proud of my intellect and creativity.  I made a very conscious, yet very confusing, decision to hide my brain.

In high school, I rebelled in the form of sex, drugs and bad poetry.  I regained my passion for reading and writing, yet my confidence had taken a permanent hit. I never again felt the same pride in my intelligence, nor had any enthusiasm for showing it off.  I even dropped out of school for a while. 

By the time I landed at college, I felt beyond all the promiscuous and boozy behavior that many undergraduates experience as a well-earned rite of passage. As a result, I just sat home most evenings and wrote or read books set in San Francisco or Paris or New York City, the city-er cities where I was sure real life began.  Soon after, I began my real life, moved myself to New York City, and completed an MFA program by the time I was twenty-three. I met the man I would eventually marry.  My teachers and peers liked me and my work.  And I had some more good luck. I placed a few of my poems in well-respected journals. 

With some talent but no focused ambition, a well-entrenched and paralyzing discomfort with myself despite the fledgling successes, not to mention enough debt to make an MBA graduate sweat, I took that talent and I went… nowhere. 

I couldn’t finish a damn thing. 

While I had enough drafts to fill several bursting folders, I had the confidence of a clam.  I wrote all the time, but I couldn’t share these passions and projects with my friends. Nor could I send my work out into the world. I couldn’t even call myself a writer in that little box on the 1040 tax form that asks for your occupation, so instead (and to address that terrifying debt) I took a job at an ad agency which advertised for book publishers. I would spend most of my days researching venues to run ads for books that catered to the lowest common denominator: books about OJ, JonBenet Ramsey, and serial killers.  Books on how to live longer, be thinner, apply makeup like a pro. 

Working at something I didn’t care about with people I was often uncomfortable with took its toll.  I found it much easier to erase myself. Days, weeks, months, then years went by;  I was barely writing anymore.  I’d get up, go to work, plaster the smile on my face, be efficient, sarcastic, friendly, find myself back home again, reading or watching television. 

At the time, my husband and I went to a lot of parties and readings that seemed very cool and literary, the kind of life I had idealized when I was a teenager in Los Angeles. Yet, I couldn’t help but feel like a fraud.  My friends and acquaintances from this time were all writing and publishing books, going on residencies and fellowships, giving readings and teaching at universities. I, on the other hand, was writing next to nothing and then nothing at all.  And I wouldn’t know how to start again for years.

Yet, during that time, my friends and coworkers and acquaintances still knew me as a poet.  I’d made no formal announcement that I no longer wrote, although I was deeply upset about it.  At parties, people would ask me what I was “working on.”  For nearly a decade, I would reply, “I’m revising.  I write very slowly.”

That those in my circle still considered me a poet momentarily re-energized me, made me vow to spend my whole weekend writing.  But then I wouldn’t end up writing.  Because at the time the very thought of writing made me want to cry, whereas before writing was what held me together.  This was how I spent my post-MFA twenties.

Then, at thirty-one, I got pregnant.  And then the majority of people I knew stopped asking me about my writing.  Instead, they asked me how I was feeling, whether or not I had registered, and if I would I go for a drug-free childbirth. I was to be a mother, and that was that.

My first daughter was born in September of 2005, and having a first baby was just the kind of disorienting, overwhelming, desperate, ecstatic, over-the-moon mindfuck that everyone tells you it’s going to be.

But a curious thing happened, something that none of the standard chatter about the bored, dissatisfied, self-neglecting, put-upon mom would have you believe.  I began to write again. More than ever. Alone with my racing thoughts and a quiet newborn, and also spending more time with my husband than I had since we were in school together, my brain and my heart opened up and I felt more creative and confident than I had in years, maybe ever.

Maybe there’s something to the notion that the experience of pregnancy and, more radically, childbirth, gives a person a new perspective on what they are capable of, and of how much they matter.  Not only had I proved myself capable of extraordinary things, but now I had a daughter who would inherit whatever lessons about the self that I had to teach.  I knew my heart would break if my daughter were ever to give up on herself.  I needed to become the person I would want her to be. Relentless responsibility began to crystallize into confidence. 

I stopped apologizing for myself.

Years ago, long before I could imagine ever being a mother, my friend Miranda Field, a superb and accomplished poet and mother, spoke to me about what it was like to be both of those things.  Her oldest was still a baby at the time and she said that, against popular wisdom of sleeping when one’s baby sleeps, she wrote during his naps, because it was a do-or-die situation.  After years of non-productivity, she had to make a conscious decision to either write or not write, to be a writer or not be a writer.  If she didn’t write during her baby’s sleeping hours, then she would never write, and she would not be a writer.  It could not be put off until just the right inspiration or bit of poetic courage presented itself.

This is what happened to me.  Grateful for the choice and decision to stay home with my two girls during the day, my hours are filled with the insistent joys and needs and sorrows of children.  I have very little time for myself, but I fill it; I have the time because I make the time.  I write during naptime and after my children go to bed in the evening, until my hunger and exhaustion catch up to me.  I socialize less, and I write more. 

This is not to say that I don’t have countless other things I have to attend to, like dishes or insurance paperwork or freelance writing projects that actually pay something or the seemingly endless to-do list from my older daughter’s school.  Somehow I squeeze that all in, but not during the hours I have set aside for writing.  When the clock strikes, I don’t waste time doubting myself, I just start writing (and I can doubt myself later if need be).  I have had to be very un-sexy about my work process; I have fixed hours for myself and sneak in extra if and when I can. Sometimes my work sucks, and sometimes it doesn’t.  But I rarely end a day without having worked on something, even if only for a small amount of time.  The progress is admittedly slow, but after a pre-kids decade of writing next to nothing, I finally finished my poetry manuscript and have almost finished a novel.

My friend Ashley Sayeau, who writes extensively on women and culture, put it best when she wrote to me, “I don’t think I knew what real fear was until I nursed my firstborn through her first high temperature, or real patience until she learned, with such exquisite proficiency, those two little words: ‘But why?  But why?’  For me, having children is a constant reminder of what it means to feel.  Every time I put pen to paper, regardless of the subject matter, I’m grateful for that.” 

Ashley has found, like I have found, that even when she is not writing about her children, her experiences with them infuse everything she creates. 

While the physical act of writing is accomplished despite the time I invest in caring for my children, the confidence to continue writing is in large part because of them.  When I lament all the wasted time, my husband reminds me that I could not have written what I write now, the way I write now, back all those wasted years ago when I was a different person.  Even though I had the time (and oh there used to be so much time!), I wouldn’t have had the nerve or the conviction, caring, as I did, about what others might learn about me, think of me.  His is a very forgiving way to look at it.  Although I don’t write about my children, my experience with mothering them has made me a stronger writer. 

In fact, the happiness I feel about being an active writer once again has pulled me through the many days when things didn’t work out as planned, mommy-wise, writing-wise or otherwise.  When I am writing it is like I’m at my childhood dresser again, where the real world doesn’t exist and anything is possible.

I realize that my story, much like Miranda Field’s experience, may be the exception to the rule.  I know that there are numerous writers who were productive and focused and duly successful in their pre-mom lives, and I imagine these women might find it very frustrating, as I definitely have, to put their work aside to on-demand feed an infant or to suddenly find their emotions tied to the success or failure of their toddler’s nap schedule or grade-schooler’s playground mishap.  Or to have many prior successes ignored, even as they might work their tails off to keep writing and publishing.  Or to have it assumed that just because they’re now  mothers, all they have to write about is being a mother.  In my experience, aside from one poem on pregnancy, I have not yet felt the urge to write about my children.  Which should answer the question I get asked with an alarming frequency: No, I don’t write “mom poems.”  

Now, at thirty-eight, married with two daughters, I write about what I’ve always written about: love, ghosts, sex, rape and California. 

I admire anyone who can write about motherhood with grace and insight, but it’s too often assumed that once a female writer has a child, her creative scope, and even her ambition, shrinks to the size of her baby’s thumbprint. 

Indeed, when my husband announced we were expecting a baby, no one assumed he would suddenly write poems only about his children or that he was putting away his pen altogether. No one asks him if he feels guilty for taking time away from his children in order to write (which he does, as do I).  And yet, I have been at my own dining table when, following discussions on what creative projects my husband is working on, guests have turned to me, only to ask how the kids are doing. 

And while I love to talk about my children, and even parenting in general, there are countless other topics I find just as fascinating.  And so the people who gave up on my brain the moment I had a baby’s brain in my uterus have gradually faded from my life. They are the same people who will insist, like some misdirected, outdated, faux-feminist automaton, that being a mother is the ruin of creative thinking and a woman’s independence. 

Being a mother certainly presents new challenges to both of these things, but it also creates new and brilliant channels for each.  And yet, I had (at least) one friend who disparaged me for years because she assumed I’d given up my writing life to be a mom.  That tired mother in a pastel twin-set sitting on Oprah’s couch and complaining that she puts herself last is so ingrained in the contemporary consciousness that more than a few (former) friends just assumed that I had stopped or would stop writing. 

Why wouldn’t I?  I was a mother now. 

Fortunately, motherhood has taught me that I’m strong and capable of anything. It has taught me that I need to enforce and reinforce my daughters’ sense of pride in their intelligence, creativity and selves. .  For my daughters to see me as a mom and a writer is a very wonderful thing to me; that they see that I am proud to be myself, above all else, seems crucial.  My older daughter knows that when she gets into bed every night at seven o’clock, her mommy gets on the couch with a notebook and a computer. She is only six, yet she knows that being a mother and being a writer are two things that can happen in the same woman.

The first time I heard that Judy Blume is one of the most censored/challenged American authors of all time, I laughed. I was about fifteen.

“Judy Blume? As in, the Judy Blume?” I didn’t believe it. You couldn’t walk through my middle school library without tripping over a copy of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.

“Yes,” my mother said. “She’s controversial because, among other things, she wrote about a girl getting her period.”

I knew this. I had read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. a couple of years before. “So what? They banned her book?”

I was incensed. I didn’t have the words to speak of it then, but I remember how viscerally rageful it made me. What was the big deal? What could be more natural, more essential, more inevitable, more female, than a girl getting her period? But like I said, I didn’t have those words.

“That’s stupid,” I told my mother (not an uncommon exchange, back then).

If I’d had the right words…well, they would have been censored. But if I’d had the words, I might have said something about what was taken from me in that moment of realization. It was my first harsh lesson about what it really means to grow up female, the first time I gained an inkling of the fact that I was a soon-to-be woman living in a society in which womanly things must be talked about behind closed doors and certainly never written down. A society in which women’s bodies are treated as objects, available for your viewing pleasure but unworthy of inner exploration. A society in which the roles that women traditionally hold—essential roles, like making homes and giving birth and raising children—are taken for granted, looked down on, and—worst of all—regarded as something unworthy of being called work.

I couldn’t comprehend all this at age fifteen, yet I’ve never forgotten the impact and the pain of that first tiny lesson. Nor have I forgotten the source that opened my eyes to this uncomfortable truth: A challenged children’s book. Even as a teenager, in the throes of my inarticulate frustration, I felt profoundly attracted to Judy Blume and strangely proud of what she had done. Society said she shouldn’t write it, but she did it anyway, and when they got mad and tried to stop her, she kept on coming. I loved that.

The more powerful lesson I’ve learned since then is that Judy Blume, in her defiance of the status quo, by no means stands alone. Children’s writers of all stripes stand with her, as do the many teachers and librarians who steadfastly insist on placing such important books in the hands of children; we are collectively and constantly at the vanguard, shaping a new generation of readers.

Much like writing from a female perspective, writing for children represents another way of diverging from the privileged, straight, white, adult male point of view that apparently dominates mainstream literature. Even though I am indeed female, I’d be remiss if I didn’t emphasize up front that the primary identity I claim in the literary world is not “woman writer” but “children’s writer.” Until very recently, it never even occurred to me to identify myself professionally based on my gender because, even though being female directly affects many aspects of my life, I’ve never experienced it as a barrier to advancement in my writing career.

Perhaps you’re about to dismiss me as naïve. Clueless. Oblivious to the obvious forces of male domination that wreak daily havoc on the literary world. The thing is I don’t live in that particular literary world. I live in the Kidlit world, an alternate reality where the only limitations for a female author are her own imagination and her willingness to speak the truth in its simplest fashion. (I kid you not.)

When women writers rail against gender discrimination, I feel quite distanced from their specific struggles, yet I do feel a kinship with them in the desire to be fully recognized and respected in the context of literature. I’ve grown increasingly aware of distinct parallels between how women writers talk about their relationship to the literary establishment and how children’s writers talk about our relationship to that same establishment. That feeling of having to claw your way into a firmament that doesn’t have much respect for your ideas or your work, despite its beauty and its power—that feeling is something that children’s writers can’t ever overlook or forget, either.

Upon further reflection, I’ve come to understand that our gender plays a direct role in why children’s writers feel so marginalized. But it’s easy to fool myself, because in the Kidlit world, quite frankly, women rule. An overwhelming majority of my writer colleagues are women, as are the authors whose careers I look up to most. My editors are women. By and large their bosses are women—well, at least until you get to a certain level. We also have a preponderance of female agents, reviewers, and on and on. I might go weeks without crossing paths with a man, professionally.

Having such a woman-centered community means the gender issues we face are very, very different from those of adult writers. For starters, there are great positives. Our community is incredibly supportive and unified—largely because it’s so woman-driven. There’s much less cattiness, public critique, and overt competition going on than I observe among adult writers. Rarely, if ever, can I recall a children’s author publicly criticizing another—instead, we tweet each other’s good news, we cross-promote each other’s books and we wish each other happy book birthdays with genuine excitement. Children’s writers band together, and we cherish that profound moral support because we never receive anything similar from the broader literary community.

Indeed, our gender-based challenges tend to originate outside the Kidlit community, not within. We struggle against the cultural perception that raising and educating children (and writing for them) is “women’s work,” and therefore something to be taken for granted and considered simple. The fact that we care about kids at all renders our contribution less valuable in the eyes of the literary mainstream. Kidlit authors are mostly women, taking care of women’s concerns, so therefore we deserve less prestige. We belong in a box, apart.

Plenty of adult writers look down their nose at children’s books. Time and again I’m asked if I think I’ll ever try adult writing, as if my efforts won’t be meaningful until I’ve done so. After looking at my (award-winning) teen novel dealing with the Black Panthers, an editor from a major publishing house once handed me her card and said, “I would love to see a real novel about this topic. Let me know when you feel ready to write for adults.” She said this with a straight face, in the careful tone of voice you might use to explain something to a toddler.

I’ve grown used to this sort of dismissal. It didn’t occur to me at the time to be separately angry that another woman used this tone on me; my mindset was stuck in “adults” vs. “children.” But such a reaction from a powerful woman in publishing points out that the problem isn’t only with men—it’s a plague on our whole society. (For instance, I have no trouble believing that Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. was removed from school libraries by just as many women as men.) Just how deeply have we internalized the need to keep woman stuff out of the public eye? When women do succeed in male-dominated industries, must we do so by casting aside our woman-cares and blending into the status quo? It often seems that’s how women survive at the top.

Children’s writers (a community of women, remember) are also radically excluded from consideration for most major writing awards and fellowships—the ones that come with the most money and which carry the most prestige. On the smaller scale, I’ve had many artist grant opportunities denied to me because “we don’t consider writing for children.” Understand me here—these committees weren’t saying to me that my writing was not deemed worthy, but that the very creative endeavor I chose to undertake was deemed so inherently less than as to not even merit the briefest of glances. Is that right? Is that fair? But children’s writers tend not to ask these questions, or aim for these goals, because it feels like beating our heads against a wall, and we know we will never convince the powers that be to respect us.

Sometimes, in social settings, I reach a point where I almost feel compelled to give in to the social pressure, and minimize my own work, “Oh, it’s just a children’s book.” But there’s nothing more frustrating, because I’m incredibly proud of what I do. I respect my young audience and I care deeply about their opinions. Much more than I care about gaining the respect of the self-appointed literary elite.

On the whole, children’s writers have ceased to care much about whether or not we fit into the mainstream literary establishment at all. Out of self-preservation, we’ve cultivated our own warm, supportive world. When children’s lit folks refer to adult writing, people outside the community sometimes think we’re being salacious. The fact of the matter is, our worlds are so very separate that “adult” vs. “children’s” are useful designations. Children’s lit isn’t simply a genre of writing; it’s an entirely separate sphere, a mirror world that caters to a younger audience. Our books can’t be pigeonholed as all alike—we have literary fiction and popular fiction, science fiction and delightfully cheesy romance, dystopian fantasy and gothic horror, short fiction anthologies and self-help. We do it all, we just speak in a language young readers can relate to, and we have breathtaking talents among us whose work rivals anything you would find in adult literature.

Female children’s authors don’t worry much about representation in the grand scheme of things, because in our alternate world, we’ve got it. We’ve got it in truckloads, to the point where we have conversations about needing more books by men. Men are prized for their scarcity, and because of that they often rise faster and farther than we, the female majority. For such a small percentage of our writers, men get a disproportionately healthy chunk of publicity, and it’s uncommon to see an award platform filled entirely without one. Do the men in our ranks really get more attention, more readers, more money, more awards relative to their numbers? It seems so, but is that yet another example of gender favoritism, or is it actually a great stride toward equality? Are children’s publishers doing for men what we wish adult publishers would do for women—enthusiastically welcoming them into the fold, offering them a chance to be seen where they haven’t been seen much before?

Such questions easily fall by the wayside, though, because in reality children’s writers (gender aside) spend most of our time worrying not about our own representation, but about what we’re representing to our audience. We care about our readers, and we care about giving our young women strong feminist girl role models, and our young men compassionate, feminist boy role models. We care about making our queer characters round and complex and dynamic as opposed to stereotypical, and we care about weaving diversity into the fabric of our stories. Those representations matter a great deal more than anyone in the adult literature world has ever given us credit for.

Children’s writers remain extremely aware of our audience as gendered. And, once again, this is an issue that originates outside our community; it veritably permeates this culture. Parents, teachers and librarians talk about “boy books” and “girl books” as if it’s a foregone conclusion that most titles will be one or the other. Nancy Drew is for girls. Hardy Boys is for boys. If there’s crossover, it tends to be girls reading “boy books,” not the other way around. When we’re lucky enough to write potential crossovers, we lament book jackets cast heavily in pink and purple because boys won’t pick them up. Booksellers and librarians repeat it time and again. Girls will read anything, but boys are embarrassed to be seen with “girl books.” By middle school, kids have internalized the belief that the male experience is universal, and the female experience is something to be kept in a sphere by itself.

Children’s writers mull these issues deeply. We sit around coffee tables and conduct tweet chats and organize conference panels to talk about what young readers are seeing in our work, and what kinds of people they are becoming as a result. We ask ourselves why boys seem to stop reading fiction for pleasure around the fourth grade, and often don’t start again until after college. We ask ourselves what impact that dearth has on their ability to have empathy and to recognize other points of view. We ask what we, as a community can do to keep boys reading, and what we as a culture can do to raise emotionally healthy children. We link these goals because we believe that books can change lives, and we want all children to have the necessary access to the books they will need if they are to become their best selves.

The trouble is, even when we create all the right books, we can’t fight these battles alone. Rather, we shouldn’t have to. The problems are systemic; they reach much further than even the most impassioned voices among us. Children’s writers are doing our part, but we’re constantly undermined by the perception that our work is a thing to make light of, a thing to grow out of and ultimately look down upon. Why must it be so? If a five-year-old boy can love a story called Miss Rumphius that’s all about flowers, why can’t an adult male reader see the same book as more than a flight of fancy? What happens in those twenty-plus years? What inspires his transformation from open-hearted to narrow-minded? Knowing the children’s lit community as I do, I can say with near certainty—it wasn’t something he read.

Children’s writers collectively understand that we hold a certain power, by virtue of our audience, yet this power is rarely acknowledged by anyone outside our community in positive ways. Adult writers have little to say to or about us, apart from a general sense of dismissal, but every year the American Library Association catalogs the most challenged books in the country, and every year the majority of those books are books for young readers. Books dealing with issues like homosexuality, politics, complex social issues and sexual exploration. It seems that our culture believes books for children can be harmful, but not otherwise meaningful.

The deep hypocrisy of it all makes children’s writers roll our eyes. We know the value and the importance of what we do, and we have the readership to show for it. What the world thinks of us might as well be lint in the laundry: we filter it out, glance at it, throw it away, and slip right back into the warm, cozy sweater that is the Kidlit world. Children’s writers have pretty much given up on explaining or trying to justify ourselves to adult literary types. The approval and respect of our grown-up colleagues isn’t what matters most (though it would be a welcome change). Rather, we prefer to focus on shaping the next generation with our words and our ideas, because isn’t that where the genuine, systemic, societal revolutions we need are going to occur?

If you can remember yourself at seven, ten, twelve, fifteen, you might remember how wide open the world seemed to you then. These are the ages when gender identities are forming, when boys begin to understand what it means to be a man, and girls come to know womanhood from the edges, rushing in. We ought to spend time nurturing the next generation of readers and writers to overcome some of the gendered barriers we’ve all internalized. Otherwise the cycle only continues and we will have resigned our daughters to a similar fate of organizing, counting, struggling for their high voices to be heard amid the clamor of basses and baritones trying to take over the world.

I’m fond of asking adult writers, what was your favorite book as a child? They always have a ready answer. Think about the impact those early reads had on you. Think about the story, essay or poem that made you want to be a writer. Think about what it would mean to have a population of adults, who were taught early to love diversity, and grapple with politics, and question the world around them, and search for their unique voices, and see men and women as equals. Then ask yourself how much children’s literature matters, and whether it’s worthy of respect.

Respected or not, we forge ahead. Children’s writers continue to flout the social status quo, using narrative to promote diversity and revealing to children simple truths the world would prefer they not know, like the fact that—gasp —women menstruate (and they might even have feelings about it). Challenge us or overlook us—we won’t fold. We are a woman-centered community, putting children first, in hopes that those children will one day build a better and more gender-balanced society for us all.

[A Paper presented on the panel: The Great Indoors: Gender, Writing and Re-envisioning Literary Merit, AWP 2011, Washington, DC]

I chose the train over the plane to travel to AWP this year because I like the gentle rocking, the bad hot chocolate and the sense of an interior.

That every (poetic) stanza is a stanza or a room is a truism I take seriously. The first stanza is a green room; the second is an antechamber; then, my favorite, the vestibule, also a part of the inner ear, a sense of balance is vestibular, suddenly a promontory, a curve into a cave and I’m there. It seems I never experience reading without entering a space, even if the writing juts, it alters the space I’m in, and in entering me, asks that I enter an interior. [Read more...]

Editor’s Note

You may have already read Eileen Myles’ essay “Being Female,” and so wonder why VIDA chose to reprint this piece in our first site update since releasing The Count 2010 pie charts. From the moment “Being Female” debuted this past Valentine’s Day in The Awl—one of many responses, in print and online, to VIDA’s count—links to Myles’ essay have shown up in all manner of blogs and social networking sites, and comment streams contain everything from effusive appreciation to scathing misogyny. In other words, this essay hit a nerve, the same nerve exposed by VIDA’s count. [Read more...]

Those who know me understand that I essentially live in a cave.  I write there and occasionally come out.  I don’t read much about what’s going on in the so-called literary world.  I like to imagine that I simply make books.  Just recently some fellow writers approached me and asked my thoughts about what they called the Freedom fuss, a discussion about the latest novel by Jonathan Franzen being called “The Great American Novel.”  I was asked to chime in.  My chiming is usually off key, but here it is, my chiming, such as it is. [Read more...]

Back in the mid 80’s, I was the girlfriend of a well-regarded, academically established poet. My partner A. (let’s call him A. for the sake of privacy) was also the poet on faculty at my undergraduate university and we set up house together when I was 18 years old.  He was recently divorced after years of marriage to another writer. After months of intense conversation and mutual longing, he picked me up at the hospital the day I had my wisdom teeth surgically removed and took me back to his house to recuperate. I lived there for the next three and a half years.

I also took classes with A., and we eventually attended university functions together, with me as the administration-tolerated equivalent of a faculty spouse. He received his tenure during the years we were together. In our home, we hosted a great number of the visiting writers who came to read for the Creative Writing Program and I sometimes traveled with A. to the readings he gave. I was there in the next bedroom to hear the screaming phone argument the novelist Richard Ford had with his editor over changing the ending of his now famous story “The Communist.” I remember making a perfectly tragic “fancy” dinner for the poet Stephen Dunn and playing ping pong with Robert Creeley. Bill Kittredge was the first person to ever get me drunk and looked on with avuncular sympathy as I hurled mint juleps over the side of the patio. So I was sometimes in the company of well-known writers who often kindly asked to look at my own budding verse (possibly their version of a hostess gift). For me, this unusual level of instruction and attention came to seem quite normal.

And yet at the time, it never occurred to me to care very deeply about how I was perceived by the company into which I had wandered. That may have something to do with my particular personality—for good and ill, I can be described as an emotional “risk taker,” the euphemism my former therapist uses for personality types who go balls to the wall and worry about the outcomes later —but it probably had as much to do with my age at the time as well. What do one’s larger reputation and the idea of professional/academic “scandal” mean to a very young writer? Because people in the writing community did talk about me—they surely did—and not very nicely, I came to discover.

From what I can tell, scandal and reputation don’t mean much immediately to a lot of  bright-eyed, eager young things, other than to add an extra sheen of “us-against-the-world, nobody-understands-me-but-my-baby” romance to a relationship. Despite most being made to read the novel in high school, only those who have some experiential context for a community’s idea of acceptable grown up behavior fully appreciate the scarlet letter of scandal and the possible long-term weight of that accessory. And those of us who particularly loved Hawthorne’s book were likely the ones who couldn’t wait to get busy earning our alphabet. What’s more romantic than suffering for true love? And the history of novels and poems gives bookish young women so many terrific models! This long-suffering ideal now seems to me a very young woman’s way of thinking about relationships. And while I was perhaps even younger than usual when my relationship began, I think middle class, artistically-inclined young women in their twenties are often very sheltered and spend years being served the cultural Kool Aid about the Great (Male) Writer and his mythology. That is, for a romantic young woman, it can seem that there’s nothing important to lose.

I have known a number of women over the years who occupied various versions of the category in which I lived with A., women now in their 30s and 40s who spent some part of their 20s as the girlfriend of so and so, the Established Male Writer (from here on referred to as EMW). A few went on to eventually marry these men with lesser, much lesser and occasionally greater degrees of marital happiness in store for them. Most often these women lived for years as the secret everyone knew about or, less often, as in my case, were publicly “out,” with their chins and their own writing held up defiantly before them. We in this club don’t share the details of our former relationships easily, as we’re all very aware of how such confidences can be interpreted by others, the embarrassing level of cliché with which it associates us. And such relationships, whether open or not, come to be defined by strict levels of secrecy, where great care must be taken not to throw extra servings of red meat to the three-headed dog of gossip. A young woman in this position soon becomes the major support system for protecting her EMW from the rumor and fall out that such relationships inevitably engender. For me, this was a part time job, though one I embraced happily enough. For young women more discreet or sensitive than myself, I’ve watched it become a full-time occupation with few benefits.

Of course things are somewhat different now: since A. and I were together, parts of the world have done some catching up on issues of harassment and acceptable conduct in the work place. Having been on a task force to examine harassment policies in university systems, having been deposed in a very public sexual harassment case between an EMW and his student back in the 90s, and as the present the director of a large Creative Writing Program, I’ve had the chance to see up close how increasingly seriously most institutions now take these issues. But then there is a huge ethical and legal difference between harassment and misconduct—I want to distinguish between those predatory EMW who take advantage of women repeatedly, holding grades, prizes and promotions over a woman’s head to get her on her knees, and the different, murkier lines A. and I crossed. I look back on my relationship now as a bona fide grown up and have to wonder: how did this issue not ever come up during his tenure process? I remember these thoughts occasionally disturbing me when A. and I were together, but I convinced myself that I was exceptional, that anyone could see my good grades were well earned, my talent apparent. I now know this kind of rationalization has another name: in this case a big, self-justifying pile of it. Because the fact is many of my classmates were rightfully disturbed by my special status. It affected their class environment in negative ways. And A.’s faculty were none too happy to be put in the position of tacitly approving our relationship, which might end up redounding on them professionally, and frustrated that the implicit rules were not applied to all. Whether I was particularly talented or not didn’t have a thing to do with their perception of our conduct.

Thankfully, I think we’d have a hard time imagining anyone getting away with such behavior these days. I write this with a semi-clear conscience, knowing that I was with A. because I indeed loved him and not because of the writers he would introduce me to or the grades I would receive. I have no regrets about my relationship with A., but I do wish I had been more mature and graceful in how I handled our situation professionally and had been able to see how our relationship impacted others around me. Even more so, I wish A. could have seen this, too.

But the truth is, even though this particular behavior is no longer condoned, these hierarchical, power-imbalanced relationships still make the writing community around them at least uncomfortable and, more often, righteously angry. And typically that ire is pointed not at the EMW, but at the young woman with whom he is involved. I’d say at least once a month I hear someone gossiping about a young woman at A, B or C writing program, or another has who received a residency or prize under what the national gossip mill deems sketchy, preferential circumstances. So women should know that there are hard-to-live-down, professional perceptions and even consequences that come from making such romantic choices, formed independently from the quality of these women’s writing. From my own experience, I’ve learned to be very slow in forming my opinions—if I believed everything I’ve heard said about now well-known women writers over the years I’d have to conclude that most of them are “crazy whores” to use a common, ugly phrase–and I always question why the woman is typically on the business end of the gossip gun. But I know others aren’t always so willing to ask that question.

I’m thinking of a friend, a woman in her early twenties, who until just a few months ago was such a girlfriend to an EMW, a man who is also a faculty member in her writing program. She is a gifted poet and a lovely, decent person. She spent two years being the open secret of which all were completely aware until the EMW broke up with her recently. While she never took classes with him, I know the relationship was a constant source of sour discussion and bad feeling within her program, no matter how discreetly she acted (and she did) and no matter how small she made her self in order not to attract the community’s notice. And she did make herself small—not participating in the life of her writing program, avoiding her peers, unable to compete for department awards, limited in the classes she could take, worrying herself sick that their relationship would put the EMW, and not her, in some professional or political jeopardy.  It was hard to hear about this and even harder to advise her. Her heart was clearly broken and she felt that so much of what she’d given to the relationship, her dreams of what she and the EMW were and would be together, had been kicked out from beneath her. What I told her finally is that I don’t believe in legislating the human heart—what we feel for others is often unruly, inconvenient and worth fighting for in the face of other people’s envy and spite. But I also told her being the “muse” and caretaker to an EMW is not a lifetime project I’d wish on any young woman. So I’m glad she’s free of the relationship and now has the chance to grow as an artist on her own. I have a strong feeling that what lies before her will ultimately be much better for her and, just as importantly, for her work.

“Poetry is not a luxury.”—Audre Lorde

I take deadlines seriously. Therefore, when I was informed that my baby would arrive on February 27th of 2009, I wrote it down in my calendar. When my doctor moved the due date to March 5th, I took note. I was in fact preoccupied with another deadline: my application for the James Merrill House residency, due on January 15th. So when I landed in the hospital on January 3rd because my water broke, and was immediately put on bed-rest for an indeterminate period of time, completing this application (from my hospital bed if necessary) was at the forefront of my mind.

Several days into my prescribed bed-rest at Beth Israel, I would find myself wheeled down to the labor ward after complaining of abdominal pain. Ever the consummate multi-tasker, I entered the delivery room with the Merrill House application in hand. After all, I’d heard tell of the many hours women in labor spend in such a room with nothing to do but time contractions, fend off anxious relatives, and watch bad television. I refused to miss the opportunity to apply for a fellowship that would allow me not only five months of writing time, but residence in poet James Merrill’s apartment just because my baby decided to arrive seven weeks early.

You see, it was a dream of mine to live in this particular poet’s home: sequestered, yes, and allowed to return to writing a book of poems I’d barely had time to begin. It wasn’t simply that I wished for the space and time. I’d already been given the time: after several years of working furiously toward tenure, I’d at long last earned a sabbatical. As for space, I already had my apartment. But Merrill’s apartment was a special space. It was there he conducted his interactions with spirits via the Ouija Board in the company of his partner David Jackson, conversations with the other world that would fuel his most famous epic sequences. Not only had I been engaged in writing longer poems; the poems I’d been writing concerned the dead. I wanted, badly, the close proximity of Merrill’s vast library, the company of his bric-a-brac, to actually see the wallpaper (navy and gold, adorned with Chinese fans and bats) that so famously covers the walls of his living room— and I wanted to be able to work in the small study which I knew to be hidden behind a secret door that one could shut behind oneself: its facade not quite a façade even, but yet another bookshelf upon which he’d placed a tiny sign: Please come in.

As much as I pride my ability to multi-task, I would not be able to work on the Merrill House application on the evening of January 6th, 2009. It turns out that giving birth to an infant requires a certain amount of concentration. Lucia weighed just over 3 pounds. Seven weeks premature, she would spend the first four weeks of her life in the Beth Israel NICU before coming home.

Free to leave the hospital, I immediately tackled the Merrill House application. It requested a biography for any person(s) who would be living with the applicant during his or her residency. There wasn’t much to tell. I wrote: “Lucia Drew Marvin, 8 days old, presently resides in the NICU at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. Her doctor describes her as ‘opinionated’ in that she expresses herself when she does not like to be touched.”

I received the news that the committee was seriously considering my application just after Lucia had been released from the hospital. They stated that I was “ideal” in terms of my qualifications, yet they had “reservations” about the fact I had a child. I could only assume they were worried that Lucia might damage the contents of the Merrill apartment, as it is a space that may be the closest thing to a living museum in existence. Knowing my daughter would be eight months old by the time my residency began, I was sympathetic to this concern. (Indeed, the very thought of my child wreaking havoc in such a sacred space pained me.)

Thus, I made an impassioned plea to the committee co-chair of the Merrill House and swore I would do whatever it took to protect Merrill’s estate from the potentially destructive movements of the toddler my daughter would ultimately become.

Much to my delight, they offered me the residency. But then, long before I’d begun to plan for the move to Stonington, CT, I received a flurry of frantic queries from the Committee. And this is where the fact I am a single mother by choice comes in. I honestly don’t think the many concerns that were sent my way would have arisen if I’d had a husband or partner, i.e., a fellow-caretaker for my child. But it was also quite difficult to ascertain the origins of their anxieties. Their misgivings appeared to center on the following.

1. You may not be able to interact with the community because you have a small child.
2. You may not be happy because you might feel isolated.
3. You may not be able to handle climbing the many stairs that lead up to the Merrill apartment with your baby.

Well, I’d never had a baby before. I received many of these queries just after Lucia had arrived home; I was sleeping only two or three hours at a time. Still, even though I was anxious and sleep-deprived like any new parent, I knew quite well my position with regard to the committee’s concerns:

1. I am forced to interact with the world much more now that I have a baby.
2. Let me deal with my isolation as I see fit. (I am a poet. I like isolation.)
3. I presently live in an apartment that has 45 steps leading up to it that I climbed several times a day while pregnant and have since climbed regularly with my baby in tow. (Bring it on.)

But how would I address the committee’s doubts? This was simple. I would show them a residency unlike any they’d ever seen before. I created a reading series that brought in five established writers that fall; I also held regular “Sunday Salons” in the Merrill Apartment, which were basically writing and reading workshops. All of these community-oriented activities turned out to be quite a bit of fun.

Living in James Merrill’s apartment was every bit as amazing as any poet might imagine it to be. His presence communicated itself through the vast array of artwork on his walls, his amazing collection of books, his excellent taste in furniture (pretty, but also pretty uncomfortable). His finely-tuned placement of brick-a-brac (all of which got packed up as soon as Lucia became mobile) . . . but the loveliest aspect of living in his home was, quite simply, his ju-ju. His apartment is by no means “haunted”; rather it is animated by his kindness, generosity, and, above all, his keenly eccentric sense of beauty. It’s a thinking space. While living there, I not only wrote like a fiend, I plotted the organization of VIDA from the ground up. Standing atop Merrill’s rooftop deck, overlooking the foggy-ether that had settled upon the buildings, boats and water below, everything and anything seemed all at once possible.

I lived with Lucia in the Merrill apartment for five months. The people I met were very kind, especially those who served on the Committee, for it was those folks who, I would learn, make the residency happen. They freely give of their own time to ensure the continuation of Merrill’s legacy.

Lucia celebrated her first birthday in the very dining room in which Merrill’s hands once moved across the Ouija Board, atop that legendary milk-glass table top that sits beneath the tangerine-hued dome of a ceiling. She dug her hands into the first cake she’d ever encountered, smeared her face with chocolate icing, while the many friends we’d made since we’d arrived in Stonington looked upon her fondly, their cameras a-flash!

I was sad to leave.

But something stuck in my craw. I’d learned through the grapevine that one member of the committee, a poet and editor I admired and whose anthology I’d used as a text in a great many classes I taught over the past decade, was my primary detractor. It was he who vetoed my application, who charged that I’d write “terrible mother poems” if I was offered the residency.

I wondered if he’d ever read my work. The speaker of my poems, in both of my books, is essentially orphaned. She, unlike me, has no family. And, because I believe that personal experience is transformed completely through poetry, I don’t know if she will ever speak as a mother and how she will do so, if she decides to do so. I don’t believe in autobiographical poetry. And if it exists, I don’t want to write it. I happen to think that this elder poet and I might have agreed on much with regard to poetics. My life is not my poetry. My life is too mundane (thankfully!) to be the life that is described in my poems. I believe in Eliot’s objective correlative!

Yet, how can I explain that the first nights I had Lucia at home? She was very small. Her eyes unsettlingly dark in the way they fully occupied their sockets. A baby is not a poem. Nor is a poem a baby. Yet, it is hard to resist comparing the two. Just as a poem is necessarily part of its author, a baby remains part if its mother. I think of Wallace Steven’s description of the writer’s intuitive movement toward the writing of a poem: “ . . . [the poem] is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was written what I wanted it to be, even though I knew before it was written what I wanted to do.” The experience of recognizing your baby, who is in fact a stranger, is a lot like that.

But am I now a “mother poet” because I had a child? Why can’t I remain a “poet”? Sure, I find myself changed now that I’ve had a child. This may affect my poetry. I also find myself changed because I adopted a dog, stopped drinking 32 ounce Big Gulps of diet soda on a daily basis, and painted my bedroom citron green. How these facts correspond with my work as a writer is not very interesting and, I would hope, irrelevant to the reader of my poems.

I’ll admit that I don’t know what comprises a “terrible mother poem.” I gleefully imagine writing a poem in which a mother abandons her child in a grocery store. Such a scenario would be “terrible,” indeed. Or is it just that my poems would be deemed “terrible” because they speak from the perspective of a mother? Am I meant to understand that such a stance is, by its very nature, tedious? I’m not sure I should care. To be honest, I’m not sure I can, though it’s clear some folks expect me to.

The fact that I chose to have a baby should be of little to no interest to anyone but those closest to me in my lived life. Do we ask male poets if they have children, or do we read their poems? As for my own poems, my duty is to remain true to them. Like most of the writers I admire, I’ve a bit of a contrary nature: being accused of an offense for which I am innocent simply makes me wish to commit it. Indeed, I think I must write a most Terrible Mother Poem right now.

* Cate Marvin, Writer-In-Residence @ Home of James Merrill