In a culture saturated with top-ten lists of everything from books to bikes to baby names — what can we do to right the gender imbalance in publishing besides tabulate our absences?

VIDA decided to start by excavating the spaces behind the lists. We asked our board members and a few other contemporary authors to share sentences about a literary woman we feel is too little mentioned. Our short anti-list is hardly comprehensive, yet seen as a whole the variety and breadth is exciting, and inclusive of poets, memoirists, literary journalists, playwrights, experimental and lyric fiction writers, children’s book authors, and even a couple of editors.

Please explore, enjoy, and share these names and works, and perhaps even consider using this roster as the seed of a diverse reading list for a class syllabus or book group, and help us change the landscapes of literary influence one passionate book discussion at a time.  Free free to comment with additions of your own.

—Barrie Jean Borich, VIDA Editorial Committee Chair

Kamala Das (1934-2009) Once called the ‘Sylvia Plath’ of India, Kamala was an all but unheard of feminist voice from south India who rallied to make no shame of celebrating women’s sensuality and the deep undercurrent of sexual and romantic yearning that ran through most of her married life. With the support and understanding of her husband, Kamala wrote poems at night once the family went to bed, typing on the very table where she cooked intricate meals. In addition to poetry, Das was a triple threat, writing fiction and several memoirs– the most famous of which recalls her childhood in an artistic but emotionally distant family; her unfulfilling arranged marriage to an older man shortly before her 16th birthday; and the emotional breakdowns and suicidal thoughts that punctuated her years as a young wife and mother.—Aimee Nezhukumatahil

Jennifer Tamayo: Writer, performer, and scholar Jennifer Tamayo’s Red Mistakes Read Missed Aches Read Mistakes Red Missed Aches was selected by Cathy Park Hong as the 2010 winner of the Switchback Books Gatewood Prize. Hong says of the collection: “[w]hile Tamayo’s poetry deliberately disorients, you can still trace the life stories of a mother and a daughter who struggle for livelihood and legitimate citizenship in a nation swept up in xenophobia; you hear a voice of resistance and resilience from the invisible underclass of the undocumented Latino immigrants.” By interrogating violence, exploring resistance, and occupying a nexus of gorgeous miscommunications, Tamayo also unpacks body and heart, revealing the red thread that stitches together all our rent pieces—Danielle Pafunda

Zetta Elliott, author of Bird and A Wish After Midnight, writes with compassion, wisdom and incredible insight into the history and the ongoing struggles of black communities. Her stark, powerful prose tells it like it is, bringing to life minority experiences that have gone un-talked-about in teen literature for far too long. Her talent for giving voice to previously “unheard” characters and her passion for bringing these relevant stories to the young readers who need them most makes Elliott a powerful and invaluable force in young adult literature today—Kekla Magoon

New York Times bestselling author Nikki Grimes is an artist extraordinaire. The award-winning author and poet of more than 45 books for children and adults is also an accomplished performing artist, fiber artist, and jeweler. Nikki’s inspiring flow of creativity stems from her strong faith, passion for storytelling, and deep roots in Harlem, New York, where she was born.—Mitali Perkins

When I first read Alexandra David-Néel’s memoir, My Journey to Llasa: The Classic Story of the Only Western Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City, I was astounded. In lively, intimate prose, David-Néel narrates her four-month trek through the rugged, high mountains of China to the capital city of Tibet—a city off-limits to foreigners—which she began in 1923 at the age of 55, disguised as a beggar. The author of more than 30 nonfiction books, David-Néel is said to have influenced beat writers and modern day philosophers, but the work of this extraordinary woman has for the most part been lost to time.—Cheryl Strayed

Carrie McGath is the author of a collection of poems, Small Murders (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2006) and three self-published limited-edition chapbooks. Her book Ward-Eighty-One is a response to photos by Mary Ellen Mark taken at the Oregon State Hospital—photos of women who have endured intense suffering, internal, external, or likely both. In this collection and others, McGath reimagines a world that opens to grand possibility while simultaneously remaining painfully claustrophobic,  and therefore married to a new kind of truth.—Monica Drake

I encountered Janet Lewis’s poem “Lullaby” when reading Alan Shapiro’s wonderful book The Last Happy Occasion. Like many readers, I had no idea who Lewis was, as her writing career existed quietly for many years in the wake of her husband’s (Lewis was married to the influential critic/poet Ivor Winters). I love this poem for it’s formal rhythmic ease and transparency of voice. I love the invention of taking one of our culture’s most foundational stories and humanizing it so completely. For me, the poem illuminates my own sense of motherhood –specifically, it’s intimacy and interconnectedness. But in its choice of subject and character, Lewis’s poem also hints at the growing disconnectedness most mothers eventually face. So the poem reminds us of the uncomfortable, ironic bargain mothers enter into: if we’re lucky, our children will leave us for their own singular destinies, great or small.—Erin Belieu

Sarojini Naidu (February 13, 1879 –March 2, 1949 ), also known by the sobriquet The Nightingale of India, was a child prodigy, Indian independence activist, and poet who wrote in English. She is remembered as a virtuoso of English metrical forms and romantic imagery in her poetry, and her mastery of such difficult poetic constructs as the dactylic garnered a lot of praise. Naidu’s early poetry evidences the strong Western influence on her Brahmin upbringing, as crafting poems in traditional English metrical forms, she concentrated primarily on Western themes and images.—Supriya Bhatnagar

Some might be hesitant to admit this, but I’ll just come clean: it was that evil empire, Amazon, that brought me to the work of Amelia Gray but if that megasite could manage to recommend to me the work of a writer with sentences like, “The girl with Rapunzel Syndrome claimed she ate her hair out of heartbreak,” then maybe it’s possible—maybe?—that we can’t entirely hate it; after all, Amelia Gray’s stories are filed with women who inadvertently give birth night after night, in which jokes are exploited and deepened (a penguin and an armadillo walk into a bar), and in which fables are re-told and newly invented,. so perhaps it’s possible for Amelia Gray to have the wider audience she so clearly deserves (her two collections have been well reviewed, with the second, Museum of the Weird, having won the prestigious Ronald Sukenick/American Book Award Innovative Fiction Award, and so her unique sensibilities have not been lost).  I’ve had a long-standing conversation with a fellow female writer about why it’s more difficult for women writers of experimental fiction to “break out,” and we’ve long since conceded that we’ll be having the same conversation in twenty years; maybe we will; maybe the tide has turned; and maybe—just maybe—Amelia Gray will be one of those who breaks out.  After all, she has a first novel coming out this month called, Threats, and I know this because Amazon told me, so, I’ll just give my passing thanks to Amazon and go buy her novel at an independent store, all the same.—Laurie Foos

Adelia Prado: This contemporary Brazilian poet, brilliantly translated from the Portuguese by Ellen Doré Watson, astonishes and confounds in The Alphabet in The Park, a volume of poems selected from her five books. Prado’s is a work of gesture, association, powerful truth and dark humor; one of my all time favorite lines can be found in “With Poetic License,” when the speaker offhandedly states, “I’m not so ugly I can’t get married.” Merging the sacred with the profane, Prado insists, “Poetry will save me,” making certain her reader understands her statement as far from blasphemy by closing: “What is poetry/ if not His face touched / by the brutality of things?”—Cate Marvin

A gifted minimalist, Gina Berriault is an oft-overlooked predecessor to writers like Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Mary Gaitskill and Mary Robison. Her stories, often set in San Francisco, are written with a mercenary attention to detail and to the complicated ways people make and break connection. As self-possessed as many of her protagonists are, they are also beautifully flawed and their stories are lucid portrayals of female lives.—Carmen Giminez Smith 

Barely out of her teens, Nellie Bly—the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochran—got a job writing for a Pittsburgh paper in 1885, through sheer force of personality (a brilliant letter to the editor about columns disparaging women caused the editor to call her for an interview, thinking she was a man; the editor tried to dismiss the woman who answered his call, but Bly convinced him she could be a serious journalist). Vivid, personal, laced with her own questions and bodily experiences of abuse and fatigue, Bly’s work anticipated New Journalism by a century; she faked lunacy and had herself committed, blowing the whistle on asylum abuses; worked in a sweatshop making boxes; and traveled around the world in homage to Jules Verne. “I had often wondered at the tales of poor pay and cruel treatment that working girls tell,” she wrote of her sweatshop days. “There was one way of getting at the truth, and I determined to try it.”—Suzanne Paola

When her groundbreaking novel This is My Body, a lacerating roman à clef about her affair with leftist poet and noir novelist Kenneth Fearing, was published in 1930, readers carried their copies in plain brown wrappers. Startling, brilliant, and almost unknown today, leftist-feminist-modernist Margery Latimer (1899-1932) published her work in the same avant-garde little journals where Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and William Faulkner appeared, but her career –two novels and two collections of short stories– was cut short when her marriage to Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer ended with her death in childbirth at the age of 33.  Nimble, fluid, muscular, and shocking, her work is gorgeous and audacious and political and smart.—Joy Castro

I don’t recall the first time I heard a Judy Grahn poem, or if the first one was “Edward the Dyke” or “The Common Woman Poems,” or if I read them in mimeograph form, or in a Women’s Press Collective volume illustrated with woodcut prints created by the poet’s lover Wendy Cadden, or on the vinyl recording of lesbian feminist poets circulating between the women I knew in the early 1980s. Judy Grahn is not under-recognized among my generation of lesbian and feminist authors, frequently in years past reading to auditoriums of screaming, boot-stomping woman-identified fans, yet much of the larger literary world is unaware of her impact.  Her influence on me was this: “A Woman Is Talking to Death”—a poem I consider the lesbian HOWL— was, from the moment I read it first, both my personal anthem and my bloody bridge into the understanding that women’s literature could be about the lives we were living and had lived, that stories about race, class and sexuality—as subject or experience—could not be extricated from one another, and that everything is related to everything and can’t help but intersect in the most vulnerable regions of our cities and our bodies. —Barrie Jean Borich

Margaret Anderson, who, in 1914, bought a good gray suit and solicited money from readers across the country to establish the Little Review, is best known for standing trial for publishing the first thirteen chapters of Ulysses in this country.  But she is under-remembered for the magazine’s other accomplishments; along with her on-again-off-again partner, Jane Heap (who co-edited the magazine until its demise in 1929), and her sometimes foreign contributor, Ezra Pound, she brought the work of such writers as W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Emma Goldman, Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle, as well as such artists as Picasso, Picabia, Ernst, and Stella to American readers.  In other words, Modernism as we know it was not only chronicled, but also shaped, by the dedication of two women who lived by the magazine’s initial slogan—”making no compromises with the public taste.”—Judith Kitchen

Adrienne Kennedy: a writer with a fearless capacity to explore theatrical form, who challenges perceptions about identity and gender and constructions of persona. Kennedy changed the way plays could behave and misbehave, and she has taught a generation or two, who know her work, what it means to be an artist committed to social and spiritual transformation.—Lisa Schlesinger and the VIDA Playwriting Committee.

Magdalena Zurawski writes complex, patient, lyric fiction in a world that often prefers its fiction easy to categorize, easy to understand, and easy to forget.  Precise, considered, and compelling, her first novel, The Bruise, deserves the attention and recognition often bestowed upon far less innovative works—Susan Steinberg

Ellen Raskin was best known for her brilliant 1979 Newbery Award–winning novel The Westing Game, a puzzle-mystery that presents more nuanced depictions of class, race, money, sex, pathology, and shame than I find in most grown-up contemporary novels. Raskin was also a brilliant and prolific illustrator and graphic designer who managed every bit of all her books, inside and out, down to their typographic dingbats— after she judged the original page trim too short, the first printing of The Westing Game was pulped on her request. She lived in a haunted house on Gay Street, in Manhattan’s West Village, and I visit it often—Sarah Manguso

Pick up any book at the bookstore: more than likely it was commissioned, edited, proofed, designed by women. In fact, the United Kingdom publishing industry is made up of an estimated 50%-70% women. Until Helen Fraser retired in 2009, the biggest three publishers in the UK by market share had women in top senior roles: Helen Fraser, Managing Director of Penguin UK; Gail Rebuck, CEO of Random House; and Victoria Barnsley, CEO of Harper Collins. The industry is no longer populated by autocratic pipe-smoking gentlemen in tweeds and well turned-out girls in pearls. Rebuck, Fraser, and Barnsley are a world away from either of those gender stereotypes associated with earlier 20th-century publishing. [Read more...]

Author’s Note: As a female Hispanic playwright of mixed race, I’ve tried to capture the unsteady, uncomfortable relationship between female undocumented Mexican women and the work they do within the United States. Although significantly impacting the country’s growth and development, these women have been denied a rightful recognition in claiming their space in that history. I’ve witnessed this first hand in South Texas, where these workers occupy a distinctly unsettled space strewn with exploitation, misogyny and other indignities from both sides of the border. [Read more...]

“By circumstance and design, the work of many women writers is concerned with issues of interiority.”

That’s the first sentence of a 2011 AWP conference panel on “The Great Indoors: Gender, Writing, and Re-envisioning Literary Merit.” While preparing my remarks for that panel, I began to think more deeply about the implications of that initial sentence, specifically this notion of circumstance and design. What, precisely, is the link between women writers and interiority? [Read more...]

Lately, as a new member of the VIDA Genre Advisory Committee for creative nonfiction, I’ve been wrestling with a paradox: I am addicted to facts, an inveterate snoop incapable of writing through the kind of invention that makes good fiction, yet I wrote nothing in creative nonfiction form until my forties. In college, I wrote what I called prose poems and fiction. I wrote poems, too, which were bad and beside the point here, but the prose poems and fiction both: a) consisted of factual material and b) often suffered as a result. [Read more...]

This essay is based on a talk delivered at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Page Turner 2010 Literary Festival in Brooklyn, NY. The panel was called: Gag Order: Writers on What Goes Unpublished.

Over the last ten years, Iranian American memoir has become a cultural and publishing phenomenon through which millions of Americans have mediated their fears and fascinations about the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the US-backed Shah, Iran has occupied a special place in the American national imagination, eventually replacing the Soviet Union as this country’s arch nemesis. The drama of the Iran that the US lost, the ally turned enemy, plays out across the political spectrum. The right wing of the US political and media establishment casts Iran as a land of medieval-style fundamentalists and terrorists while the more liberal wing acknowledges a complete breakdown in the ability to make sense of the place at all. For most Americans, Iran is an enigma, shrouded in black and unbearably impenetrable to those on the outside. The Iranian American memoirist, whether she has grown up in Iran and immigrated to the US or was raised in the US and journeyed to Iran, is therefore placed in the indispensible role of offering access, an inside scoop, as no white American could¾of translating modern Iran and making it appear transparent for an English-speaking audience.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of these memoirs have been written by Iranian American women adds another layer to the cultural and political work these texts are called upon to perform, as the oppression of Iranian/Muslim women has been a troubling preoccupation of Western societies at least since the nineteenth century. Western readers still really want to know what’s going on under those veils!

Therefore, Iranian American women memoirists face quite a complicated situation: on the one hand, there is the importance of women’s voices and storytelling emerging into sound and print¾a major way in which women have been able to transform themselves from objects into subjects of history. But on the other hand, this imperative collides with a particular political moment when concern for the plight of Muslim women has been mobilized through popular culture and official state rhetoric as a justification for war.

This conflicted encounter has proved very lucrative for some, most obviously with the controversial book Reading Lolita in Tehran, which went viral on the book club circuit and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for over 100 weeks. When the publishing industry discovers a market niche, like most industries in a profit-driven world, each competing firm rushes to cash in. Since September 11, 2001, I have counted close to 20 published memoirs written by women of Iranian descent. Despite the uniqueness of each of their stories, a quick scan of the marketing blurbs on the book jackets, and the images of veiled women on the covers, gives you an idea of the narrow way in which these memoirs have been packaged and sold.

The description of Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky singles out mention of “the Ayatollah’s ubiquitous enforcers of female modesty” even though this issue takes up about one sentence in her entire story; on the back of Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad, Iran is referred to as “a dark country”; the back of Persian Girls promises readers a “harrowing memoir of the cruelty of men towards women” as well as “the exotic scents and traditions of Tehran”; the blurb for Journey from the Land of No says that Iran will be revealed to us and that we will understand “what life was like for women” after the revolution (even though the book is about a wealthy, literary Jewish family, hardly representative of the range of Iranian women’s experience); My Name is Iran’s cover jacket features almost identical language about “revealing Iran” to the reader by detailing a journey between “East and West, tradition and modernity.” I could go on, but I won’t.

When the most clichéd Orientalist language is being shamelessly recycled in this manner, it can lead to a sense of despair¾and a backlash of silence¾among Iranian American writers. Indeed many people I work with in the Association of Iranian American Writers are so fed up with this situation they feel the genre of memoir is irredeemably tainted and long for its demise, declaring fiction the great hope of Iranian American literature to disrupt the typecasting. While I look forward to a new wave of Iranian American novels, which I hope will break new literary and representational ground, I also want to recuperate memoir as a legitimate and vital part of Iranian American literature that can challenge, rather than perpetuate, facile and politically expedient constructions of “East” and “West.” This is, of course, easier said than done, as my experience tying to write and publish a memoir can attest.

Smack in the middle of the Iranian American women’s memoir craze, in 2005, I had started an MFA program in creative nonfiction. I had a story I was compelled to write, but I was, like many women writers of color before me, unsure how to tell it, unsure of what my voice could or should sound like, whether or not I was even allowed to speak, whether I would be enacting a form of treachery by writing about the ways historical legacies of oppression and political betrayals played out inside my family. With tremendous support from my professors and classmates, I began to reach through my fears towards sentences I hoped would one day say what I wanted them to.

And then suddenly, after just one semester of this necessary, disorienting and exhilarating process, I found myself living out every MFA student’s dream come true: I had an agent. My professor, a dear friend and mentor to this day, had sent my work to her agent who had agreed to represent me. Since an aspiring memoirist only needs a chapter or two tell sell a work of non-fiction, I was faced with the task of putting together a proposal to market a book I hadn’t yet written! My agent, a kind and, I still believe, well-meaning white woman, exuded confidence in my work. She’d go on about how Iran was “it” right now, how I was in the right place at the right time. But what about the writing? What about the story?

My agent told me how I should envision my book: it should start with 9/11 as a catalyst for my decision to travel alone on a one-way ticket to Iran, my first time going to the country my father was from, where his entire extended family still lived. I would then be like a tour guide, she said, outsider and family member at the same time, showing my readers what life in Iran was really like. The fact that my family members are working-class Zoroastrians was added caché. We haven’t heard that before! I should write about their rituals and attitudes towards the Muslim state. I should write about their persecution as religious minorities. Flashbacks to my childhood in DC with my Iranian immigrant father and Jewish American mother would then be interspersed with the action in Tehran.

Ever so grateful that someone had given me permission to speak, ever so araid of displeasing the powerful people who had gone out of their way to help me, I tried to write this book. But it wasn’t working. The writing felt timid to me, overly concerned with explaining myself and my family to an audience I was told to imagine as ignorant about Iran but open-minded and eager to learn. What was never said was that this presumed audience was white and middle class. I was supposed to write for this demographic because they buy the most books. What I couldn’t put into words at the time was that I felt I was being asked to participate in a new form of assimilation, to perform a certain version of difference, to become the “Other” who could then be revealed and made knowable within the dominant American cultural framework. As in–look! Behind the veil, Iranians are really just like us after all.

My agent praised my work to the skies, which only made me more uncomfortable. Right before she was about to send out my proposal and writing sample to her long list of publishers, I called her and told her I didn’t think the work was ready. I wasn’t happy with the voice, the “I” felt generic. The whole thing felt like it was for someone else, not for me. My agent disagreed vehemently and told me I had to trust her because she’d been in this business a lot longer. When I continued to ask for more time, she threatened me. I would hate to see you miss out on this market trend; a lot of memoirs are coming out. There will be a glut and you will have blown your chance. She told me to trust her and, not wanting to risk losing my relationship with her, starting to doubt my own judgment of my work (was I just an obsessive perfectionist?) I buckled under the pressure and allowed her to send out my manuscript.

I was more upset with myself than anyone else, and not at all surprised, when the rejection letters started trickling in. What did catch me off guard was their content. My writing was called “riveting,” my story heartfelt and best wishes were offered for the placement of “this talented writer.” This was disorienting and I began to wonder if publishers had lower standards for the quality of writing when the topic itself, in this case “Iran”, was supposed to be enough to sell a book. The reasons these editors gave for passing on my book seemed to have nothing to do with me, my story or my writing. One of the editors cited the “Middle East fatigue” reported by her sales force, another expressed the “worry that too many related books have been published in recent years” and still another was doubtful that the book would “break through to commercial success in this market. I wish I felt otherwise,” she added, “and I wish more than that that it didn’t matter.”

My agent called me and said it was too late, we’d missed the moment; the market for Iranian-American memoirs was saturated. Perhaps there is a saturation point for other kinds of memoirs¾say those by white men and women struggling with drug addictions or depression and we just haven’t reached it yet¾or the flip side of tokenism is the sudden glut of stories perceived to be alike because of an ethnic overlap. Publishers have access to a website where they can type in titles and see the sales figures, my agent explained. My memoir was not a good investment in this climate. I should stop writing it, she told me, and think of another project to work on. I never heard from her again.

There was only one problem with this plan to do something else; writing this memoir was the project around which I had organized my life for the last several years—completing the MFA, adjuncting and living frugally so I could have time to write. I was on my way to a month-long writing residency at Hedgebrook. Now what would I do there in my fairytale cottage in the woods?

Hedgebrook, an incredible residency for women writers on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound, turned out to be a turning point for me as a writer. It was there, among a small community of women writers that I realized failure could be liberating. The manuscript I hadn’t liked anyway was dead. The pressure to turn my art into a commodity before I’d even finished creating it was over. The audience I was supposed to be writing for had disappeared. I was finally free to play, to explore and experiment according to the whims of my own mind. At Hedgebrook I started my memoir over from scratch and had four of the most thrilling weeks of my life. With all that space, those woods and coastline, and with the six other women who became my accomplices, I gave myself permission to speak and to write in a way I’d never been able to do before. The first chapter of my new manuscript, “A Far Corner of the Revolution,” was subsequently published in a special issue of Callaloo that featured North African and Middle Eastern writers. And I was so pleased to place my writing in a journal with a long commitment to writing by people of color, writing that resists the assimilation and exotification¾which, as I experienced, are really two sides of the same coin.

I’ve been writing the new manuscript ever since and I’m going to keep on writing it at my own pace until I’m good and satisfied that I have at last told the story I wanted to tell. And then I’ll see what new encounters with the publishing world may be in store. So far, the story takes place in DC where I grew up, not exactly in the middle of a culture clash between my Iranian father and American mother, but in the midst of a battle over my political consciousness waged by my communist father and corporate lawyer mother, a battle that called into question the fundamental narratives America tells about itself and its place in the world. I’ve ended up writing about the historical forces that brought my mismatched family together, finding the meaning and the humor in that which seemed incomprehensible at the time. Think David Sedaris meets Maxine Hong Kingston. 

Through my work in the Association of Iranian American Writers, I’ve also had the opportunity to see my writing in dialogue with that of other Iranian American writers. I can’t emphasize enough how important I think this is, not to approach memoir as an individualistic pursuit, as a jockeying for the few artificially scarce places in a market, but instead to situate one’s writing in conversation with a body of work that already exists, not repeating or competing, but contributing to and broadening out the field of what can be called Iranian American or Asian American literature. Memoir can be a vital way of, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “brushing history against the grain,” of democratizing the voices that get to speak with authority on embodied experiences of various forms of resistance. My goal is to balance my right to break silences, to tell my truth, with an awareness and sense of responsibility about the political climate in which I write. And the audience I imagine when I write has changed from the stock character of the clueless but open-minded middle class white reader to the diverse groups of people who have supported me by coming to my readings over the last two years and connecting with my story.

Night envelops the cabin as the airplane flies across the United States en route to South America. In many hours time, I’m to land in Santiago de Chile for the Latin American premiere of my stage adaptation of Isabel Allende’s landmark novel The House of the Spirits. The play has already been running in New York City for a year at Repertorio Espanol, and will be staged in my English-language version at Denver Theatre Center and Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis later this season. Although I’ve been working on many other plays and collaborative projects in the last year and half, The House of the Spirits has been at the forefront of my consciousness most of the time. [Read more...]

Carmen Giménez Smith is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University, and publisher for Noemi Press as well as editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. Her work has most recently appeared in jubilat, Ploughshares and Colorado Review and is forthcoming in A Public Space, Denver Quarterly and New American Writing. Her collection of poetry, Odalisque in Pieces, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009. A memoir called Bring Down the Little Birds will be published by University of Arizona Press in 2010.

Since the splashy, high-profile release of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, a vigorous and provocative conversation has taken shape regarding the female writer’s role in the publishing sphere. In approaching this conversation in light of VIDA’s project of researching literary magazines and the gender breakdown of their authors, I realized that to draw together Franzen’s success with the dearth of books by women reviewed in the New York Times and with the statistical disparity of women’s representation in literary magazines was to draw a complicated landscape in broad brushstrokes. There is, after all, a cultural complicity on all our parts when it comes to any type of injustice. Whether through reinventions of feminist social justice, the banal force of hegemony, activism or apathy, there are simply too many factors, and more importantly, possibilities to consider before we can start to construct hard lines.

This online discussion of gender and publishing seeks to broaden the conversation, to represent the nuance of numbers and the diverse ways in which women’s representation in the literary marketplace and canon can be considered. I have invited several different viewpoints on the subject from writers, poets, and publishers. Their responses are varied, sometimes contradictory, but definitely reflective of the complex issues surrounding the discussion of gender and publishing.

1. How does gender impact the success or the non-success of the female writer?

Tracy Bowling: I do believe that bias is present in the publishing world such that women writers are underpublicized and undersold after their work is published, but it’s not a bias I feel very qualified to speak to. The more distressing evidence of a gender bias I see comes before publication, in that women writers often seem pressed to fit themselves very neatly into categories, to define a space for their work or to proclaim whose footsteps they’re following in. In the wake of Jonathan Franzen’s glowing reception, many writers have discussed the infrequency with which the word “genius” is applied to women writers; I’d be curious to see if the same is true of words like “breakthrough,” “innovative,” and “new.” I think that in order to attain success, especially in mainstream publishing, women often have to (often artificially) join a particular group or cohort of other women writers in order for their craft to be perceived as serious and studied. I’ve seen this a lot among women who write fantastic or fairy tale fiction, where, for example, no matter how little one’s work resembles or echoes that of Angela Carter, that work rarely gets discussed without heavy reference to Angela Carter. The really unfortunate side effect of having to strategize and situate oneself as one among many others, I think, is that women become less likely to write the Franzen-esque literary epics, simply because there is less precedent–less of a niche within which their work can be easily framed.

Jane Ciabattari: Women who write in the 21st century have wider opportunities than in the past. (At one point women wrote under male pseudonyms or used initials to disguise who they were. At one point literary magazines were filled with stories by and about men and no batted an eye) But we are not in a post-feminist world. If anything, there is a bit of a backlash against the “favored” aspects of affirmative action (Which is too bad, because the point was to restore equity, not swing back). Gender roles, if anything, have shifted back to the more traditional.

I suspect one reason the major raves for the new Jonathan Franzen novel rankle some women writers is that Franzen is writing a relatively traditional nineteenth-century domestic novel, a form perfected by women over the past century, and the response he is getting seems out of proportion.

Sometimes I think on some levels it boils down to empathy. Women in this culture have tended to be raised with a dual perspective, seeing both male and female points of view, and are educated to read and give critical responses to literature by men with primarily male protagonists (we all read Moby-Dick, right? and the major war novels) as well as books by and about women. Most men in this culture are not raised to have this gift for empathetic flexibility, nor offered the idea that books by and about women are of equal intellectual weight.

What we need, I think, is to open the doors of imagination wide rather than favor a few authors who write about a narrow economic niche. I’ve been excited over the past year to read the work of newcomer Tiphanie Yanique, short story master Yiyun Li, the amazing Lily Hoang, who breaks the mold and puts it back together again, Jennifer Egan, who is pushing the limits of fiction in new ways with each book, and I consider them on par with the male writers whose work seems fresh and exciting to me this year.

Danielle Dutton: I’m torn. On the one hand, yes, there is an imbalance, and it can be infuriating, disappointing, stifling, just plain sad, especially because I’d like the world to be a fair place, not just for women writers but for any group of marginalized writers (or people) here in America or somewhere else. I myself haven’t felt discriminated against as a woman writer (or at least I haven’t registered any particular rejection as discriminatory), but I have certainly registered the patriarchal impulse pulsing through literary history and criticism, primarily in my many years as a student. So there’s that. On the other hand, fair or not, I don’t think anyone should dictate how or whom a publisher should publish. In a very basic sense, I’m against that. If we’re talking about publishing literature (i.e., art), then I don’t think that’s how it works. If we’re talking about review coverage in the New York Times, that’s another (shameful) story, because then it’s not about a publisher’s commitment to work that calls to her/him to be published, it’s about a review source (which is supposed to be a kind of public service, right?) ignoring what’s so obviously out there (be it writing by women, or books in translation, or experimental fiction, or . . . ).

This will perhaps come off as naïve, nevertheless my instinct is to say that if you don’t like how someone’s doing something, start doing something else. My perception is that there are a lot of choices out there right now in terms of where to publish your work. I mentioned that I’ve never really noticed gender discrimination as regards publishing my own writing, and perhaps this has to do with where I’ve chosen to submit my work (and this no doubt has to do with my answer to question 4). If a magazine consistently publishes mostly men, what’s the point of beating them over the head trying to get in? I don’t even want to be in that magazine. Does the desire to be included stem from some perception that the magazine “matters,” and we fear we won’t get recognition, or sales, or jobs because we’re not being included? There are some real issues there, but there’s also an opportunity to “let” other venues in. As I’m sure we all know, there are many presses and magazines that do publish a wonderful mix of women and men. Tarpaulin Sky Press and their magazine spring immediately to mind, as does Fence Books and magazine. And some of my favorite presses are presses dedicated to publishing women’s writing, such as Kelsey St. Press and the Belladonna* collective. The problem perhaps comes when we (or the people we are trying to or, for whatever reason, need to impress) don’t recognize the wider world of contemporary publishing, focusing narrowly on a few “major” presses and magazines and awards. Personally, I think the best way to work against these imbalances, at least in my own life, is to consistently champion the writers who matter to me, for example to focus my teaching on the work that thrills me, whether it be the novels of Virginia Woolf or the poems of Lisa Jarnot or the strange hybrid books of Anne Carson or Bhanu Kapil.

To this end (i.e., championing writing I love), I recently started a press of my own—Dorothy, a publishing project—which happens to be dedicated, as the website puts it, to “works of fiction, or near fiction, or about fiction, mostly by women.” My own desire to publish “mostly women” is something I’m actually still figuring out for myself. I can say that in a general sense it comes from 1) the fact that my own aesthetic literary interests tend mainly toward the work of women writers (I’m not out to posit a specific feminine aesthetic, just stating the case) and 2) my reaction to some patronizing/misogynistic words/moments I’ve witnessed from men (mostly men, anyway) in and out of the literary world. I’ve found such behavior and comments personally troubling, and this press is a very personal endeavor, named for my great aunt who loved books very much, and so I choose to engage my time and my money (as a publisher) elsewhere. This isn’t to say all men are pigs—no no no (and no offense to pigs)—or that I wouldn’t publish a man’s book—I already have one in the works—but that my primary interests lie in the writing I’ve seen from women, aesthetically and personally, at least right now, and I want to make that clear up front (ultimately, of course, the thing that matters most is that the books I publish are books I think are great, important, and provocative whether written by a man or a woman . . . if my interests were to publish male writers, would I be so bold as to state this on my website? . . . I doubt it, but at least the admission would be honest, even if the preference, as this whole discussion attests to, would be somewhat pointless). Incidentally, since posting my website earlier this year, even with the line there about an interest in publishing “mostly women,” I have had more inquiries about submissions from men than from women. Why is that?

I’d also like to propose that numbers aren’t always the most useful way of evaluating a publisher (not that the question implied this, but because it’s something I’ve thought about and would like to bring up). The press I work for is called Dalkey Archive, and it publishes mostly literature in translation and considerably more male writers than women writers (sigh), and yet I maintain that Dalkey is an important and worthwhile press, one that furthermore publishes some amazing, risky books by women (everything from Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and Violette Leduc’s La Batarde to Meiko Kanai’s The Word Book, Rosa Liksom’s Dark Paradise, and Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Mirror in the Well, which you should really check out, if you haven’t already).

Finally, I guess one thing that I would be interested in, and which might be useful, in addition to or as a way of “calling out,” would be to invite the “offending” publishers or magazines to be (a welcome) part of a forum discussion, such as this one, or to set up a conference or some panel discussion where men and women can sit and talk about the issue together, as writers, readers, publishers, people. In the end, the numbers themselves will mean something to people, to publishers, and interviewers, and reviewers . . . or they won’t.

Becca Klaver: In the blogosphere debates in the wake of Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s “Numbers Trouble,” I remember a lot of (mostly male) editors claiming that they didn’t publish as many women as men because fewer women submitted to their magazines. We have fewer hard numbers on this, and they can’t be verified as easily as the publication numbers can be, but I believe that this is probably the case.

So, then, why? Is it because women are cultured to be less assertive than men? Have a harder time “putting themselves out there”? It is because women, on the whole, have a harder time believing their work is worthy of publication? I think there is some truth to these speculations. In my roles as teacher, editor, and assistant programs director for a poetry program, I have seen how many women do not submit their work to magazines or contests unless they’re encouraged to do so by someone else (and sometimes, not even then). Not everyone, of course, but enough to make you wonder what the root is. And what I think the root is—crises of self-esteem and confidence that overwhelm girls and women—feels like a culturally pervasive problem that sometimes feels impossible to “solve” without total cultural upheaval. I shouldn’t say “impossible,” though—total cultural upheaval in the name of women has clearly occurred more than once in this country in the last century!

My other hunch, which I have even less “proof” for, is that women are still doing more to manage the mundane details of life than men—from doing dishes to planning travel itineraries—and that leaves them less time for the “leisure” that gathering together submission packets can often feel like.

Elizabeth McCracken: First, I’ll say that it’s changing. I think writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Nicole Krauss, and Julie Orringer are reviewed very seriously–not to mention Zadie Smith, who I think is seen as one of the most important writers of her generation here as well as in England. In twenty years, the conversation will be different.

Older women writers–by which I mean, 40 and older–are not going to be (you should pardon the expression) grandfathered in. People praise them but they somehow don’t have the same kind of reputation as male writers in the same age brackets. Sue Miller, Mary Gaitskill, Joanna Scott, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathryn Davis, Joy Williams, Sarah Schulman, Leslie Marmon Silko–the usual suspects, in other words.

Of course, there is no Geiger counter for sexism. Do I believe that women as a whole have not been taken as seriously as literary writers? Absolutely. But it’s impossible to point to specific careers–male or female–whose careers have benefited or suffered because of it. I have read for enough fellowships and graduate programs to know that, no matter the demographic breakdown of the people whose work you want to support, when you’re reading and choosing you’re always certain it comes down to the work and only the work. When I see best-of-lists, I count up the genders, and I groan when they’re overwhelmingly male. I also know I have helped compile prize lists and fellowship programs that are primarily or exclusively male (as well as plenty that are primarily or exclusively female), and I know I cannot bear kicking a male writer whose work I adore off a list simply because there’s a female writer whose work I like well enough but less who won’t make it if I don’t. I can only hope that my lifetime list is well-balanced.

Don Share: If we generalize (and I hope that to do so is different from stereotyping), men are more likely to put themselves forward and form advantageous and powerful professional relationships; they are likely to get better jobs and better-paying jobs, and to dominate discussions. Women are condescended to in many kinds of ways. Moreover, women who raise children are significantly less free to get writing done and get it out there than men are. Erin Belieu and Cate Marvin, among others, have described these things well; and Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young have compiled numbers that have given us all pause. But to put it succinctly: All of the women writers I know have had to work in the face of one form or another of disadvantage.

2. What do you think of calling out publishers and magazines for gender imbalances among the writers they publish? Will this be effective or not? What else might work to call attention to the imbalances?

Tracy Bowling: I think it’s definitely worth bringing gender imbalances to publishers’ and editors’ attention when they occur. Often this gender imbalance happens to the most conscientious and proactive of editors despite their best efforts to the contrary, but it’s certainly worth raising the issue just in case they hadn’t given a lot of thought to what writers they were and weren’t representing. I think the hounding on that front should generally stop there–either there’s a good explanation and a good faith effort or there’s not–and that the work then becomes to promote and spread the word about women writers and to improve conditions that might stand in the way of women writers producing and publishing work. It’s still true on average that women spend more time doing household chores and taking care of children, for instance–that obviously eats into writing time, and while changes like these may seem to hinge primarily on macro-level social reforms, I think there are also things the writing community can do to encourage or enable women to write more, to write more broadly (in more genres, forms, lengths, etc.), and to get that writing out there.

Jane Ciabattari: I think it is useful to point out the number of reviews of male versus female writers, the number of male/female bylines, because it’s likely the imbalance has crept in unconsciously. And unless it is pointed out, it is likely to continue.

Stephanie G’Schwind: Donald Revell, one of the Colorado Review‘s longtime poetry editors, once said to me, “We don’t publish poets; we publish poems.” And that really resonated with me. So I find myself looking for stories and essays first, and particular writers second. (This is one of the many reasons we don’t read cover letters before we read manuscripts.) And yet, gender balance is important to me. For the fall issue of the Colorado Review, which I just sent to the printer an hour ago, I was at a place where I had two stories and needed one more, and it occurred to me as I was searching for the right story that I hoped it would be by a male author, as the other two stories were written by women. And that’s how it turned out. Most of the time, the pieces I select for the magazine end up being balanced by gender whether I initially intended that or not; but I have published issues in which all the fiction was written by women, and issues in which all the fiction was written by men. And I find I’m not comfortable with that.

Becca Klaver: I think it’s the necessary first step. Because when you have these debates without being able to point to numbers, those who want to argue that this isn’t really a problem—that plenty of women get published—always ask for numbers, as if the topic isn’t worthy of discussion without empirical proof. So, it’s good to have some cold, hard data to present and to analyze, and then it’s good to put it aside and talk about causes, symptoms, and solutions. There isn’t a scientific answer to this problem, but people seem to want to see the problem in a scientific way, anyway, as if our cultural woes are always visible woes. They’re not.

Elizabeth McCracken: You know, I’m not sure. My private fantasy is that Terry Gross was horrified when she heard–if she heard–the gender breakdown for the writers who have appeared on her show. (That’s the breakdown that broke my heart.) When these various statistics were published in the past couple of weeks–the Times reviewing 24% more fiction by men in the Book Review; Oprah not having chosen a woman writer for a book club in five years–I think a lot of us were disturbed, and then strangely comforted that there was evidence to back up some old suspicions. I do hope that people whose choices have been analyzed find it useful–with an eye to improve that lifetime average.

Don Share: I think it’s salutary; and perhaps it has already been, and will continue to be effective. Yet it has to be understood that these imbalances are more intricate than numbers alone indicate. Stephen Corey, editor of Georgia Review, recently left a comment on John Gallaher’s blog that I hope will stimulate further discussion:

“Suppose you went to the trouble of picking up the current (Summer 2010) issue of Georgia? You wouldn’t have to READ the poems–you could just count the male and female poets, finding three and four respectively. Or you could go further, counting the pages of poetry by males and females, finding nine and thirty-five respectively… Are things this way all the time? No. Should one run four times as many pages of poetry by women as men, or men as women, because of the gender of the poets? No. What are we counting here, and why–especially if we are just counting without reading?”

Change is needed, but it’s worth considering his point about “counting without reading.”

3. How might a magazine, newspaper or publisher work to better represent female writers? Is any change necessary?

Tracy Bowling: I’m in general an advocate for publishers and editors relaxing and broadening their aesthetic tendencies to make room for female writers who take the risk of working in uncharacteristic and/or uncategorizeable forms and genres. A lot of female writers seem to be doing great things with atypical genres like horror and adventure, or with hybrid forms like lyric essays, and I feel like the journals and presses who are bending their aesthetic frameworks to allow for such risk-taking are generally receiving happy returns from reviewers and buyers.

Jane Ciabattari: I think it helps to maintain a gender balance on staff so that all voices are heard. The question is, who is the “I” making the choice or the value judgment. Male or female? If a relatively equal number of women and men are gatekeepers, the “I” is served in both cases. Also, it helps to maintain a gender balance among the top leaders. Everyone pays attention to the thinkers at the top.

Becca Klaver: I like to think of the editor’s job in the old-fashioned way. Someone who’s actively seeking new writers to promote, not just by going after big names, or looking through the slush pile, but by reading other magazines and by asking around. Young editors, or editors of a brand-new magazine, can’t just take what’s sent to them—they have to actively seek out work, and build an aesthetic that way. So, what I’m getting at is that I think it’s absolutely appropriate for editors to seek out women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups to help correct imbalances, and more than that, to create a richer, more exciting publication. It’s also appropriate for faculty advisors of school lit mags to teach their students to be aware of these issues.

The idea of the editor as Bastion of Impeccable Taste is only an ego trip, a myth. It’s always the straight white male editors who are getting defensive and saying they’re only choosing “the best work” by choosing other straight white male writers. I believe they think they are. I also believe that these guys are the ones who have had the privilege (loss) of never having had to try on another cultural perspective—never having to pass, to code-switch. They don’t know as much what it is to be inside the mind of a person who is different from them. Besides the lack of empathy (and therefore the increase in defensiveness) this engenders, their publication selections will be the poorer for that; we see that in plenty of mainstream magazines and in some indies, too.

Elizabeth McCracken: Of course newspapers and magazines (and radio shows) could do a better job–but part of the problem, it seems to me, is marketing. Books by women are marketed as magical and quiet and lyrical; they have covers with portions of body parts (the side of a face, a pair of hands–the parade of headless and/or faceless people who have appeared on these novels! the amputated legs!) and floaty script. They don’t look serious. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Is it merely a matter of making the book look commercial? Is it underestimating all those fabled women book buyers? Books by women that straddle the literary/commercial line are pushed over into the commercial, with covers that look like covers of previously successful books. I absolutely agree with Jennifer Weiner on this subject: the Venn Diagram that shows the intersection between Literary and Commercial has a far bigger overlap for men than for women.

4. Is gender bias the most prevalent type at work in the publishing industry today? If not, what is?

Tracy Bowling: I think there is a lot of work still to be done to give a fair shot to writers of other nationalities who write in English. From the perspective of a fiction writer especially, I feel like I see a lot of writers from other countries rejected not for lack of literary merit but for their use of unfamiliar, often culturally influenced forms or styles of storytelling. Correcting for this bias means that publishers and editors have to question their invisible frameworks for the structure and content of good literature, and asking if those frameworks may in fact be culturally biased in favor of Western literature specifically. Hopefully such reflection would go a long way toward correcting gender biases as well–while I don’t want to suggest that women create in fundamentally different ways from men, there are plenty of unexamined assumptions about what makes good writing that can potentially block out forms of writing that emerge from the real experiences and contexts of being in a marginalized group.

Jane Ciabattari: It’s particularly evident right now, but I wouldn’t say it’s the most prevalent bias.

Danielle Dutton: Again I think this depends on what community one is paying attention to. If we’re talking about The Publishing Industry, about publishing houses that regularly do get reviewed in the New York Times, for example, then I’d say the major bias is artistic, a bias against anything that isn’t familiar, or obviously marketable.

Becca Klaver: Probably not. But it’s the easiest to count, since names reveal gender more easily than they reveal ethnicity, disability, etc. I really hope that “Numbers Trouble,” The Count at VIDA, and other counting and analysis projects are just the beginning of a more wide-ranging effort that will affect writers in all sorts of marginalized positions.

Elizabeth McCracken: Oh heavens, no. Writers of color and gay and lesbian writers are still subject to the instant genrefication of their work by people, simply for writing about the lives somewhat like their own. There are exceptions, of course, but no major publisher would ever be nervous about the marketability–and therefore publishability–of a book because it had too many heterosexual characters. Straight white writers don’t have to worry about what their characters’ lives being defined as “content”–as in, “You write beautifully, but I’m not sure about the content.”

Maria Melendez: I’ve just come from a reading and book discussion with Gloria Zamora, featuring her first book, the memoir Sweet Nata: Growing Up in Rural New Mexico. Our library in Pueblo, Colorado has a wonderful Latino Book Group hosted by our (publicly funded! halelu!) Hispanic Resource Librarian, Charlene Garcia Simms. How did we end up celebrating this particular ascending woman writer? Rudolfo Anaya wants to promote this memoir because he believes it to be an essential contribution to Chicano literature, and to American literature. Halelus to you, Rudy, for holding the door open to a lady. Eventually, we’ll open more doors for ourselves (we are, everyday, mas y mas—witness the virtual gathering here), we’ll remove the hinges and change out the old portals for…who knows what? Halls lined with mylar and mirrors, where we can see ourselves, and see all who travel with us, as Rudy does.

Ahem. Does the gentleman Jonathan Franzen use the platform of his fame to hold doors open for any up and coming (or down and going!) ladies? What other writers does he promote? I’m sorry I’m not up on my White writer gossip—to make a fairer comparison, which White male writers over 70 are going out of their way to promote new women’s writing?

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Calling out literary publishers, promoters and personae for gender imbalances is completely appropriate.* (And yes, I use “literary” in the broadest, most Latinate sense—“of reading and writing.”) My friend and colleague Francisco Aragón (Director of Letras Latinas, founder and publisher of Momotombo Press) works hard to periodically make constructive “calling out” gestures, where needed, to draw attention to national-scale poetry venues from which Latino poets are conspicuously absent. I’ve often daydreamed about a grape-boycott-style, long-running collective snub of literary magazines that disproportionately exclude Latino writers, literary event series that feature too few, or zero, Latino guest speakers/readers, and bookstores that refuse to bring Latino lit front and center, so to speak. On the down side, this boycott would run so deep as to leave readers/patrons with precious few remaining options. On the up side, such a boycott would highlight those out there fighting the good lucha—Resistencia Book Store in San Antonio, Mestizo Coffee House in Salt Lake City, the several active Latino-focused literary publishers working today, to begin to name a few orgs on the working side of Latino equality.

Where are the similarities/informative parallel histories of the struggles for literary (and by extension, cultural) equality between writers of color in the U.S. and women writers in the U.S.? I think that in both cases, our resistance and survival (survivance, thank YOU, Mr. Vizenor) are served by two concurrent efforts:

1) Work we do to collectively hold our own doors open—for ourselves! Examples: CALYX, on the x-chromosome side, Arte Publico for the raza route.

2) Work we and our allies do to foster integration and inclusivity of our work in curricula, in anthologies, in reading series, in reviews, in print, on screens, etc.**

Most of what I’ve had to say has been about the non-commercial, non-profit literary world. I’m not an insider to the commercial fiction world (as is Jennifer Weiner, whose remarks launched this discussion), and have the great joy and relief of speaking from the puny land of poetry, home of an entire genre already poorly received and underdiscussed on the whole—Dana Gioia, pass me a tissue, pleez—where expectations for public acclaim do not soar to the Oprahsphere, and Moby Norton may be the biggest, whitest whale that drives us crazy— Anyhoo. Even while considering Latino poetry, I experience Franzenfreude, as Weiner describes it—dismay at the disproportionate tauting of male literary successes, at the expense of recognition for more women writers. Witness the reputation and New Age bookstore distribution of Pablo Neruda vs. Gabriela Mistral, or the beloved-of-anthologists oeuvre of Jimmy Santiago Baca vs. that of any Chicana poet.

Sigh. It’s times like these I reach for a bottle of Buddhist non-attachment. Isn’t fame just emptiness, anyway? Isn’t the plea “Know me, know me, know me” the outward expression of an inner hunger that only leads to more hunger? Although I know I have to resurface into Babel from time to time—it’s where my commerce takes place, after all—I guard the times, deep underground in writing or other contemplative processes, when there is “no me.” When all my communities, both those of marginalization and those of privilege,

flow through, but do not get trapped in, this one body.

*I would like to take this opportunity to say: Garrison Keillor! You probably do not realize this! But you are promoting! A White supremacist vision! Of American poetry! Please! Take! A! Critical! Look! At! Your! Writer’s Almanac list of featured poets! And! Then! Email me! Have I got books by some great women poets of color to send to you.

** Does this equate to having “assimilationist” goals, with all the fraught baggage and plaintive hope that a-word carries?

5. What advice would you offer to the next generation of female writers?

Tracy Bowling: Find and fight for mentors. It can be hard to find women writers who have the time or energy to offer their wisdom and experience. This may also mean fighting for the increased presence of female editors, female publishers, female panelists, female faculty, female administrators, and so on, wherever it is in the writing world you don’t see a female mentor represented.

And encourage each other. Find writers you admire and blog about them, or write them notes. Communicate about the work you love and the kind of work you want to see more of. This is a good way to make sure that a place for it will be created.

Jane Ciabattari: Read and support the work of other women; keep it in the mix of work you consider valuable. It is so easy to slide into a habit of downplaying or downgrading work by women when the culture shifts toward a more male-oriented focus, as it has during this first decade of the 21st century, with the country at war.

I recently looked back at the winners and finalists of the National Book Critics Circle awards since the first year–36 years of winners. So many astonishing writers. I don’t know if their work is being read as frequently as DeLillo, Updike, Cheever, Bellow, Roth, and (Franzen). so I’ll just pick a sampling, in alphabetical order, and say, read these authors (I’m sticking to fiction, because that’s what I know best): Chimamanda Adichie, Renata Adler, Kiran Desai, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, Elizabeth Hardwick, Shirley Hazzard, Bharati Mukherjee, Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick, Jayne Anne Phillips, Annie Proulx, Carol Shields, Jane Smiley, Zadie Smith, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Tan, Alice Walker. You can read the books they were honored for and more honorees on the NBCC website, http://bookcritics.org/awards/past_awards/

I think Kamy Wicoff and colleagues at SheWrites have a good idea going.

And putting forth the names of women writing today as editors for anthologies, judges for contests, guest editors and top editors for literary magazines, reviewing and supporting their work, can make a huge difference. Being male has been the “default” position for writers for so long, it takes lots of effort to widen that position to include all of us.

Becca Klaver: Find a community of other women writers. Through an MFA program, through starting a chapbook press, whatever. I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to me to have the women of the poetry programs at Columbia College Chicago—undergrads, grad students, and faculty—and the women of Switchback Books on my side. We promote each other’s work as much as possible—through blogs, Facebook links, etc.—and we all benefit this way. You do have to start by letting people know what you’re up to, but oftentimes it’s easier to do that within a small group of friends, and then have that support system to help you promote yourself, since self-promotion will always feel icky to some people, no matter how confident they feel about their writing.

Elizabeth McCracken: Years ago, on the late lamented Readerville, some annoying dude said that the reason there would never be a Great American Women Writer is that women worry too much about people liking them, even in their fiction: they avoid frightening darkness. I don’t think this is true–I’ll mention Mary Gaitskill again, because I think she’s a genius and oh my I cannot think of a less ingratiating writer. Still, the observation has resonated with me, and if I’m ever afraid of the dark in my own work I ask myself if I’m worried that someone will read it and not like me. I tell my students–all of them–to likewise be careful.

And: some people will tell you, “Real writers write every day.” Sometimes life interrupts, and women’s lives are still more likely to interrupt–taking care of children, or parents–and life actually makes you a better writer. Again, one needs to look at the lifetime average, and not the daily page count. Don’t let anyone tell you what makes a real writer, in other words.

The last thing I’ll say: on the one hand it’s good that Jonathan Franzen is the writer who’s occasioned all of this. He can take it. & I do agree that it’s annoying to read reviews that say, He takes the domestic seriously, and that’s REVOLUTIONARY! Believe me: I published my last novel in the same week, or nearly, as The Corrections, and I remember how it stung to read that the novel had been reinvented. On the other hand, the fact is that no writer, no novel, NOBODY got the attention that Franzen and The Corrections did 9 years ago; and of course the Freedom attention is even more than that. It’s a one-off. He’s the high water mark. Phillip Roth might even feel bad at how seriously Franzen is taken, but I don’t think he could claim Anti-Semitism or Septuagenerianism. Beyond Franzen’s undeniable talent as a writer: he talks up and promotes women writers, and moreover he writes some of the best women characters in modern fiction. It seems a shame that his name has been yoked to literary sexism.

Don Share: It would be patronizing for a male editor to dispense advice! But I’d like to say this: I hope that every writer will be as persistent as her resources and circumstances permit, and that despair, however much it impinges, will never defeat any writer who has talent and devotion.

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CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTES

Tracy Bowling is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University, where she serves as a managing editor of Puerto del Sol. She also runs the magazine and lit blog Uncanny Valley with her husband, Mike Meginnis. Her work has been published online at PANK and Storyglossia.

Jane Ciabattari, an award-winning and widely published short story writer, is author of the collection Stealing the Fire. Her reviews and interviews have been published on NPR.org, Salon.com, The Daily Beast, the New York Times, The Guardian, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and dozens of others. She currently serves as president of the National Book Critics Circle. She has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship and fellowships at The MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has taught at Columbia’s Journalism School, New York University, Knox College, Bennington’s Low-residency MFA program and numerous summer writers’ workshops from Squaw Valley to Taos to Chautauqua. (More at www.janeciabattari.com Follow her on Twitter @janeciab)

Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life and S P R A W L. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, Where We Live Now: an annotated reader, and A Best of Fence. She designs books at Dalkey Archive Press; is an instructor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa; and edits Dorothy, a publishing project.

Stephanie G’Schwind is the editor of Colorado Review and the Colorado Prize for Poetry book series. She directs the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University where she runs an internship program for graduate students.

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), a founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, and a PhD student in Literatures in English at Rutgers University.

Elizabeth McCracken, a former public librarian, is the author of four books: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, The Giant’s House (a finalist for a National Book Award), Niagara Falls All Over Again (winner of the L.L. Winship /PEN New England award), and the short-story collection Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry. She is frequently a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received grants and awards from numerous organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Maria Melendez publishes Pilgrimage in Pueblo, Colorado, a literary magazine serving a far-flung community of writers, artists, naturalists, contemplatives, activists, seekers, and other adventurers in and beyond the Greater Southwest (www.pilgrimagepress.org). University of Arizona Press has published two of her poetry collections: How Long She’ll Last in This World (2006), and Flexible Bones (2010). She serves as Contributing Editor for Latino Poetry Review and acquiring editor for Momotombo Press, a chapbook publisher featuring prose and poetry by emerging Latino writers.

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine. His most recent full-length book of poems is Squandermania.

If this essay were a burlesque dancer, she would speak with pasties and feather boa, full-bodily bumping to display all the ways the best writing doesn’t fit the mold, bending back so far it hurts, asking if you like her, then whispering she does not need saving, is not really dancing for you, though she’ll never stop smiling as wide and hard as a girl on a gas station calendar. If this essay were a drag king, she would ask you to watch as the best writing applies facial hair and stuffs a bottle in his pants, asking you to notice, forget, then notice again what is a body, what is not a body, wishing for you to see which dance steps evoke the body as it is, which remake the body. If this essay were one of those straight guys who doesn’t see the ways a woman remakes her body for her own use, he would not know how to dance on this post male-gaze stage where part of the job is to perform mockery to power, because no matter how, or where, or with what authority he had or had not lived, audiences don’t come to the show expecting him to apologize for his body.

This essay is, as it happens, none of the above, but is rather a plea, from a literary nonfiction writer who believes women’s memoir is not telling the whole truth if it claims the past is ever something a woman can fully leave behind. I begin here with burlesque and drag because both, like my identity as a high-femme queer woman, are performance modes which embrace the old and the new, and in doing so subvert the old-school male gaze and celebrate, upset, complicate, obscure and remake women’s bodies. All of which I look for in women’s memoirs, essays and nonfiction lyrics—women’s voices resisting redemption, complicating, rather than apologizing for, sex. When sexuality in women’s nonfiction narratives, queer or straight, is relegated to the redemption or recovery arc we suggest that women are unable to intelligently embrace the full and messy spectrum of sexuality, and need only to write the erotic as mea culpa.

While I agree with Audre Lorde’s notion that the erotic is the life force we wish to permeate the rest of living, I also use the term erotic here to mean sex—unrepentant, life affirming, body-banging sex, but also the unredeemed parts of ourselves that shadow sexual joy, because one rarely exists without the other. When I ask women’s memoirs to resist redemption, at least some of the time, I mean I wish to write, and read, a better erotics of sexuality—Lorde’s call for an embodiment that permeates everything but also the erotic absorption of the rest of life into the gritty corporeality of sex. I mean that if nonfictional representations of female sexuality were less the province of cable TV exposés of the “secret” lives of women and more the subject of un-sensationalized, uncensored and witty discourse, we might all be able to better comprehend what women’s many ways of representing sexuality mean to women’s identities, intimacies, and ways of organizing our worlds.

Visceral, transformative, and hot sexual writing by women, queer or not queer, as well as gorgeously rendered women’s memoir and essay on many subjects, is certainly abundant. Yet too many memoiristic renderings of sexuality are bound to the confessional mode, particularly those written by women, including queer women publishing outside of the ever shrinking Lesbian-Gay-Bi-Transgender-Queer [LGBTQ] press world (and I include aspects of my own past works here). Our personal, nonfictional depictions of the actuality of sex which define sexuality as only a mistake, or only healing, or only love, or abuse, or pleasure, or regret, do a disservice to women’s desire, even when otherwise brilliantly written.  Female sexual experience is all of the above and more, every one of our erotic urges steeped in what individual women, and women throughout time, have done, and have had done to them, in cars, in their fantasies, in open fields, in dormitory rooms, in professor’s offices, in strange or known houses, in their childhood bedrooms, on the phone or online, at the prom, in the alleys behind bars, in their love affairs and marriages, in their own apartments, on the pages of their diaries, and under the bright lights of any chosen or un-chosen stage.

By resisting redemption I mean embracing the way Alison Bechdel writes (and draws) an ecstatic coming out story in a book that begins with her father’s apparent suicide, or the way Mary Cappello writes of the intimacy of cancer treatment by imagining her oncologist penetrating her with her fist. All the big abstractions—grief, love, loss, hope, fear, bravery, despair, ecstasy —happen in actual life at the same time as sex, and if these simultaneities are more often evident in memoirs by queer women this may be because LGBTQ writers writing since Stonewall have written within a countercultural expectation of an out-of-the-closet sexuality, in which sex is just another landscape writers are charged to bring to the page.

Alternative lesbian, bi, genderqueer arts communities formed themselves in social spaces free of the conventional male gaze. The ways female sexualities are expressed in these off-center cabaret-style settings is through explicit use of sexual language, ironic costume, drag lipsynching, burlesque poetics, sequined back-bending, mustachioed male impersonation, clowning, miming and aerial acrobatics, mixed up with storytelling and lyric monologue, work which may never be fully translatable to the literary page. Yet these spaces—often alternatives to the bars, geographies free of both the self-defensive stances necessary for any woman living within the structures of misogyny and of expectations of apology for past sexual experience—are where many queer women artists’ identities are made.

The literary influences of the queer realms are not always recognizable in mainstream settings where lesbians might now be welcome, but where little is known about the alternative worlds we’ve made. And while much of the margin will never cross over into the center—the margins being worlds unto themselves, not for everyone, made up of individuals who wish to not be invaded or assimilated or appropriated—some aspects of any underground can speak out to other realms, and might themselves deepen if more often invited into respectful conversation and exchange regarding the formal concerns of the conventional literary world.

Out queer women writers work today at an intense intersection. We are deeply embedded into college and university classrooms and administrations; we work in positions of power in publishing, theater and media; we speak at mainstream male-dominated literary conferences. We are no longer only speaking to ourselves, but we are permeating into the rest of American letters. We come with sexualities made of unapologetic wit, provocation and campy self-rendering—a presence created within an unashamed and sub-culturally supported embrace of our own desires.

This queer world sexual expression made by-and-for women often contains a charge that is, to us, normal—but which, seen outside of our own spheres, is often skewed as too bodied, too porno, too gratuitous, too unrepentant, too angry, too un-publishable, too un-tenurable—by too many of the venues writers depend on for recognition, validation, citizenship. This means useful alternative models of women’s essays and memoirs that vex the boundaries between female sexual experience and the rest of life remain in a countercultural domain very few beyond the queer world know exists.

Which is a shame, because the self-defining ways we discuss female sexuality in the lesbian-queer world might help transform how female sexuality is explored in all women’s creative nonfiction, and might be of use to any woman in search of a smart, witty rethinking of erotic expression. I say this as a challenge to myself, as well as to all CNF writers and their publishers. It’s easy to write for emotional response, harder to radically remake the form and content of the work, therefore our bodies, therefore women’s lives.

Which leads me back to resisting redemption, or resisting a reliance on only redemption, or complicating the meaning of redemption. Book editors so often use the word redemption when describing what they are looking for in women’s literary nonfiction—which even some independent presses want to squeeze into the classic conversion narrative arc dating back to St. Augustine, an admittedly lovely story form replicated in every AA meeting in which the teller is asked to tell what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now, but which assumes that a sexual past is something to recover from.

The landscape of the women’s memoir will never broaden, and the sass, irreverence, and re-inventive power of the contemporary queer-lesbian aesthetic will always have problems finding its way into the publication fray, if we don’t take apart expectations placed on women’s autobiographical stories. At stake is the integrity of not just women’s bodies but the contributions of women to a literature of actuality, a genre in which actuality itself is a kind of character. When our stories rely too heavily on the victim-turned-hero structure we perpetuate an illusion of actuality that is dangerously less than actual.

It’s comforting to believe that women can struggle toward a moment of crisis and change, and then, redeemed, move forward. Such is compelling mythology, and humans need mythological foundations in order to abide. But linear redemption is a fiction and the purpose of nonfiction art (too often a separate category than the bestselling memoir) is to continually remake and deepen ways we see actuality. Actual life is never purely redemptive, and we never fully recover from what happens to us, particularly the erotic surprises, and violations, that occur when we’re young.

I don’t dismiss recovery itself as a valid woman’s experience. Twenty years since the start of my own story of change and remaking, what I know is that the path out is no easy arc, but  rather a cyclone cluttered with usable furniture, broken utensils, the family jewels, all manner of keepsake and detritus— my past, like all forms of history, continually returning and receding again—which is part of why I understand the trap of allowing an always forward-moving recovery journey to pose as actuality. The too simple redemption narrative might sell well, but is work that entertains rather than elucidates, and so fails to contribute to a lasting literature that breaks open the truths of women’s lives.

What I want to see in all women’s memoirs, essays, and nonfiction lyrics, including my own, is less linear confession and more attempt, in form and content, to embrace brilliant, funny, excruciating, spangled, garish and yes even intentionally titillating contradictions, including the motion and feel of smart-mouth unrepentant women, bumping and grinding any number of desires, challenging all our uncertain histories, a nonfiction literature which, like real life, might make us happy and uncomfortable at the same time.

Barrie Jean Borich
Essayist and creative nonfiction editor of Water~Stone Review

Here, where I live and work, in the Washington DC area, pundits and politicos and some regular people have the idea–and somewhat hilariously accept the notion–that Here is the center of the world. The discussion of what happens Here seems to go on non-stop. On these wide capital city streets, in wide Capitol building hallways, on the airwaves, as people walk along. You can overhear a conversation about Here, almost anywhere, and you can turn on the radio, and hear analysis of Here go on at great length. Here is not just a political environment. Here is not just defined by ties and flag pins. There are artists and writers and arts communities Here. There are national endowments Here. Awards are greatly touted Here. Prize winners are feted Here and heretofore, accorded great respect.

Not too long ago, a male radio personality saw me out, here, in the sunshine, and dubbed our meeting a “sighting.” He says, You’re so rarely seen. A day after the “sighting” said radio man sent me an email, asking me to comment on the state of the novel today.

My process for deciding whether I can respond to what people ask is straightforward: if I can answer in three minutes or less, I reply. If I can answer, but it will take me longer, I work toward a reply if I have some obligation or some burning passion about what they’ve asked. If I cannot answer, or have no passion, I do not reply. Can you predict, based on his question, whether he heard from me?

But here is different: here is where Women in Letters & Literary Arts considers its focus and its future and its femmes-de-lettres. I have reason to take the time, to articulate and to air my views. The state of the novel does matter to me greatly, although, can the state of the novel be summarized, or even surmised? Perhaps, perhaps not. The state of the novel depends in part on requirements, and the requirements of novels, of poems and of art are quite clear. The novel—and other forms of art—must be, first and foremost, novel. This freshness requirement is explicitly true of all art, literature not excepted. In order to be admired, or respected, or celebrated, new literature has to give the illusion or the impression of covering something new, or treating something that isn’t new in a new or new-ish way. This artistic requirement of freshness or innovation applies across genres—and is, itself, not new. New takes on old subjects must qualify as fresh, because, as my mother has always said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” So, in order to be able to stand up and be artistic, you have to be able to be fresh, even if only by finesse. To seek the grace note, or the tryst and turn, is, in our time, an admirable way to go fresh. As my mother has always said to me, "There is nothing new under sun." With this philosophical truth unarguable, freshness and finesse become worth reaching for.

You can be new because you are new, and you can be new because you are unknown. If I raise the name of one of my current favorite women writers, I wonder whether I’ll be calling out a name new to you? Have you read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? Are you familiar with her growing body of work? Are you aware that this celebrated African woman writer is producing great books, winning big prizes—the Orange, the Booker Mann, the Macarthur? Adichie has published two novels, a short story collection, an early play.

I have been reading her latest book, Half of a Yellow Sun. And her stories: "That Thing Around Your Neck." I have heard her talk about the perils of marriage for women, and the tyranny of the Euro-American storyline. Ballsy. I have found her language, and her inventiveness and her treatment of men particularly stunning, and delicious. I started to read Adichie’s current novel because another woman, a physician, a through and through American, insisted that I get and read Half of a Yellow Sun—an emotional, if figurative, press of the novel into my open hand.

The friends of mine who recommend novels to me are women of great courage. My friends and compatriots generally want me to tell them what to read. A book I haven’t heard of is often quieted around me—surely, my pals presume, the writer knows what and who to read.

Adichie herself writes about Africa, or, about Africa in America. A conflagration of geographies that she subtly and heroically describes. New subjects in the here and now. Neither Africa as a subject, nor Africa in America as a subject, has much, if anything to do with the American cultural preoccupation with African Americans. We African Americans are so very hybrid: we are GMOs of culture—distinct from Africa, and from America. But isn’t that another story? And for another time.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie does not represent Africa, but her work never moves its gaze from the ancient Continent in the modern world, presenting the Continent as old country, in new and evocative ways. We can read Adichie and experience how parts of Africa are managing in this millennial age, where the rest of the world has gone digital, and has moved on to new preoccupations, tiny-screen, hyper-linked obsessions. Scarcity and rubber and palm-greasing and petrol are still vibrant controlling issues There, where her characters live and beg and breathe. There is much we don’t realize about hard goods and soft relations that Adichie raises up to us in her subversively innovative stories, That Thing Around Your Neck, and in her novel novels—Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun. Adichie is funny and eloquent and in some ways furious. If you read her, and read her closely, you begin to understand: her worldview takes the broad view: there’s blue-soaped Brillo between there and here. Her observations of who we all are come from far, and therefore read as new. To hear Adichie discuss the dangers of a single story, or how short stories come and linger before they come alive, or how her opinions of marriage and gay people emerge in her fiction, or what it means to watch—follow the links below.

TED talk

YouTube Video

YouTube Video (2)

Adichie’s work reminds us that lots of us write to break out of the province of the parochial—to step outside the old walled city, no matter that old city’s name. We writers and artists and we VIDA-types are always battling to be met where we live, outside the proverbial Gate. Where we start from determines how far out we can get. What we know is that there’s nothing new or refreshing or awakening on the inside: there is what we all are always seeking—les nouvelles.

A decade and a half ago, I published a debut novel. Just the other day, I was sitting in my new editor’s office, discussing the book before us presently, my “long-awaited” second novel. My agent was telling the story of our deciding on the title of my first book. She said, “I turned my back just for one minute, and the book was called The Good Negress. One minute!” she said, reminding all of us of her very real alarm. The title, The Good Negress, was/is a new take on an old word. A new tryst, a new twist, nouvelle.

If we ask ourselves the question–Who has literary and artistic power? – even if we name others, we cannot leave out our own names. If we ask the old guard, they might repeat an old saw, and say they: They have the power. But, anything inactive, inert or unchanged cannot have power, and that’s the only way the power goes to they. When we consider who we turn to, commingle with, rely on, who we look to to make what we need to happen happen, we have to define power as an expansion of we. My first editor, Shannon Ravenel, my first publisher, Elisabeth Scharlatt, my agent, Wendy Weil, my very perceptive purchasing editor, Julie Grau, my current editor, Rebecca Saletan, my former editor-compatriot, Tracy Sherrod, my curator-critic-compatriot, Kinshasha Holman-Conwill, my writer countrywomen: Crystal Wilkinson, Janet Sylvester, Chimamanda Adichie, Adichie’s editor, Robin Desser, my poet-partner, Nikky Finney, my writer-hero: Toni Morrison. We all, double x’s, seek & write new about this old world we live in, see new about these old paradigms we reject; we write female about our brothers, about the men; we write crystalline about our sisters, daughters, sons. We nod to each other, we teach. We wield pens, pound keyboards, make new. This is not for naught. This is not for the timid. This is not a limited or limiting activity. Our words do not stay corralled. Our futures are not bound and gagged. We · have · power.

Now, using power takes gumption and vigilance and courage: drape & display. We populate literature, and literary pursuits; in the country of writing/reading, we have to claim our geography just like ants occupy anthills, like worker bees inhabit hives. We · are · not · strangers · to · each · other. We are not unable to identify each other, to literally or figuratively press our works into each other’s hands.

There is nothing novel about us women writing novels. See Jane, see Willa, see Anais, see Zora. If we didn’t write, I daresay, we’d have a whole lot less to read. If we didn’t labor over the lovely word, we’d have a sight fewer well-spoken children, the market for keyboards and for pens would be decimated, the history of ink would be interrupted, the education of children and women would be lopsided, or lost. Just like we are teachers, and mothers, and compassionate folks, who nurse and nurture and who also choose not to—so too, we are authors, a powerful corps of creators. We can take the helm and recognize each other, and each other’s work. We can.

Every woman who reads supports the work of other women. Women in Letters & Literary Arts necessarily refers, as a moniker, to a broad band of working women, united in the endeavor of shaping ideas into notable expression, and keeping good words aloft. We can acknowledge the women who make books and make publishing; we can call their names. We can grace their prodigious output with our activism and our regard.

A.J. Verdelle

Novelist