For more information on Editor’s Corner contact me at mwilson@vidaweb.org.

On her project, role and publishing philosophy:

Cherry Bomb Books is an imprint of Bona Fide Books, and I started it last year to publish Get Out of My Crotch!: Twenty-One Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health. I couldn’t believe that I was hearing about legislation based on menstrual cycles, and the attacks on choice were increasing at an alarming rate at the state level. At the time, several young women worked in my office, and I was concerned that they were tuning out political noise during the run-up to the presidential election, unaware that their rights and their agency were at stake. I made this book for them, for the next generation of feminists. Thanks to amazing contributors, what started out as a book on horrific legislation turned into an indictment of the kind of culture that accepts it, a deeply misogynist culture.

More simply put, I started Cherry Bomb Books to right wrongs. I was already the publisher of Bona Fide Books, but the focus of that press is to build communities around stories of place and poets. It wasn’t the right vibe for Get Out!, so I created an imprint, Cherry Bomb, for explosive writing. Based on the strength of our inaugural collection, we’ve received some intriguing proposals. I can’t wait to see what we do next.

On the current publishing climate:

Part of the reason I started Cherry Bomb was because I was reading a lot of great feminist writers, but it didn’t seem like they were represented in traditional publishing. (This is evidenced by VIDA’s The Count.) I’d also heard from writers whose publishers, who previously supported feminist voices, were hesitant to publish writing on topics like abortion. Or, worse, they thought it wouldn’t sell or might offend, and they weren’t willing to take the risk. This was appalling to hear—I wanted to publish a book about choice, and about all of the other reproductive health issues that were (bizarrely) up for debate in 2012. I felt it was my responsibility as a publisher to give voice to these issues, as there seemed to be a void.

For Cherry Bomb Books, issues of gender, sexuality, class and race are all extremely important. It was important to me, and to my co-editor on Get Out!, Sari Botton, that we invite writers tackling class, sexuality, and gender to be part of the collection. It’s amazing, the variety of topics in Get Out! – the contributors really stepped up and the book is an incredible snapshot of a troubling time. Even in 2013, maybe especially now, we need to keep the drumbeat going, to publish excellent work that examines these issues. The underrepresentation of women’s voices in publishing is absurd. When I first had the idea for Get Out!, I made a list of my favorite writers and invited them to contribute. In about five minutes, I had a list of ten, all of them women. They each agreed to be in the collection. These writers are wildly talented and should be much more widely read. I feel it’s my job to help expand their readership.

On VIDA’s Count:

Unfortunately, when I saw the first of VIDA’s Counts, I wasn’t surprised. When I see that publications like Harper’s, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Book Review aren’t publishing or reviewing more women, I think they must be hemorrhaging readers. Personally, I have subscribed and then unsubscribed for years. There is no excuse for not assigning or reviewing more women writers–if they were reading more widely, they would be! These publications need to evolve or die. I was able to come up with a list of ten smart, exciting writers each with a brave, unique lens in five minutes—all women. How hard are they trying? How widely are they reading? Not very.

Thank you, VIDA, for your essential work!

On A+ Lit People:

There is a lot of interesting work coming out of the West Coast. I love all of the great things happening in Portland, from the Independent Publishing Resource Center to Hawthorne Books, publishing writers like Lidia Yuknavitch, writers who are redefining narrative and genre. The Rumpus has introduced me to some great feminist writers. It’s an exciting time for indies, and I look forward to what lies ahead.

Kim Wyatt is the publisher of Bona Fide Books and Cherry Bomb Books. Kim has worked in most facets of publishing, including journalism, textbook development, manuscript evaluation, and as managing editor at print and online publications. Kim holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Bona Fide Books is the convergence of her lifelong love of literature and commitment to community. She founded its imprint, Cherry Bomb Books, in 2012 to right wrongs.

Dear Fury,

There’s a woman in my writer’s group who is constantly putting the rest of us down. She’s the only one who’s published and it’s like she thinks she’s better because of it. I mean, why join a writer’s group if you’re going to spend it disparaging the others? For example, she told me my writing style is somewhat old fashioned — I use the word “nay” sometimes to mean “no” and the word “lest” to mean, well, “lest” and was told I shouldn’t write like that if I don’t speak like that. I told her tough shit that’s how I write; it’s not affected because it comes out naturally. That’s how I write.Anyway, as a group we’re reluctant to give her the boot because she actually gives constructive (if caustic) criticism. What do you think?

Signed,

Writers Can Be Cruel to Be Kind

Dear Writers Can Be Cruel to Be Kind,

Why, yes, they can! I was in a writer’s group once where I was frequently told, “You need to cut the first part of this piece, because it’s really just you getting warmed up.” Oh, it hurt. It most especially hurt because I knew it was true. Still, there was always that split second where I wanted to scream “Fuck you! This is a work of goddamn genius and it runs circles around this drivel that you force upon us each week!” Allow yourself that split second. And then listen. And then eat!

I think we can all agree that the best and most productive part of these writer’s groups is the food. I’m partial to soft cheeses and olives to start, and then I like to move on to the sugary side of things. Sure, I could seriously be done with cupcakes at this point, as could we all, but I love dessert, and one week someone brought this raisin bread pudding which I would have burnt my whole manuscript for another bite of. But anyway.

Here’s a question: Has anyone in your group ever brought up your issues to the woman-in-question herself? Before I continue, I’d just like to point out that there is a good chance she doesn’t know how she is coming off and maybe she thinks she’s being helpful. She would especially not know how she’s coming off if no one has ever told her, if you all just sit around and talk shit about her when she excuses herself to the restroom.

But, in fairness to you all, and in my experience, in any gathering of writers – a class, an informal group, a panel discussion at a pain-in-the-ass annual writer’s convention – there’s one grump who somehow believes it is her or his duty to “tell the truth,” by which they usually mean it is their duty to be a raging asshole and make their fellow writers feel like shit about the work they hold so dear. On one hand, we need people like that, because too often writers can fall into a bad pattern of circle jerking and that’s really unproductive for everyone. On the other hand, these sour folks can cast a dread over a group and make it a bit nerve-wracking for anyone less outspoken to advocate for their or anyone else’s work-in-progress.

But I don’t think that’s your trouble; clearly you are able to speak up for yourself and your writing. I am super proud of your response to this naysayer. Fury positively swoons at a well-placed “tough shit!” This woman sounds rather tedious, zeroing in on the flaw of each piece. A lot of very sad people like to build themselves up by putting others down, and this could eventually drag the whole group down, because it’s, well, a drag. So, depending on her other character traits, at some point the rest of the group needs to decide if it’s worth keeping her around. Does she have any positive qualities? As she is the only one of your group who has been published, does she have an abundance of talents or tricks you could all learn from? Does she have contacts she’d be willing to share? Does she, perhaps, bring really kick-ass snacks each week? A carefully chosen hummus spread is worth a lot, you know. (If she consistently brings cupcakes, boot her ass!)

As far as the “you’re not writing how you speak” bit of idiocy, I offer this: I know a man who was told this very thing in one of the first workshops he took in college. He ignored the advice, and, decades later, still doesn’t write how he speaks. He also has won a ton of the most coveted literary awards out there and he wrote a best-selling book. So fuck that advice, because we’re supposed to write however the hell we want, as long as it’s good. “You’re not writing how you speak” is not criticism; it’s just dull observation. If this is the sort of wisdom this woman in your writer’s group has to offer, I don’t see the point of keeping her around.

Now, all that said, what if this wet blanket is actually quite spot-on? What if her “putting the rest of us down?” is just her offering her best advice? What if she thinks your “yays” and “nays” are incorrect because your characters are high school students in present-day New Jersey or something? What if she’s right? What if she thinks she’s better because she is better? What if you just tell yourself she is stuck-up because you’re jealous of her success and talent? Wait up, there! Don’t just laugh this off! Think about it! Are you jealous of her success and talent? Admit it, it’s okay. We all feel that sometimes. Now use those feelings to spur you on, spur you on to write something she might actually like, spur you on to even greater success than either of you have ever imagined.

In the meantime, pass the snacks!

Your,

Fury

For more information on Editor’s Corner contact me at mwilson@vidaweb.org.

On her project, role and publishing philosophy:

Noctuary Press is a small independent press that focuses on female writers working with cross-genre prose forms (such as flash fiction, prose poetry, footnoted texts, etc.). All too often, writing that is easily classifiable as “poetry,” “prose,” or “nonfiction” is privileged over exciting literary work that is not so easily categorized. Noctuary Press seeks to create a public space for women writers working across literary genres. We publish writing that does not simply challenge the notion of genre, but engages it in a meaningful way, assessing both the artistic possibilities and the dangers inherent in maintaining genre categories.

With that in mind, Noctuary Press strives to open up a dialogue among writers, reviewers, and readers about what constitutes a literary genre, the purpose of genre categories, and, perhaps most importantly, the politics of genre categories in the literary community. We focus on female writers because these efforts to define, label, and categorize literary texts often reflect larger power structures in the literary community and in the academy. In most cases, only those texts that fit the established genre categories are perceived as “legitimate.” Noctuary Press hopes to create a space where efforts to question, engage, and revise existing notions of genre are considered not only legitimate, but exciting, rewarding, and worthwhile endeavors.

For me, the name of the project, “Noctuary Press,” says it all.  A noctuary is a record of what passes in the night.  In other words, it’s a nighttime version of a diary.  With that in mind, Noctuary Press strives to create a record of, and bring visibility to, women’s writing that takes place at the peripheries of existing genre categories.

All too often, writing that doesn’t fit neatly within an established genre category is left unpublished and, as a result, is not documented or canonized.   This is often because cultural gatekeeping mechanisms are predicated on normative ideas of what writing in a certain genre should or ought to be.  Noctuary Press strives to offer writers an alternative gatekeeping practice, which opens up the possibility of creating a concrete record of cross-genre writing by women.   Additionally, Noctuary Press strives to bring visibility to this writing by women by creating an alternative channel of distribution, thus allowing these texts to be disseminated to appreciative readers.

On the current publishing climate:

There’s so much cross-genre writing being published, but most of it is merely rebellious, and rejects the notion of genre without engaging with it in a meaningful way.  Noctuary Press titles strive to not only critique normative ideas about genre, but also interrogate the gender politics inherent in the creation and perpetuation of these genre categories.  Writing that doesn’t fit within these entrenched categories is almost always “othered,” and the writing that’s most frequently “othered” is women’s writing.  With that in mind, Noctuary Press is very interested in the ways women work within the confines of genre to render these categories more inclusive. Noctuary Press only publishes women’s writing, but class, sexuality, and race do not factor into our editorial decisions.  With that said, our definition of “women’s writing” is expansive, and includes all writers who self-identify as female.

On VIDA’s Count:

So much of the time, the underrepresentation of women in publishing is blamed on women, either for not submitting work as frequently as men or for their lack of aggression and/or networking skills.  I think that this is completely wrong.  I’ve always thought women were underrepresented in publishing because, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, they refuse to write in literary forms that are hostile to them (i.e. traditionally male literary forms).  But the channels of distribution are predicated on these entrenched forms, genres, and categories.   So writing that doesn’t fit within their parameters becomes difficult to publish, disseminate, and situate within a critical discourse. There is so much work to be done.  And I think that most of the work doesn’t have anything to do with women submitting to magazines more aggressively, or publishing all-women’s issues of prestigious magazines.  I think that we (as writers, as editors, and as a culture) need to rethink our ideas about what constitutes “legitimacy” and “value” when evaluating writing for possible publication.

On A+ Lit People:

Birds of Lace Press, Dancing Girl Press, Patasola Press, Switchback Books, and Sundress publications are (and have always been) a source of inspiration for my work with Noctuary Press.

This spring we’ll be publishing new books by Eva Heisler and Kristy Bowen.   In these collections, you’ll find bed barges, algebra word problems, and so much more.  Stay tuned.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of twelve books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan(BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and (with Carol Guess) X Marks the Dress: A Registry (Gold Wake Press, forthcoming in 2014). Her writing has been honored with fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

For more information on Editor’s Corner contact me at mwilson@vidaweb.org.

On their project, role and publishing philosophies:

It’s Complicated is a zine and future book project about feminist writers’ relationships to the artists whose misogynist work we love. We just released our debut issue last month.

The project originated at a meeting of the feminist collective Permanent Wave’s New York chapter, in the context of a conversation on the doubts so many of us carry about whether appreciating or identifying with misogynist artists makes us hypocrites. We want to dispel the idea that there is such a thing as a “perfect feminist,” and reject the movement’s most ascetic orthodoxy by exploring the cognitive dissonance that surrounds loving artists and artworks that are, explicitly or implicitly, hostile to women.

On the current publishing climate:

Although we both also work in more mainstream media and publishing environments, for this project we embraced a DIY philosophy — partially because it was the only way to do It’s Complicated on our own terms. This certainly says something about the commercial publishing climate for feminist projects, but we have found the DIY/zine world to be extremely open to and supportive of what we’re doing.

Due to the very nature of our project, the majority of our submissions came from women; therefore, we were lucky to not have to pay explicit attention to gender. We have, however, had conversations concerning the race and class makeup of our zines, and are constantly working to ensure that they don’t become too homogenous. Even so, we realize that, as two middle-class white women (who are aware of being middle-class white women), the onus is on us — if this is not a diverse and intersectional project, we are at fault.

Unfortunately, there’s an assumption in publishing that women aren’t trying hard enough — that they’re not submitting enough, that they’re not ambitious enough. In reality, though, editorial departments should be trying harder to make women (as well as queer, transgender, and non-white people) a part of their culture. Editors should be aware of their own prejudices and the types of stories they tend to prioritize. Mainstream publications need to reevaluate whose work they value — and whose work they dismiss as marginal or “other.”

On VIDA’s Count:

As feminists who have long been aware of how few women get published in venerable magazines like The New Yorker and Harper’s, seeing The Count for the first time was strangely satisfying; it’s not that we’re happy about the numbers, but we’re glad that VIDA is raising awareness about a phenomenon that has upset us for years. Now that The Count has been around for a few years, it’s frustrating to see the same low numbers from publications that always respond to the studies with the promise that they’ll do better next time.

On A+ Lit People:

There are plenty of explicitly feminist and multicultural publications doing great work to increase representation of women, LGBT people, and people of color in the publishing industry. But as far as publications that don’t have an explicitly progressive purpose go, we were impressed by Creative Nonfiction, which devoted an all-female recent issue to opposing the idea that women don’t write about serious topics. We’re also enjoying The American Reader, an excellent new literary magazine founded and run by a brilliant young woman of color, Uzoamaka Maduka.

Judy Berman is a co-editor of the It’s Complicated Project and the editor-in-chief of Flavorwire. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and has written on music, TV, and pop culture for the LA Times, Slate, The Atlantic, and Salon, among other publications.

Niina Pollari is co-editor of the It’s Complicated Project, and works at Kickstarter. She’s written two chapbooks of poetry, and her translation of the work of Tytti Heikkinen was published by Action Books in spring 2013.

I know your column is for writers with writer problems, and I’m not sure my problem falls into this category, though I’m writer with a problem. Hopefully, you’ll find it worthy of your scrutiny. Here goes: I’m a writer involved with a non-writer. This is a new paradigm for me, as I’ve always been preternaturally disposed to date other writers. Something that has not served me well.

For the first time, the person I’m romantically involved with supports my writing. He is not in competition with me and/or my writing. The problem is not my writer, but the type of thinker/person I am because I’m a writer.

When we argue, I point out sometimes that various words he uses trouble me. For example, he refers to watching my son (who he has said on many occasion he wishes to adopt) as “babysitting.” This is but one example. I don’t appreciate the use of the word “babysitting,” for the following reasons: my partner is not in my employ, and my child is a member of our family. I pay babysitters $10 an hour. If I paid my partner, the boundaries might clearer, I just now realize, but that’s not the heart of the problem.

The problem is that he claims I shouldn’t invest so much into what words mean. That they don’t mean anything. That I “read too much into it.” When this issue has come up, I’ve explained, because it seems like a natural explanation, that “I’m a writer.” He finds this annoying and, it would seem, meaningless.

I realize it’s an obnoxious response, and I have told him I will avoid using that as an “excuse.” However, the problem remains. Words carry meaning for me, and that fact that someone could dismiss that fact makes me angry. I believe, as any writer does, that people should be responsible for their language. Whether they are writers or not.

How do I convey this without coming across as a literary bore? My argument seems obvious enough to me, and nothing to get bent out of shape about, but even after I agreed to not use the “writer excuse” anymore, my partner is not talking to me. Ironically, he is upstairs right now, reading.

With thanks in advance,

Silent Treatment

Dear Silent Treatment,

There’s a lot of crap going on in this letter, just like there’s a lot of crap going on in life. As far as I’m concerned, writing and life is all connected. So don’t start underselling yourself before you even ask your question. If I don’t find a question worthy of my time and my readers’ time, I won’t fucking answer it. It’s pretty simple, really.

I once dated a scientist, a very un-creative and nerdy person who liked to throw things at my head when angry and in other ways was a complete ass. I thought it would be a relief to get away from the creative types (I’d thus far only dated writers and musicians) but what a fucking mistake that was. It turns out assholes dominate many fields. On the flip side, I know several couples where the one is a writer and the other is… a doctor, a schoolteacher, whatever you call people who work in marketing. These couples seem pretty happy, I mean, as happy as the rest of us, anyway.

I think one of the benefits to dating a non-writer (or non-creative type in general) is that you get to corner the market on moodiness and quirkiness and angst, so you can freak out that the walls are crumbling down and your partner can stand on the sidelines shaking her or his head ever so slightly with a look that says, “Oh my adorable writer!” or “I’m so worried about this tormented soul!”

So if dating writers hasn’t worked out for you (and of course it hasn’t, writers are such a pain in the ass…I know because I get letters from them all the time), then good for you for recognizing that and finding yourself another sort of lover. That said, I don’t think that all writer couples are in competition with one another, as you suggest. I’ve known many to be quite supportive and fiercely proud and protective of one another. Maybe the writers you have dated are just too competitive by nature. Or maybe you are.

Now, you’ve got some other issues here, and one of them seems to be a very common issue about negotiating between new relationships and one’s children. Not knowing you or your kid or your partner at all, it’s difficult for me to suggest what you might do here, except to advise that you give it time and be patient and let the comfort you all feel with each other unfold in its natural way. And if this relationship seems to be something headed for the long term, I would very much recommend couples and family counseling. With a licensed therapist. Not a grumpy advice columnist so far short of how much coffee she needs to drink today she can’t even look at you right now.

But I can agree that, yes, using the term “babysitter” is annoying (I know a man who uses this term to refer to watching his own son) and perhaps this speaks to a deeper issue that your partner has in taking on a new role in this family he’s suddenly a part of, but I suspect it speaks more closely to the way in which much/most of society uses words casually and without care. Whereas you, someone sensitive to words, interpret the word “babysitter” to suggest someone who is paid to mind your child, your partner likely sees the word as a catch-all for anyone who is not the child’s mother.

And this, of course, as you suggest, is the heart of the problem, right? Not the particular comment or word, but that you are so deeply attuned to words and your regular-guy Romeo is not? I mean, you need to figure out whether or not your partner’s inattentiveness to the things you live and breathe will ultimately cause irreparable frustration, resentment and alienation.

You also need to figure out this: Why are you so quick to downgrade your stance here? What is obnoxious about saying “But I’m a writer?” as an explanation for why you might be more sensitive to words than your lover is used to? I get the feeling, just from reading your letter, that you downgrade yourself a lot, and that your partner, or something, has made you self-conscious about being a writer. STOP IT. Being a writer is a privilege. So how about instead of apologizing for thinking word choice matters, how about you respond more like this: “But I’m a writer, motherfucker! Words matter!”

If your partner was a nutritionist and you were lying around in a pile of shit, eating Twinkies all day, that would bother him because he’s a nutritionist, and also because he’s a human being. Which is to say, people need to be responsible for their words whether they are writers or not.

Look, when I read over your letter, I essentially get this: you are in a relatively new relationship (certainly a new kind of relationship) and both you and your partner are trying to get your footing. You feel insecure that your partner doesn’t understand the writer parts of you and it seems like he feels insecure that he’s not equal to the writer parts of you. But you seem to like him and you say he respects your writing, so here’s a final thought: sit down and talk calmly to one another, and talk clearly, and talk carefully.

Words do matter.

Your,

Fury

Claire Lawrence:

Audrey Colombe: And I was the woman sitting next to her, marginally okay with how I looked, but desperate to get my stuff published just like CL (who I know from graduate school) while also failing miserably at a bunch of other things in life—like keeping up with my poet partner (she has a good job in another state, so we travel a lot) or my family (“Mom?  Remember me?”) or friends (where did they all go?) and getting enough sleep with my 3/3 teaching load and too many committee assignments and my duties as a fiction editor at a lit mag. The editor-in-chief of the magazine is old-school—but I am loath to say anything because he is otherwise, and in most things, a very good man. He sometimes does not speak up in situations of obvious disparity, in the same way that I have sometimes been loathe to speak up about yet another incident of sexism at my university. To balance out, I constantly ask women to submit their work to our magazine.

CL: The VIDA panel at AWP was a discussion of the three counts.  Since the first count, a few of the magazines are doing better, publishing more women.  Some are the same, some are worse. The situation is not really improving.  That’s what I got.

AC: Two men spoke first, editors of lit magazines we all know.  The first, Don Bogen, pointed out that his numbers, according to his own count, are very good—like “equal.”  The second, Stephen Corey, pointed out that his journal’s numbers were not good—he has been the editor for a very long time, and anyone who knows him or the journal would not be the least surprised. This editor also had some questions re: whether VIDA is really counting binders of…I mean numbers of women or numbers of pages written by women and etc.  (The questions of this ilk Katha Pollitt dispensed with later and quickly.)  I found this editor a perfect example of what the Vida numbers are all about.

CL: I was too mesmerized by his comb over to pay too much attention to him but I did feel as though he was up there as a bit of a straw man, and wanted to give him props in a weird way for doing that. But then a young woman journalist, E.J. Graff, spoke, and the point she made that resonated so clearly with me was that magazines would publish more women if more women wrote more, submitted more, were more aggressive about pushing their work and selling themselves to editors.  And here’s the bone I keep choking on: you have to believe in yourself enough to make that push.

AC: Or somebody has to believe, right?

CL: Middle aged women and their concerns are often invisible, you know.  I think that’s part of the socialization thing; we’re less decorative as we get older and therefore less valuable. There’s making art, and then there’s the act of asking someone to care that you made it.  The second one is so much harder.  Herein lie the silences. How do I believe that someone wants to hear what I have to say?

AC: I want to hear it, CL. And I think other women do, too.

CL: Why?  Because we’re women?  Friends?  Writers? (Almond says the only people who read our work are other writers. Is our audience even more narrowed by gender?) How I answer that question can lead to a lot of self-silencing, a lot of writing stashed in the attic or stuck in a drawer.

AC: Or put out, sent out, returned, revised, put out again—really, “put out” as in put-out-of-its-misery works so much better in my case.  When I pick up a magazine or look at favorite websites, I am always looking for what I don’t often find:  work by women who are writing about thought and experiences—I’m thinking Amy Fusselman’s “8.”  It’s rare.

CL: The women on the panel said act like the men. If someone gives you an assignment make the deadline no matter what.  If you pitch someone an idea, don’t crawl away with your tail between your legs if they say no, be ready with three follow-up pitches.  The woman bodybuilder I lift with always says “Grab your ladyballs,” if I say something looks too heavy.  The VIDA panel was for me the writerly equivalent.

AC: I sat there listening to all of these panelists and felt that I wanted to start a magazine specifically for middle aged women so we could not hear about tedious Dos and Don’ts.  When the two women on the panel who work successfully in the media (journalist, critic) insisted that women have to act differently, they reveal a blind side.  For instance, saying that women need to be more available and grab the jobs they sometimes say no to—well, I suspect those women say no for two very good reasons: one, they are completely overbooked because they are already expected to do more than any man in their working sphere and, two, they refuse to say yes anyway and then disappoint someone they’ve already promised something to.  Because we know those women are not saying no when they really do have the time and really can do a great job.  They already know–other people already know–that they do a really great job.  Over and over.  Also, women might not persevere like men do when they’ve been told no or been rejected for many reasons, including:

The number of words frequently used to describe women who insist;

The number of people who find those words easy to use;

The number of doors that shut once a woman has been described using one of those words;

The ease with which people repeat those words and ideas;

The amount of work a woman must do in order to overcome, move past, prove wrong, rise above or otherwise undermine the undermining that has taken place as a result of one ‘insisting event.’

CL: Then Pollitt said, stop writing about the “girly” things. This bothers me on a few levels.  Stephen Elliott made a great point in his post AWP Rumpus email: Column A is making art, Column B is selling it, and you shouldn’t let B interfere with the process of A.  If I try to make art for the male dominated marketplace instead of making art about what’s important to me, if I self-marginalize, am I selling out?

AC: Yes, Katha Pollitt (I wanted to hear what Katha Pollitt would say) kinda bitched on younger woman.  She complained that some “only want to write about dating and fashion and sex.” But perhaps we need to listen to, listen past, the middle aged woman from the audience (she had an accent—Australian?) who pointed out a problem in the categories used in discussion of men’s and women’s writing:  “Why are childrearing, sex, the domestic sphere, and intimacy all considered one small category of subject matter? Isn’t that what most people do all day?”  Those young women Katha Pollitt disparaged have had those things (sex, fashion, relationships) forced on them in very specific (meaning commercial) ways since day one.  The young women who write, they also think.  As a result of their socialization and thinking they’ve begun to realize some key things:

1) The socialization they have experienced was so limiting that their maps have few points of interest. They will have to create new points by bucking a system that wants them to stay in the box. We have to watch them fight their way out of the box—and assist when possible.  I’m sorry, but we owe them that.

2) The young women are in big sad trouble if they want to remain heterosexual because the age-appropriate men available to them are not typically asking the questions that the young women are asking–the young men don’t have to. Nothing about the system encourages it. Even if the young men were lucky enough to have parents who tried to get them to think otherwise, the young men have been socialized (also in the commercial realm) to expect attention, pleasure, advantage, and women.  The young men are not socialized to critique their own positions, to ask the young women questions, or to think about the things that young women are freaking out about.  In fact, they are taught that this particular line of questioning is a dead end.

The young women are lonely.

The young women were lied to.

The young women have every right to be angry and a little goofy until they can figure out what to do with themselves, how much to fight, where to give in, what help is available.

Frankly, are young women today any more likely than their grandmothers to have a satisfying sex life? Intimacy? A less stressful day?

CL: Yes, that woman who made the ‘categories’ statement was awesome.  She had bright red hair and looked as though she had wrapped her whole body in a giant blue scarf.  I heard her say that sex and dating and families are kind of the whole human experience, no? You want us to stop writing about that?  I thought that was such a great point.  I write about relationships (with my partner, my children, my family of origin) because they are the most important things that have happened to me.

AC: I never write about those things—at least not as they reflect my household directly.  I’m protective. Sigh.  Also, Cate Marvin got up and demanded that we do some things, too:  like write or call the editors of the magazines and newspapers we buy and demand more articles by women, about women.

CL: What if, instead of seeing ourselves as in competition with each other we worked together, men and women, as a huge cultural force for art making?

AC: How?

CL: At her reading, Cheryl Strayed called us a tribe.  What if we acted that way, collectively not individually?

AC: Oh, this scares me a little bit, because I’m not sure women did very well in tribes, either.  Although I did visit the public home of a tribe in Ghana where they explained an interesting structure. There was one powerful woman in the tribal hierarchy who was not the queen—it wasn’t family held, the power—and she got to choose the head man and she was the only one who could get rid of him.  She was chosen by a group of men, however.  And then she could never be replaced, so they had to choose carefully.  They also had a position in the tribe called a messenger—he told the people what the king wanted, had decided, etc.  The thing was, if the people didn’t like it, they would kill the messenger.  (Yes, this is where the saying comes from.) And here’s the rub:  the chief and the councils and that woman at the top would know when they should probably adjust their choices because the people had killed the messenger—they would get the message, so to speak.  It went both ways.  The job of messenger was appointed—you were told you were it.  And the thing is, you also knew that you better talk really, really carefully—to everyone–if you wanted to live.  They had a postcard picture of one of these messengers from the mid twentieth century.  What a scary looking dude.  I sent it to my dean.

CL: Point taken. At least the part about the women and the tribes.  Not sure about the messenger part. Does anyone care enough about what we have to say to kill us?

AC: Silence=death?

CL: Remember, we’re nobody.

AC: Exactly.

CL: The day after I got home I kept thinking about my responsibility to young women, both as colleague and as teacher – that’s the thing everybody seems to forget about AWP – most of us teach at universities as well and therefore do have some influence about the direction of our culture. Anyway, I bought this little tin of “Empowermints” (with Rosie the Riveter on the top) and as I walked around campus I gave one to a woman every time I heard her express a lack of confidence or silence herself.

AC: How could you tell when someone was doing that?

CL: Two of my female students were saying how much they dreaded oral presentations because everyone would be looking at them. But then I just started giving the mints to all of the women I liked. I think everybody thought I was a little crazy but eventually they got it – every gal could use a little empowerment, no?

AC: I went home and powerwashed the house.

CL: What a metaphor.

AC: And in defense of AWP (Steve Almond gets enough attention–I don’t understand why the hatin’), I did restructure a major writing project (after listening to several panels on novel writing) and got two new short stories started, and bought some books that are completely, it turns out, incredible—not your Barnes and Noble usual.

CL: I guess I’m still on my tribe kick. The AWP conference brings 12,000 writers together every year.  (That’s 6,000 more people than live in my small town, by the way.)

AC: I agree it’s intimidating.

CL: But, let’s say the women and some enlightened men start working together. Couldn’t we still get something done in a culture that largely ignores us artists?  It seems so, well, linear to see all the writers as a competitive pyramidal pecking order (though I do admit to getting drunk and dreaming a little of fame).  And, again, it can make you clam up really fast.  As in I’m not one of the A-list so why bother.

AC: I’m always bothering—I never stop writing, I don’t know why.  I try not to feel the weight of rejection, because ultimately I’m the one who has to measure what I do.  My inner critic is perfectly capable!  As I washed the house, I pondered a few possible titles to my new magazine. Freak Out? Middle Age? Middle Age Freak Out?

CL: I still think the magazine should be called “Ladyballs.” But I want to get back to the point of why I wanted to have this conversation with you.  What we decided after sitting together in the panel is that we needed more hustle, like Almond and Elliott (who I totally admire for the way they put themselves out there, which might be why I keep mentioning them).  But they’re guys; let’s say it’s a little harder for us as women to feel we deserve to be read, listened to, whatever.  The answer is what we’re doing right now: collaboration.  Encouragement.  It’s so much easier to try and think of getting someone to publish this strange little essayish thing when it’s both of us doing it together.  I also really loved the idea we had of emailing each other every Sunday evening about the week’s submissions:  what have you sent out, where?  Why aren’t you sending more?  What if all the women who came to the panel (or even the whole conference) started to do that? I was talking to one of my younger female colleagues, a Virginia Woolf scholar, about all of this and she said what we need is no longer 500 pounds and a room of our own but a common room.  A place for exchange (ideas, art, influence, whatever).

AC: Men and women, sure—I have less energy towards talking the guys into anything new. The women, I’m totally there. Let’s go.  Every woman has a Sunday evening.  Near the end of the panel, someone reminded the audience of the Audre Lorde comment, “Your silence will not protect you.” So true.  I’m writing and calling the editors of magazines, yes (I’ve done three so far).  Of course I’ll continue sending my work out, trying new ways of saying what I consider important or interesting—and I hope I won’t be horrified if something connects, because I tend to write what’s less certain. (I do think critically about my own work, while I pressure myself to say something new, to not complain endlessly, to posit alternative structures and ways of thinking.)  CL, your writing on your new daughter was some of the most real and important thinking on motherhood I’d ever read.  Your un-complicated mother-in-laws as well.  It’s many voices all at once to tell a story—this story about women writing women’s lives.  If I have to talk myself into it another day, I can assume that you are doing the same. Sunday night it is.

CL: Let’s make some noise!

Q: Don’t male authors get asked dumb questions, too?
A: Well…yes. And no.

Pity the female writer. Not only is she less likely to get reviewed in major magazines and short-listed for prizes, she often finds herself on the receiving end of interview questions that would leave most of us mouthing three little letters: WTF?

My frustration with author interviews came to a head last November, when Terry Gross interviewed Hilary Mantel on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air.

Mantel has won the Man Booker Prize twice, most recently in 2012 for Bring Up the Bodies. That novel and its predecessor Wolf Hall are the first two books in a planned trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, a chief advisor to Henry VIII. Cromwell played a significant role in Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and her subsequent execution.

NPR likes to brag about its “driveway moments,” when a story is so good you sit in the driveway listening rather than going into the house. Me, I had a “drive the car into the bushes” moment while listening to the Mantel interview.

Gross began by asking about execution methods. This consumed at least a quarter of the interview, with the Fresh Air host delivering a figurative coup de grace:

GROSS: So excuse me for asking this, but if you had to be beheaded centuries ago, would you have preferred the guillotine, or the axe or sword customarily used in England?

MANTEL: Well, it’s a strange question.

GROSS: I thought so.

(LAUGHTER)

My reaction: Okay, that was weird, but now that we’ve gotten the silly questions out of the way, let’s talk about writing.

For about ten minutes, Gross did ask about the life of Thomas Cromwell—until the interview took another turn.

Mantel has suffered from health problems caused by endometriosis. In a frail voice, she explained to Gross that multiple surgeries had made it impossible for her to work for almost nine months between her two Cromwell books.

Then, in the icky moment that snapped my attention away from driving, Gross began asking Mantel increasingly intrusive questions about her body:

GROSS: So correct me if I’m wrong here. But because of the steroids that you are on to help with your condition…

MANTEL: Yeah.

GROSS: …and I think because of a thyroid condition as well, your weight just about doubled.

MANTEL: Yeah.

GROSS: And you ended up with a completely different body…

MANTEL: That’s right. Yes.

GROSS: …than the one you used to have. How did that change the sense of who you are?

Mantel soldiered on, even when Gross brought up what it must have been like under these circumstances to live in Saudi Arabia with her geologist husband:

GROSS: …And I’m thinking you probably already had gained the weight so you were in a new body in a country that basically granted you no rights. That must have been such a really strange and alienating period for you.

By this point, I was shouting at the radio. What did this have to do with writing? It sounded like one of Gross’s squirm-inducing chats about drug rehab with Richard Pryor or Steve Tyler. If I’d been in Mantel’s position, I would not have remained as dignified.

In Gross’s defense, this author’s struggles with weight had already been made public in a New Yorker profile; Mantel herself discusses them in her 2004 memoir Giving Up the Ghost. So, okay: If you talk about it in a memoir, you open yourself up to such questions. That’s the deal you make with the media devil.

But sometimes context is all, especially in a broadcast interview, and Gross didn’t preface her remarks with any reference to Mantel’s memoir or the New Yorker piece. Gross approached this distinguished literary author as if she were sitting next to her and had suddenly noticed that Hilary Mantel was fat.

“Could I See Your Shoe Collection?”

I knew the Gross-Mantel fiasco was not the first time I’d heard an author interview with a woman go awry. So, I did the cutting-edge thing: I used Twitter to find out if other writers, male and female, had ever experienced overly personal interview questions.

First, I sent out a general tweet, which netted me immediate responses from a number of women and one man. Then I sent a tweet to Jennifer Weiner and several other well-known women authors: “Writing article on offensive questions asked of female writers. Have you encountered this?”

Within minutes, I had my first response—from Jodi Picoult—who tweeted, “I have been asked how I lost weight. MULTIPLE TIMES.”

Weiner, who’s often bristled at being dubbed a “chick lit” writer, tweeted back, too. She also re-tweeted my query, and the avalanche began. She and I then corresponded by email, and here’s an excerpt from one of her horror stories:

In an interview for the NYT Sunday magazine that I eventually bailed out of—because the (female!) reporter’s questions were so inappropriate—I was asked if she could see my shoe collection, if I felt bad for ‘abandoning’ my husband and daughter to go on book tour, how I felt about my mother being gay, and if I wrote my blog ‘so that people would like me.’”

Margaret Overton, an anesthesiologist and author of the 2012 memoir Good in a Crisis (Bloomsbury), had a similar problem with an interviewer when it came to “why” she wrote. Overton contacted me on Facebook and then emailed me this account:

My worst interviewer led with ‘So, you went through this ugly four-year divorce and wrote this book to let it all hang out there.’ He asked if I ever dumbed myself down for one of my Internet dates. I said, ‘No, I don’t ever dumb myself down. That isn’t my nature, I don’t feel the need to dumb down for any reason, ever.’ That made it pretty clear he hadn’t read the book. He asked personal questions about my children that I would not answer, and about my ex-husband that I felt legally unable to answer… At the end, he actually misquoted a book jacket blurb. I knew I was in trouble.”

Caitlin McCarthy, a screenwriter who responded to my initial tweet and then followed up by email, remembers when an interview came with a precondition:

A reporter at a small publication that covers Irish Americans responded to my press release. He sent me an email, asking if I could give him a call so that we could set up a time and a place for the interview—so I did. To my surprise, the reporter asked if I would drive in from Worcester to Boston (over an hour away with traffic) on a Friday night, because he had tickets to Celtic Woman. ‘Would you like to see the show with me? We could do the interview over dinner afterward.’ Uh…isn’t that a date?”

When McCarthy refused, she never heard from the reporter again.

It’s not just journalists who leap out of bounds. Lauren Groff recalls readings where she was asked a number of intrusive questions:

The one that stands out was during the tour for my first book, The Monsters of Templeton, in which a main character becomes pregnant and isn’t forthcoming about who the father is. I was myself very pregnant at the time. A woman stood up in the audience and asked me if I knew who the father of my baby was.”

To be sure, my survey is very informal and anecdotal. But all the women who responded to me—whether by tweet, email, or Facebook—reported that interviewers or fans had grilled them about personal details.

“Have You Ever Died?”

Of course, authors of every persuasion have grumbled for decades—if not centuries—about the havoc journalists can wreak.

Connie Willis insists that all writers get asked dumb questions. In a recent TW interview I did with her, the renowned science fiction author points out that, for the average reader (or literal-minded reporter), the idea of making up something whole-cloth out of your head is a foreign concept. They assume you must be drawing on some event that happened to you personally.

This is Willis’s generous explanation for why people have actually asked her if she’s experienced the things she’s described in her novels, including time travel and death.

When I asked J. Robert Lennon, author of literary novels like Familiar (Graywolf, 2012) and the subject of an upcoming TW interview, if he’d ever dealt with intrusive questions, he said no, not the way he knew women writers did.

But in his email response, he noted that he’d faced a different problem:

I’ve had some interviewers, always men, who frame their questions in terms of complicated and (to me) obscure references to other writers, as if to prove to me how smart they are. I’ve talked to some female writers who say this never happens to them—it’s a male pissing-contest thing.”

The qualitative difference between Lauren Groff being asked about the paternity of her baby and Lennon’s pissing contest is the crux of the matter. The first question feels shaming in its intent, while the second is confrontational about the actual subject at hand: writing.

In other words, personal questions directed at a male writer don’t dispute his right to be a writer. Lennon claims that interviewers have tried to challenge his intellect. But the women I heard from have been challenged in ways that implicate their bodies—through overt references to children, marriages, or attractiveness as potential dates.

“Men get insulted in a different way,” Lennon adds, “one that is less personally wounding. We don’t get asked to prove we’re legit the way women do.”

“Do You Have a Thing for Little Debbie?”

If anything, my disgust with the various ways women authors are undermined has only deepened since that “drive the car into the bushes” moment last November.

Yet, while I’ve heard plenty since Mantel’s Fresh Air interview to confirm my suspicions about women writers and bad interviews, other stories don’t fit into a knee-jerk interpretation. I’m convinced that intrusive questions are still predominantly a woman’s problem, but screaming “misogyny!” fails to get at the nuances.

In fact, the novelist who put this in perspective for me is male—Mat Johnson, recipient of a USA James Baldwin fellowship and the 2011 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. At first, he denied getting intrusive questions. Then he asked what I meant specifically.

“Lordy,” he tweeted back. “I’ve had kid questions. Also weight questions. But as a male, there’s so much less social stigma there.” He added, “I get [questions] on race, almost always, but I’ve done work on race, so I basically consider it open for play.”

When Johnson invited me to email him, I did, asking if he saw connections between race and gender and the types of questions that writers get asked. His reply:

White, male, and straight is an invisible identity for most Americans. So when [interviewers] come up with questions, they never wonder how this very specific identity influences the work. It’s ‘the norm’…. [But] most non-white writers I know get much of the questioning filtered through identity, as if their personal identity was an artistic choice.”

Yes. Just check the Paris Review, the gold standard for literary interviews, for proof that white male authors are the norm. On its interview page, 23 featured interviews are currently listed for the “2010s.” Of those 23, only 4 of the writers are women. Only 2 are authors of color: Samuel Delany and Louise Erdrich.

Racism and sexism are often linked, scuttling literary opportunities in similar ways. The connection isn’t a simple one-to-one, however. For Johnson, interview questions that seem too personal for a woman likely feel much less so to a man—“not because of personal sensitivity issues,” he says, “but because of societal expectations.”

He believes he gets asked about his weight—for example, regarding a character in his 2012 novel PYM who loves Little Debbie snack cakes—because he’s publicly discussed being a Type II diabetic. But “[a]s a man,” he writes, “it doesn’t matter as much, because I will always be more valued for my accomplishment than my appearance.”

For his part, Victor LaValle, a former National Book Award judge and author of The Devil in Silver (Spiegel & Grau, 2012), tweeted me that he encourages personal questions, arguing that “I write from my life and feel ok saying so.”

LaValle and I had a wide-ranging conversation, much of it through back-and-forth tweets. I tried to draw him out about whether he thought race played a part in the questions writers are asked, but he didn’t respond to those queries. Clearly, the impact of race—and one’s comfort level with such questions—could pack many articles beyond this one.

Still, like Johnson, LaValle did confirm that the probing questions he’s asked aren’t the same as those lobbed at women:

As a man, I do think there’s a whole range of questions/presumptuousness I never encounter…. I believe in openness, but skeevy interviewers deserve to get smacked.”

“How Clueless Can You Be?”

Indeed, the skeevy among us deserve more than smacks, and maybe it was ever thus. If you’re an author in the public eye, especially an author who is not a white male, maybe it does come down to learning the right publicity tricks, to getting good at managing fools and voyeuristic creeps.

Along with many of the other women I contacted, Lauren Groff believes that female authors “have a very difficult time being taken seriously, especially early in their careers.” So, when interviewers get too personal, she says, she derails that line of questioning as fast as she can:

I’ve managed the questions in different ways, most recently by preempting the question about the alliance between my body and my work very early in the interview.”

I agree with her strategy—it’s smart and survival oriented—but I’m not ready to let anyone who asks intrusive questions off the hook. The sexism and racism may be unconscious, but cluelessness, journalistic time constraints, “readers want to know,” “everyone does it”—none of that is a good excuse.

NPR’s Terry Gross is no stranger to feminism, but she couldn’t seem to help herself when she said to Mantel, “I was thinking if anyone ever needs an antidote to princess fantasies, they might want to read your books.” Mantel laughed and agreed, but then:

GROSS: Because women who were chosen as queen, that sounds really great, right, but if they don’t give birth to a male heir for Henry VIII, bam, they’re executed.

MANTEL: Well no, I don’t think it’s as simple as that, in all fairness.

GROSS: Oh, OK.

 

 

Lorraine Berry has published in DIAGRAM, YOU ARE HERE, THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, THE RAVEN CHRONICLES, FLAVORWIRE, and SUGAR MULE, among other literary journals. In addition, she is a frequent contributor at SALON, where she publishes in both the “life” and “culture” section of the magazine.

She works at TALKING WRITING  as an associate editor, and has had multiple CNF essays, interviews, and opinion pieces published there.

She lives in Brooktondale, New York with her partner, Rob. She is co-raising two daughters: one in college, the other in high school.

For more information on Editor’s Corner contact me at mwilson@vidaweb.org.

On her review, role and publishing philosophies:

So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art has been a space for feminist writing for more than twenty years. We publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art in two print issues and one online issue per year, plus reviews and commentary on our blog.

First and foremost, we want to dedicate a space for feminist writing, and to find writing that complicates and expands our conceptions of feminism. So to Speak was founded by a group of women MFA candidates at George Mason in the early 90’s, who describe the first meetings of the journal as sitting around on someone’s living room floor with a glass of wine in one hand, talking about what it would mean to put together a journal by women. I think that creating a space for writing by and about women is a type of activism, and the way the journal operates today is in many ways a product of its initial editorial collective: we don’t adhere to a particular definition of feminism as a staff, but view our work as an opportunity to bring all of our diverse experiences and definitions to the table. More than anything, I value being a part of this tradition of women writers who are committed to sharing feminist writing and supporting each other as feminist writers and teachers.

On the current publishing climate:

In one of our issues from the early 90’s, there’s a little list of feminist publishing resources on the web that includes five or six sites; it’s one of my favorite pieces of So to Speak memorabilia because it comes from a time when the journal’s editors were still experimenting a great deal with what types of content to publish, and because the list itself is very adorable (it refers to the World Wide Web). Now, not only are there more journals publishing feminist and socially conscious writing, but we have easier access to each other and the capability to post content online. StS, for example, has started publishing an online issue during the summer for the past two years, and I think this has been an amazing opportunity for us to reach people who might not normally think of themselves as interested in feminist writing. It’s consistently a hurdle for us that people don’t want to define themselves in that way, but now we have this avenue for making some of the writing available to them for free; I think that there’s no better way to make the case that feminism is still relevant and exciting than to share the incredible writing and art we receive. We’ve had an incredible response to those online issues, as well as the interviews and posts on our blog, because some of the conversations about feminism that we used to have in our office or over our bookfair table at AWP are now happening on the blog, where people can respond to them directly. For instance, we recently had an interview with the poet and translator Moira Egan about her writing and ideas about feminism.

I’m also very conscious of the fact that StS often publishes work that would be harder to place elsewhere because of its themes or content. We’re very lucky to also have the opportunity to read lots of submissions from emerging and established writers with a common interest, but interpreted in many different ways. I think that sometimes people assume that we only publish work that is angry, confessional, or erotic because those are things they associate with feminist writing; to be fair, we do publish work with those qualities because, well, women do have things to be angry about, and they should be able to write about sexuality and their own experiences. But our contributors help define what we mean by “issues of importance to women’s lives,” and sometimes the issues of importance to their lives become evident in stories about mountain-climbing or revised folk tales. One of my favorite recent essays was about beards! But the essay was really about how we express gender through hair, and it was a hilarious way to rethink my ideas about the subject. I really enjoy finding a piece of writing that expresses feminist ideas in a way that had never occurred to me.

Of course, issues of gender, class, sexuality and race play a role in our publication. Our mission statement actually reads, “We look for work that addresses issues of significance to women’s lives and movements for women’s equality and are especially interested in pieces that explore issues of race, class, and sexuality in relation to gender.”

We want good writing that has relevance to women’s lives, written by anyone—women, men, people who identify themselves in myriad other ways. We try to represent a range of those ideas and experiences in each issue. So, absolutely, it is important to us that So to Speak is a place for anyone who wants to talk about feminism, and we want to draw in as many different voices as possible, especially those that are underrepresented elsewhere (including within feminism).

At StS, the majority of our contributors are women, and I have great admiration for their writing and their efforts to engage with feminism. On the one hand, I think how fortunate we are to have the opportunity to share their work; on the other, I think how much could be gained if voices like theirs did, in fact, make up a more significant proportion of the writers in publications with a broader focus. Ideally, I’d like to have it both ways: spaces for women’s writing would exist, but because that is inherently valuable, not because their work is less valued in other arenas. For now, though, we’re hoping to do our small part to swing the scales back toward our favor.

On VIDA’s Count:

I’m so glad that VIDA has organized this effort to monitor the industry. It’s incredibly important work, and when I first saw The Count, I realized that I was both shocked and not shocked at all—VIDA really quantified what was easy to dismiss before as a kind of subjective problem, but is so obviously a pattern when you see the numbers and charts. As a publisher, it reminds me that So to Speak is doing important work by making sure that a space is available that prioritizes women’s voices, but don’t we all wish that space was bigger?

On A+ Lit People:

I admire the work of other great feminist publications like Calyx and ROAR (and many others), as well as journals like Witness that promote a broad social awareness. At George Mason, where StS is housed, we have not only a sister journal, Phoebe, but an inclusive feminist chapbook press, Gazing Grain, founded by alums of the MFA program, and I think they are discovering some really interesting emerging poets.

Kate Partridge lives in Annandale, VA, where she is a student in the MFA program in poetry at George Mason University and teaches composition. She is the editor-in-chief of So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art. Her poems have appeared in BLOOM, Barely South Review, MAYDAY, Weave Magazine, and OVS Magazine, among others.

Mary Harpin

Edwidge Danticat: I started out submitting to small literary magazines, the kind that pay you with two copies of the issue. I have a great deal of respect for people who do this work because you would get back these stunningly beautiful little gems and someone, or a few people, had put so much work into making your story look good, and into the publication in general. After I’d been published in a few places, I applied to the MFA program at Brown University and got in. I wrote my first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory as my thesis at Brown and when I was done with it, right before graduation, I sent the manuscript to three publishers who were reading unsolicited material and one of them was Soho Press. Laura Hruska, the owner and head editor of Soho Press at the time, accepted the book for publication. I was twenty-four years old.

MH: What obstacles have you personally encountered as a female writer in the literary world?

ED: I realize that I am in an extremely privileged position. I was very lucky from the beginning. There are many very talented women out there and sometimes no matter how hard you work the stars just don’t line up right away. I realize too that I have had a very particular journey. And, if you’re a woman writer and you’ve had some success and you point out any inequalities, people start singing “Don’t cry for me Argentina” and use you as a counter example. Well, you’re doing well, they say, and in my case, and you’re not even a real American.

In any case, it’s worth stressing that what we’re saying is that we want to be the rule and not the exception, the one or two cases someone brings up to shut down an important conversation or to keep it from being had. When I was just starting out, many people assumed that I had slept with someone to get where I was. I remember being at the National Book Award Ceremony in 1995. My second book Krik? Krak! was nominated in the fiction category and I was told that Phillip Roth and I were the two youngest people ever nominated for the fiction award. I was seeing someone who was a writer then, someone who was older than me, and people—even people who were generally kind people—kept saying to me, Isn’t it nice that he made all of this happen for you? I’ve had people tell me they thought I was some kind of media creation. One male reporter who interviewed me once said, Well we needed a Haitian writer so it seems we kind made you up. Another writer, a woman, accused me of being a token, a result of ethnic and racial pandering in the publishing industry, and said that my work was completely worthless.

Every now and then these types of things will resurface in some way, but all I can really control is what I do and what I can do is work really hard everyday to prove these types of people wrong. And I’ve had the privilege of being at this for twenty years now and if my health holds up and everything else stays the same, I’m not going to stop just because someone would like me to shut up and go away.

MH: What can women writers, whether established or emerging, do to help women achieve recognition and success in this field? What are you doing?

ED: Well, if you have a big hammer, don’t use it to squash another woman writer, especially if she is just starting out. You can also be a mentor, given of course your time and ability to do so. I have mentoring relationships with a few women writers, some who will be very famous one day and some who may never be, but these are people who I suspect will never stop writing, no matter what.

I am involved with an organization called Women Writers of Haitian Descent. They just published a wonderful anthology called So Spoke the Earth. A good friend of mine, Marlene Racine-Toussaint, founded a micro press called the Multicultural Women’s Press. We have worked on projects together. I have also been involved with an organization called the Daughters of Anacaona Writing Project. It is run by a very talented writer named Ibi Zoboi. I have been a kind of anthologist, personal counselor, and preface writer, whenever I can manage it.

MH: Have you seen the industry change in this regard over the course of your career?

ED: There was a time when there were three African-American women on the bestsellers’s list: Alice Walker, Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison, and this gave a real boost to (revolutionized, really) women’s publishing and black publishing, and changed the way people looked at black women writers as well as black readers in general. This has not been reproduced often enough. I think the industry is still struggling with balance, as VIDA’s yearly numbers show.

I think many people still think of white male as neutral and kind of the norm and when they introduce a woman or person of color into a situation they might think they’re getting off neutral. There is that tendency to put the weight of an entire group of people on one writer. So you might hear folks say, we have our woman writer for this. We have our writer of color. Someone told me when I was starting out, Well now because of you and Anne-Christine d’Adesky (a friend of mine who wrote a wonderful novel about Haiti called Under the Bone), Junot Diaz and Julia Alvarez we have Hispaniola covered. Of course, the more diverse the female voices, the more diverse the immigrant voices, the more “coverage” you get, the fuller your understanding.

Every writer is still a singular voice. So you need more and more singular voices from all over. If anything this last election cycle showed us is how much the country is changing and we need to hear from as many segments of the population as possible. And women are not a trend. And immigrants are not a trend. People of color are not a trend. We’re not seasonal, and only special issue worthy.

MH: What kind of advice would you give to other women writers?

ED: Do the very best work you can. Really that is the only thing that you are able to fully affect. Always do the very best you can at the time. Knock on as many doors as possible. And know that even though we are not always going to be an Amen chorus and agree on every single issue just because we are women, there are still many of us pulling for you, as much as your more challenged female ancestors might have been dreaming you into existence.

I often re-read Alice Walker’s amazing essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” for inspiration in this realm. It is a must read, I think, for all women writers, all artists and writers really.

“Our mothers and grandmothers, some of them: moving to music not yet written,” she wrote, “were not ‘Saints,’ but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release.”

We, at least many of us, have our women writer friends, the Facebookers, the Twitter folks, the list serves, and organizations like VIDA and others looking out for the interests of women writers at all different levels of their careers. And thankfully now there are also many more alternate paths to being heard, read, and published, online, in blogs, in even more sophisticated small literary journals etc, than there was when I was getting started twenty years ago. We also can’t forget this wonderful network of female booksellers who all hold us up as well. Kudos to them. Every time I have a new book and I go out, I feel like as though they have been waiting for it, and what a wonderful thing that is.

Finally the best piece of advice I can give to any woman writer, and the best piece of advise I’ve ever gotten myself, is to just keep going, no matter what. Don’t give up. If you believe in your writing, and if you believe you have something to say, don’t let others crush or destroy that. Just keep at it. Hang in there. Even if you’re just writing for yourself for a time.

To paraphrase a Haitian proverb: Let your own words bring wings to your feet.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner, and the novel-in-stories, The Dew Breaker. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures, Haiti Noir and Best American Essays 2011. She has written four books for young adults and children, Anacaona, Golden Flower, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance, A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel. Her memoir , Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her most recent book is Create Dangerously is a collection of essays. In August 2013, Knopf will publish her story collection, Claire of the Sea Light. (Photo credit: Josephine Demme)