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After a long and fruitful week of getting up to speed in my new position over in Ethnic Studies and teaching my first session of a graduate workshop in memoir, I am looking forward to some kicking-back time tonight at 7 p.m. at Indigo Bridge Books, swilling some ethical decaf and listening to a bunch of slam-winning young people, including one Grey Castro, perform their spoken-word poetry for us locals.

I'm a little nervous.  Among the pieces Grey's going to do is one about what it was like for him to read my memoir The Truth Book, something he put off for four years after its publication, aware that it probably wouldn't be pretty.  Wise child.  But he took the plunge, and responded with words.  I've read a paper copy of the piece, and that alone was intense enough to leave me torn up for a while.  It won Grey a slam in Ohio, so, though I'm obviously saturated with bias, I'm not the only one who thinks it's strong work.  So this evening should be interesting.  It's kind of a rare and special privilege to now be in a two-generation cycle of making art from hard things.

On the topic of making art from hard things at a broader sociopolitical level, i.e., surviving U.S. history, the inimitable Honorée Fanonne Jeffers posted a bracing piece on why Women's Equality Day still doesn't feel so equal:

So, I don’t celebrate Women’s Equality Day today, because contrary to popular mainstream American opinion, Women includes all American women, not just White ladies.

Whoa!  Thanks to the Handsome Husband for this link to a story about A.S. Byatt, who claimed that women who write novels of intellectual substance are seen as unnatural--and sparked a debate about it.  Also note Ian Rankin on female crime writers and the Orange prize chair on women's "misery lit."

Rest in peace, Abbey Lincoln.  The jazz singer and civil-rights force passed away last Saturday; NPR ran a tribute that includes cuts from her music and great clips from two past interviews; you can read and/or listen here.  Lincoln has interesting things to say about artistic integrity and (heads-up, mujeres) about her own transformation from sexy supper-club commodity to "warrior woman."

Moving into a semester of teaching memoir-writing to graduate students, I was particularly grateful for what Lincoln said about art and claiming the right to one's own voice:

. . . "Oh, why don't you--why don't you shut up?"  I think I've had that said to me more than anything else over the years when I was younger.  "You talk too much."  You know?  "Don't rock the boat."  Even though they're miserable--people are miserable--they'll tell you this.  But you're not supposed to say anything about it.

So when I discovered that there was the world of the artist, it saved my life, because I could strive to be individual and as best as I could be.  I didn't have to have money.   I didn't have to have anything except my life.

And I went for that.  And I'm glad I did.

Amen.  Writers, artists, everyone:  go for it, and be glad.

I recently reread the three memoirs that my graduate workshop will be analyzing for craft strategies--Alice Sebold's Lucky, Rigoberto González's Butterfly Boy, and Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss--and was knocked out all over again by their power.  I picked books that deal well with really hard, hard material--intimate, tricky stuff like trauma, family, loss, shame, sex--because that's so much harder to handle, for us as writers, than, oh, I don't know, cooking or traveling or learning to tango, all of which are fun and interesting and can take you to deep and difficult places but don't necessarily do so.  I learn best from urgent, crucial, driven writing that sticks close to the bone, "words that," to quote Kay Boyle, "must somehow be said." 

And it's the how in somehow that we'll be analyzing in the workshop this fall.  How does Sebold handle moments she can't fully remember, signaling to readers her lack of specific recall without breaking the flow of the scene?  How does González use a real, literal journey to its fullest, richest advantage as an organizing structure?  How does he handle shifts in time smoothly and clearly?  How does he use descriptive language to suggest resonances between different characters, and how does he work on the page to be fair to the other people in his life?  How does Harrison select details that function as object correlatives for the emotional story that's taking place? 

Can you tell I love these brave and brilliant books?  Getting to talk about this stuff with smart, talented, eager people for three hours every week--and then talk about the students' own work!--is a gift.  For a dayjob, it's definitely pretty great.

In that regard, ladies and gents, I'm happy to say that THE DESIRE PROJECTS is finally off my desk.  408 pages of obsessively polished prose that publishing houses may or may not find desirable went into the mail to my agent on Friday--which is a great relief, since classes start on Monday.  (When I have to say what I did last summer--and last summer, and the one before that--I'm just going to point mutely to that fat stack of paper.)

The draft came super-fast:  on April 1, 2008, I had 22 pages of notes that I'd been dinking around on for about a year, just this and that, sketches toward an outline.  By June 10, I had 364 pages.  Since then, it's been revision, revision, revision.  Expand, cut, edit, polish.  Repeat.

And now it's that beautiful feeling, when the manuscript is out of my hands and out in the world.  My agent and I haven't decided yet which publishers it will go to, but I'll be posting full reports here as the process unfolds this fall.  (I'll try to keep my woes in check when those rejection letters arrive, but consider yourselves forewarned.)

Adding to the cheerful chaos of back-to-school preparations, Greyby arrives tonight (from California--by Greyhound) and will be here with us until early September (when he leaves for Massachusetts--by Greyhound; don't ask, it's a carbon-emissions thing), so the rest of my Saturday will be devoted to cleaning, laundering linens, and hanging shiny gold papel picado all around the room where he'll sleep.   The Handsome Husband is out stocking up on vegan cookies and other sundries Grey likes.  Hurray! 

Ahhh.  Family.  The good kind.  My two very favorite people in the world, right here with me, together for ten days.  Forgive me if I look a little dreamy.

Will flowers on the cover of your novel prevent it from being considered for literary prizes?  If your focus and setting are domestic, will critics be surprised when your book turns out to be textured and intelligent?  Novelist Diane Meier surveys the field in "Chick Lit?  Women's Literature?  Why Not Just . . . Literature?":

Still, if Tom Wolfe had written "The Recessionistas," he would have noted the brands of shoes, the Birkin bags and the personal trainers. And he would have been praised for his attention to detail. . . .

But my concern is larger, for the issue is insidious: the way Chick Lit has been used to denigrate a wide swath of novels about contemporary life that happen to be written by women.

If you think it's not affecting our work, not affecting what the publishers are handed, not affecting the legacy we leave for future generations, you're wrong.

Meier fillets the reviews of her own book, The Season of Second Chances, which assessed it in terms of how well it conformed to or diverged from the conventions of chick-lit, as though chick-lit were itself the new neutral, the norm to which every book authored by a woman must be compared. 

It's enough to make one wistful for the days when a pseudonym--Acton Bell, George Eliot, Anonymous--could cocoon a book in a sheltering layer of seriousness. 

And what does that say about the state of things in 2010?

 

Lovely readers, right now, as I type, Lorraine López and the other PEN/Faulkner finalists, including winner Sherman Alexie, are being feted at a dinner at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC.  Congratulations, Lorraine, on the national success of the probing, funny, honest stories of Homicide Survivors Picnic.

Congratulations to poet Carrie Shipers, whose collection Ordinary Mourning is just out (as in yesterday) from ABZ Press.  To read three of her striking poems, go here. 

Also right now, in the USA, an estimated two and a half million women--most of whom are women of color from the global South--labor as domestic workers, making possible the labor and leisure of all those who choose to leave the care of "the most precious elements of [their] lives: their families and homes," to others.  Ai-jen Poo's essay looks at our interconnections, sketches out a feminist bill of rights for domestic workers, and calls for change:

The upside-down concentration of the world's resources and wealth in the hands of a small minority at the expense of the vast majority is in fact unsustainable for everyone. Domestic worker policy demands that we recognize and value the basic care that we all require to live and provides a model for reshaping our economy to serve our collective human needs.

Gentle readers, the electricians left this morning.  My new office has walls, a door (with a lock), lights, and the Internet.  I'm so happy.  Photos soon. 

It awaits paint and a floor.  Oh, and furniture.  But it's standing, and I love it. 

Thanks so much to whoever nominated one of my blog posts as "Best Writing Advice" for Jane Friedman's blog at Writer's Digest.  The titles of all 20 blog posts look fascinating and useful; link to the list here.  What a nice surprise, to be in such good company.  Thank you!

If you live in Lincoln and need to buy some gifts (or spoil yourself), shop tomorrow, Saturday the 24th, at Ten Thousand Villages in the Haymarket.  Ten Thousand Villages is an amazing enterprise, period, but tomorrow, ten percent of their profits tomorrow go to Voices of Hope, a center that helps survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.  So get your shop on and do some good.  Thanks, Ariana, for the heads-up.

I'm very excited to have received, just yesterday, an acceptance from Indiana Review of my creative nonfiction piece "Hip Joints."  It's about sexual harassment and strip mining in West Virginia in the '80s, when I was a high school senior and my boss at the factory hadn't yet heard of women's rights.  (Pre-Anita Hill, sexual harassment wasn't a term very many people anywhere knew, and it sure hadn't trickled down to rural Appalachia back when I was sixteen.)  "Hip Joints" (which are what we manufactured at the factory, but you can see the possibilities) is an ecofeminist piece that also incorporates issues of ethnicity.  I'm happy that it's going to have an audience soon.

Here at UNL, there's one week left in the semester, and it's total crazy-time.  Students are writing their final papers, and graduate students are defending their theses and dissertations and taking oral exams--which means we professors should really have cloned ourselves by now to handle it all.   Somewhat counterintuitively, I've taken to revising a chapter of THE DESIRE PROJECTS every morning before the work-day starts.  (I had been revising one chapter a week, and calling it good.)  This makes me much happier.  I can go around blithely, knowing I've paid my dues to writing first. 

In other news, my Little Sister Amara turned 16 this week, my marriage to the HH turned 15, and Grey is counting down the days until his college graduation.  Spring is always such an exciting time.  And damn, it's good not to have to wear a coat everywhere!


 

Dear Hegemony, please tell me who I am.  Please tell me how to see myself. 

We've just been reading Wide Sargasso Sea in class, so my mind's on how a dominant voice--backed by money and the power of the metropole--can erase and madden someone else's truth.

And how generous Hegemony is with its answers!  Here are just two that scratched their fingernails across my brain this week. 

David Denby, reviewing Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer in the March 8, 2010 New Yorker, refers in passing--admiringly--to Olivia Williams "one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier."  Just in passing, mind you.  It's not his focus; it's an aside.

But pause.  Let that sink in.  So . . . the majority of actresses, then, seem more stupid and ugly as they get angrier?   Do women in general, David Denby?  (Is it any wonder that so many women have trouble expressing anger directly?)  Is that true of male actors, of men? 

On to #2.  Nathaniel Rich, who turns all of 30 tomorrow, is perhaps surprisingly young to be the senior editor of fiction at The Paris Review, but then, he's had unusual opportunities.  His father is Frank Rich, who writes for the New York Times; his brother Simon writes humor for the New Yorker.  He grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Yale.  He worked at the New York Review of Books straight out of college. 

Hegemony.  Money.  The metropole.

Why does this matter to you, writers?  Well, at the Paris Review, a most desirable publication venue for any writer, Nathaniel Rich serves as the decider, the gatekeeper.  His taste determines what gets into the journal's pages.

So I found it rather fascinating to stumble across this window into his desires.  It appeared in Canteen Magazine this January in what Rich's own website describes as "an autobiographical nonfiction piece."  Its title, "Over Ernest," suggests that it's looking back at youthful folly; that the author's early infatuation with Hemingway is now outgrown.  Still, its opening paragraph is fascinating:

There was a time—not as long ago as I’d like to believe—when I imagined all novelists as Ernest Hemingways, hero-adventurers who shot tigers, fought in wars, seduced wild-eyed women, gambled their life savings at high-stakes poker, won duels, lost duels, and wrote frantic bursts of prose while standing upright in their rented rooms in Havana or Saigon or Beirut. I didn’t fully understand the standing-upright part, but I had read that Hemingway worked this way. At first I figured it had something to do with the immense ferocity of the act; surely he was too wired with genius to sit down at a desk. The more I thought about it, though, it occurred to me that the reason Hemingway wrote standing up was to allow a woman (his muse, no doubt) to more easily “inspire” him while he was in the midst of his demanding labor. This image—of the great writer madly scribbling masterpieces while being fellated by a native woman—haunted me. If this was the writing life, who wouldn’t want to be a writer? . . . I had just turned 21 years old.

While being fellated by a native woman. 

Gentle readers, we recently read and discussed in class an excerpt from Madwoman in the Attic, that groundbreaking work of feminist criticism from the 1970s.  The students were shocked by the wildly sexist things that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century male writers said about the blood-congested male drive they saw as essential to writing works of literary genius. 

How backward, we all said. 

Yet here we go again, in 2010.  (Hey, it's working for Avatar.)

Okay, so Nathaniel Rich was young and oversexed when he fantasized about Hemingway.  Okay, so surely the essay will later take his younger self to task--I couldn't tell, because Canteen only excerpts the first page.  (Invited to read more--by subscribing, at $10 an issue--gee, I declined.)  Okay, so it was 9 whole years ago.

But not as long ago as I'd like to believe.

If you'll be in Lincoln this weekend, consider attending the screening of the award-winning documentary The Greatest Silence:  Rape in the Congo, with a discussion led afterward by a local psychologist who does trauma work with survivors.  Filmmaker Lisa Jackson, a survivor of gang rape herself, has won multiple awards for her documentaries over the past 30 years. 

This particular film is the one that led the UN in 2008 to classify rape as a weapon of war.

It screens at the Ross, which is hosting the film festival Women Make Movies:  Women Changing the World.  It begins today and runs through March 11, and if you're a student or a senior, you can get a pass to all of the films for $15.  A full-price pass costs $25 and lets you into all 13 astonishing, award-winning movies from around the world. 

Here's the info on Saturday's screening and talk:

Film Discussion:
THE GREATEST SILENCE
with speaker Megan Watson, PhD, LMHP

Saturday, Feb. 27 - Film begins at 1:00
Discussion following film (approx. 2:20 p.m.)

Admission to the discussion is free and open to the public. Admission  
to THE GREATEST SILENCE is at regular Ross prices.

Megan Watson is a psychologist in private practice who works with  
treating immigrants, refugees, and torture survivors. Watson does  
trauma work and focuses on culturally competent, holistic treatment.

Before its closure, Watson spent three years working at the FIRST  
Project, a torture treatment center in Lincoln.

THE GREATEST SILENCE: RAPE IN THE CONGO

Winner of the Sundance Special Jury Prize in Documentary and the  
inspiration for a 2008 U.N. Resolution classifying rape as a weapon of  
war, this extraordinary film, shot in the war zones of the Democratic  
Republic of Congo (DRC), shatters the silence that surrounds the use  
of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.

WILLA responds to Publishers Weekly's massive oversight (below) with a list of their own:  "Great Books by Women That Publishers Weekly Missed in 2009."  It's a Wiki, so go chime in!

For Immediate Release                                   

November 2, 2009  

Why Weren’t Any Women Invited

To Publishers Weekly’s Weenie Roast?  

Publishers Weekly recently announced their Best Books Of 2009 list.  Of their top ten, chosen by editorial staff, no books written by women were included. Quoted in The Huffington Post, PW confidently admitted that they're “not the most politically correct" choices.  This statement comes in a year in which new books appeared by writers such as Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh and Alicia Ostriker.   

“The absence made me nearly speechless,” said writer Cate Marvin, cofounder of the newly launched national literary organization WILLA (Women In Letters And Literary Arts), which, since August, has attracted close to 5400 members on their Facebook web page, including many major and emerging women writers. “It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.” 

WILLA’s other cofounder, Erin Belieu, Director Of The Creative Writing Program at Florida State University, asked, “So is the flipside here that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that.  I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people—-writers and readers--who don’t feel good about it at all.” 

PW also did a Top 100 list and, of the authors included, only 29 were women. The WILLA Advisory Board is in the process of putting together a list titled “Great Books Published By Women In 2009.”  This will be posted to the organization’s Facebook page and website. A WILLA Wiki has also been started for people to share their nominations for Great Books By Women in 2009.  Press release to follow.

WILLA was founded to bring increased attention to women’s literary accomplishments and to question the American literary establishment’s historical slow-footedness in recognizing and rewarding women writer’s achievements. WILLA is about to launch their website and is in the process of planning their first national conference to be held next year. 

(Note: until recently, WILLA went under the acronym WILA, with one “L.” If you’re interested in the organization, please Google WILA with one “L” to see background on how this group was originally formed.) 

For more information contact: 

Erin Belieu ebelieu@fsu.edu

Cate Marvin catemarvin@gmail.com