Recently in gender Category

Hello, hello, hello!  I'm happy to be back from an incredible, marvelous workshop at Macondo, and I thought my first blog would be a big report about it.  But I've been hearing from some writers lately who need encouragement. 

When I was writing the first draft of The Truth Book, I stayed for three weeks at the beautiful women's writing colony Norcroft up in Minnesota (now sadly defunct--sigh).  I had the Julia Alvarez room.  Framed on the wall was a poster, Alvarez's "Ten of My Writing Commandments."  I've always been a sucker for wise aphorisms, and the sayings that inspired Alvarez also buoyed me through the difficult evenings when I came back alone from my little shed overlooking Lake Superior to the solitude of my room. 

Here are the first five:

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities.
In the expert's mind there are few.

~Zen Masters

The obligation of the artist is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.

~Anton Chekhov

Do not be afraid!

~Angels appearing to shepherds tending their flocks by night

If you bring forth what is inside you,
    what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is inside you,
    what is inside you will destroy you.

~St. Thomas, Gnostic Gospels

Poetry presents the thing  in order to convey the feeling.
It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.

~Wei T'ai

. . . before I get on the road.

First, my friend from grad school, Dave Pruett, wrote in about the Cixous/"Laugh of the Medusa"/ecriture feminine thread to say that he's been reading Nuala O'Faolain's memoir Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman and thinks it just might fit.  So for those of you looking for examples of ecriture feminine, you might check it out.  (I haven't read it yet, but I trust Dave's judgment.)

I remember loving O'Faolain's "7 Tips on How to Write a Best-Selling Memoir (even though nobody in the world is interested in you)" when it appeared in Ms. magazine a few years ago.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find an online version for you.  But it's a great piece, so track it down if you're interested.

Second, I mentioned Helen Elaine Lee's lovely story in a previous blog--the one she read at the Pine Manor residency that made me want to rush home and hug my husband, and I just wanted to tell you that it's called "Marriage Bones," and it appeared in  Ancestral House:  The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, edited by Charles Rowell (of Callaloo fame) and published by Westview Press/Harper Collins in 1995. 

There.  Now I can drive south with a clear(ish) conscience.

Despite therapy for it (from a psychotherapist/commercial pilot, no less, and I recommend him), I am still afflicted by a lingering anxiety about flying.  At least I can get on a plane now, though, and magazines or light reading help to distract me at thirty thousand feet--an excellent reason, I think, to have bought a novel for my trip this Tuesday to teach in the Pine Manor low-res MFA program. 

I got Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Playing With Boys, her 2004 follow-up to the chica lit breakout The Dirty Girls Social Club.  (And $5.99 in hardcover at Walgreen's--you can't beat it.)  I just finished the first chapter, and I'll share this little bit from the voice of one of her co-narrators, Alexis:

As I often had to tell reporters, America was changing, fast.  Tortillas now outsold bagels.  Famously, Americans now ate more salsa than ketchup.  Wal-Mart carried plantains, yuca, and Goya products.  Kraft in the U.S. had come out with something they called "mayonesa," a Mexican mayonnaise with lime.  Why?  Not because they were nice.  Because they had to.  The top FM stations in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago now broadcast in Spanish, and the U.S. had become the world's fourth-largest Spanish-speaking country.  I was one of those lucky people who had long existed in a United States that spoke Spanish and English with matching facility.  I swung with ease between the cheesy comedy of Sábado Gigante and the cheesy comedy of WB sitcoms.  Some academic types, like my professors at Southern Methodist University, called people like me bicultural.  But with Latinos poised to make up one in four Americans in the blink of a big brown eye, I preferred to call it American.

And here's one more clip:

Dangit.  He was married?  I'd been hoping he wasn't, and was a little surprised, given the shameless way the boy had flirted with me, that he was married.  Or at least I thought he'd been flirting.  But that was the problem with me.  I misread men all the time.  I thought they wanted me when all they wanted was a sandwich.

I laughed out loud.  Playing with Boys will be a frothy counterbalance to the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is 2600+ pages of Bible-paper, dense with theory, and from which I'll be teaching while I'm Boston.  It's very, very good, and my friend, the lovely Laurie Finke at Kenyon, co-edited--but, as you can imagine, it's way less fun.  Give me drama, sex, quips, and cultural observations any day.

LNK-ORD-BOS, here I come. 

A couple of posts ago, I wrote asking for your help coming up with examples of écriture feminine, Cixous's term for writing associated with the feminine/female, for my lovely Pine Manor student.

In "The Laugh of the Medusa," Cixous writes:

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility which will remain, for this practice can never by theorized, enclosed, coded . . . it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system . . .

That said, she explains:

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse . . . Such is the strength of women that, sweeping away syntax, breaking that famous thread (just a tiny little thread, they say) which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord . . .

The other night, it hit me:  Jamaica Kincaid!  Maybe not all her work, but definitely the stories in her slender, beautiful collection At the Bottom of the River and also her painful, hypnotic memoir My Brother, about her brother's death in Antigua from AIDS.  Just her short story "Girl" might be a wonderful short example of her work in this regard.

Other suggestions?  Come on, I know there are some literary folks out there!

Hurray!  I've been doing nothing--and I mean nothing--but revising since I last posted, but I'm finally done!  Woohoo!  (Well, for the moment, at any rate--my best reader is going to read the manuscript and give feedback this week, and then it's back to the grindstone.)  After revising, the book weighed in at 395 pages, and I know size doesn't matter, but still, it's so massive that I can't help grinning.  This is the kind of page count you can generate when you deliberately choose to have no life . . .  :)

So, back to real life.  I got the most interesting question from a wonderful student at Pine Manor College's MFA program, where I moonlight, and I have some random thoughts in response, but I thought I'd throw it open to your collective wisdom and see what all of us can generate for her.

For a class I'm teaching at this summer's residency at Pine Manor, I've asked students to read in advance Hélène Cixous's famous essay "The Laugh of the Medusa."

My dutiful and smart student, who's already read the essay, writes: 

I am just wondering if you have any reading suggestions for what you'd consider "writing from the body" (especially) or "feminine literature" (since time has passed since 1976) and contrasting books/writing by women that you would not consider in that category.

Suggestions?  Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of--post 1976--Louise Erdrich's memoir The Blue Jay's Dance and novel Love Medicine, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (whoops--1972 pub date), fiction and poetry by Sandra Cisneros, and Lauren Slater's Lying.  And to me, Toni Morrison's work, starting with The Bluest Eye seems very much written from the body. 

On the negative side of the writing-from-the-body equation, and perhaps not what Cixous was calling for, there's Susanna Moore's novel In the Cut, Kathryn Harrison's memoir The Kiss, and, in other un-cheer, Alice Sebold's excellent memoir Lucky. 

For pre-1975/76 publications that Cixous probably wouldn't have known about, I'm thinking of Meridel Le Sueur's classic short story "Annunciation" and H.D.'s creative manifesto "Notes on Thought and Vision," both of which have a positive vision, together with much of the work by Jean Rhys, which doesn't.

But all of these selections are debatable, and I welcome your feedback and alternatives.

And what books by women aren't in that category?  Hmm.  Where to start?  

Hey, all you members of the adoption triad out there--or just you folks who like a romantic comedy with a grain of reality and brains in it--Then She Found Me is really good.  Helen Hunt, of Mad About You fame, directed, wrote the screenplay, and stars.  Other members of the cast are Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick (who's terrific as the clueless, self-absorbed child-husband), and Bette Midler.  Ben Shenkman (Angels in America) and Lynn Cohen (Miranda's housekeeper on Sex and the City) also have good roles.

The film, which has apparently been a labor of love for Helen Hunt, who's been working on it since 1997, is based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Elinor Lipman, who shares her thoughts about its conversion into film on her website.  (Take note of the timeline, all you writers whose books have been optioned or who are hoping for that.)

I really like the way the film explores the sense of total upheaval that an adoption reunion can bring to your life.  As excited and hopeful as you may feel, a reunion is still like an earthquake.  It shakes everything.  The film captures those chaotic highs and lows. 

And it's not like the rest of your life just holds still so you can think about it and deal.  The movie does a good job with that aspect, which it represents in a nicely, realistically complex fashion.  I'm excited about the way Then She Found Me might bring a better understanding of adoption issues to a mainstream, non-adoption-related audience.

I really liked the unabashed inclusion of the protagonist's Jewish faith, too.  Seeing her spirituality presented seriously and with grace made me think about how often Jewishness is depicted in pop culture as inevitably allied with humor, from Woody Allen to Seinfeld to Curb Your Enthusiasm to Jon Stewart's self-deprecating remarks on The Daily Show.  As hilarious as those folks can be, I realized how rare it is to see anything different.  Good for Helen Hunt.

Though most elements of the film are quite strong, some of the dialogue delivery feels, to me, a bit too much like dialogue, not enough like real talk, but that's a minor quibble, and it only happens in a few scenes.  Overall, the movie's terrific.  Here in Lincoln, it's showing at The Ross, but only until this Thursday. 

If you go, prepare to think and be moved.

Do feminist writers--and women writers generally--get shafted in the pages of the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review?  Sarah Seltzer thinks so.  Read her piece "Hard Times" in Bitch to see if you agree.  

Malcolm X would have have turned 83 yesterday.  Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes at The Root:

. . . Malcolm's struggle to make his own authentic, political contribution reminds us that ideals are more important than personalities. Progressive political movements that engender lasting change are always bigger than the flawed human beings who lead them. . . .  He criticized the powerful rather than the powerless.  He pointed to the pathologies of the privileged instead of the failings of the oppressed. His own story of redemption was emblematic of the possibilities available to even the most disempowered, but when he pointed to solutions, they were consistently collective.

To read the rest of Harris-Lacewell's essay, go here, and many thanks to Daniel Zeno, activist and law student at University of Iowa (and my lovely former student at Wabash) for the link.

To read Veronica Chambers' new essay on the sexual wound, suffering, and shame of fistula--and how to help--go here, and go here for the New York Times story that first broke my heart about this issue.

And for my women friends who write and doubt themselves--and especially all my women writing students, who work so hard and are so talented--go here to Kore Press's blog while Gisela Telis's essay is still headlining.  You deserve to flourish with courage, confidence, and boldness.  With thanks to Tayari for the link.

So Grey was whisked to Manhattan, chauffeured around in black sedans and SUVs, and put up in the "snazzy-ass" Hotel Mela, a four-star luxury boutique hotel on West 44th.  With the other students slated to be on the show, he went to Times Square and took a carriage ride through Central Park.

But after prepping his rationale for opposite-sex dorm rooms so that it would sound articulate on national TV, he never got the chance to speak!  LOL.  Check it out:  the mother, the future roommate Sam, and Disapproving Girl took up all the airtime. 

C'est la vie.  He got a wild behind-the-scenes glimpse at big media--on FOX News's dime, no less--and he's back on campus in time for finals. 

Which is what, after all, a mother cares about most. 

We returned home from our Austin/New Orleans road trip late last night to learn that our sweet son Grey is in an AP story about co-ed dorm living that got nationwide exposure, including this spot on on CNN.com, where (I'm told) it was the second-most emailed story.

But it gets better.  Apparently, the story on gender-blind college housing caught someone's attention, and as I type, he's being flown to New York!  He and his future female roommate, Sam, were picked up at Oberlin, and they'll be interviewed (together with Sam's mother) tomorrow morning on a FOX News show, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet.

As soon as it's YouTubed, I'll put it up here.  In the meantime, good luck to the kiddo!  He says he plans to wear his cargo pants with the "I VOTE" patch hand-sewn on the butt.  We'll see if that gets any airplay.