by Kekla Magoon
The first time I heard that Judy Blume is one of the most censored/challenged American authors of all time, I laughed. I was about fifteen.
“Judy Blume? As in, the Judy Blume?” I didn’t believe it. You couldn’t walk through my middle school library without tripping over a copy of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.
“Yes,” my mother said. “She’s controversial because, among other things, she wrote about a girl getting her period.”
by Katrina Melvin
Pick up any book at the bookstore: more than likely it was commissioned, edited, proofed, designed by women. In fact, the United Kingdom publishing industry is made up of an estimated 50%-70% women. Until Helen Fraser retired in 2009, the biggest three publishers in the UK by market share had women in top senior roles: Helen Fraser, Managing Director of Penguin UK; Gail Rebuck, CEO of Random House; and Victoria Barnsley, CEO of Harper Collins. The industry is no longer populated by autocratic pipe-smoking gentlemen in tweeds and well turned-out girls in pearls. Rebuck, Fraser, and Barnsley are a world away from either of those gender stereotypes associated with earlier 20th-century publishing. (more…)
by Rosebud Ben-Oni
Author’s Note: As a female Hispanic playwright of mixed race, I’ve tried to capture the unsteady, uncomfortable relationship between female undocumented Mexican women and the work they do within the United States. Although significantly impacting the country’s growth and development, these women have been denied a rightful recognition in claiming their space in that history. I’ve witnessed this first hand in South Texas, where these workers occupy a distinctly unsettled space strewn with exploitation, misogyny and other indignities from both sides of the border. (more…)
by Patti Horvath
“By circumstance and design, the work of many women writers is concerned with issues of interiority.”
That’s the first sentence of a 2011 AWP conference panel on “The Great Indoors: Gender, Writing, and Re-envisioning Literary Merit.” While preparing my remarks for that panel, I began to think more deeply about the implications of that initial sentence, specifically this notion of circumstance and design. What, precisely, is the link between women writers and interiority? (more…)
by Susanne Antonetta
Lately, as a new member of the VIDA Genre Advisory Committee for creative nonfiction, I’ve been wrestling with a paradox: I am addicted to facts, an inveterate snoop incapable of writing through the kind of invention that makes good fiction, yet I wrote nothing in creative nonfiction form until my forties. In college, I wrote what I called prose poems and fiction. I wrote poems, too, which were bad and beside the point here, but the prose poems and fiction both: a) consisted of factual material and b) often suffered as a result. (more…)
by Manijeh Nasrabadi
The writing felt timid to me, overly concerned with explaining myself and my family to an audience I was told to imagine as ignorant about Iran but open-minded and eager to learn. What was never said was that this presumed audience was white and middle class. I was supposed to write for this demographic because they buy the most books.
by Caridad Svich
When I was asked to write this essay and explore what it means to be a woman who writes for the theatre in the 20th and 21st centuries, I wrestled long and hard with the subject of a) being a woman who writes and b) a woman who writes for the theatre. Are they different things? Should they be?
by gimenez
“In approaching this conversation in light of VIDA’s project of researching literary magazines and the gender breakdown of their authors, I realized that to draw together Franzen’s success with the dearth of books by women reviewed in the New York Times and with the statistical disparity of women’s representation in literary magazines was to draw a complicated landscape in broad brushstrokes.”
by Barrie Jean Borich
“The self-defining ways we discuss female sexuality in the lesbian-queer world might help transform how female sexuality is explored in all women’s creative nonfiction, and might be of use to any woman in search of a smart, witty rethinking of erotic expression. I say this as a challenge to myself, as well as to all CNF writers and their publishers.”
by A.J. Verdelle
Adichie herself writes about Africa, or, about Africa in America. A conflagration of geographies that she subtly and heroically describes. New subjects in the here and now.
