“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.”

I knew this. I had read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. a couple of years before. “So what? They banned her book?”

I was incensed. I didn’t have the words to speak of it then, but I remember how viscerally rageful it made me. What was the big deal? What could be more natural, more essential, more inevitable, more female, than a girl getting her period? But like I said, I didn’t have those words.

“That’s stupid,” I told my mother (not an uncommon exchange, back then).

If I’d had the right words…well, they would have been censored. But if I’d had the words, I might have said something about what was taken from me in that moment of realization. It was my first harsh lesson about what it really means to grow up female, the first time I gained an inkling of the fact that I was a soon-to-be woman living in a society in which womanly things must be talked about behind closed doors and certainly never written down. A society in which women’s bodies are treated as objects, available for your viewing pleasure but unworthy of inner exploration. A society in which the roles that women traditionally hold—essential roles, like making homes and giving birth and raising children—are taken for granted, looked down on, and—worst of all—regarded as something unworthy of being called work.

I couldn’t comprehend all this at age fifteen, yet I’ve never forgotten the impact and the pain of that first tiny lesson. Nor have I forgotten the source that opened my eyes to this uncomfortable truth: A challenged children’s book. Even as a teenager, in the throes of my inarticulate frustration, I felt profoundly attracted to Judy Blume and strangely proud of what she had done. Society said she shouldn’t write it, but she did it anyway, and when they got mad and tried to stop her, she kept on coming. I loved that.

The more powerful lesson I’ve learned since then is that Judy Blume, in her defiance of the status quo, by no means stands alone. Children’s writers of all stripes stand with her, as do the many teachers and librarians who steadfastly insist on placing such important books in the hands of children; we are collectively and constantly at the vanguard, shaping a new generation of readers.

Much like writing from a female perspective, writing for children represents another way of diverging from the privileged, straight, white, adult male point of view that apparently dominates mainstream literature. Even though I am indeed female, I’d be remiss if I didn’t emphasize up front that the primary identity I claim in the literary world is not “woman writer” but “children’s writer.” Until very recently, it never even occurred to me to identify myself professionally based on my gender because, even though being female directly affects many aspects of my life, I’ve never experienced it as a barrier to advancement in my writing career.

Perhaps you’re about to dismiss me as naïve. Clueless. Oblivious to the obvious forces of male domination that wreak daily havoc on the literary world. The thing is I don’t live in that particular literary world. I live in the Kidlit world, an alternate reality where the only limitations for a female author are her own imagination and her willingness to speak the truth in its simplest fashion. (I kid you not.)

When women writers rail against gender discrimination, I feel quite distanced from their specific struggles, yet I do feel a kinship with them in the desire to be fully recognized and respected in the context of literature. I’ve grown increasingly aware of distinct parallels between how women writers talk about their relationship to the literary establishment and how children’s writers talk about our relationship to that same establishment. That feeling of having to claw your way into a firmament that doesn’t have much respect for your ideas or your work, despite its beauty and its power—that feeling is something that children’s writers can’t ever overlook or forget, either.

Upon further reflection, I’ve come to understand that our gender plays a direct role in why children’s writers feel so marginalized. But it’s easy to fool myself, because in the Kidlit world, quite frankly, women rule. An overwhelming majority of my writer colleagues are women, as are the authors whose careers I look up to most. My editors are women. By and large their bosses are women—well, at least until you get to a certain level. We also have a preponderance of female agents, reviewers, and on and on. I might go weeks without crossing paths with a man, professionally.

Having such a woman-centered community means the gender issues we face are very, very different from those of adult writers. For starters, there are great positives. Our community is incredibly supportive and unified—largely because it’s so woman-driven. There’s much less cattiness, public critique, and overt competition going on than I observe among adult writers. Rarely, if ever, can I recall a children’s author publicly criticizing another—instead, we tweet each other’s good news, we cross-promote each other’s books and we wish each other happy book birthdays with genuine excitement. Children’s writers band together, and we cherish that profound moral support because we never receive anything similar from the broader literary community.

Indeed, our gender-based challenges tend to originate outside the Kidlit community, not within. We struggle against the cultural perception that raising and educating children (and writing for them) is “women’s work,” and therefore something to be taken for granted and considered simple. The fact that we care about kids at all renders our contribution less valuable in the eyes of the literary mainstream. Kidlit authors are mostly women, taking care of women’s concerns, so therefore we deserve less prestige. We belong in a box, apart.

Plenty of adult writers look down their nose at children’s books. Time and again I’m asked if I think I’ll ever try adult writing, as if my efforts won’t be meaningful until I’ve done so. After looking at my (award-winning) teen novel dealing with the Black Panthers, an editor from a major publishing house once handed me her card and said, “I would love to see a real novel about this topic. Let me know when you feel ready to write for adults.” She said this with a straight face, in the careful tone of voice you might use to explain something to a toddler.

I’ve grown used to this sort of dismissal. It didn’t occur to me at the time to be separately angry that another woman used this tone on me; my mindset was stuck in “adults” vs. “children.” But such a reaction from a powerful woman in publishing points out that the problem isn’t only with men—it’s a plague on our whole society. (For instance, I have no trouble believing that Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. was removed from school libraries by just as many women as men.) Just how deeply have we internalized the need to keep woman stuff out of the public eye? When women do succeed in male-dominated industries, must we do so by casting aside our woman-cares and blending into the status quo? It often seems that’s how women survive at the top.

Children’s writers (a community of women, remember) are also radically excluded from consideration for most major writing awards and fellowships—the ones that come with the most money and which carry the most prestige. On the smaller scale, I’ve had many artist grant opportunities denied to me because “we don’t consider writing for children.” Understand me here—these committees weren’t saying to me that my writing was not deemed worthy, but that the very creative endeavor I chose to undertake was deemed so inherently less than as to not even merit the briefest of glances. Is that right? Is that fair? But children’s writers tend not to ask these questions, or aim for these goals, because it feels like beating our heads against a wall, and we know we will never convince the powers that be to respect us.

Sometimes, in social settings, I reach a point where I almost feel compelled to give in to the social pressure, and minimize my own work, “Oh, it’s just a children’s book.” But there’s nothing more frustrating, because I’m incredibly proud of what I do. I respect my young audience and I care deeply about their opinions. Much more than I care about gaining the respect of the self-appointed literary elite.

On the whole, children’s writers have ceased to care much about whether or not we fit into the mainstream literary establishment at all. Out of self-preservation, we’ve cultivated our own warm, supportive world. When children’s lit folks refer to adult writing, people outside the community sometimes think we’re being salacious. The fact of the matter is, our worlds are so very separate that “adult” vs. “children’s” are useful designations. Children’s lit isn’t simply a genre of writing; it’s an entirely separate sphere, a mirror world that caters to a younger audience. Our books can’t be pigeonholed as all alike—we have literary fiction and popular fiction, science fiction and delightfully cheesy romance, dystopian fantasy and gothic horror, short fiction anthologies and self-help. We do it all, we just speak in a language young readers can relate to, and we have breathtaking talents among us whose work rivals anything you would find in adult literature.

Female children’s authors don’t worry much about representation in the grand scheme of things, because in our alternate world, we’ve got it. We’ve got it in truckloads, to the point where we have conversations about needing more books by men. Men are prized for their scarcity, and because of that they often rise faster and farther than we, the female majority. For such a small percentage of our writers, men get a disproportionately healthy chunk of publicity, and it’s uncommon to see an award platform filled entirely without one. Do the men in our ranks really get more attention, more readers, more money, more awards relative to their numbers? It seems so, but is that yet another example of gender favoritism, or is it actually a great stride toward equality? Are children’s publishers doing for men what we wish adult publishers would do for women—enthusiastically welcoming them into the fold, offering them a chance to be seen where they haven’t been seen much before?

Such questions easily fall by the wayside, though, because in reality children’s writers (gender aside) spend most of our time worrying not about our own representation, but about what we’re representing to our audience. We care about our readers, and we care about giving our young women strong feminist girl role models, and our young men compassionate, feminist boy role models. We care about making our queer characters round and complex and dynamic as opposed to stereotypical, and we care about weaving diversity into the fabric of our stories. Those representations matter a great deal more than anyone in the adult literature world has ever given us credit for.

Children’s writers remain extremely aware of our audience as gendered. And, once again, this is an issue that originates outside our community; it veritably permeates this culture. Parents, teachers and librarians talk about “boy books” and “girl books” as if it’s a foregone conclusion that most titles will be one or the other. Nancy Drew is for girls. Hardy Boys is for boys. If there’s crossover, it tends to be girls reading “boy books,” not the other way around. When we’re lucky enough to write potential crossovers, we lament book jackets cast heavily in pink and purple because boys won’t pick them up. Booksellers and librarians repeat it time and again. Girls will read anything, but boys are embarrassed to be seen with “girl books.” By middle school, kids have internalized the belief that the male experience is universal, and the female experience is something to be kept in a sphere by itself.

Children’s writers mull these issues deeply. We sit around coffee tables and conduct tweet chats and organize conference panels to talk about what young readers are seeing in our work, and what kinds of people they are becoming as a result. We ask ourselves why boys seem to stop reading fiction for pleasure around the fourth grade, and often don’t start again until after college. We ask ourselves what impact that dearth has on their ability to have empathy and to recognize other points of view. We ask what we, as a community can do to keep boys reading, and what we as a culture can do to raise emotionally healthy children. We link these goals because we believe that books can change lives, and we want all children to have the necessary access to the books they will need if they are to become their best selves.

The trouble is, even when we create all the right books, we can’t fight these battles alone. Rather, we shouldn’t have to. The problems are systemic; they reach much further than even the most impassioned voices among us. Children’s writers are doing our part, but we’re constantly undermined by the perception that our work is a thing to make light of, a thing to grow out of and ultimately look down upon. Why must it be so? If a five-year-old boy can love a story called Miss Rumphius that’s all about flowers, why can’t an adult male reader see the same book as more than a flight of fancy? What happens in those twenty-plus years? What inspires his transformation from open-hearted to narrow-minded? Knowing the children’s lit community as I do, I can say with near certainty—it wasn’t something he read.

Children’s writers collectively understand that we hold a certain power, by virtue of our audience, yet this power is rarely acknowledged by anyone outside our community in positive ways. Adult writers have little to say to or about us, apart from a general sense of dismissal, but every year the American Library Association catalogs the most challenged books in the country, and every year the majority of those books are books for young readers. Books dealing with issues like homosexuality, politics, complex social issues and sexual exploration. It seems that our culture believes books for children can be harmful, but not otherwise meaningful.

The deep hypocrisy of it all makes children’s writers roll our eyes. We know the value and the importance of what we do, and we have the readership to show for it. What the world thinks of us might as well be lint in the laundry: we filter it out, glance at it, throw it away, and slip right back into the warm, cozy sweater that is the Kidlit world. Children’s writers have pretty much given up on explaining or trying to justify ourselves to adult literary types. The approval and respect of our grown-up colleagues isn’t what matters most (though it would be a welcome change). Rather, we prefer to focus on shaping the next generation with our words and our ideas, because isn’t that where the genuine, systemic, societal revolutions we need are going to occur?

If you can remember yourself at seven, ten, twelve, fifteen, you might remember how wide open the world seemed to you then. These are the ages when gender identities are forming, when boys begin to understand what it means to be a man, and girls come to know womanhood from the edges, rushing in. We ought to spend time nurturing the next generation of readers and writers to overcome some of the gendered barriers we’ve all internalized. Otherwise the cycle only continues and we will have resigned our daughters to a similar fate of organizing, counting, struggling for their high voices to be heard amid the clamor of basses and baritones trying to take over the world.

I’m fond of asking adult writers, what was your favorite book as a child? They always have a ready answer. Think about the impact those early reads had on you. Think about the story, essay or poem that made you want to be a writer. Think about what it would mean to have a population of adults, who were taught early to love diversity, and grapple with politics, and question the world around them, and search for their unique voices, and see men and women as equals. Then ask yourself how much children’s literature matters, and whether it’s worthy of respect.

Respected or not, we forge ahead. Children’s writers continue to flout the social status quo, using narrative to promote diversity and revealing to children simple truths the world would prefer they not know, like the fact that—gasp —women menstruate (and they might even have feelings about it). Challenge us or overlook us—we won’t fold. We are a woman-centered community, putting children first, in hopes that those children will one day build a better and more gender-balanced society for us all.

Hirshfield’s many honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and three Pushcart Prizes.  Her 2001 book, Given Sugar, Given Salt, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and After was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and England’s Financial Times. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, McSweeney’s, Orion, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, six editions of The Best American Poetry and many other publications. Hirshfield’s work has appeared frequently on Garrison Keillor’s public radio program The Writer’s Almanac, and she has been featured in two Bill Moyers PBS programs. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop.

Jane Hirshfield speaks with poet Leslie McGrath about what it means to be women-poets of their generation. The two met in 2004 at the Bennington Writing Seminars, when Hirshfield was McGrath’s teacher.

Leslie: Since we’re having this conversation in the context of VIDA, I’d like to begin by asking how much of the arc of our friendship comes from being female?  I also wonder about what research psychologists call a cohort effect—the fact that we both grew up during the second wave of American feminism, in which women were very much on their own in many ways. It made me quite independent as a feminist. Would you speak to this?

Jane:  It’s always hard to label the sources of affinity, affection, and friendship, since the ease of them springs unlabelled from the heart. When a new friendship slips into your life, it simply feels right— you don’t feel you are walking on eggshells or need to spell everything out, the conversation brings a collaborative, living joy… Is this particularly “feminine,” I suddenly wonder? Is male friendship built more on as happily-shared competitive stresses? In any case, I’m sure our own friendship blossomed because it has always felt so completely natural to talk with you, even, as we have mostly done from the start, by correspondence. We’ve only seen each other once since your graduation, I think. Can that be right?

Leslie: Twice, since 2004—at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and again in Connecticut when you read at the Sunken Garden.

Jane: Ah, there’s my famously unreliable memory. It was that Sunken Garden reading I was remembering.  Anyhow, you must also be right that we shared from the start certain understandings, being liberal, feminist women of roughly the same generation.  I am, as you say, very much a second-wave feminist, more from the generation of equality-feminism than from the generation of difference-feminism. Recent research has come to convince me that a certain amount of difference is indeed real—though not in fixed quantities or rigid ways. Still, my feminism tilts pretty strongly toward non-limitation rather than categorization. My image here has always been that of a squash plant. The plant has male and female flowers, but its first identity is that it’s a squash.  I want to be a human poet first. That I am a woman poet also will simply be so. I have never felt the need to bring any addition to the circumstance that I am a woman, and will write as one—I couldn’t help it if I tried. But I don’t want to be told that I should write in some special way because of that, either. Writing for me is very much a process of dropping held certainties, and finding out what then can be seen.

I do question certain formulations of difference feminism—the idea that standard grammar or narrative is particularly male or “dominating,” for instance, or the suggestion that logical speech is somehow “male.” Why cede to men what surely was made as much by women? We each need the speech of reason and we need the speech of feeling. And when I’m asked the unanswerable question about the origins of poetry, my speculation is similarly multiple: prayer, courtship, work song, grief song, rituals of passage and of harvest, war song, lullaby, memory-keeping mnemonic. Each of these must have pulled poetry onto early human tongues. Most are experiences shared by both men and women, and if war-making’s drum cry has more often been the domain of men, that’s counterbalanced by the murmur that sends an infant to sleeping. If one had to guess which came first, lullaby’s as plausible a guess as any. And one of the interesting things about lullaby is that it isn’t only rhythmic humming: there are words, and those words often do very interesting things with the gestures of logic. “And down will come baby, cradle and all” is conveying the language of consequence—winds blow, trees are high, cradles fall—and like many of the stories we tell children, is really quite frightening. Lullaby, among other things, wraps fear inside safety—a not infrequent task of adult poems as well.

Leslie:  Yes, I’ve always had the feeling that you are completely at ease with being a woman. There’s nothing defensive about the range and intensity of your involvement with the world, be it a poem in the form of a scientific assay or one about cooking breakfast or your making available three books containing the work of early women writers.  The theme of the richness of our shared humanity, despite geography, history, and all else, runs throughout your poems. Always has. What I find both thrilling and reassuring about your new collection, Come, Thief, is that this theme and many of your prevailing images (the horse, the bell, the sleeve) are very much present. There are new images and ideas as well, of course. I’m startled by phrases and titles like “If Truth is the Lure, Humans are Fishes.” Oh yes, yes they are. Why have I not thought this before? Still, reading this collection is sometimes like attending a family reunion: the beloved are there, the mysterious, the feared. Many have changed with time, others not as much, but the journey of the poet’s eye as it moves from each to each is always surprising.

Jane:  Thank you, Leslie. I feel truly read.

One wise older woman, when I described my sense of my life to her, said I seemed something of a “sport,” in the biological sense. I never felt anything was shut off to me simply because I was a woman. I’m sure some of that goes back to my education—to my many women teachers in an all-girls school with a woman headmistress, and also to the books we read. If as a young person you read Dickinson, Austen, Eliot (George—ok, an interesting case), Katherine Ann Porter, Sappho, Mansfield, and Woolf, you don’t know that “you aren’t supposed to write.”

I discovered sexism’s glass walls—which do exist still, to a shocking degree—later rather than earlier. A great blessing, that belatedness. As a young person, I felt the world’s heritage of art and literature was mine to forage. When I arrived for my years of practice at the Zen monastery in 1975, deep in the wilderness and found that, in work hours, only the men were allowed to drive the community’s pickup, I was quite simply startled. I’d driven my stick-shift van with its yellow tie-dyed curtains, homemade bed, and pieced-remnant floor carpet across the country, over the Rockies, into deserts and forests, and finally down a narrow, rock-strewn, cliff-edged 14-mile mountain dirt road to get there, and now I wasn’t permitted to drive a pickup the length of the canyon floor?  It just seemed peculiar. When, years later, at a writers’ conference, I found myself in a hotel room, after hours, in which the male faculty poets seemed to be talking only to the other men, it was the same—startling, and not a little ridiculous. I saw one of them suddenly notice what was going on, and quite obviously, deliberately, try to change it. The rest of the men, meanwhile, failed to notice at all.

Leslie: Can you say what the older woman meant, in describing you as “a sport”?

Jane: In biology, a sport is an abrupt, inexplicable mutation. She meant that I seemed so oblivious to the constrictions of sexism, that I’d never bought into the story that women could do some things but not others. In other ways, I was chastened and timid, but that particular doubt-seed just wasn’t planted.

Leslie: This is a time of real sea-change for American women (I wish I could say for women across the world), who are better-educated than ever before, have equal protection under the law in many aspects, and are healthier for many more years than, say, a hundred years ago. There’s been much written about how the advent of the Pill and the increase of women in the paid work force has changed women’s lives, but I’ve read little about how the years after age fifty are changing for women, and how this might affect the culture by extension. It wasn’t that long ago that when a woman reached menopause it was time to slow down and think about retiring. But a writer’s creative life doesn’t necessarily shut off in one’s sixties. And for a female writer now in her fifties, who can expect another forty or fifty years of productive life, with essentially two generations of writers who’ve come up after her already, it’s an extraordinary thing to think about, an historical first. What’s to be done with those decades? Does the responsibility to teach and serve in other ways as a model increase as we enter those later years?

Jane:  A great question, Leslie. In answer, may I send you to Mary Catherine Bateson? The daughter of Margaret Meade and Gregory Bateson, and an anthropologist herself, she’s recently published a book on those “extra” decades, exactly as you describe them: not as more years of extreme old age but as an addition to the middle of our lives. Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom (Knopf, 2010).  She says this stage brings both new possibilities into a life’s arc and also an obligation to revisit and renew our conception of our lives’ meanings and purpose. Each of the questions a person first deals with on entering adulthood—Who will I love? What will I do? How will I serve?—will need to be pondered again, Bateson says, as one enters these auxiliary years of relative good health and relative freedom. Thank you also, by the way, for pointing out what a privilege this is, when we consider women’s lives worldwide; it’s a point that always does need conscious acknowledgment. One of the great awarenesses of my life has been that larger good luck, for which a person can take no credit at all.

Leslie: I am wondering, do you think of yourself as approaching the “wise older woman” stage of your life? It’s something I think about a great deal now that my children have their own families. I think of Jung’s Wise Old Woman archetype, a “mana” personality that symbolizes the wholeness of the self. I’m feeling the pull toward this kind of activity grow stronger as I get older. Yet how does one step into that formal role of “elder” while at the same time maintaining the sense of wonder and “beginner’s mind” (yet another term you introduced to me) so essential to writing poetry?

Jane: I immediately think of Marie Ponsot as one embodiment of the wise old woman archetype, in our current community of poets. The one time I saw her read, she had noticeably beautiful posture, no make-up, and, as I recall it, a T-shirt and long gray braid. And then there are her poems, their own noticeable posture, beauty and powers. For two other examples, I’ve just come back from the Milosz Centennial Festival in Krakow, where I heard Julia Hartwig and Wislawa Szymborska read. They resembled two teenagers, as they bent their heads together to talk on stage, though one is 90, the other 88. Their recent poems, I think, carry a similar quality: if they are rooted in the wisdom of age, they are also ageless. A poem can hold the comprehension of a life lived thoroughly through, yet at the same time have a spirit entirely new— wide-eyed, cognitively and imaginatively supple. One marker of good poetry could be that it returns its writer, its reader, to beginner’s mind. (The phrase comes, for those who may not know it, from the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, who said, “In the beginner’s mind are many possibilities, in the expert’s only a few.”)

Unarthritic comprehension, undiminished passion—these are part of what “wise old woman” poet means, for me.  I’ve not quite entered that stage yet, I don’t think, though I am certainly what the French call “a woman of a certain age.” Many of the poems in the new book reflect that. One poem is about bruising more easily, for instance, in the context of love and the body. I do write from my own life stage and age.

Leslie:  I remember that you fell in love with your current beloved just as you were turning 50. Not so long ago that was considered to be a time past the influence and delight of eros.

Jane:  You have to wonder, what was the actual truth of it, even then?  Another model figure for me has been yet another Polish woman poet, the late Anna Swir. The American edition of her selected poems, Talking to My Body, shows an older woman fully embodying eros. One poem mentions that this embarrasses her children, and it’s quite clear that she doesn’t care. That’s a sentiment I don’t believe has been brought into lyric poetry before. Swir’s poems are short, flintily free. Her images are intimate, impeccable and inventive, and that image-freedom is a subliminal, echoing demonstration of their author’s spirit. Such poets change our idea of what “old woman” is, and what“old” is. I admire this without dismissing what must also be learned from the truly final stages of aging, in which all powers begin entirely to abandon a person. Or animal—my little cat now is failing, and she is teaching me something of the dignity with which that can be done. Past words, outside words, there is still awareness, and it has a quality that can be transmitted.

Leslie: I want to be sure also that you know how much of the wisdom I’ve gleaned from you I’ve been fortunate enough to turn and give to others, both as a teacher and while I was the managing editor at Drunken Boat. During my years at Drunken Boat, we took on editors in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, as well as a dozen readers, all of whom I trained, and most of whom were women. The undergraduates I teach at Central Connecticut State University, who are younger than my children, are often surprised by what poetry is, what its function has been throughout history, and how they too, with the right kind of attention, can enter it fully. It’s a privilege to be a link in this chain, to pass the gift on into the future.

Jane: It’s wonderful to know you’ve been taking other, younger poets under your wing. Does this make me their grandmother, a little?

Sometimes this kind of transmission happens just because of who a person is, sometimes there’s a conscious decision to serve as a model for those who follow.  I wonder, did you know that the women faculty at Bennington at one point made a pact to speak up in the question and answer time after craft lectures, to be just as audibly present, challenging, and visibly engaged as the men? It’s a lesson I’ve carried since, into other, similar situations: Embody the reality you would like to exist, until it comes to exist without effort.

Leslie: I have great faith that as more and more American women are educated and published and as they move into positions of authority as writers and teachers, those men talking only to men situations will happen less and less often. I’ve been heartened by the generation of women who’ve come after us. For one thing, they have lots of female peers to talk things over with, and more ways to do it. There’s the “WomPo” listserv conversation, there’s VIDA, and many other online sites where women can gather. But there are still fewer female role models for them than there are for men. How do we pass down our wisdom and give our encouragement? As much change as there’s been in the last fifty years, I feel a certain impatience rise when I hear about gender discrimination in publishing, for example.

Jane: Impatience is the right response. How is it that, in 2011, we are still talking about issues of equality in publication? Yet we are, and need to. Among the research scientists I know of my own generation, the parity of respect and also a fair distribution of honors and awards seem far more ingrained than among the creative people I know—which is either an anomaly peculiar to my specific groups of friends or something quite interesting to ponder about the difference between “objective” and “subjective” fields, and how judgments are made about what or who in them is “important.”

There remains, as VIDA has amply tallied, an uncomfortable disparity in the matter of both tare weight publication and of major literary awards and honors. That this surprises some shows how much conscious awareness matters, and how much awareness itself constitutes a rectifying pressure. If two men follow one another as Poet Laureate, or in receiving the Pulitzer Prize, say, no one much notices. If two women, or two poets of color did, everyone still would. If three did, essays would be written. That tells us something worth noticing. Stereotypes of what “important” looks like self-perpetuate themselves especially strongly in the arts, because there’s no escape from subjective perception, really.  I’m enough of an idealist in matters of social change to think the most important thing is the work itself, that it be done—for itself, first of all, but then as path-opener, as model, and, at times perhaps, as rebuke. In periodical publishing, for instance, if the New Yorker could find, from its earliest issues, Katherine White and Dorothy Parker, and more recently Susan Sontag, Jane Mayer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Janet Malcolm, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith and so on, no magazine has any excuse for saying, “But we don’t know how to find good women writers.” Zadie Smith’s book-review essays currently running in Harper’s bring me intoxicant happiness, each time I read one. But women writers have always been there—to counter the myth that they haven’t is one reason I brought out the 1994 anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Writing by Women.  The world’s first identified author, of any kind, was the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, who wrote her “Hymn to Innana” around 2300 B.C.E.  And still almost no one knows that. And partly, I have to say, that continuing ignorance is due, ironically, to another woman’s fiercely effective writing—Virginia Woolf’s description of Shakespeare’s sister, buried unknown at the crossroads, was so powerful that it still shrouds the fact that there were quite a few women writers in the Elizabethan age—including Elizabeth herself. An exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library this coming January (2012) is about just that.

Leslie: Are there any other issues that come to mind, as we think here about the current state of women and publishing?

Jane:   I find it truly troubling that women journalists are so often asked only to write on “women’s issues.” This is something outside the capture of VIDA’s count, yet it matters to me a great deal that men write about parenting and relationship, that women write about physics, the environment, history, war. I want Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Feminist Consciousness and I want also Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and The Guns of August.  Adam Gopnik’s pieces about raising his children make me happy primarily because they’re beautifully written and genuinely interesting; but they make me happy also because they’re written by a man—and one who is not, by the way, a single father—who never seems to question that domestic life and family are worthwhile subjects. The poems of fatherhood by the generation of poets now in its 80’s, made me similarly happy. So far as I know, this was the first generation in world literature whose men wrote of their children in poems—Galway Kinnell’s poem on his son Fergus’s birth, for instance, at the end of The Book of Nightmares, is a touchstone.

Liberation from subject stereotypes travels both directions.  C.D. Wright, for instance, takes on prison and racism in her recent books—raids not just on traditionally “non-women’s” subjects, but on terrain more commonly explored in prose. Some good number of women poets now explore similar investigations, in poems that involve research, collage, combining the personal and impersonal, the large and the detailed, intermingling dictions and modes. Still, I can’t help but ponder that Anne Carson only reached broad cultural awareness with The Autobiography of Red, when her earlier Glass, Irony, and God, Eros the Bittersweet, and Plainwater: Essays and Poetry were, I think, equally astonishing and utterly new.

That I feel as I do, and question as I do, is one reflection of the kind of feminist I am. I want the doors to be open in every direction.

Leslie: Oh, Lord yes. I grew up thinking that feminism, for the most part, meant inclusiveness. And not just a place at the boardroom table or in the literary magazine’s pages, but the understanding that a woman’s preoccupations, be they cooking, raising children, neuroscience and any combination of these, had weight. That our lives matter to men, just as Native American lives matter to Mexican Americans, and on and on, and also that our thinking on any subject is met with simple, equal respect.

Being able to get a college degree—and I was the first woman in my family to do so—meant access to whatever the world held in its libraries and laboratories. I’d never want to limit my interests and influences.

Jane: Just so. And oddly, I never realized until this very moment that I am also the first woman in my family to earn a B.A. My mother started college, but didn’t finish—she left to work as a secretary. I’ve never thought about that. And that is the debt I owe to earlier feminists. I could take it for granted that I would go to college.

I do want to be really clear here that when I speak about wanting not only pages, but also subjects and styles to be open, I’m not dismissing the achievement of women who opened the field—I’ve after all published three books bringing those women forward. The freedom of being and simple courage and persistence required of them were and are immeasurable.  Sappho, Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Mirabai, Austen and, yes, Woolf in prose, Plath and Rukeyser, di Prima, Bishop and Levertov and Rich—all groundbreakers in different ways, and all women who made a landscape I could enter and live in. I simply want to feel that the full field of human experience is open to everyone, and that seems to me to be still the current edge, when it comes to the major magazines, particularly in journalism and other non-fiction… The numerical ratio of men and women writers must change, but the conceptual ghettoization must change also.

The last troubling thing I’d like to mention is the way reviewers all too often compare women writers only to other women, men only to men, as if women were somehow sequestered in a segregated balcony in an Orthodox temple, or as if we read only those of our own sex. Elizabeth Bishop is so clearly Mark Doty’s greatest influence—and yet, while I’ve admittedly not read everything written about him, I have never once seen or heard that said.

Simple equality’s needed, of course, first of all, but those other things, too, are needed—non-separation, non-segregation, equality of respect and of interest. I’ve been transfixed and altered by women, by men, by writers still in their teens, by writers in their eighties, by writers from every continent (if you count the explorers’ Antarctic journals).  Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man affected me as radically as any book I’ve ever read. I want to read Toni Morrison and I want to read Ellison, I want Szymborska and Milosz, I want Su Tung Po, Sor Juana, Cavafy, Laux, Howe (both Marie and Fannie), Hughes (both Ted and Langston), Wright (all five or six of them), Hillman, Dunn, Ryan, Valentine, Bishop and Doty.  This is what literature brings: realities of human experience, our own and also the ones beyond what we can know by living inside our own skin and histories, which then become our own skin, our own histories, through others’ words. I don’t think we want equality in publishing just so women can read women, or so people of color can read other people of color.  We want—I at least want—the doors to be open so that human beings can know the full story of human lives.

Yet, pick up a book on the history of the publishing industry, again probably published by a female-dominated publishing house, and you’ll find it strangely lacking in references to book women. An outsider to the industry would never guess that most “book people” are book women.

Men such as book historians Robert Darnton and John Feather espouse theories that justify an inclusion of women in the history of books, and yet, this history remains to be written. Meanwhile, feminist book historians have focused on feminist publishing to the exclusion of women in the mainstream.

Understanding gender as an aspect of book history

Arguably the most influential theory of book history in recent years is Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, “a general model for analyzing the way books come into being and spread through society” (Darnton 2006, p.10). This continuous cycle illustrates the relationships between the various agents involved in the life of a text, with complexities of interdependence and influence. Darnton argues that the book as an historical object cannot be fully understood without taking all of these agents into account. The agents include authors, publishers, readers, and distributors.

Figure 1.1 Robert Darnton’s communication circuit (2006)

This understanding of the book as manifestation of a complex network of influencing factors is central to book history. A comprehensive understanding of all of the factors involved would require a cross-disciplinary approach to researching an infinitely-expanding web of complexities, which causes Darnton to describe book history as “interdisciplinarity run riot” (Darnton, quoted in Vander Meulen 2003, p.171).

Murray accepts the “interdependence and dialectical tension between the book industry and larger societal context,” which defines Darnton’s model and others like it (Murray 2004, p.14). However, she argues that Darnton’s model is “mono-gendered” and Feather’s A History of British Publishing (1988) is typical in its “total omission of gender as a differential in the publishing equation across 500 years” (Murray 2004, p.10). Similarly, Travis states that book historians have “lagged behind when it comes to theorizing gender” (Travis 2008, p.276). Murray also states that Darnton has failed to notice that gender plays a “determining role at every stage of his [Darnton’s] communications network” (Murray 2004, p.14). As Murray points out, Darnton chooses as a case study an eighteenth-century text (2004, p.14), allowing him to discuss “bookmen” (Darnton 2006, p.11), thus avoiding gender altogether.

Problematically, Murray’s model is specific to feminist publishing, and so it remains that gender has yet to be made an explicit factor in the circuit. As Travis argues that “talk about women is not necessarily talk about gender” (Travis 2008, p.275), it can also be said that talk about feminist publishing is not necessarily talk about either gender or women.

Like Murray, I took Darnton’s model as my starting point. Unlike Murray, I attempt to look at mainstream publishing and the industry as a whole.

A change of gatekeeper

The publisher is the decision maker, the manager, the enabler, who provides the link between author and reader. In the contemporary UK publishing industry, it is most often the publisher who links the author to distributors, printers, booksellers, and suppliers, in addition to providing the necessary capital, editorial services, sales, and marketing, as well as identifying and defining readerships (Clark & Phillips 2008). It is the publisher who allows the author access to the publishing process. Although there are many people within a publishing company who could be defined as, or represent, the publisher, the ultimate choice and responsibility rests with those at the top of the hierarchy. Until at least 1970, those at the top were almost exclusively men (Baird-Smith 1999). However, this has changed dramatically in the past forty years.

In Feather’s approach to publishing history, in A History of British Publishing (2006), he acknowledges the validity of the balanced and circuitous nature of models for understanding book history, such as Darnton’s communication circuit. However, he writes that “[t]he publisher— whether a person or a company” is central to the publishing process, and should therefore be the focus of a history of publishing (Feather 2006, p.3). Although Spender uses different terms and writes from a different and arguably more political perspective than does Feather, her concept of “gatekeeping” (Spender 1983, p. 25) stems from the same awareness, which causes Feather to place the publisher at the centre of his model.

For Spender the gatekeeper’s choices are political, but Brewer paints them as far more whimsical, depending upon the “personal interests and sympathies” of the individual publisher (Brewer 2006, p. 323). In either case, the publisher’s choice to allow the author access to the publishing process is subjective. Either way, the gender of the publisher could alter the nature of those personal and political judgements, which is of particular interest if it is agreed that the publisher, as gatekeeper, is key to the communication circuit.

Further, Bourdieu’s concept of the struggle for the monopoly of power which dictates literary legitimacy (Bourdieu 2006, p.100) is a struggle for the position of power that the gatekeeper holds. If the gatekeeper’s nature changes significantly, for instance in terms of age, class, or gender, then literary legitimacy will be differently determined, and the gates will be differently guarded. Thus, the publisher can be seen as central to the models of Spender, Brewer, Bourdieu, and Feather, and the publisher in a position of considerable power.

Unfortunately, despite historians’ obvious awareness of the central role of the publishers, little research exists on how the industry may have changed in the light of a large amount of this power being in female hands for the first time.

A model for understanding the impact of women in the publishing workplace

Whilst it may be true that Darnton does not make explicit the impact of gender on the communication circuit and chooses to discuss a period when women played a far smaller role in the publishing process, Feather limits his discussion of women in the industry in the period 1970-2010 to a cursory paragraph on feminist publishing (Feather 2006, p. 206). None of the theorists, from Adams & Barker to Vander Meulen, has specifically addressed gender—it is an influencing factor implicit in all approaches. Although none has chosen to directly address gender, they have provided frameworks that incorporate it, perhaps not consciously, but with an awareness of the great number of complexities at play, which theoretically include everything from the psychological profile of the bookseller to the gender of the printer.

Masculine and feminine qualities can be found in almost equal measure in men and women (Claes 1999), so to measure the impact of a masculine versus a feminine approach would not be to measure the impact of a rise of the number of women in publishing. Rather, the question is whether the industry has been affected by its being run by people who do not support (in that they do not benefit from) the patriarchal agenda and who have different tastes and interests from the typical publisher.

This applies not just to gender, but also to race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and so on: anything which could be seen as a deviation from the straight-white-male norm. These factors have not been made explicit as categories of analysis in these models because “[c]atergories of analysis are not analytically neutral” (Boydston 2008, p. 558). They reflect the historian’s personal interests, and their absence may signal that something ‘has been missed or suppressed’ (Boydston 2008, p. 560). In this case, the absence of gender reflects the male-dominated nature of the field of book history, and, until recently, the publishing industry; in a mono-gendered world; gender is not a differential. Publishing, however, and therefore its history, is certainly no longer mono-gendered. If gender can be understood as “a key field of experience for both men and women” (Boydston 2008), understanding that men are as gendered as women, then gender can be seen as relevant to all, and therefore an essential element of a theoretical framework for understanding publishing history.

However, to theorize gender as an aspect of book history does not require a new model of book history, but rather research can be based on existing models. The rise to between 50% and 70% women working in the publishing industry can be viewed from two perspectives: both as a socio-political change which has had an influence on the industry, and as a change in the central player in the publishing process.

In order to make explicit the role of publisher as gatekeeper, whilst maintaining the circuitous nature of the communication circuit and the relationships and influences within the circuit, a minor revision of Darnton’s circuit is required. (See figure 1.1). Rather than placing the author in an equal position to the publisher, the author is placed behind the publisher, outside of the circuit, showing the dependency of the author on the publisher for access to the circuit. A line has been added between the author and reader in order to illustrate the direct relationship between the two, and a line from reader to publisher to illustrate the circuitous process of feedback implicit in the entire circuit. Importantly, the publisher is at the top of the cycle, signifying the role of manager or overseer. This makes explicit the role and the relevance of the nature of the “one agent at the centre of the cycle” (McCleery 2002, p. 163). (See figure 1.2).

Where publishing historians have failed is not in providing a theoretical framework for understanding the influence of workplace demographics, but in applying their theories to arguably the most significant internal change in the publishing industry in the late twentieth century next to conglomeration.

Figure 1.2 Revised communication circuit

General neglect

Neither Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to the History of the Book (2009) nor Feather’s A History of British Publishing (2006) dedicates more than a page to women in the publishing workplace in the latter part of the twentieth century. Feather merely writes, in a section on diversity in publishing in the period:

Women had played a part in the book trade since the seventeenth century, and women were important as buyers and borrowers of books, especially for certain kinds of “library fiction” such as romance and historical novels. Publishing houses had female employees, but usually in comparatively lowly positions, even though they might be more influential than their status suggested. (Feather 2006, pp. 205-206)

Here, Feather is referencing a period prior to that of the main focus of the section. Despite implying that something has changed, he does not go on to explain how or why. This contradicts his assertion that the publisher should be the focus of publishing history— he suggests that a demographic change of a political and social nature has taken place, that the nature of the publisher and publishing company has altered due to social and political factors, yet he gives women credit only for feminist publishing, which is a small part of the UK publishing industry.

In addition, The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), which has been described as saying “something about almost everything that matters in the world of writing, printing, publishing and book-collecting” (Malcolm 2010), contains no reference to feminist publishing or women in publishing in its index, excepting one reference to the Women in Publishing organization and one to Virago Press. This is representative of the neglect which Hemmungs Wirtén (2009) and Murray (2004) write.

Theories of book and publishing history, however, do clearly justify the inclusion of a study of the effects of workplace demographics in publishing histories covering the period in question; the impact of such a massive internal shift is more about just individual publishers and cannot be dismissed until it has been more thoroughly researched.

An anxious gentleman

Although Feather generally avoids the term “gentleman publisher,” he does seem to mourn his death. He writes of the vulnerability of tradition and of the family business, and lauds the generation, which revitalized the publishing industry in post-war Britain (Feather 2006, p. 210). This was the last generation of the archetypal gentleman publisher, such as Allen Lane and Mark Longman, who were the last in line of a long generation of Longman men. Whilst he accepts the weaknesses of a system dependent on heirs and inheritance, he does describe the man in charge as the “driving force,” who, in general publishing, aimed to promote “a cause or interest without actually losing money” (Feather 2006, p. 206). He writes about the dying off of these family businesses in relation to conglomeration, in that a “commercial revolution with deep political roots” meant the end of this type of publisher and publishing. Historic names in publishing, passed down from father to son, of which he describes Longman as an “outstanding example,” become ‘merely’ imprints which served the purpose of a mega-corporation” (Feather 2006, pp. 200-222).

For Feather, conglomerates represent not only an attack on the family business and the patrilineal principles of inheritance and tradition, but also an attack on Britishness (Feather 2006, pp. 208).

The sentimentalization of the gentleman’s occupation is explicitly a reaction to conglomeration and globalization. However, the particular focus on the men of the period and the patriarchal traditions which supported them suggests that the feminization of the publishing workplace may have contributed to the negativity about the current publishing industry. There is perhaps an underlying anxiety regarding a change of gatekeeper. This sentimentality is by no means unique to Feather: the dying off of the gentleman publisher, the beginning of the age of monopolies and mergers, and rise of the number of women working in publishing out with the typing pool are often interconnected in histories of publishing.

For instance, to Steel it meant the end of  “a world where employees, particularly women, had to know their place’ (Steel 2010). Like Feather, he connects this “gentlemanly institution” with Britishness. In addition, Baird-Smith, in his Lament for Publishing, celebrates the “towering individuals” who ran publishing houses, “autocratic men, often but not always people with literary passion and wide culture” (Baird-Smith 1999): the ultimate and most trustworthy gatekeeper. He adds that in the 1960s, prior to the “gobbling up” of British firms, publishing staff were either gentlemen or players, the players always being addressed as Mr… (Baird-Smith 1999). Clearly this description does not include the “fleet of girls from Roedean and Sherbourne,” who treated publishing as a “finishing school” (Baird-Smith 1999).

Overall, the picture of publishing prior to 1970 is painted as quintessentially British, traditional, patriarchal, and almost selfless in its efforts to publish quality literature. Most significantly, it is painted as being run by autocratic, cultured, and characterful men, supported by girls in pearls. Sentimentality for the time before conglomeration cannot be separated from sentimentality for an industry that revolved around a few patriarchs, where the gentlemen and the girls knew their respective places. To laud the era of the gentleman publisher is surely as much a comment on the feminization of the publishing industry as it is on conglomeration.

Conclusion

Book and publishing historians have not yet written of the impact of women in the mainstream publishing workplace; rather, a predominant interest has been the mergers and conglomeration which characterized the publishing industry in the second half of the twentieth century, which is often coupled with nostalgia for the patriarchal and patrilineal nature of publishing pre-1970. This is despite the implicit acceptance by a number of prominent historians, such as Robert Darnton and John Feather, of the ways in which political, social, and economic factors influence the publishing process and its products, of which the feminization of the publishing workplace is a significant example in the period in question.

However, an incorporation of existing theories of and approaches to book history does suggest a way forward in qualifying, and eventually quantifying, that impact. My intention is not to dismiss the work that has gone before, but rather to expose “flaws and fallacies in previous research” (Colgan & Francis 1991, p.16), with an aim to moving towards an understanding of the impact of women in publishing to be incorporated into the existing body of work. Finally, it is intended that the revised communication circuit, which incorporates various theories and approaches, will be useful in understanding not only gender in the publishing workplace, but also race, ethnicity, class, and so on.

To justify a study of the impact of a change of workplace demographics in the UK publishing industry, the revision of Robert Darnton’s communication circuit combines the concept of gatekeeping with the accepted wisdom of a publishing circuit, which is influenced by a number of external factors. This revision illustrates the role of the publisher as central to the publishing process, and highlights the ways in which gender—either the gender of the gatekeeper, or gender as an external influencing factor—could influence the publishing process. It is hoped that this revised communication circuit will provide a useful framework for further research into the impact of women in the publishing workplace, as well as for research into other demographic changes in the industry.

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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.

In my play Quimera on the Storm, I intended to portray a “realistic” representation of such a woman who, after living in the U.S. for over two decades, comes to know the land better than anyone, and reclaims a space from which her Mexican-American boss himself has been evicted. Shortly after conceiving the story, I had concerns: How would she speak? I wanted to write an innovative, sharp-witted woman who’d not only learned English but used it better than the native speakers around her. But what would it mean if I wanted her to sound lyrical? I knew I did not want to transform her into an “Aztec Earth Mother,” or turn her into a political soapbox. Lastly, the stage itself already gives way to a sense of “unreality,” which provided both freedoms and obstacles in telling this story, which was imagined but not imaginary. What followed in writing the play was a meditation on her character, and my anxieties, on how I should portray her particular experience.

I.

You lie in wait, a distant point on the horizon, where the dark night sky falls into chaparral and salt marshes of Tamapulipas, or perhaps an old Tamarisk tree, which you’ve hidden behind, the strong winds of the Sonora Desert whistling through patches of bristly cholla. Perhaps you are waiting for a panga on a Gulf coast beach to steal you across.

As you draw closer, I see the bent, thinned-out body, the diaphanous haze of sleeplessness and worry, a face like warped wood and twisted with determination. You were never out for war, which you are walking into, even before you crossed over from Matamoros, Rey Nosa, Nuevo Laredo, the swipes of your nimble feet running across the river’s edge and vast deserts where coyotes have stolen you across the border.

Most likely this is not your first trip.

Most likely, this is at least the second time you’ve handed over several years worth of savings to a coyote who promises to smuggle you into Gringolandia, all the while knowing he might betray you and dump you in the river, the very divide itself, which you then brave in the dead of night only to have la migra shine a flashlight in your face. In the darkness your eyes do not meet, but it is both a moment of instant recognition and imminent erasure of your dead-end fate, the most temporary and vagrant of desires. Perhaps the first time you let the man jackknife your tired, soaked body over his shoulder, and wrap you in a blanket before the mass roundup into the police van, before the fingerprints, mug shot, holding, deportation. But not this time: you know the fortune found in shadows. What it means to be wanted without the desire to possess, or know on an intimate level. Your name will never be mentioned in the papers, only “a woman who matches this description…” Your elusiveness, the cunning of exploited anonymity, how soon before you emerge from the shadows and overtake us in our fitful sleep, with your wily tongue and knowledge of our land we no longer cultivate ourselves…

As you can see, the talk about you, which is not about you, never stops.

And I imagine you, a woman who made it to Gringolandia, who has listened to that talk for over 20 years. You’ve given two decades of your life to a ranch in the Texas Hill Country owned by a Mexican-American, which had been in his family since the 1830s, which you come to know better than him. And yet you cannot claim it as your own, not even one speck of dirt, although you are the first to see that the land has become exhausted and depleted and unable to give anymore. It loses its value, and the ranch goes into foreclosure.

That is when an Anglo (as my mother calls white men) from the North, who originally came for a taste of cowboy churches and the storefronts on Main Street, buys the ranch. He ends up on the porch swing, still in loafers, listening to the tarnished metal chains creaking until the sun goes down, as pretty little somethings (but not you) wait at his feet, until he decides to cut his losses and sell the land to developers to turn into a golf course. He turns the other workers loose with nothing except their wits and their grit. But not you– you will not leave just like that and what’s more, you’re taking the land with you, you will raze it to the ground, so it will be new again and belong to no one, so women like yourself don’t have to go on the run from la migra, from those who want to send you back to a place that you no longer call home.

Querida, my mother says when I call to tell her of my idea. That is the stupidest thing you could do.

Stupid? I say once I’ve recovered from her response. It’s not stupid– it’s beautiful. And it’s better than what she’d get in the end if it really happened.

What she’d …“get?” My mother sounds even more upset. Look, you might as well be writing propaganda: “see this play, see how the illegals will burn your house down.” You can’t be poetic with this; it will be taken from you and used against you– and you won’t even be the one to feel the effects.

I’m trying to show the impossibility of her dream, I retort. That’s the tragedy. What is done to these people– they work and slave with no–

Querida, she cuts me off, you don’t know what’s become of the border. You’ve been gone too long. You’re out of touch…

As you can see, the talk about you, which is not about you, never stops.

But I’ve stopped listening. It’s my mother who is out of touch with the new generation. Where she sees quemadura, a burning and destruction, I see the possibility of quimera: a woman living outside the law who still takes action.

I will call you Quimera. Chimera. In Greek mythology, an indomitable, fire-breathing creature waging wars against those who seek to go against the unsympathetic lawlessness of the natural world because the imposition of law leads to mass extinctions. You are also a desire which cannot be fulfilled because it is impossible, and in the end, one must settle for the beauty to be found in the attempt itself, however futile.

II.

That summer I begin writing you, I return with my mother to her family’s home in Harlingen, a small, neglected Texas town about 15 minutes away from the U.S.-Mexican border. Outside a half-abandoned strip mall, we see your image peddled and misplaced on a ceramic plate by a midwestern artist who came to paint the local color. He has left you barefoot. Every other part of you is hidden in the folds of a ratty rebozo. You look like something that someone else had discarded. I imagine this middle-aged Anglo imagining you smelling like old newspaper left out in the rain. I imagine him greasing rouge over your wounds and then tearing you down again, until you are born with clothes ripped in the right places, so that he can cover you and make you properly, politely, native again, back into a peso who had thought herself a penny.

While my mother smiles politely and shakes her head as he explains the local color to her, as he explains the jagged, thin line on which she grew up, I shut him up by forking over the ten bucks that he was asking for his local color. Only out of earshot does my mother tell this is more distasteful than the plate itself.

That night, she says little to me as she prepares dinner with my aunts. I sit with my male cousins and uncles– I can’t cook to save my life– my feet skimming the ground on the porch swing, as we simmer along with the barbacoa and drink warm beer. The men pass around the plate and have a round of laughs, especially when I smother you in meatless tamales and eat off your ratty-rebozo body. When I finish, your image has bald spots and I realize I have ingested some of the local color. My mother is silent, but her gaze levels mine when I dare to meet it. I avoid her for the rest of the night.

Perhaps due to paint toxicity, that night I dream of women who work in maquiladoras (depending on one’s translation, either “factory” or “duty-free-enslavement”) across the border. Instead of gluing together the soles of athletic shoes or dipping their bare hands in solvents, they are stitching up the border with simple thread. I am not there, but I am all around them, hovering as close as I can get, when suddenly, windfall men without saddles dust down from Southwest plains and try to stop these women. But their skilled fingers are too quick. Like a long-festered wound, the Rio Grande disappears, its seams nearly invisible. The air became very thin. Birds fell from the sky like spent stones.
I awake quickly, and throw up, unable to keep down what I have done.
For it was my doing. I cannot possibly know what you have left behind, Quimera.
Decorative plates, after all, are not meant to be used.

III.

In the dizzy haze of the next day, I wake up worried that all I can do is write you as a costume and not even know how to wear you. I realize I’ve done it before. Once in high school I wanted to be a pachuco for Halloween. A Jewish Mexican of mixed race dressing up as a kind of Mexican-American rebel/criminal (depending on your version of history). The zoot suit belonged to my mother’s uncle who lent it to me only when he realized I wouldn’t shut up about it.

In his collection of essays The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz observed that the kind of pachuco he met in Los Angeles “seeks and attracts persecution and scandal…his dangerousness lies in his singularity” (16). But from my mother’s memories, I don’t think that’s what my uncle and his friends were after. Persecution wasn’t the goal, nor was it the image of a social menace. They were after something larger: an aggressive (though not necessarily threatening) aspiration to claim a space both physical and linguistic.

When my mother first saw her uncle in his zoot suit, she thought he was muy padre. Cool. She wanted to wear one too, but since she was a ruca (Pachuco for “girl”), it wasn’t allowed. And she was too young, a mere child who hadn’t lost all her baby teeth and was still somewhat new to language in general. Still she was old enough to envy the pachucos. La raza unida nunca sera vencida, my mother recited, recalling an old motto that to her as a child sounded like a call-to-arms. It means “United, the people will never be defeated.”

We used to believe that, my mother had told me, waiting for me in the living room as I tried to figure out the suit in the bathroom. The whole family, whether they said it or not believed it, she went on, because he believed it. Even the women who worried that they were walking bulls-eyes for the police. Because we still believed that he was on to something. That he would start new and promising that would last. That our place would finally be carved very clearly. With definitive lines, understand? A dangerous but necessary dream that was going to happen regardless of how we felt about it.

But now, how many decades later, who speaks pachuco anymore? It was just slang, a fad that faded away along with the fashion of the dress. It wouldn’t be a new language for Mexican-Americans, or a new way of living. Who today says Viva La Raza when there’s all this talk about putting the National Guard on the border, to hunt down people like they’re mosquitoes swarming the Rio Grande, people– my mother lamented, her voice hoarse and quiet so my uncle who’s hidden himself in the kitchen won’t hear– people who are closer to us in blood and breathing than those who told me us as a child to leave Harlingen to get somewhere better? It got them nowhere. Her uncle became used-up and bitter by the time he was twenty-five.

There was a knock on the bathroom door. It was said uncle, who indeed had heard everything she was saying. He took one look at me, snorted in amusement, and announced that he should’ve just kept it hidden in back of the closet. Out of my covetous reach. It is only now that I realize the insult of playing dress-in his discarded dreams on Halloween. Of invading a space where many men his age hid a whole generation’s failures. After all, where did it get them? He and his friends never went through any riots. They weren’t out there defending East L.A. from bigoted sailors who were burning zoot suits right out in the streets.

And yet I remember there was something subversive about putting on a pair of tramas, attaching a long-chained watch that had stopped working long ago, and draping a carlango around my shoulders. In that moment, I even thought it would make my mother proud, reclaiming something she was denied as a young girl. I didn’t notice how the lapel was twisted back, or how crumpled and threadbare the feather on the hat was, after years of regret and shame and neglect.

When I brought the vision over to my mother, her mouth dropped open.

I was a gangly teenager who was a third of his size.

Take it off, she said, trying to save me further embarrassment. Querida, you look really dumb.

VI.

The questions and fears and doubt, I suppose, will remain. The look of suspicion and then disappointment from theatergoers, as well as my family, that I gave you the name Quimera.

But in the end, who is the illusion? Am I pretending to be part of something that I am now too far away and removed to understand, even if I carry it in my blood? At what point does your story become nothing more than a sounding board for border politics, or worse, an idiotic portrayal of a kind of woman whom I’ve ironically locked into a stereotype in order to seem authentic? Can I really tell the reality from the illusions (and which came first?) of borders, laws and the facelessness that come along with being Quimera? And of your course, your gender is inescapable– and I mean your gender, not your sex. What it means to be a Mexican woman in South Texas without papers, without rights, and with the will to speak of things other than these that come from my mouth, shoving into yours. I want to capture the story of a woman without choices who nonetheless takes action, but in doing so I too risk painting that fantastic, yet recognizable, image on the plate. Costumes and the local color. An image that does capture you, though not in the way I mean.

Who am I to think I can free you from that plate?

It must be believable, my mother advises, and this must be difficult. Don’t put her in a costume, but don’t make her too grand either. There should be some quiet, some solitude.

Nothing too grand. You are not a prophet for the world. If I put you in a loin-cloth, you’d wear it with self-loathing purpose. As I write you, I anguish how many lives you have had, only to tear you down again, tear off the ratty rebozo. And perhaps I too grease rouge over your wounds, and now it seems you were born with clothes ripped in places and I know I have failed once more, I—

Have yet to let you finish a sentence, Quimera….

Works Cited

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude and other Writings. Translated by Lysander Kemp,

Yara Milos and Rachel Phillips Belash. Grove Press: New York, 1985.

Performance

Quimera on the Storm. By Rosebud Ben-Oni. Dir. Melody Brooks. New Perspectives Theater
Company. New York, New York. 20-26 Sept 2010.

Cheryl Strayed: I don’t feel conflicted at all. In fact, I hope that the editors of the Best American series take it as a compliment that we’ve looked at their numbers when it comes to gender. We counted them because they count. It’s a series that matters not only to poets and writers, but also to the culture at large. When I first heard an essay of mine had been selected for inclusion in the series—in Best American Essays 2000—it felt like the biggest thing that had ever happened to me professionally, and it was. It made an actual difference in my career. It gave my work a national audience before I published a book. A lot of opportunities that have come my way can be traced back to my two essays that have appeared in Best American. Editors called to ask me to write for their magazines because they read those essays, or people editing anthologies got in touch to see if I’d like to contribute; colleges have invited me to give a reading or a talk. I am indebted to Robert Atwan, who edits the essay series, and I don’t in any way see our count as a condemnation of his or any editor’s work. Rather, our count is—and always has been—an opening to a conversation that I imagine the Best American series editors are going to be interested in having. We aren’t saying: shame on you. We’re saying: look what we found.

Danielle Pafunda: I love thinking of us—members, supporters, volunteers, directors—as Team VIDA, but we don’t play against anyone. We play for literature, for women writers. I think, I hope people get that. Myself, I was honored to appear in three editions of Best American Poetry, and equally pleased to see poems from the online journal I edited appear in the series. One of my poems was a sort of vigilante epistle to a difficult health insurance company. How I loved imagining someone from the company might actually read the poem; the chances had gone up exponentially! Anyhow, curating a Best American edition is no small task. Full disclosure, here—in graduate school I had an assistantship that allowed me to work for David Lehman, the Best American Poetry series editor. While I had fairly limited contact with BAP, I do know that each year’s editor read an incredible number of poems, committed to reading the year’s publications. Seriously, I can only imagine the hours, pots of coffee, and internal struggles that go into the selection process. The introductions to these volumes make evident the care each editor takes in constructing his/her own rubric for best. I’d hope that editors already attending so thoughtfully to the process would welcome our interest. As Cheryl says: look what we found. Also: look what you might consider next time! Best is a shifting and subjective appellation. If we want best to stay fresh, then it’ll help to look at what’s been done, what’s yet to do.

Erin Belieu: I agree wholeheartedly with what Cheryl and Danielle say here. Being in Best American Poetry the times I’ve been chosen has had very positive professional ramifications for which I am grateful. I like feeding my kid and paying my mortgage and the reality is that the BA series means something significant to deans and publicists and presses. But those of us involved with VIDA have always believed in this conversation as an inherent opportunity. I won’t pretend to be naïve and suggest that I don’t know that such conversation can make some people uncomfortable. Examining long held views about one’s aesthetics, feeling anxious about opening up one’s experience to other voices that challenge the often unconscious aspects of our belief system—well, I’m afraid that is part of the necessary process but not something most humans run towards with their arms open. I certainly don’t. But isn’t that what writers and people who love literature should be striving for? A meaningful agitation that reveals more of the world each time we question ourselves? If I wanted to feel comfortable I’d find another line of business.

Adrienne Su: Like my fellow VIDAs, I’ve benefited greatly from being in Best American. As a result, I ought to be at least somewhat conflicted about this Count. But because VIDA doesn’t seek to accuse individual entities, and because it’s the job of the creative writer to explore the junctures at which we’re unable to speak with full certainty, I’m having a hard time finding the conflict. If I were more of a pragmatist, I might say yes, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. But we think the writers and editors involved in Best American are better than that. We think they’re likely to respond thoughtfully, not defensively. Plus, we’ve made long-term sacrifices to become writers; it makes no sense to compromise on what we view as important. It’s also my hope that the conversation will invoke more broadly relevant issues than those of the literary publishing world. Maybe the imbalance has more to do with U.S. laws on income tax and family leave, for instance, that tend to derail women’s careers, than to do with the sexism of any person or organization, and literature is just one of many areas in which the problem is expressed. We would love to have this discussion, and we’d love to see it begin with the venerable authors who took time away from their own work to sift through mountains of literary journals, looking for “the best.”

Amy King: You each express gratitude and no fear in publishing these numbers. But the numbers, as we’ve seen, are certainly read by many as an indictment. These Best American numbers are imbalanced and will likely curry similar reception. Can you speculate why the most immediate response is often defensive? We continue to frame our findings as conversation starters; how can we push past this wall of defense and what avenues might we follow?

Danielle Pafunda: As Erin says, we’re not catalyzing this conversation naïvely. Examining a publication’s imbalance renders its editor(s) vulnerable to criticism. While we’re clearly tracking a system of disparity, a global imbalance, the people who operate within that system are going to feel called upon to defend their methods. The people with the most power will likely feel we called them out personally. That’s a sincerely lousy feeling. Heck, we’ve all been there. When someone notes a gap in my syllabus, my list of contributors, my bookshelf, or my circle of friends, my instinct is to prove my decency and defend my choices. But that’s really very boring. Through the graciousness of good friends, colleagues, and those writers I admire (and perhaps through a perverse attraction to the discomfort Erin describes), I’ve learned to pipe down and recalibrate. Flailing about with my injured ego does little to advance a rich, diverse, dynamically intersectional experience of being human. If I don’t shy from the ugly feelings, I can stop conceiving of myself as central and the center of society as a fixed position. I can try on new lenses and turn my focus to the margins, which margins can in turn become exciting new centers. I wonder how else the system might function and what I—if only in my small, plodding way—can do to change it. One trick is to remember that even as we critique the culture, we’re products of it and we have to live here. Let’s not worry about defending ourselves on that count (ha!). Instead, let’s get out of this well-worn rut and reproduce the culture in exciting new ways. Start the conversation here:do we want to see writers from a broader range of subjectivities? Or here: what do I mean when I say good writing, the best writing? Or here: what would it take to get more women (writers of color, queer writers, writers living with disability, etc. etc.) in print?

Adrienne Su: Danielle is right on the mark: it’s only human to defend oneself. We also live in a world where, thanks to media developments, it’s increasingly possible to cluster with like-minded people. As a result, we get used to the norms within our specialties. I do, as much as anyone else. I’m reminded of a job I had many years ago, as one of several editors of a language-arts magazine for middle- and high-school students. While my colleagues and I were not shaping the elite literary landscape as the Best American editors do, we did have a hand in shaping young minds. Knowing that girls would read stories about anyone, but boys would read only stories about boys, we had to be sparing in the proportion of girl-centered stories we published, and to place them in the middle or back of an issue. With boys lagging behind girls in school, and at-risk teens one of our target audiences, this was a priority not just to sell magazines but to help keep kids in school. Thus I got used to the practice and accepted it. Fast-forward twenty years, and I’m the mother of two girls who love to read but have observed with disappointment that books (along with movies and TV shows) for young people are much more often boy- than girl-centered. Although, as one lowly editor for a brief spell, I couldn’t have changed children’s literature by myself, I have to admit to them my complicity in the situation, along with the grim fact that they’re going to find the same imbalance in literature for adults, especially the literature regarded as “serious.” If we run this conversation well, the editors of the publications we count will know that we’re asking them to join us in a larger effort to question the larger culture – the culture in which a boy is afraid to be seen reading a magazine with Laura Ingalls Wilder on the cover – and see what can be done to change it, for everyone’s benefit, not just women writers’. We count them because their influence is profound. We can’t do it without them.

Amy King: Since the notion of “criticism” seems akin to finger-pointing, and perhaps is not even ultimately productive, do you think we should move on to a more “forward-looking” response that offers up challenges to editors and reviewers alike? Is it possible to articulate practical, tangible suggestions that might motivate a broader range of inclusion that extends beyond “count your numbers”? What about publications that have writers on Rolodex? Their publications aren’t generally open to submissions; they call regular staff and freelance writers with assignments, which narrows the possibility of changing their usually male-heavy rosters for some time – what can we ask of them?

Cheryl Strayed: I think editors who solicit writers for their publications have the greatest capacity to create gender balance on their pages. They aren’t sitting around waiting for women to send them work; they’re asking writers to write for them. Any editor worth his or her salt knows that there are oodles of incredibly talented writers who happen to be female. Our count is a way of broadcasting what many women writers have been speaking of privately for years. We’re saying we see this. We notice that women aren’t being published in the same numbers as their male counterparts. If speaking of the imbalance publicly is what it takes to get editors to update their contact lists to include women writers they’ve overlooked because they never much considered gender, then we’ve done our job. I think I can speak for VIDA when I say that we’re not interested in making editors to feel miserable about what’s happened in the past. We’re interested in compelling them to do better in the future.

Danielle Pafunda: Well said, Cheryl! Let me add: demonstrating that gender imbalance in publishing is a global epidemic does more than relieve editors and reviewers of a heavy individual blame. Its primary purpose is to demonstrate a cultural phenomenon. And, yes–wage gap, healthcare, mommy tracking, lack of lady CEOs, and so on–it feels ever so DUH to point out the disparity inherent in each. Happily, with these numbers we’re pointing out a cultural phenomenon we regular citizens actually have the power to change. Immediately! The next issue, the next best-of list, the next set of reviews. We’re opening up an opportunity to work for change and see that change in the blink of an eye. Instant gratification and social equality in one fell swoop? You betcha! To take advantage of this offer, we’ll just have to figure out what’s mobile in our publishing processes. We’re smart folks. If we rely on staff writers, we can figure out how to change the content. If we rely on submissions, we can figure out how to more effectively solicit. The hard work of editing takes mettle and ingenuity. Our editors have these resources at the ready and need only come up with smart new ways to apply them.

Erin Belieu: As a person who edited for several magazines over the years, I know finding more women to write for a publication isn’t a particularly difficult task. It’s having the will to do so that’s more problematic. Which gets back to VIDA’s mission—generating thoughtful, proactive conversation about this and other related subjects. Shaming people is dull and humorless and never really changes anyone’s heart or mind (or so my 18 years being raised in the Presbyterian church leads me to believe). Again, I hope the editors we reach will come to see this as the interesting aesthetic opportunity that it is. Not much heavy lifting there once you decide that it might actually be interesting to hear what the other half of the world has to say about their various experiences of the world.

Adrienne Su: Counting looks like finger-pointing, but numbers are necessary to demonstrate the imbalance. Even self-identified feminists may need numbers to see clearly. I include myself in that group: When VIDA first formed, I gathered the novels strewn around my house and “counted” myself. (Because my genre is poetry, my novel-reading habits are probably more like a general literary reader’s than my poetry-reading habits are.) My “novels to read” were about 90% male-authored. I’d had no idea. Here I was – VIDA committee member, poet for whom gender and motherhood are important subjects, professor whose courses usually draw more female than male students – unconsciously favoring fiction by men, probably because, as a casual follower of fiction reviews, I simply remembered the books that got the most attention. Perhaps we need to be more consistent in contextualizing our “challenges” to editors and reviewers and making connections to the reason inclusiveness matters: what the culture proclaims to be important shapes everything, not just what people read in their leisure time but how they vote, how they use language, what values they teach younger generations, how they spend time and money, and how they treat people over whom they have power: employees or potential employees, students, patients, children.

Amy King: This is very encouraging, but what do you say to those who resist with, “Why should I solicit and publish women writers just because they’re women?” or “Even when I solicit women, they don’t send as often as men?”

Danielle Pafunda: I find both those questions misleading and disingenuous; they’re easy ways to shift the burden, but don’t do much to improve publications. Why would balancing the scales require publishing writers “just because they’re women?” We’re not so few or far between, nor are we so universally wretched as that question suggests. Step 1. read work by women, step 2. publish the work that appeals. If an editor carefully and extensively, attempting to account for some of that gender bias we all bear, and still can’t find work by women writers s/he considers publishable? Good riddance to someone not qualified for his/her job. As to the second question: I haven’t had this experience myself, but perhaps, in many cases, women are less likely or able to respond to solicitations due to a complex set of economic, social, cultural, familial, and literary factors. Why not simply solicit a greater number of women? Keep asking until we get work we love? Sometimes we editors get odd notions about what’s fair, what the rules of the game should be, and how our hands might be tied. We’ve got to shake off such limitations! There’s no rulebook, and insofar as there are protocols, we define them. We decide what’s fair and good, best for the publication. If we care about these discrepancies, we won’t fabricate silly obstacles, but will instead work out the most effective way to create that ideal, dynamic, irresistible publication. The collection of work that speaks to many via many, embraces the new, respects its lineages, and generally knocks the socks off.

Adrienne Su: 1. You shouldn’t solicit and publish women writers just because they’re women. VIDA doesn’t want that any more than you do. 2. Women don’t send as often as men for a complex range of reasons, as Danielle suggests: for a start, women on average still bear a disproportionate share of domestic responsibilities, even when working hours are equal, and yet they are still paid less than men with the same qualifications. Another reason women send less often is that savvy writers read publications to which they might send work, then submit to those they deem likely to be sympathetic to it. If a publication’s table of contents is heavily skewed toward male authors or subjects generally considered masculine, its editors can expect to see fewer submissions from and about women. Writing time is hard enough to get; many publications won’t read simultaneous submissions; writers seeking tenure are under pressure to publish sooner rather than later. As a result, many send to places where acceptance looks more likely, even if those publications are lower-profile than the ones VIDA counted.

Amy King: I think that’s enough to start with – thank you. Looking forward to hearing the thoughts and ideas from other writers, editors and readers on these issues!

In the Best American Essays Series from 1986 through 2010, the numbers look dire across the board. Works by women accounted for only 29% of those published in the anthology. There was only one year in twenty-five that the number of works by women published in the anthology outnumbered the works by men.

In the Best American Poetry Series, the percentage of women published in the anthologies was 39%. In twenty-four years of the Best American Poetry anthologies, there were only four years in which the number of published works by women were greater than those by men.

In the Best American Short Stories Series, however, women authors fared much better overall: of the stories published in the anthologies from 1978 through 2010, 47% were written by women. Of the thirty-three years of the Best American Short Stories we counted, there were sixteen years in which the number of works by women published in the anthologies were equal to or greater than the number of works by men.

The Best American Series Count has given us more data and more angles from which to evaluate the state of gender in publishing. It has discounted some of the positions used to explain or support the disparity found in our 2010 Count, while supporting some of the others. And it has raised additional questions that must be asked in our ongoing discussion.

Clearly, counting alone is not enough. However, raising awareness is the first step toward affecting change. We hope that as we continue to disseminate the data, ask the difficult questions raised by our findings and engage in rigorous dialogue with members of our shared literary community, we’ll be embarking on a path toward parity in publishing.

We hope you will continue with us in our efforts and invite you to join VIDA in this conversation.

- Tara Rebele

-Best American Count pie chart images by Ana Božičević

The Best American Essays Series

(editor: Robert Atwan)

Year	Guest Editor	Men	Women	Notable Essays Men	Notable Essays Women
1986	Elizabeth Hardwick	14	3	58	11
1987	Gay Talese	18	2	81	14
1988	Annie Dillard	14	6	108	28
1989	Geoffrey Wolff	17	4	107	21
1990	Justin Kaplan	15	6	109	28
1991	Joyce Carol Oates	10	11	108	39
1992	Susan Sontag	14	6	115	50
1993	Joseph Epstein	17	5	103	33
1994	Tracy Kidder	15	6	82	40
1995	Jamaica Kincaid	13	7	90	48
1996	Geoffrey C. Ward	17	5	114	44
1997	Ian Frazier	16	8	108	45
1998	Cynthia Ozick	19	6	91	53
1999	Edward Hoagland	17	8	94	53
2000	Alan Lightman	13	8	133	63
2001	Kathleen Norris	18	8	105	62
2002	Stephen Jay Gould	20	5	96	39
2003	Anne Fadiman	14	10	84	55
2004	Louis Menand	15	7	136	68
2005	Susan Orlean	17	8	94	51
2006	Lauren Slater	12	8	114	82
2007	David Foster Wallace	16	6	126	81
2008	Adam Gopnik	16	5	116	74
2009	Mary Oliver	15	7	116	108
2010	Christopher Hitchens	16	5	175	105
Overall		388 (71%)	160 (29%)	2,663 (67%)	1,295 (33%)

The Best American Poetry Series

(editor: David Lehman)

Year	Guest Editor	Men	Women
1988	John Ashbery	55	20
1989	Donald Hall	50	25
1990	Jorie Graham	48	27
1991	Mark Strand	46	29
1992	Charles Simic	43	32
1993	Louise Gluck	47	28
1994	A.R. Ammons	44	31
1995	Richard Howard	42	33
1996	Adrienne Rich	35	40
1997	James Tate	52	23
Best of (1988-1997)*	Harold Bloom	51	24
1998	John Hollander	54	21
1999	Robert Bly	46	29
2000	Rita Dove	41	34
2001	Robert Hass	34	41
2002	Robert Creeley	49	26
2003	Yusef Komunyakaa	49	26
2004	Lyn Hejinian	51	24
2005	Paul Muldoon	36	39
2006	Billy Collins	46	29
2007	Heather McHugh	49	24
2008	Charles Wright	51	24
2009	David Wagoner	37	38
2010	Amy Gerstler	43	32
Overall		1048    (61%)	675    (39%)

*Not included in overall totals.

For more on the Best American Count check out Amy King’s interview with VIDA members Erin Belieu, Danielle Pafunda, Cheryl Strayed, and Adrienne Su: Biting the Hand: VIDA Women Discuss Their Selection For The Best American Series.

I chose the train over the plane to travel to AWP this year because I like the gentle rocking, the bad hot chocolate and the sense of an interior.

That every (poetic) stanza is a stanza or a room is a truism I take seriously. The first stanza is a green room; the second is an antechamber; then, my favorite, the vestibule, also a part of the inner ear, a sense of balance is vestibular, suddenly a promontory, a curve into a cave and I’m there. It seems I never experience reading without entering a space, even if the writing juts, it alters the space I’m in, and in entering me, asks that I enter an interior.

When I was a young writer, newly eighteen, I pictured myself literally as a man when I visualized giving voice to my poetry in public. As though when I tried to dream myself into a writer-in-public, or to fantasize, a male dummy entered where my voice and body should have been. Thirty years later at the verdant epicenter of a small amphitheater in Palazzolo Acreide, Sicily, I felt I’d found my place, the spirit welling within me and the words sprouting from foot through crown in vowels that could stir as much as quiet, even though I knew, in its (ancient Greek or Roman) day, no woman would be wanted there except as figure or idea.

Could my voice fill an amphitheater, or my body? Can yours?

Do we privilege a macro over an interior disposition in writing? I’m not so sure. Think of the history and pantheon of male mystics, philosophers, and contemplatives—it’s possible we privilege maleness, period—as it relates to ideas, creativity, and of course authorship and its none-too-distant cousin, authority, the idea of the author as such. Writing demands equal measures of introspection and profound attention to exteriority—in nonfiction, we call it witnessing—the need to be open to what’s there, to note it with loving care. Nonfiction might even be tantamount to the particular or exquisite tension its writer re-creates between inner and outer worlds. It’s not that women are shuttled into interiors while men enjoy the outside; it’s that we’re only each allowed particular kinds of relationships to each.

Intellectual, writer; writer, intellectual. If the two are allowed to come together, they can augur a “public intellectual,” the likes of Susan Sontag, but consider how much trouble she had inhabiting the position: being a public intellectual required her becoming a celebrity, a site of iconic sexiness while at the same time she remained sexually closeted.

Women are expected to have a conflicted at best, and nonexistent at worst, relationship both to the exteriorization implied by public-ness and the inner authority implied by thought.

What I love about Sontag is that she had the guts to believe her ideas were worth hearing, and she could engage with absolutely anything put before her. Where she fails me is in her not allowing herself much of the time to be more than a dutiful daughter whose essays sometimes read like homework, answers to assignments or canon-making drills.

I’m casting about for a sense of female public intellectuals—can I count them currently on more than one hand?—but the view through the train window is distractingly surreal, and I’m negotiating fears of getting as far away from myself as possible: I don’t think I’ve ever digressed to the point where I’ve lost myself, or forgotten who I am. Was that a woman or a drag queen who just glanced past? White snow against undifferentiated white sky—why are there no deer in the clearing?—smoky pulsions of factory turbines, red cargo carts, divine: who comes to mind when I ask myself: who are today’s women public intellectuals? Or was Susan Sontag the only and the last?

A Wikipedia list of public intellectuals features 95 men to five women, including Camille Paglia, whom Susan Sontag suggested should join a rock band (no offense to rock bands.) I think: Rebecca Solnit, Barbara Ehrenreich and Katha Pollitt. I think: if only Oprah would have Judith Butler on and inaugurate radical philosophy’s popular appeal. I think about Patricia Williams, Michelle Wallace, bell hooks, Angela Davis. Who ardently or urgently reads them now? I think of experimental women filmmakers, Abigail Child, Su Freidrich, Barbara Hammer.

I admit to being the product of an anti-intellectual culture, but I reserve the right to produce a counter-cultural space.

There’s an interview with filmmakers, Agnes Varda and Susan Sontag with Newsweek journalist Jack Kroll that you can watch online. The occasion was the 1969 New York film festival where Sontag’s film, Duet For Cannibals, and Varda’s Lions Love, barely available now, had just appeared. It’s amazing to watch each woman light a cigarette on stage, but more than this, the way they show absolute and utter contempt for their interviewer—his constant interruptions, his condescension. Just when I think they are doing something that today no one would be allowed to do, I notice Sontag isn’t breathing. She’s visibly heaving, breathing so hard and fast, it seems she might jump right out of her skin.

What do you allow yourself in your writing? Where do you allow yourself to go?
Do you have an inner life or have new technologies vanquished that? Is your sense of an interior private or expansive? Is it a real place or a conjuration? A place you make in writing or a dream? Do you know when you’re thinking or have your thoughts been quelled by worrying?

Roland Barthes writes about interiors—the utopian phalanstery and the TB sanitarium as places where desire circulates differently; I’m not sure that can be said for the hotel hallways and meeting rooms of the AWP.

I chose the train over the plane because I always say I want to be monkish and then I end up talking endlessly to the person next to me and making a new friend. Parsing the hours that could have been hewn by solitude. Because really I like nothing more than to read for long uninterrupted periods of time. I chose the train over the plane because I have a phobia of book fair halls and prefer the spaces of the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles, like-minded folk gathered in a small place atop a winding staircase, spinning with ice and smelling of mulled wine: it’s ok if it’s vertiginous if it provides me an alternative to the ground I think I know so well.

“And yet it would be a kind of phalanstery,” Barthes writes, of a type of writing he wishes to produce, “for in it contradictions would be acknowledged… difference would be observed, and conflict rendered insignificant…” (The Pleasure of the Text, Hill and Wang, 1975)

My own next books are on Mood, a kind of interior subject, in one case, and the idea of the study, in another—the study as a heretofore nonexistent literary form, that issues from a particular idea of the student and inspired by philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Ideas of Prose. The study as the place from which my writing issues, and one of its primary conditions of possibility: study as a practice that can have no rightful end, according to Agamben, because it does not need one; that does not demand the exclusion of undergoing from undertaking; that can begin to represent the enigmatic summa of my existence and the realities of lives of others that I still seek a form for, or that my writing has yet to perform a proper justice. (I imagine this as my contribution to the short form in an age taking shape around tweets and status lines).

Women writers are exceptions in a publishing world that remains a boys’ club, by and large, though it is possible there are more women editors of books than acknowledged female writers—more women clean up the shit (see Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, Routledge, 1995); more men write or are allowed a public presence for their work. Still, to paraphrase Susan Sontag—you can’t spend every waking moment of your day feeling indignant. What state would be preferable? I don’t recommend ressentiment as a feminist stance: when defensiveness takes the place of a strategy for change. What’s needed instead is the clearing of a space from which to respond otherwise.

How does any of us understand the difference between our inner lives, and the writing that we produce? That which is pre-occupying and that which we have not yet occupied, in our thinking, in our life, and in our work?

My mother had been an agoraphobic letter writer—as a child I both acutely witnessed and just as surely felt her combination of vitality laced with fear; I saw that passion was the other side of anxiety, that going out or not was an effect of an immigrant legacy, and that the thinking, desiring female body in public was a threat. My own battles with exposition and disclosure through the years have taken many forms, but I remember in particular at one point momentously concluding that as a lesbian I had nothing to confess, and I went about refusing to confess because there was nothing to confess. These days, I think we are all expected to say a whole lot publicly and to say basically nothing much at all.

What do you feel you need or want right now?

I want something other than a list. And the degradation of the list as a multifarious, aesthetically powerful form, twin to prayer and kin to ritual, envelope for elegy, and for ordering systems of all kinds—a way of knowing and a poetics of finite infinitude. “Favorites” lists, best of the year lists are a perverse reduction of the “list” as such, and I wonder if they are really necessary. What would a literary, political and lived landscape of letters look like without them or if we refused to make them, contribute to them, or abide them? If you think there’s a relationship between the collection of poems you’ve just read and the coffee maker, cork screw, dehumidifier or Doc Martens you bought last week, then continue to generate lists, and continue to post thumbs up or down on the pages that announce a new book in the world. Our words and our work circulate in and through a marketplace; as such, they are commodities, whose readers are understood to be consumers. But we all know that there are ways of re-appropriating this flattening out of a book’s volubility and its value, its voice, and the alternate space it asks us to enter. I want something other than a list; and I want something other than a universe whose span is so shrunken to only include one to five stars, and I want something other than a thumb, which is just about as telling as a middle finger. Is the solution for us to assure that women writers appear more often on lists? Or is it possible to re-invent the terms by which a conversation can emerge. Co-conspiring to read and discuss each other’s work, and to make new work from it: in place of lists: what we need is a technique of interruption not replication, re-duplication, or reaction; in place of lists, lips. Lisps. Ellipses, “at once in-dwelling and eventuating from without…”**

I wish to thank Barrie Jean Borich, Cate Marvin, Patti Horvath, Randall Mann, and Susan Steinberg, for inviting me to be part of this conversation.

*The phrase is purposely resonant with Diana Fuss’ wonderful book, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (Routledge, 2004).

**The phrase is borrowed from Avital Ronell’s book, Stupidity (University of Illinois Press, 2002), that I am currently re-reading.

“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? What are the situations and inclinations that lead many—though by no means all—women writers to embrace depictions of interior life? To what extent is this decision informed by gender?

At the time, I was also conducting background research for a women’s studies course, and I happened upon a passage from Joyce Johnson’s 1983 memoir Minor Characters.

In 1953, when she was a junior at Barnard, her creative writing professor told Johnson that she and the other young women in the class should collect experiences before beginning to write.

“How many of you wish to be writers?” the professor asked the class. All of the students raised their hands.

“That’s too bad,” he said. “First of all, if you were going to be writers, you wouldn’t be enrolled in this class. You wouldn’t even be enrolled in school. You’d be hopping freight trains, running through America.”

They would, in other words, be boys.

The message here is clear: experience counts. And experience, by definition, is physically rigorous and risky. If you want to be a writer, forget the classroom—go enroll in Outward Bound.

Today it’s easy enough to see this statement for what it is. Yet while we may disavow the baldness of the remark, the assumptions behind it are still very much with us.

A New York Times article from January 31, 2011 on gender disparities in Wikipedia noted that the writer Pat Baker has a three paragraph Wikipedia entry, while Niko Bellic, a character from Grand Theft Auto IV, has an entry five times as long. Apparently only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women, perhaps because, as the article put it, Wikipedia fosters “a culture that may discourage women.” Now I know virtually nothing about Grand Theft Auto. But surely there are women who do, just as there are women who like football games or boxing matches or John Wayne movies. The thing is, no matter how we may feel about these narratives, we’re unlikely to be the protagonists of them. Cheerleaders? Sure. Love interests? You bet! In the action driven stories that take up so much shelf space, psychic and otherwise, women are relegated to Minor Characters. Ulysses is exciting; Penelope, not so much. Only who’s to say that Penelope’s story—with its aspects of wit, longing, hope, menace, duplicity—isn’t also compelling? Must “adventures” be physically daunting to matter? Must they take place out of doors?

Penelope’s experiences were, by necessity, interior. But even today how many women can drop everything to hitchhike across country or backpack alone in the wilderness or hop freight trains? And what happens when they do? The romance of rugged individualism is another “culture that may discourage women.”

Recently, I received a very thoughtful and somewhat lengthy e-mail from an
editor at a respected literary journal in response to a story I’d submitted. His e-mail started with the usual kind words, praising the story’s “intimacy of details” and “the richness of the protagonist’s interior life.” It then went on to explain that the piece was being rejected because “the majority of the story happens so close to the protagonist’s interiority” and to request that I include “more of the external world.”

This was well-intentioned and generous advice. Someone—a busy editor—had taken time to give me feedback on an unsolicited story. But his advice left me puzzled because it struck me as somewhat contradictory: praise for a story’s “intimacy” and “interior life” contained within a request for its opposite: “more of the external world.”
In other words, “We like all this interior stuff, really we do. Now, could you please go make the story more external?”

Around the same time this occurred, I had the pleasure of working with the fiction editor at Bellevue Literary Review on edits to a story that was to appear in the next issue of that journal. She, too, mentioned how “interior” the writing in the story felt, not pejoratively, our discussion having to do with, in her words, “the difficulty of keeping your reader in a piece that’s wedded to a single interior consciousness.” Our conversation was about interiority as a matter of stylistics—which is to say, a matter of design. But what about the issue of circumstance?

On nice days, when my students ask me to conduct class outside, I have a ready answer. I warn them about all the reasons why we should stay indoors: ticks, mosquitoes, sunburn, poison ivy, muggers. I tell them my motto: “You’re always better off indoors.” I’m joking—but not entirely. The truth is, I’m a lot more comfortable indoors than out, and I think in my own case that this has at least something to do with being female.

It is true that a disability forced me to spend much of my adolescence indoors and limited what I could do physically, including most outdoor activities. My stories and essays reflect this predilection for interior spaces, set as they are in kitchens and bedrooms, libraries and classrooms, hospitals, movie theaters, restaurants—places with walls. But I don’t think this tendency can be strictly attributed to physical limitations.

Some years ago I was walking down a not-yet-gentrified street in a residential neighborhood in Boston, where I used to live. It was late at night, July, and I was with a friend.

After a block or so, my friend stopped, excited. “Look!” he said, pointing to a tree planted in the sidewalk. It was an elm, a giant of an elm, with branches that arced far above us and touched the brownstone across the street. What with blight, elms are rare enough, and this one was truly impressive.

A couple of blocks later, my friend stopped again. This time he indicated a second story window where dozens of birds were flying around a room with a vaulted ceiling painted to resemble a cloud-streaked sky. We watched them: parakeets and finches and other exotic looking birds that dove and swooped and flew in and out of cages.

Later, at home, I wondered at my obtuseness. Henry James has said that a writer should be one on whom nothing is lost. I wanted, badly, to notice things: the aviary, the elms, the small surprises the world gives up. What else was lost on me?

I thought about my friend Michael, walking around Boston, seeing things that I blew right by. I thought about the way he walks—slowly, looking left and right, taking things in, taking his time. Then I thought about the way I walk—briskly, eyes focused straight ahead, aware of my periphery, careful not to make eye contact with strangers.

It’s the way that many urban women learn to walk, the self-protective stance we inhabit whether consciously or not.

The next night I conducted an experiment. Walking home from dinner, I decided to slow down. This worked well enough within the confines of the Christian Science Center, which is crowded and well lit and (I might add) patrolled by security guards. Things got a little sketchier when I head south down Mass. Ave. An entire block had been torn up to make way for a new subway. The block was essentially deserted; a couple of streetlights were out. Two men turned a corner and started walking towards me—there was no one else around—and…I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t slow down. I breezed by, all business and busyness.

Of course it’s likely that had I slowed my pace nothing would have happened. Or nothing more than the routine verbal harassment that women are subjected to. On a busy well-lit street these comments lose their edge. But it was late and quiet and dark and I acted on a sense of apprehension that has become second nature to me.

In the end, I suppose, I’m not much more likely to stroll the streets of my New York neighborhood at night than I am to hitchhike across America or explore the Amazon. Perhaps, for safety’s sake, I’m cultivating a type of blindness, a blinkered point of view. I don’t know. All I can say for certain is that for many writers interiority may be a more complex issue than a simple matter of choice. For many of us it’s a natural perspective, and the great outdoors never really felt like home.

The Publisher’s Weekly 2009 list included books by 10 men and—wait for it—zero women. Announcing the list, Louisa Ermelino said that PW wanted the list “to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration.” “We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz,” she wrote, adding “it disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.”

Disturbed, but not disturbed enough to include 2009 books by, say, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh, and Jayne Ann Phillips.

In her response to this list, called “On Disturbance,” published in The Rumpus, panelist Susan Steinberg wrote the following:

“Why would they choose to put out a list that disturbs them? Wouldn’t it also disturb others? Were they trying to send a message? I’m just saying, a remedy for the disturbance may have been to call their list into question. A next step may have been to call their criteria into question. A next step may have been to stop consciously ‘ignoring gender’ if an all-male list was disturbing. ‘Ignoring gender,’ after all, often results in the all-male list. We’ve seen how this works, and it’s certainly not limited to the literary world.”

In her response to Susan’s response, panelist Patti Horvath wrote, “ ‘Ignoring gender’ seems to me suspiciously akin to people who claim they don’t ‘see’ color. It’s there and these editors are clearly making a statement about what norms & subjects make for the ‘best’ literature. They might, if they are so disturbed, question how those norms were determined.”

And in the VIDA press release regarding this PW list, co-founder Erin Belieu wrote, “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 was disheartened by the 2009 list because the book I cared about the most that year, a luminous, subversive book that I couldn’t get out of my head, Louise Glück’s A Village Life, was of course not in the Top 10; but, more importantly, because exclusions are always troubling, especially in light of a statement such as “we ignored gender,” which is maybe little more than an oafish, ball-scratching way of saying “Ladies, we see you, and what of it?” And for me, not to make too much of this, but as a queer poet of color, I know something of erasures. It would be one thing if women writers were talentless hacks, but let’s not kid ourselves, there’s something else at work here, and it’s that something, the implications of merit and omission and gender and interiority, that the essays in this month’s issue address.

Editor’s Note

You may have already read Eileen Myles’ essay “Being Female,” and so wonder why VIDA chose to reprint this piece in our first site update since releasing The Count 2010 pie charts. From the moment “Being Female” debuted this past Valentine’s Day in The Awl—one of many responses, in print and online, to VIDA’s count—links to Myles’ essay have shown up in all manner of blogs and social networking sites, and comment streams contain everything from effusive appreciation to scathing misogyny. In other words, this essay hit a nerve, the same nerve exposed by VIDA’s count.

When I read Myles’ essay the first time, I cried. (Cried like a girl you might be thinking? Yes—like an angry, starved, revolutionary literary girl, relieved and grateful someone finally wrote down what it feels like to be inside her skin.) We reprint Myles’ essay here because the whole point of counting was to start a conversation about women’s writing, gender politics, and the literary terrain within which we are all attempting to work. Whether or not you agree with Myles’ take on our numbers, this essay is a good fit for the VIDA site because her words begin to get at what the counting means, as well as what – in the discussion, in literature, in culture—is really at stake.

If you’re new to these words, then we are pleased to share this work with you now. If you’ve read “Being Female” before, then we invite you to read, and share, the essay again, and then let’s talk.

Barrie Jean Borich—VIDA Editorial Committee Chair

BEING FEMALE

by Eileen Myles

When I think about being female, I think about being loved. What I mean is that I have a little exercise I do when I present my work or speak publicly or even write (like this.) In order to build up my courage, I try to imagine myself deeply loved. Because there are men whose lives I’ve avidly followed—out of admiration for their work or their “way.” Paolo Pasolini always comes to mind. I love his work, his films, his poetry, his writings on film and literature, his life, all of it, even his death. How did he do it—make such amazing work and stand up so boldly as a queer and a Marxist in a Catholic country in the face of so much (as his violent death proved) hate. I have one clear answer. He was loved. Pasolini’s mother was wild about him. We joke about this syndrome—Oh she was an Italian mother, but she could just have well been a Jewish mother, an Irish mother, an African American one. A mother loves her son. And so does a country. And that is much to count on. So I try to conjure that for myself, particularly when I’m writing or saying something that seems both vulnerable and important, so I don’t have to be defending myself so hard. I try and act like it’s mine. The culture. That I’m its beloved son. It’s not an impossible conceit. But it’s hard. Because a woman, reflexively, often feels unloved.

When I saw the recent VIDA pie charts that showed how low the numbers are of female writers getting reviewed in the mainstream press, I just wasn’t surprised at all, though I did cringe. When you see your oldest fears reflected back at you in the hard, bright light of day it doesn’t feel good. Because a woman is someone who grew up observing that everyone was imagining a whole lot more for her brother and the boys around her in school.   If she’s a talented artist, she’s told that she could probably teach art to children when she grows up, and then she hears the boy who’s good in art get told by the same teacher that one day he can grow up to be a commercial artist. The adult doing the talking in these kinds of exchanges is most often female. And the woman who is still a child begins to wonder if her childhood is already gone because she has been already replaced in the future by a woman who will be teaching children like herself. And will she tell them that they too will not so much fail but vanish before their lives can even begin. These pie charts don’t surprise me. They just demonstrate that a lot of us can easily become just a few, or even just one, of us. I am mildly curious about whether the situation in book reviewing (or even publishing) was actually better for a while during and right after the 70s, the heyday of feminism, but you know I’m not that curious. That thrilling rise then dogged fall would only underline the sad fact that the increased interest in women’s writings for a decade or so was a kind of fleeting impulse, like the interest-in-incest moment, just “a thing,” not a deep cultural shift like the comprehension that slavery or human sacrifice is wrong and we just won’t ever go there again. But to have such a deep sea change in a culture and keep it, you have put the reins of its institutions permanently in other hands, and let them stay there.  “They” would have to have become “you.” And you (whether you were male or female) would have long concluded that women’s writing is either just writing or no different than men’s or equally interesting, or even better.  And that perspective would by now be so embedded in our cultural sense of self that the Times or Harpers or The New York Review of Books would no more likely be short changing women’s books today anymore than they would be pulling quietly away from reviewing books written in English in order to uphold a belief that the only good work being written today is by African, South American or Icelandic authors. And think, nobody would notice. Reasonable people of course would smile and insist that the NYRB be renamed The New York Review of African Books or South American Books or Icelandic. It would have to happen, the NYRB would have to own their bias eventually, what they were doing, the editor would have to issue a statement or else the publication would become a total joke. But to publish a review today that purportedly reviews “all” books, yet in fact is dedicated to the project of mainly reviewing men’s without acknowledging that kind of bias sort of begs the question; the operating presumption must be that “we” “all know” that men’s writing is in fact better or more important than women’s—is the real deal and the only thing disputing this is feminism and since that’s “over” (phew) we are back to business as usual. When I say business I mean that there’s just a whole lot of money talking. That’s what’s going on. The more culturally generous moment we’re all missing (whether it ever truly happened or not) was tied to a booming economy. Men weren’t actually sharing space in the 70s and 80s—the doors just got a little wider for a while. And now that there’s less money to go around in book publishing and the surrounding media, it seems like what’s getting shoved out is women. That’s what I believe is happening, don’t you. I think we can do this, right? The editor might ask his staff holding up the cover of the next great all-male issue that dare not speak its name—and his staff probably includes a few females and queers who want to be in on “the conversation.” Who could blame them for that? Well I can. Can’t you? I mean what are we doing here after all.

Is writing just a job? Writing books, writing poems. If it is, then the message to women is to go elsewhere. But they can go to hell—these messengers, the collective whoever or whatever that is saying it. I don’t believe that this is a job. I think writing is a passion. It’s an urge as deep as life itself. It’s sex. It’s being and becoming. If you write, then writing is how you know. And when someone starts slowly removing women from the public reflection of this fact, they are saying that she doesn’t know. Or I don’t care if she thinks she knows. She is not a safe bet. Interestingly, the poetry world is getting celebrated for its VIDA showing of nearly equal gender parity in reviewing etc. The problem there though is that the majority of the poets writing is female. It’s true. That’s who takes workshops, that’s who gets MFAs, you can easily get some numbers there, and frankly, in the poetry scene, the women are the ones who are generally doing the most exciting work. Why? Because the female reality is still largely unknown. And language is the thrill that holds the unknown in its vague and shifting ways. That’s writing. But despite the fact that there are more females in the poetry world, more females writing their accounts, somehow only a fraction of them are able to bob to the top of the heap. So the poetry world is in effect performing a kind of affirmative action for men by giving their work a big push ahead, celebrating men’s books at a much higher ratio to the amount and quality of work actually being produced. And I’m not entertaining for a moment that this is because male work is better. I’m female, and I don’t so much think female work is better. Female reality is not better. But female reality has consumed male reality abundantly—we have to in order just to survive, so female reality always contains male and female. That seems interesting as hell, so at the very least, I think it’s a lot more interesting than a monotonous male reality. Which seems just sort of staid and old. Tapped out. Female reality (and this goes for all the “other” realities as well—queer, black, trans, everyone else) is more interesting because it is wider, more representative of humanity—it’s definitely more stylistically various because of all it has to carry and show. After all, style is practical. You do different things because you are different. Women are different. Maybe not the women who routinely get invited to take part in the men’s monolith. They are another item. But women as a class are different. That’s how I dispense with the quality question.

But here’s the actual problem. If the poetry world celebrated its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave. Poetry would not seem to be the job for them. I think that’s the fear. Losing daddy again! Plus women always need to support, I mean actively support, male work in order to dispense with the revolting suggestion that they are feminists. I supported Hillary Clinton with my vote, but did you notice she wasn’t really a feminist until she was losing. Well what does feminism mean? Well I think it means that you don’t do much in your work except complain about injustice and describe the personal sphere and talk in a wide variety of ways about labias. You think I’m kidding. Cause I actually do that in my most recent novel—I thought, well, women in the art world are always celebrating their labias, so maybe I should do that in writing. What a great funny, even masculine idea. To use the pussy as material. So I wrote five pages of pussy wallpaper and gave it to the editors at VICE who did publish it, but confided in me that the money people really had to be convinced that it was not entirely disgusting. With all the dirty and violent and racist things that VICE has done, this was, um, a little troubling. Do we really want to send that kind of message to our readers? What kind of message is that? I guess a wet, hairy, soft female one. I mean a big, giant female hole you might fall into never to be heard from again. I mean and there’s just always a danger if you’re a feminist that you’re also a lesbian (I am.) and the only way to really make it clear that you are not that (or that “it” means nothing) is to firmly vote with the guys, kid with them, and be willing to laugh at other women (to demonstrate that you have “a sense of humor”) and not push too hard to include women in anything. Speaking frankly as a lesbian, I have to say that the salient fact about the danger zone I call home is the persistent experience of witnessing the quick revulsion of people who believe that because I love women I am a bottom feeder. I am desperately running towards what anyone in his or her right mind would be running away from. Which is femaleness, which is failure.

And one does after all want to be read as a man. As a man who is a woman perhaps. Can’t we just all be men and some have these genitals and some have those. I heard that that’s how they saw it in the middle ages. And some died after having thirteen children and some just got another wife. Women finally are all replaceable and that’s the real truth. The more different we get, the less likely we can fit our foot in the tiny shoe. And that’s the gig. Not being female, but being small. But I want to be loved because I am. That’s all.