Features - State of the Art

“On Gender and Publishing”: A Panel Moderated by Carmen Giménez Smith

by gimenez

Carmen Giménez Smith is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University, and publisher for Noemi Press as well as editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. Her work has most recently appeared in jubilat, Ploughshares and Colorado Review and is forthcoming in A Public Space, Denver Quarterly and New American Writing. Her collection of poetry, Odalisque in Pieces, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009. A memoir called Bring Down the Little Birds will be published by University of Arizona Press in 2010.

Since the splashy, high-profile release of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, a vigorous and provocative conversation has taken shape regarding the female writer’s role in the publishing sphere. In approaching this conversation in light of VIDA’s project of researching literary magazines and the gender breakdown of their authors, I realized that to draw together Franzen’s success with the dearth of books by women reviewed in the New York Times and with the statistical disparity of women’s representation in literary magazines was to draw a complicated landscape in broad brushstrokes. There is, after all, a cultural complicity on all our parts when it comes to any type of injustice. Whether through reinventions of feminist social justice, the banal force of hegemony, activism or apathy, there are simply too many factors, and more importantly, possibilities to consider before we can start to construct hard lines.

This online discussion of gender and publishing seeks to broaden the conversation, to represent the nuance of numbers and the diverse ways in which women’s representation in the literary marketplace and canon can be considered. I have invited several different viewpoints on the subject from writers, poets, and publishers. Their responses are varied, sometimes contradictory, but definitely reflective of the complex issues surrounding the discussion of gender and publishing.

1. How does gender impact the success or the non-success of the female writer?

Tracy Bowling: I do believe that bias is present in the publishing world such that women writers are underpublicized and undersold after their work is published, but it’s not a bias I feel very qualified to speak to. The more distressing evidence of a gender bias I see comes before publication, in that women writers often seem pressed to fit themselves very neatly into categories, to define a space for their work or to proclaim whose footsteps they’re following in. In the wake of Jonathan Franzen’s glowing reception, many writers have discussed the infrequency with which the word “genius” is applied to women writers; I’d be curious to see if the same is true of words like “breakthrough,” “innovative,” and “new.” I think that in order to attain success, especially in mainstream publishing, women often have to (often artificially) join a particular group or cohort of other women writers in order for their craft to be perceived as serious and studied. I’ve seen this a lot among women who write fantastic or fairy tale fiction, where, for example, no matter how little one’s work resembles or echoes that of Angela Carter, that work rarely gets discussed without heavy reference to Angela Carter. The really unfortunate side effect of having to strategize and situate oneself as one among many others, I think, is that women become less likely to write the Franzen-esque literary epics, simply because there is less precedent–less of a niche within which their work can be easily framed.

Jane Ciabattari: Women who write in the 21st century have wider opportunities than in the past. (At one point women wrote under male pseudonyms or used initials to disguise who they were. At one point literary magazines were filled with stories by and about men and no batted an eye) But we are not in a post-feminist world. If anything, there is a bit of a backlash against the “favored” aspects of affirmative action (Which is too bad, because the point was to restore equity, not swing back). Gender roles, if anything, have shifted back to the more traditional.

I suspect one reason the major raves for the new Jonathan Franzen novel rankle some women writers is that Franzen is writing a relatively traditional nineteenth-century domestic novel, a form perfected by women over the past century, and the response he is getting seems out of proportion.

Sometimes I think on some levels it boils down to empathy. Women in this culture have tended to be raised with a dual perspective, seeing both male and female points of view, and are educated to read and give critical responses to literature by men with primarily male protagonists (we all read Moby-Dick, right? and the major war novels) as well as books by and about women. Most men in this culture are not raised to have this gift for empathetic flexibility, nor offered the idea that books by and about women are of equal intellectual weight.

What we need, I think, is to open the doors of imagination wide rather than favor a few authors who write about a narrow economic niche. I’ve been excited over the past year to read the work of newcomer Tiphanie Yanique, short story master Yiyun Li, the amazing Lily Hoang, who breaks the mold and puts it back together again, Jennifer Egan, who is pushing the limits of fiction in new ways with each book, and I consider them on par with the male writers whose work seems fresh and exciting to me this year.

Danielle Dutton: I’m torn. On the one hand, yes, there is an imbalance, and it can be infuriating, disappointing, stifling, just plain sad, especially because I’d like the world to be a fair place, not just for women writers but for any group of marginalized writers (or people) here in America or somewhere else. I myself haven’t felt discriminated against as a woman writer (or at least I haven’t registered any particular rejection as discriminatory), but I have certainly registered the patriarchal impulse pulsing through literary history and criticism, primarily in my many years as a student. So there’s that. On the other hand, fair or not, I don’t think anyone should dictate how or whom a publisher should publish. In a very basic sense, I’m against that. If we’re talking about publishing literature (i.e., art), then I don’t think that’s how it works. If we’re talking about review coverage in the New York Times, that’s another (shameful) story, because then it’s not about a publisher’s commitment to work that calls to her/him to be published, it’s about a review source (which is supposed to be a kind of public service, right?) ignoring what’s so obviously out there (be it writing by women, or books in translation, or experimental fiction, or . . . ).

This will perhaps come off as naïve, nevertheless my instinct is to say that if you don’t like how someone’s doing something, start doing something else. My perception is that there are a lot of choices out there right now in terms of where to publish your work. I mentioned that I’ve never really noticed gender discrimination as regards publishing my own writing, and perhaps this has to do with where I’ve chosen to submit my work (and this no doubt has to do with my answer to question 4). If a magazine consistently publishes mostly men, what’s the point of beating them over the head trying to get in? I don’t even want to be in that magazine. Does the desire to be included stem from some perception that the magazine “matters,” and we fear we won’t get recognition, or sales, or jobs because we’re not being included? There are some real issues there, but there’s also an opportunity to “let” other venues in. As I’m sure we all know, there are many presses and magazines that do publish a wonderful mix of women and men. Tarpaulin Sky Press and their magazine spring immediately to mind, as does Fence Books and magazine. And some of my favorite presses are presses dedicated to publishing women’s writing, such as Kelsey St. Press and the Belladonna* collective. The problem perhaps comes when we (or the people we are trying to or, for whatever reason, need to impress) don’t recognize the wider world of contemporary publishing, focusing narrowly on a few “major” presses and magazines and awards. Personally, I think the best way to work against these imbalances, at least in my own life, is to consistently champion the writers who matter to me, for example to focus my teaching on the work that thrills me, whether it be the novels of Virginia Woolf or the poems of Lisa Jarnot or the strange hybrid books of Anne Carson or Bhanu Kapil.

To this end (i.e., championing writing I love), I recently started a press of my own—Dorothy, a publishing project—which happens to be dedicated, as the website puts it, to “works of fiction, or near fiction, or about fiction, mostly by women.” My own desire to publish “mostly women” is something I’m actually still figuring out for myself. I can say that in a general sense it comes from 1) the fact that my own aesthetic literary interests tend mainly toward the work of women writers (I’m not out to posit a specific feminine aesthetic, just stating the case) and 2) my reaction to some patronizing/misogynistic words/moments I’ve witnessed from men (mostly men, anyway) in and out of the literary world. I’ve found such behavior and comments personally troubling, and this press is a very personal endeavor, named for my great aunt who loved books very much, and so I choose to engage my time and my money (as a publisher) elsewhere. This isn’t to say all men are pigs—no no no (and no offense to pigs)—or that I wouldn’t publish a man’s book—I already have one in the works—but that my primary interests lie in the writing I’ve seen from women, aesthetically and personally, at least right now, and I want to make that clear up front (ultimately, of course, the thing that matters most is that the books I publish are books I think are great, important, and provocative whether written by a man or a woman . . . if my interests were to publish male writers, would I be so bold as to state this on my website? . . . I doubt it, but at least the admission would be honest, even if the preference, as this whole discussion attests to, would be somewhat pointless). Incidentally, since posting my website earlier this year, even with the line there about an interest in publishing “mostly women,” I have had more inquiries about submissions from men than from women. Why is that?

I’d also like to propose that numbers aren’t always the most useful way of evaluating a publisher (not that the question implied this, but because it’s something I’ve thought about and would like to bring up). The press I work for is called Dalkey Archive, and it publishes mostly literature in translation and considerably more male writers than women writers (sigh), and yet I maintain that Dalkey is an important and worthwhile press, one that furthermore publishes some amazing, risky books by women (everything from Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and Violette Leduc’s La Batarde to Meiko Kanai’s The Word Book, Rosa Liksom’s Dark Paradise, and Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Mirror in the Well, which you should really check out, if you haven’t already).

Finally, I guess one thing that I would be interested in, and which might be useful, in addition to or as a way of “calling out,” would be to invite the “offending” publishers or magazines to be (a welcome) part of a forum discussion, such as this one, or to set up a conference or some panel discussion where men and women can sit and talk about the issue together, as writers, readers, publishers, people. In the end, the numbers themselves will mean something to people, to publishers, and interviewers, and reviewers . . . or they won’t.

Becca Klaver: In the blogosphere debates in the wake of Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s “Numbers Trouble,” I remember a lot of (mostly male) editors claiming that they didn’t publish as many women as men because fewer women submitted to their magazines. We have fewer hard numbers on this, and they can’t be verified as easily as the publication numbers can be, but I believe that this is probably the case.

So, then, why? Is it because women are cultured to be less assertive than men? Have a harder time “putting themselves out there”? It is because women, on the whole, have a harder time believing their work is worthy of publication? I think there is some truth to these speculations. In my roles as teacher, editor, and assistant programs director for a poetry program, I have seen how many women do not submit their work to magazines or contests unless they’re encouraged to do so by someone else (and sometimes, not even then). Not everyone, of course, but enough to make you wonder what the root is. And what I think the root is—crises of self-esteem and confidence that overwhelm girls and women—feels like a culturally pervasive problem that sometimes feels impossible to “solve” without total cultural upheaval. I shouldn’t say “impossible,” though—total cultural upheaval in the name of women has clearly occurred more than once in this country in the last century!

My other hunch, which I have even less “proof” for, is that women are still doing more to manage the mundane details of life than men—from doing dishes to planning travel itineraries—and that leaves them less time for the “leisure” that gathering together submission packets can often feel like.

Elizabeth McCracken: First, I’ll say that it’s changing. I think writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Nicole Krauss, and Julie Orringer are reviewed very seriously–not to mention Zadie Smith, who I think is seen as one of the most important writers of her generation here as well as in England. In twenty years, the conversation will be different.

Older women writers–by which I mean, 40 and older–are not going to be (you should pardon the expression) grandfathered in. People praise them but they somehow don’t have the same kind of reputation as male writers in the same age brackets. Sue Miller, Mary Gaitskill, Joanna Scott, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathryn Davis, Joy Williams, Sarah Schulman, Leslie Marmon Silko–the usual suspects, in other words.

Of course, there is no Geiger counter for sexism. Do I believe that women as a whole have not been taken as seriously as literary writers? Absolutely. But it’s impossible to point to specific careers–male or female–whose careers have benefited or suffered because of it. I have read for enough fellowships and graduate programs to know that, no matter the demographic breakdown of the people whose work you want to support, when you’re reading and choosing you’re always certain it comes down to the work and only the work. When I see best-of-lists, I count up the genders, and I groan when they’re overwhelmingly male. I also know I have helped compile prize lists and fellowship programs that are primarily or exclusively male (as well as plenty that are primarily or exclusively female), and I know I cannot bear kicking a male writer whose work I adore off a list simply because there’s a female writer whose work I like well enough but less who won’t make it if I don’t. I can only hope that my lifetime list is well-balanced.

Don Share: If we generalize (and I hope that to do so is different from stereotyping), men are more likely to put themselves forward and form advantageous and powerful professional relationships; they are likely to get better jobs and better-paying jobs, and to dominate discussions. Women are condescended to in many kinds of ways. Moreover, women who raise children are significantly less free to get writing done and get it out there than men are. Erin Belieu and Cate Marvin, among others, have described these things well; and Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young have compiled numbers that have given us all pause. But to put it succinctly: All of the women writers I know have had to work in the face of one form or another of disadvantage.

2. What do you think of calling out publishers and magazines for gender imbalances among the writers they publish? Will this be effective or not? What else might work to call attention to the imbalances?

Tracy Bowling: I think it’s definitely worth bringing gender imbalances to publishers’ and editors’ attention when they occur. Often this gender imbalance happens to the most conscientious and proactive of editors despite their best efforts to the contrary, but it’s certainly worth raising the issue just in case they hadn’t given a lot of thought to what writers they were and weren’t representing. I think the hounding on that front should generally stop there–either there’s a good explanation and a good faith effort or there’s not–and that the work then becomes to promote and spread the word about women writers and to improve conditions that might stand in the way of women writers producing and publishing work. It’s still true on average that women spend more time doing household chores and taking care of children, for instance–that obviously eats into writing time, and while changes like these may seem to hinge primarily on macro-level social reforms, I think there are also things the writing community can do to encourage or enable women to write more, to write more broadly (in more genres, forms, lengths, etc.), and to get that writing out there.

Jane Ciabattari: I think it is useful to point out the number of reviews of male versus female writers, the number of male/female bylines, because it’s likely the imbalance has crept in unconsciously. And unless it is pointed out, it is likely to continue.

Stephanie G’Schwind: Donald Revell, one of the Colorado Review‘s longtime poetry editors, once said to me, “We don’t publish poets; we publish poems.” And that really resonated with me. So I find myself looking for stories and essays first, and particular writers second. (This is one of the many reasons we don’t read cover letters before we read manuscripts.) And yet, gender balance is important to me. For the fall issue of the Colorado Review, which I just sent to the printer an hour ago, I was at a place where I had two stories and needed one more, and it occurred to me as I was searching for the right story that I hoped it would be by a male author, as the other two stories were written by women. And that’s how it turned out. Most of the time, the pieces I select for the magazine end up being balanced by gender whether I initially intended that or not; but I have published issues in which all the fiction was written by women, and issues in which all the fiction was written by men. And I find I’m not comfortable with that.

Becca Klaver: I think it’s the necessary first step. Because when you have these debates without being able to point to numbers, those who want to argue that this isn’t really a problem—that plenty of women get published—always ask for numbers, as if the topic isn’t worthy of discussion without empirical proof. So, it’s good to have some cold, hard data to present and to analyze, and then it’s good to put it aside and talk about causes, symptoms, and solutions. There isn’t a scientific answer to this problem, but people seem to want to see the problem in a scientific way, anyway, as if our cultural woes are always visible woes. They’re not.

Elizabeth McCracken: You know, I’m not sure. My private fantasy is that Terry Gross was horrified when she heard–if she heard–the gender breakdown for the writers who have appeared on her show. (That’s the breakdown that broke my heart.) When these various statistics were published in the past couple of weeks–the Times reviewing 24% more fiction by men in the Book Review; Oprah not having chosen a woman writer for a book club in five years–I think a lot of us were disturbed, and then strangely comforted that there was evidence to back up some old suspicions. I do hope that people whose choices have been analyzed find it useful–with an eye to improve that lifetime average.

Don Share: I think it’s salutary; and perhaps it has already been, and will continue to be effective. Yet it has to be understood that these imbalances are more intricate than numbers alone indicate. Stephen Corey, editor of Georgia Review, recently left a comment on John Gallaher’s blog that I hope will stimulate further discussion:

“Suppose you went to the trouble of picking up the current (Summer 2010) issue of Georgia? You wouldn’t have to READ the poems–you could just count the male and female poets, finding three and four respectively. Or you could go further, counting the pages of poetry by males and females, finding nine and thirty-five respectively… Are things this way all the time? No. Should one run four times as many pages of poetry by women as men, or men as women, because of the gender of the poets? No. What are we counting here, and why–especially if we are just counting without reading?”

Change is needed, but it’s worth considering his point about “counting without reading.”

3. How might a magazine, newspaper or publisher work to better represent female writers? Is any change necessary?

Tracy Bowling: I’m in general an advocate for publishers and editors relaxing and broadening their aesthetic tendencies to make room for female writers who take the risk of working in uncharacteristic and/or uncategorizeable forms and genres. A lot of female writers seem to be doing great things with atypical genres like horror and adventure, or with hybrid forms like lyric essays, and I feel like the journals and presses who are bending their aesthetic frameworks to allow for such risk-taking are generally receiving happy returns from reviewers and buyers.

Jane Ciabattari: I think it helps to maintain a gender balance on staff so that all voices are heard. The question is, who is the “I” making the choice or the value judgment. Male or female? If a relatively equal number of women and men are gatekeepers, the “I” is served in both cases. Also, it helps to maintain a gender balance among the top leaders. Everyone pays attention to the thinkers at the top.

Becca Klaver: I like to think of the editor’s job in the old-fashioned way. Someone who’s actively seeking new writers to promote, not just by going after big names, or looking through the slush pile, but by reading other magazines and by asking around. Young editors, or editors of a brand-new magazine, can’t just take what’s sent to them—they have to actively seek out work, and build an aesthetic that way. So, what I’m getting at is that I think it’s absolutely appropriate for editors to seek out women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups to help correct imbalances, and more than that, to create a richer, more exciting publication. It’s also appropriate for faculty advisors of school lit mags to teach their students to be aware of these issues.

The idea of the editor as Bastion of Impeccable Taste is only an ego trip, a myth. It’s always the straight white male editors who are getting defensive and saying they’re only choosing “the best work” by choosing other straight white male writers. I believe they think they are. I also believe that these guys are the ones who have had the privilege (loss) of never having had to try on another cultural perspective—never having to pass, to code-switch. They don’t know as much what it is to be inside the mind of a person who is different from them. Besides the lack of empathy (and therefore the increase in defensiveness) this engenders, their publication selections will be the poorer for that; we see that in plenty of mainstream magazines and in some indies, too.

Elizabeth McCracken: Of course newspapers and magazines (and radio shows) could do a better job–but part of the problem, it seems to me, is marketing. Books by women are marketed as magical and quiet and lyrical; they have covers with portions of body parts (the side of a face, a pair of hands–the parade of headless and/or faceless people who have appeared on these novels! the amputated legs!) and floaty script. They don’t look serious. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Is it merely a matter of making the book look commercial? Is it underestimating all those fabled women book buyers? Books by women that straddle the literary/commercial line are pushed over into the commercial, with covers that look like covers of previously successful books. I absolutely agree with Jennifer Weiner on this subject: the Venn Diagram that shows the intersection between Literary and Commercial has a far bigger overlap for men than for women.

4. Is gender bias the most prevalent type at work in the publishing industry today? If not, what is?

Tracy Bowling: I think there is a lot of work still to be done to give a fair shot to writers of other nationalities who write in English. From the perspective of a fiction writer especially, I feel like I see a lot of writers from other countries rejected not for lack of literary merit but for their use of unfamiliar, often culturally influenced forms or styles of storytelling. Correcting for this bias means that publishers and editors have to question their invisible frameworks for the structure and content of good literature, and asking if those frameworks may in fact be culturally biased in favor of Western literature specifically. Hopefully such reflection would go a long way toward correcting gender biases as well–while I don’t want to suggest that women create in fundamentally different ways from men, there are plenty of unexamined assumptions about what makes good writing that can potentially block out forms of writing that emerge from the real experiences and contexts of being in a marginalized group.

Jane Ciabattari: It’s particularly evident right now, but I wouldn’t say it’s the most prevalent bias.

Danielle Dutton: Again I think this depends on what community one is paying attention to. If we’re talking about The Publishing Industry, about publishing houses that regularly do get reviewed in the New York Times, for example, then I’d say the major bias is artistic, a bias against anything that isn’t familiar, or obviously marketable.

Becca Klaver: Probably not. But it’s the easiest to count, since names reveal gender more easily than they reveal ethnicity, disability, etc. I really hope that “Numbers Trouble,” The Count at VIDA, and other counting and analysis projects are just the beginning of a more wide-ranging effort that will affect writers in all sorts of marginalized positions.

Elizabeth McCracken: Oh heavens, no. Writers of color and gay and lesbian writers are still subject to the instant genrefication of their work by people, simply for writing about the lives somewhat like their own. There are exceptions, of course, but no major publisher would ever be nervous about the marketability–and therefore publishability–of a book because it had too many heterosexual characters. Straight white writers don’t have to worry about what their characters’ lives being defined as “content”–as in, “You write beautifully, but I’m not sure about the content.”

Maria Melendez: I’ve just come from a reading and book discussion with Gloria Zamora, featuring her first book, the memoir Sweet Nata: Growing Up in Rural New Mexico. Our library in Pueblo, Colorado has a wonderful Latino Book Group hosted by our (publicly funded! halelu!) Hispanic Resource Librarian, Charlene Garcia Simms. How did we end up celebrating this particular ascending woman writer? Rudolfo Anaya wants to promote this memoir because he believes it to be an essential contribution to Chicano literature, and to American literature. Halelus to you, Rudy, for holding the door open to a lady. Eventually, we’ll open more doors for ourselves (we are, everyday, mas y mas—witness the virtual gathering here), we’ll remove the hinges and change out the old portals for…who knows what? Halls lined with mylar and mirrors, where we can see ourselves, and see all who travel with us, as Rudy does.

Ahem. Does the gentleman Jonathan Franzen use the platform of his fame to hold doors open for any up and coming (or down and going!) ladies? What other writers does he promote? I’m sorry I’m not up on my White writer gossip—to make a fairer comparison, which White male writers over 70 are going out of their way to promote new women’s writing?

__________________

Calling out literary publishers, promoters and personae for gender imbalances is completely appropriate.* (And yes, I use “literary” in the broadest, most Latinate sense—“of reading and writing.”) My friend and colleague Francisco Aragón (Director of Letras Latinas, founder and publisher of Momotombo Press) works hard to periodically make constructive “calling out” gestures, where needed, to draw attention to national-scale poetry venues from which Latino poets are conspicuously absent. I’ve often daydreamed about a grape-boycott-style, long-running collective snub of literary magazines that disproportionately exclude Latino writers, literary event series that feature too few, or zero, Latino guest speakers/readers, and bookstores that refuse to bring Latino lit front and center, so to speak. On the down side, this boycott would run so deep as to leave readers/patrons with precious few remaining options. On the up side, such a boycott would highlight those out there fighting the good lucha—Resistencia Book Store in San Antonio, Mestizo Coffee House in Salt Lake City, the several active Latino-focused literary publishers working today, to begin to name a few orgs on the working side of Latino equality.

Where are the similarities/informative parallel histories of the struggles for literary (and by extension, cultural) equality between writers of color in the U.S. and women writers in the U.S.? I think that in both cases, our resistance and survival (survivance, thank YOU, Mr. Vizenor) are served by two concurrent efforts:

1) Work we do to collectively hold our own doors open—for ourselves! Examples: CALYX, on the x-chromosome side, Arte Publico for the raza route.

2) Work we and our allies do to foster integration and inclusivity of our work in curricula, in anthologies, in reading series, in reviews, in print, on screens, etc.**

Most of what I’ve had to say has been about the non-commercial, non-profit literary world. I’m not an insider to the commercial fiction world (as is Jennifer Weiner, whose remarks launched this discussion), and have the great joy and relief of speaking from the puny land of poetry, home of an entire genre already poorly received and underdiscussed on the whole—Dana Gioia, pass me a tissue, pleez—where expectations for public acclaim do not soar to the Oprahsphere, and Moby Norton may be the biggest, whitest whale that drives us crazy— Anyhoo. Even while considering Latino poetry, I experience Franzenfreude, as Weiner describes it—dismay at the disproportionate tauting of male literary successes, at the expense of recognition for more women writers. Witness the reputation and New Age bookstore distribution of Pablo Neruda vs. Gabriela Mistral, or the beloved-of-anthologists oeuvre of Jimmy Santiago Baca vs. that of any Chicana poet.

Sigh. It’s times like these I reach for a bottle of Buddhist non-attachment. Isn’t fame just emptiness, anyway? Isn’t the plea “Know me, know me, know me” the outward expression of an inner hunger that only leads to more hunger? Although I know I have to resurface into Babel from time to time—it’s where my commerce takes place, after all—I guard the times, deep underground in writing or other contemplative processes, when there is “no me.” When all my communities, both those of marginalization and those of privilege,

flow through, but do not get trapped in, this one body.

*I would like to take this opportunity to say: Garrison Keillor! You probably do not realize this! But you are promoting! A White supremacist vision! Of American poetry! Please! Take! A! Critical! Look! At! Your! Writer’s Almanac list of featured poets! And! Then! Email me! Have I got books by some great women poets of color to send to you.

** Does this equate to having “assimilationist” goals, with all the fraught baggage and plaintive hope that a-word carries?

5. What advice would you offer to the next generation of female writers?

Tracy Bowling: Find and fight for mentors. It can be hard to find women writers who have the time or energy to offer their wisdom and experience. This may also mean fighting for the increased presence of female editors, female publishers, female panelists, female faculty, female administrators, and so on, wherever it is in the writing world you don’t see a female mentor represented.

And encourage each other. Find writers you admire and blog about them, or write them notes. Communicate about the work you love and the kind of work you want to see more of. This is a good way to make sure that a place for it will be created.

Jane Ciabattari: Read and support the work of other women; keep it in the mix of work you consider valuable. It is so easy to slide into a habit of downplaying or downgrading work by women when the culture shifts toward a more male-oriented focus, as it has during this first decade of the 21st century, with the country at war.

I recently looked back at the winners and finalists of the National Book Critics Circle awards since the first year–36 years of winners. So many astonishing writers. I don’t know if their work is being read as frequently as DeLillo, Updike, Cheever, Bellow, Roth, and (Franzen). so I’ll just pick a sampling, in alphabetical order, and say, read these authors (I’m sticking to fiction, because that’s what I know best): Chimamanda Adichie, Renata Adler, Kiran Desai, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, Elizabeth Hardwick, Shirley Hazzard, Bharati Mukherjee, Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick, Jayne Anne Phillips, Annie Proulx, Carol Shields, Jane Smiley, Zadie Smith, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Tan, Alice Walker. You can read the books they were honored for and more honorees on the NBCC website, http://bookcritics.org/awards/past_awards/

I think Kamy Wicoff and colleagues at SheWrites have a good idea going.

And putting forth the names of women writing today as editors for anthologies, judges for contests, guest editors and top editors for literary magazines, reviewing and supporting their work, can make a huge difference. Being male has been the “default” position for writers for so long, it takes lots of effort to widen that position to include all of us.

Becca Klaver: Find a community of other women writers. Through an MFA program, through starting a chapbook press, whatever. I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to me to have the women of the poetry programs at Columbia College Chicago—undergrads, grad students, and faculty—and the women of Switchback Books on my side. We promote each other’s work as much as possible—through blogs, Facebook links, etc.—and we all benefit this way. You do have to start by letting people know what you’re up to, but oftentimes it’s easier to do that within a small group of friends, and then have that support system to help you promote yourself, since self-promotion will always feel icky to some people, no matter how confident they feel about their writing.

Elizabeth McCracken: Years ago, on the late lamented Readerville, some annoying dude said that the reason there would never be a Great American Women Writer is that women worry too much about people liking them, even in their fiction: they avoid frightening darkness. I don’t think this is true–I’ll mention Mary Gaitskill again, because I think she’s a genius and oh my I cannot think of a less ingratiating writer. Still, the observation has resonated with me, and if I’m ever afraid of the dark in my own work I ask myself if I’m worried that someone will read it and not like me. I tell my students–all of them–to likewise be careful.

And: some people will tell you, “Real writers write every day.” Sometimes life interrupts, and women’s lives are still more likely to interrupt–taking care of children, or parents–and life actually makes you a better writer. Again, one needs to look at the lifetime average, and not the daily page count. Don’t let anyone tell you what makes a real writer, in other words.

The last thing I’ll say: on the one hand it’s good that Jonathan Franzen is the writer who’s occasioned all of this. He can take it. & I do agree that it’s annoying to read reviews that say, He takes the domestic seriously, and that’s REVOLUTIONARY! Believe me: I published my last novel in the same week, or nearly, as The Corrections, and I remember how it stung to read that the novel had been reinvented. On the other hand, the fact is that no writer, no novel, NOBODY got the attention that Franzen and The Corrections did 9 years ago; and of course the Freedom attention is even more than that. It’s a one-off. He’s the high water mark. Phillip Roth might even feel bad at how seriously Franzen is taken, but I don’t think he could claim Anti-Semitism or Septuagenerianism. Beyond Franzen’s undeniable talent as a writer: he talks up and promotes women writers, and moreover he writes some of the best women characters in modern fiction. It seems a shame that his name has been yoked to literary sexism.

Don Share: It would be patronizing for a male editor to dispense advice! But I’d like to say this: I hope that every writer will be as persistent as her resources and circumstances permit, and that despair, however much it impinges, will never defeat any writer who has talent and devotion.

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CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTES

Tracy Bowling is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University, where she serves as a managing editor of Puerto del Sol. She also runs the magazine and lit blog Uncanny Valley with her husband, Mike Meginnis. Her work has been published online at PANK and Storyglossia.

Jane Ciabattari, an award-winning and widely published short story writer, is author of the collection Stealing the Fire. Her reviews and interviews have been published on NPR.org, Salon.com, The Daily Beast, the New York Times, The Guardian, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and dozens of others. She currently serves as president of the National Book Critics Circle. She has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship and fellowships at The MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has taught at Columbia’s Journalism School, New York University, Knox College, Bennington’s Low-residency MFA program and numerous summer writers’ workshops from Squaw Valley to Taos to Chautauqua. (More at www.janeciabattari.com Follow her on Twitter @janeciab)

Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life and S P R A W L. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, Where We Live Now: an annotated reader, and A Best of Fence. She designs books at Dalkey Archive Press; is an instructor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa; and edits Dorothy, a publishing project.

Stephanie G’Schwind is the editor of Colorado Review and the Colorado Prize for Poetry book series. She directs the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University where she runs an internship program for graduate students.

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), a founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, and a PhD student in Literatures in English at Rutgers University.

Elizabeth McCracken, a former public librarian, is the author of four books: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, The Giant’s House (a finalist for a National Book Award), Niagara Falls All Over Again (winner of the L.L. Winship /PEN New England award), and the short-story collection Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry. She is frequently a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received grants and awards from numerous organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Maria Melendez publishes Pilgrimage in Pueblo, Colorado, a literary magazine serving a far-flung community of writers, artists, naturalists, contemplatives, activists, seekers, and other adventurers in and beyond the Greater Southwest (www.pilgrimagepress.org). University of Arizona Press has published two of her poetry collections: How Long She’ll Last in This World (2006), and Flexible Bones (2010). She serves as Contributing Editor for Latino Poetry Review and acquiring editor for Momotombo Press, a chapbook publisher featuring prose and poetry by emerging Latino writers.

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine. His most recent full-length book of poems is Squandermania.