Gina Frangello's Blog

Single Motherhood, Poverty and Literature, by Corrina Wycoff (author of O Street)

Awhile ago, Gina asked me to write a post about representations of single motherhood and socioeconomic class in contemporary American fiction. I think we all recognize—due, in part, to Hurricane Katrina’s devastating lessons—that American culture likes to keep its poor as invisible as possible, regardless of whether those poor are single mothers. I think we all recognize, too, that single mothers, statistically, are more likely to live in poverty than married mothers, and that young women who become single mothers before (or instead of) finishing high school, or before (or instead of) starting any kind of post-high school education are very acutely at risk. The census numbers tell this story (http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032006/pov/new04_000.htm) and it’s true that fiction often doesn’t. (I’m grateful to Gina and OV Books for publishing mine.)

I started writing about the struggles of working class single motherhood in response—or reaction?—to the many tender, celebratory texts about upper-middle class motherhood I’d read, texts which liberally used the tropes, “my husband” and “our house.” This is not to imply that struggle is exclusive to certain types of mothers, or that fathers don’t struggle, too. The difficulties and loneliness constituent of parenthood’s worst moments transcend gender, age and class.

But the details don’t.

Here’s an example: My son contracted chicken pox when he was three years old. It was winter, Chicago was buried under snow, and the power had gone out in our apartment building, knocking out the elevator and, worse, the electric-generated water pump. My son and I, who lived on the 13th floor, climbed the stairs over and over as we made runs to the convenience store to buy gallons of bottled water with which to wash his itchy scabs. I didn’t dare buy too many bottles at once. I figured the electricity would be fixed at any time, and couldn’t afford to waste money.

Perhaps this anecdote sounds grim and “victimy” but, even then, I could see its humor. More importantly, as I climbed thirteen flights of stairs, holding a toddler and a gallon of water for the third time in as many hours, I felt a furious kind of pride. This was the kind of story I didn’t see in motherhood magazines. But not many people wanted to read it. In fact, motherhood journals and anthologies frequently rejected my work for being “too dark.”

But these are not dark stories.

When my son was five, he and I moved from Chicago to Eugene, Oregon, where we were surrounded by other single moms and their kids. Howling with laughter and hot with pride, we moms shared our war stories. All of us had our babies young, before we’d gotten through (or even started, in many cases) college. My best friend, who’d become the single mother of her first child when she was twenty, often began sentences with, “When I was pregnant and working as a cashier at Wal-Mart...” She told a story of schlepping laundry on one foot because her two-year son had gotten head lice just after she herself had broken her ankle in several places.

Another good friend had become the single mother of her first child when she was sixteen. She told a story about seeing her daughter’s father (who’d refused to admit the baby could be his) at a high school gathering. He’d asked, “Who are you?” and she’d answered, “Your worst nightmare.”

I was the group’s senior member. My son was born shortly after my twenty-third birthday. I worked full-time, then, making just over $8/hour. Like the others, I had been underprepared for motherhood, economically and emotionally, and I wrote about those struggles, with all their intrinsic humor and joy. “Too dark” astonished me as a critique. After all, I wasn’t even writing about mothers in our nation’s worst poverty. We Oregon moms were the lucky ones: We were in school.

It’s not true that poor, single parents don’t figure at all in contemporary culture. Triumphant underdog stories are always popular, of course, so much the better if that underdog has a charming kid or two in tow (see The Pursuit of Happyness). The idea that anyone can pull himself up by the bootstraps to achieve the so-called American Dream for himself and his children still seduces us, even though, more and more, we realize that trajectory is the exception, not the norm. (In Seattle, where I live, two-bedroom townhouses sell for half a million dollars, so even the trappings of middle class life are becoming preposterously difficult to attain.) However, there aren’t many “rags to rags” stories in today’s American fiction, even though that’s the socioeconomic truth of many Americans’ lives. My book, O Street, is a “rags to a few less rags” story. The main character, who’s fictional, is one of the lucky ones, too.

I was in college by the time my son turned three. By the time my son and I moved to Eugene, I was starting graduate school. I don’t take these privileges lightly. He turned thirteen just a few days ago, and I feel very lucky indeed. We rent an unsubsidized two-bedroom apartment. We drive a financed, low-end sedan. We have two computers, four cats, a multitude of health care professionals, and we haven’t qualified for free school lunches or foodstamps since 2001. Who am I to complain?

Nowadays, I teach English at a community college, where heroic students in conditions worse than mine ever were attend my classes. One student, training to be a nurse, is the mother of three children, supports her parents and siblings in Haiti, and waits for her husband to return from his 15-month Stryker Brigade tour in Iraq. Another student, nine months pregnant, missed no classes at all, not even on the day I caught her doing “Lamaze breathing” on the college stairs. A third, the single mother of five children, maintains a straight A average, even though she has health complications that include partial blindness. Whether or not they “make it” in the conventional sense, their stories, “dark” or not, should be told.

Prime Time: On Being Married to Another Writer

By Dan Libman and Molly McNett

Dan:
Both of us are fishing in the same shallow pond for story ideas. When a bachelor neighbor went to a foreign land and came back with a bride thirty years his junior, everyone else on our block clucked their tongues in judgment. Molly and I excitedly tussled with each other for dibs to the material. I won the “rights” (“You’ve got to admit it’s more my kind of story...”) but she went ahead and wrote it anyway while I was still being titillated by the dirty parts. She got her version published and then anthologized. She even gets fan mail on it, swear to God. “I’ll be darned,” I say after she shows one to me. In my last rejection, Glimmer Train checked the box that says I can send them more unsolicited submissions.

Molly:
The kids got up, Dan got up, and my daughter finally came in our room with my slippers, “for your feet so they can get out of bed.” But I was dreading the day. Last night Dan presented me with today’s schedule: “You’ll take the kids for the morning while I write, then I’ll run, then we’ll eat lunch (he always makes this part funny by saying, “we’ll eat the delicious lunch you’ll prepare for us…” indicating that…what? He knows that expecting me to prepare lunch, too, is over the top?) “and then I’ll take them out for the afternoon. Okay?”

Sigh. What’s wrong with this, you might ask. Indeed, it offers me the afternoon, but the afternoon is the used goods of writing time. Everybody knows it.

But last night I agreed to the schedule, and there is no use in renegotiating. I get up. Dan yells from the den, where I can hear him typing, that I’d better get started on the laundry, “if not it won’t get done today and that will depress you.” He often does laundry himself, of course. We share everything, almost every single chore. But it’s the morning, and he’s writing and I’m doing laundry, and this gives me time, as I load up the washer, to remember that about a week ago, he presented me with what he called his “ideal summer schedule”: He would write in the morning, then he would go for a run. Shower. Then he would sit down with our family and “eat the delicious lunch” that I’ve “prepared” for them. After this, I could have the afternoon.

We were driving in the car; I forget where.

Now and then I am able to bite my tongue. I said something innocuous, like “that might work,” and tried to think about it reasonably. For eight years, since we’ve had children and teaching jobs, we’ve squabbled every summer over morning writing time. Why should this be? There are two of us, and just two children, and more than three months to divide. We have tried switching off the morning time: every other week, every two days, every three days, and at some point it’s just so hot that the afternoon person gives up and we find ourselves on the beach at two-thirty, watching the kids play and wondering if it’s too early to start drinking.

Some writer-friends of mine were divorced last year. When I talked to her on the phone about it, she complained about the difficulty of having children and a mess of a house, and both wanting time to write, and always squabbling over it.
Hmmn, I said. That’s what Dan and I fight about, too.
And do you feel like you’re just sharing responsibilities, and not a marriage? she asked.
No, I said. I was surprised at how easily I had this answer. I was certain about it.
I love Dan, for one thing. I respect his opinion and his writing; and his opinion on my writing. He’s the first one I show anything to, and usually that’s enough. And I just like being around him: He’s funny; It’s a pleasure to talk to him over dinner or even better, beer; I rely on him to recommend books and music and movies; and he is the kind of father any kid would like to have, one who reads the same chapter in Alice or Huck Finn or Pippi three times in a row, and makes pancakes in any shape, including penguins sledding on vending machines.
Also, I guess I don’t usually consider the fact that he loves the city but moved to a farm because of me, because I wanted to live here. After a few years of complaining about it, he bought four chickens, and as I write this there is a swimming pool on the dining room table filled with 25 baby chicks: not my project, but his. So he did something he didn’t want to do and found something (chickens!) that satisfies him, though it’s far from what he might have guessed when he married me.
I know Dan has this impulse toward me; I could always feel it. It’s true generousity: the impulse to want to make me happy, even sometimes at his own expense. So I could say yes, take the morning. I could say it in hopes that he’ll be grateful and offer me the morning next summer. Or better than that, I could do it without expecting anything, which would be best. I’m even dopey enough to think that if the afternoon hours are mine because I’ve accepted them selflessly, they will become better hours in some way, and the time itself will be kinder to me. (Which means…what? I’ll find some sort of “chickens” of my own? Or, at least, I somehow, miraculously, won’t be sluggish or, as Dan describes me, “drag-assy”?)
Human beings are not the only animals who can act generously, but the only ones who can consciously choose to. Some take this as proof that we were made in god’s image. I don’t, but I have to admit it is a mysterious and very marvellous ability, and I wish I made use of it more often.
Still, I haven’t given Dan my answer yet about this summer schedule. Maybe the generous wife who accepts the afternoon gladly is who I want to be and not quite who I am. It would be right and good of me to agree to it; and dangerous if I only plan to seethe, secretly, for as long as I can hold it in.

Dan again:
This morning I lost my writing time getting my daughter’s kindergarten check-up at the doctor. Yesterday it was roto-tilling the garden which had to be done on that day because that was when Ace had a machine for rent, and it had to be done at that time becuase otherwise the heat of the day would have been unbearable. And now that summer is here one waits all week for that moment when the coffee gets poured and the door closes and one can stare down the blank screen getting ready to fill it with shifty dots and squiggles, one realizes shortly that there are still other writers in the house whose work needs encouraging. I’m working on a whimsical, baudy short story set in 17th century Holland (reminder to self: look up “huik”) when the children come in with ideas of their own.
“Can I just type a few lines?” my son asks.
All too eager to be distracted, I let him sit on my lap and bang a few sentences out. When my son was four years old he wrote something called “Indians Making Fires.” Over the course of a summer and countless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches he added sentence after sentence, taking my writing time but leaving me with something better: Indians usually make fires when they’re cold. Indians only make fires when it’s really, really dark. Indians drop two sticks down and then a fire becomes. It could be as big as a tree that reaches up to the sky.
My congenital middle class nature began to assert itself: He should submit this, I started thinking. This is good enough to publish! After all, if my own noble efforts to keep my writing in the hands of undergrad interns and slush-pile rakers all over the country was being lost, at the very least they should get to read his stuff. In fact, the idea that I was depriving the world my sweet boy’s heartfelt writing came in direct conflict with my new found parental urge to protect the boy from the nip of rejection as long as possible. And yet.... Maybe it wouldn’t be rejected. Maybe some sharp reader at the right journal would get it on the right day and bring it to the right editor in the right mood and my son’s genius would be recognized before the age of five! How could I deprive the world of “Indians Making Fires”?
"What's a linked vignette?" he asked me when I read his cover letter out loud to him. We printed it, stamped both envelopes (for literary journals, unsolicited submissions travel free both ways, like shoes from Zappos) and walked hand in hand to the corner mailbox. He's going to be nine in a few months and we're still waiting to hear back.

Molly McNett is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; her stories have appeared in The Best American Non-required Reading 2005, The Missouri Review, The New England Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and a few other places. She hates coiling garden hoses.

Dan Libman has published stories in Paris Review, Santa Monica Review and Other Voices among others. He is a Pushcart Prize winner and a grant from the Illinois Art Council in prose. He is currently serving as the guest fiction editor for the premier issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal, submissions welcome at www.fifthwednesdayjournal.com. Nothing irritates him more than an uncoiled garden hose.

Their twelfth anniversary is this August.

The Book Is Out . . . Now What? by Corrina Wycoff

Last month, in March 2007, OV Books had a jam-packed week of events in Chicago, celebrating the release of O STREET, our second title. O STREET is a linked story collection following protagonist Elizabeth Dinard from her early years raised by a schizophrenic, drug-addicted and charismatic mother, to her own turbulent early adulthood, struggling to find and maintain intimacy in her early lesbian relationships and ultimately becoming a single mother herself, raising herself out of poverty and self-destruction, but still bearing the scars of her youth. O STREET has been described as the antithesis of chick-lit by TIME OUT CHICAGO, and this past week got a rave review from the SEATTLE TIMES. Here, first-time author Corrina Wycoff reflects on some of the excitement, surrealism, challenges and thrills of "finally having that first book published" and doing it indie-OV-style . . .

From Corrina:
Last week, in Chicago, I read at Women and Children First, the independent, feminist bookstore where, coincidentally, I attended my very first reading many years before, when I was twenty. That long ago night, Adrienne Rich read from her then-new book, An Atlas of the Difficult World. I prepared as though I had front row tickets for a Beatles reunion: I got off work early, dressed up, wrote Adrienne Rich a fan letter in anticipation of being too starstruck to speak to her directly, and headed giddily to the bookstore. I don’t know what I expected to happen. I didn’t expect a hundred other women, young and old, similarly startstruck, many holding envelopes presumably containing fan letters of their own. When Adrienne Rich walked through the thick crowd (seated on the floor), I told my friend Kara, “I know her!” dizzily thinking Adrienne Rich was someone I’d seen around town, maybe even someone who worked at the bookstore; I was too revved up to realize it was Rich herself, and that I recognized her from author photos.

The audience for my own reading was considerably smaller, of course, and no one brought a fan letter or sat starry eyed while I read. No one resorted to floor seating; there were chairs to spare. Still, I gratefully witnessed the contrast between past and present. At age twenty, I never thought I would, at age thirty-six, have a published book from which to read. Two of my favorite professors from college—Cris Mazza and Lisa Freeman—attended, a gesture so thoughtful that, when I looked up during my reading and saw them, I momentarily lost my place. As recently as last year, this had all seemed impossible. I sat up late one night, depressed, playing online video games and contemplating downgrading, to hobby status, the way I thought about my writing. Sure, I’d gotten work placed in journals and anthologies, but my book had never received anything more promising than warmly written rejection letters. I didn’t know that one of these letters had already made all the difference. In 2005, I’d entered OV Press’s first manuscript contest. Executive Editor Gina Frangello’s response included detailed, thoughtful feedback. This was exceptional attention from someone who read over 300 contest submissions. I followed a lot of her advice and resubmitted the manuscript in OV’s next contest. A few days after my self-pity and videogame binge, Gina emailed me with unexpectedly good news. For the next six months, I waited for something terrible to happen to counterbalance this incredible stroke of luck.

A year later, it still feels like incredible luck. Before having a book published, I took part in lots of conversations with other people who wrote, and my focus never veered from whether or not I would ultimately be fortunate enough to publish. Last week in Chicago, I understood: Writers don’t talk only about whether one gets published but by whom. I heard and remembered horror stories about both independent and commercial presses. About the former: Some independent presses had eschewed things like publicity and contracts. About the latter: Some commercial presses had required authors to revise layers and depth out of their work until it barely resembled earlier drafts. In both groups, some authors complained about feeling unsupported once their books got released.

My experience with OV Books couldn’t be more different. Gina Frangello and OV’s Associate Editor, Marina Lewis, worked tirelessly. Their feedback inspired revisions that improved my book, making it more consistent with my hopes for it. Throughout the editing process, Gina and I talked all the time. I don’t think I ever waited longer than two hours for a response from her. In Chicago last week, it seemed as though every time I saw Gina and Marina, they were hauling snack trays and heavy cases of wine to events they’d arranged for my book, having secured who-knows how many extra hours of childcare for their kids. Gina, who has three children, not only publicized the events; she attended all of them—even one in a distant suburb on an evening when her toddler son had a fever. She gave me rides. She let me stay in her house. I can’t imagine feeling more supported. In fact, I got so much attention that, during my week in Chicago, I frequently remembered the closing scene from Thelma and Louise in which Thelma, noticing a seeming multitude in pursuit, comments to Louise, “All this for us?”

From a Distance, by Roy Kesey

In a recent essay about electronic communication in Slate, Tim Harford begins by saying, “It stands to reason that distance is dead.” Then he gives four reasons why that argument is mostly crap. And when Cris Mazza suggested that for this blog entry I engage in a fun bit of studied self-pity by considering all the things I’m missing out on by choosing to reside so far away from the living, breathing scene of Contemporary American Literature (hereinafter “CAL”), I went and had another look at Harford’s opening proposition.

It’s still, as he argues, mostly crap, but perhaps not quite to the same degree in the field I’m addressing here as on the prairie he crosses. For my money, distance as re: CAL is in fact not dead, nor even dying, but pretty well beat up, as e-means land blow after blow--albeit not equally to all parts of the body. Which means that while I had no prior intention of turning this into an on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other, manure-but-also-flowers type exercise, it may well shape up that way regardless.

I’ve come up with four Ways in Which I May Very Well Have Suffered Horribly Without Ever Knowing It as a result of my varying but generally appreciable distance from CAL (and for those of you keeping score at home, it’s been nearly four years for me and my family here in China, and before that eight years in Peru, and before that a bunch of places with mainly hard-to-spell names): logistics, learning/craft, schmoozing/networking, and parties. Obviously, those four categories can (and perhaps most often do) intermingle. But to keep my brain from melting down, let’s pretend for a moment that they don’t.

Logistics is the easiest category to dispense with: the interwebsurfnet thing that all the kids are talking about these days has this aspect of distance on the ropes. I rarely have trouble getting manuscripts in or out, and editing sessions are, I think, faster and easier than ever. And while it’s true that overseas magazine subscriptions cost a little more than the regular kind, it’s hardly an overwhelming difference.

Learning/craft is perhaps a stickier wicket. The conferences and readings and seminars and workshops that together constitute a good chunk of CAL have for the most part been something that I could only imagine from afar, kind of like Britney’s recent meltdown, rather than something I could participate in firsthand, like Britney’s forthcoming recovery, assuming she ever decides to come to me for advice, and I can think of something useful to say. The only exception to this in the past decade or two has been Francis Ford Coppola’s online workshop, Zoetrope, which I discovered in 1998 or thereabouts, while I was living in a small and still-smaller-feeling desert town near the Peruvian border with Ecuador; Zoetrope brought me into touch with a number of extremely talented writers and critiquers, which was something I very much needed at the time, and still often do. Not unrelatedly, thanks to the great generosity of the webpage editors of many literary journals, I have easy access to nearly as much contemporary work as anyone anywhere else, and can study it at my leisure. Summing the writers at Zoetrope with those found in these journals and the authors of the books in my small but steadfast ex-pat library, I’m not sure I have any right to plead for additional instruction.

Schmoozing/networking, though, has for the most part been a non-starter. As Harford is at pains to point out in his article, electronic means are much better at maintaining relationships than at establishing them in the first place. Certain moments in this world still need a handshake. Trust comes sooner with eye-contact. On the other hand, the technical term for my level of interpersonal networking savvy is “sucky,” so even if I had been invited to and present for any of the moments in question, they may well not have helped any. And I’m not so sure this is a bad thing. That which hardly needs saying: in our cleanest heart of hearts, we all want this business to be all and only about the quality of the work, not about who you met at MacDowell. Furthermore, I was fortunate in that mail (e- and regular, working in conjunction) sufficed for finding an agent and then an editor. And these days, there are book webpages and personal webpages and Facebook and MySpace to close the gap slightly further. (Yes, I have a page at MySpace. How do I feel about that? Well, as Zhou Enlai is reputed to have said of the French Revolution: it’s still too early to tell. But I’ve met some great folks there, and some magnificent writers with whom I would otherwise have had no clear form of exchange, and that’s all to the good.) Finally, full disclosure, I did get to do a little of this in the course of my first, brief, and thus far only book tour last year. And it was totally fun!

I’ve saved partying for last, because here distance is still the undefeated champ. While the rest of you were throwing down at Plimpton’s crib, and romping in the bushes at Bread Loaf, and standing uproariously still so that David Foster Wallace could, between mugs of tequila, shoot haiku-inscribed tangerines off of your heads, I was, well, doing whatever I was doing at the time. (Mainly walking around. Also, looking at things. This is what I like: walking and looking.)

Now: would I trade a single moment of that walking and looking and et cetera for any other given moment spent luxuriating in the glories of CAL? No, I really wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t envy the hell out of everyone who has! All of which means that I’m very much looking forward to the tour coming up this October to push my first collection of stories, and to the actually real reality-based realness of whatever the folks at Dzanc have in store. And for the record, Mr. Wallace, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d save a round for me, in both senses.

LINKS

Slate

"The Distance Paradox"

Zoetrope

a page at MySpace

Dzanc

Everything Kat Meads Thinks about Everything

I don’t much care for comfort and solace fiction. I like fiction that perturbs in major or minor fashion, fiction that plays off a reader’s assumptions, going in. Because if you haven’t roiled a reader’s status quo, you haven’t made her or him ponder and brood. You’ve simply entertained, like a clown or a monkey or a hack.

In Austin, Texas, of all places, Cris (Mazza) and I got on the subject of writer labels. I’ve been called a poet, a prose poet, an essayist, a novelist, a short story writer, an experimental writer, a realistic writer, a sci fi writer, a Southern writer, a woman writer and a few other unprintables. Of that list, Cris declared, Southern trumped all. Probably she’s right. Because critics, editors and gobs of readers seem to assume one’s region of origin is even more defining than gender. That said, I haven’t lived in the South for 25 years. That said, I do on occasion write about the South.

Am I Southern-influenced? Absolutely. The famous Southern oral tradition is also a tradition of interruption and meander. When I listened in on my relatives telling stories on Sunday afternoons, I wasn’t hearing one relative tell a story. It was a group effort. The narrative moved forward, diverged, digressed, circled round and started again. I was listening to a story, following that story, but it was, in every case, a fractured narrative. Day in and day out of my childhood I overheard the most vicious of remarks, content wise, delivered by grown-ups in the loveliest of tones and cadences. Right there: a formative lesson in the distinctions of delivery and meaning. If you live past the age of five and are paying any kind of attention, you already know all there is to know about power politics. But it took a few years before I learned to type.

When I moved to California (and not until), I was asked to declare an allegiance, to clarify my niche. Was I a Southern writer? A feminist writer? A poet turned novelist or a novelist turned poet? Choose one and only one: a, b, c. The Southerner in me finds that funny. California. Anything goes, but tell us, tell us: Which team are you on? Which side are you really rooting for?

Writers that early on warped me in a good way. For an independent study course in college I read all of Va. Woolf’s novels. I was partial to The Waves. But the first book I read that took my head off, so to speak, I read immediately after college, in the wintertime, on Martha’s Vineyard, in the tiniest of rooms. Stein’s The Geographical History of America. Not a novel, but a book whose language left me bug-eyed, just bug-eyed, nevertheless. The movement of the prose. Where it went, when it went, how it went (with and without commas). And of course what made it go. (“These are ordinary ideas. If you please these are ordinary ideas.”) Jane Bowles, Beryl Bainbridge, Alice Thomas Ellis. The extraordinary Nancy Lemann. All writers who knew and know that stories are limber, that sentences and paragraphs can flex.

That fictional bugaboo: “unsympathetic characters.” I have to rant a bit here. Have to. When I hear complaints from students and from people in the writing trade who should know better that this or that character is “unsympathetic,” I bristle and sulk. Accept the terms of that rigid dichotomy of characterization and still the derision makes no sense. Who plays off the “sympathetics” if not the “unsympathetics”? More fundamentally: what’s unsympathetic for one reader may be entirely sympathetic for another. Why pretend a uniformity of reaction that doesn’t exist? Heathcliff, Humbert Humbert, Madame Merle. Make a list of literature’s unsympathetics, then try, just try, to imagine those novels without them. No tension, no propulsion. No plot.

Recently I got asked at a reading why I chose to write about someone as “offensive” as Kitty Duncan, one of two main characters in my novel, The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan Benedict Roberts (Chiasmus Press). I could have replied: “I don’t find Kitty Duncan offensive.” I could have admitted: “To write only about the inoffensive would bore me stiff.” But someone at the back of room caught my eye. She was smiling, wagging her head. She vaguely resembled my Aunt Madeline. I took that to be a sign, a prompt, to “go Southern.” So in my very sweetest voice I said: “To entertain.”

Kat Meads
http://www.katmeads.com/

*Kat Meads' short fiction can be found in the current issue of Other Voices magazine (Other Voices 45).

Debbie Lee Wesselmann on Gender and Publishing

Hi all--
As you will have noticed, the OV Blog is up and running again, with a series of guest-editors. Below is Debbie Wesselmann's provocative post about the gender inequity in publishing, and Cris Mazza, author of last month's posting, is now coordinating additional guest-bloggers. If you have some previous connection to OV, likely you would qualify. To contact Cris, email OV at [email protected] and indicate your interest in contributing a post!
Cheers--Gina

In 1998, Francine Prose published "Scent of a Women's Ink" in Harper's. The article dissected the literary establishment and its reluctance to bestow major book prizes on female authors and outlined the difficulties this fact posed for the serious female writer. Prose's first sentence––and question–– was "Are women writers really inferior?" The answer is, of course, no. Since the publication of Prose's essay, three of the eight Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction and four of seven National Book Award winners for fiction have been women, giving them roughly half of these two literary honors. Unless you are a female novelist trying to get a book published, you might guess from these facts that the environment is now favorable for women tackling complex thematic issues in their fiction. You would be wrong. Prose's article may have jabbed prize committees into taking notice of inequities, but publishers seem to have continued, with their heads stubbornly down, with their almost-single-minded quest for the new, light "Chick-Lit."

In addition to books that demand pink or purple covers, publishers also want upbeat stories of middle-age women overcoming obstacles or finding true love, a leftover from Oprah's Book Club days when every publisher dreamed of securing the next featured book and so accepted book-after-book that fit the mold, just to up the company's chance of scoring the coveted gold seal. Men are not expected to write these kind of books, although they sometimes do. Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook) and Robert James Waller (The Bridges of Madison County) write escapist novels designed to appeal to middle-aged women. Not surprisingly, however, most of these books, both Chick-Lit and Life-Affirming Fiction, come from the computer keyboards of women. I do not begrudge the women who write these novels, just as I would never criticize a writer who chooses to write thrillers or religious fiction; however, I am concerned about the expectations this genre creates for all female writers.

A few years ago, my then-agent submitted a novel manuscript of mine to several large New York publishers. The novel told the story about a primatologist who had, through the circumstances of her life, grown up with the changing animal rights movement. The novel explored the issues of politics within the primatology and animal rights communities as well as the personal crises that my protagonist faced. My agent believed that this would be my "break out" novel. When the rejections came back, one in particular shocked me: the editor wanted a love story at the center of the plot. As I looked over the other letters, I noticed a similarity: the editors wanted a more personal, less "tinged with sadness" novel. Their list of flaws often included a suggestion for a stronger relationship between the protagonist and a specific male character. It didn't seem to matter that the most compelling, most defining relationship was between the protagonist and her wayward brother.

Of course, my novel may have been rejected for other reasons, but the suggestion that I revise the novel with an upbeat love story rankled. How could I write serious literature if I had to limit my plots and themes? Somehow I doubt that E.L. Doctorow, Michael Ondaatje, and Chang-Rae Lee have ever been asked to write more personal, love-driven stories. Would Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize winning, gender-bending novel, Middlesex, been published if it had been written by a woman? What about Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum or Steven Wright's Amalgamation Polka? Doctorow's The March? I felt that I was taken back to the days when I had just graduated from an Ivy League school, and I was told during job interviews that I had to begin as a secretary even though discriminatory hiring practices were illegal. Again, I doubt that any of my male classmates, even those who had much lower G.P.A.'s than mine, were asked about their typing skills. Still, I lived with the delusion that the situation had changed for women. I believed that a serious, well-written novel would be published, no matter who had written it.

I am not the only one who has noticed the major publishers' shunning of serious novels written by women. In an online interview, Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press noted, "I think it’s somewhat likelier that women are going to fall in this mid-list category because if they’re not writing stuff that’s going to be readily embraced by 500 book clubs around the country… well, yeah, it seems like there are two ways for fiction to get sold in this country - though I’m being very crude here with my description. One way is more 'male' and the other way is more 'female'. The more female way is through book clubs, because they are 85% women, and that is like a really crucial component of how paperback books really are being sold in the United States . . .Then there’s the traditional side, it comes from how a book is perceived, for example, a new book from so-and-so, the kind of book that will be reviewed in the Times and Newsweek, and will appear on Fresh Air. This is the stuff that’s going to be face out and everyone’s going to be talking about it – the new Philip Roth, the new John Updike or in terms of the younger generation, the new Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Myla Goldberg. But there are a lot more male writers in that category." (http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/features/soft_skull_pres.html)
Why are there more male writers in that category? Why must female writers who write similar fiction turn to the short list of independent publishers who publish literary fiction? Although Francine Prose's article forced prize committees to consider the inequity of their selections, the pool of eligible novels written by women remains limited by what gets published and promoted. Titles released by independent presses often languish despite their quality simply because such publishers do not have the resources to market their best titles and to bring them to the attention of a large readership, so even if the independent publishers don't care whether women concentrate on romance and domestic issues (and it's not clear that most don't follow the same trends as the major houses, only on a smaller scale), then women literary writers are fated to be largely unknown.

My New Year's wish is for publishers and editors to realize that their manuscript acquisitions may be subconsciously discriminatory. For every Stephen Wright, there should be a female counterpart. I want them to understand that asking a women to put romance in her novel is the literary equivalent of demanding that she enter the workforce as a secretary despite her credentials. I want them to begin to chip away at their own glass ceiling, not within the organization where many top editors are indeed women, but with their products, their books. If men can write intellectually intriguing books, then allow women to do the same–– and let them reap the same rewards.

Debbie Lee Wesselmann
http://www.trutor.net/

Blog Hiatus Announcement

This Thursday, Other Voices--or more specifically I, along with OV Managing Editor Kathy Kosmeja--heads to Los Angeles for a long weekend of readings and festivities. For me, the trip will be a milestone of sorts in more ways than one.

For starters (though less to the point here), it will be my first trip away from Giovanni, who will turn 8 months old the day of my return.

It's also only the second time I'll have ever been to Los Angeles in my adult life . . . and I hope the first time it will not rain the entirety of my trip.

But the bigger issue here is that it will mark the end of a frenzied 9 month period--from my release party on January 20--of readings from MY SISTER'S CONTINENT. I'll read three times while in LA with some of my favorite writers (and definitely my favorite Californians!), and then, other than a panel/reading at AWP in February and a gig at U-W-Milwaukee that same month, I am officially hanging up my shingle. It's been a great ride, better than I ever expected, but the length of a pregnancy is definitely long enough to spend promoting a novel, and I will be relieved to . . . well, never check my Amazon.com ranking again, basically, and to officially move on, in all ways, to new projects.

As anyone patient enough to read this blog whenever I manage to post to it knows, my life is more than a little chaotic lately. Actually, this has always been true, at least since I became a mother while simultaneously running a nonprofit business and writing and teaching--but traditionally all the chaos has been "good chaos," and has feuled my energy rather than depleting it. Since June, though, with both my mother and my husband's mother facing serious health problems, while my dad is partly disabled, the issue of "how busy I am" has become more of a stress than a thrill. To no one's surprise except perhaps my own, even a fair bit of mania cannot render a woman super-human, and I have hit a decided wall in terms of not being able to take anything else on without all the other balls I have in the air falling on my head. Each ball seems to have a label on it: Mother, Daughter, Writer, Wife, Editor, Daughter-in-Law, Teacher, Friend . . . even Grant-Writer, Event Planner, Advance-Copies-of-O-Street-Sender-Outer, Parents' Chauffeur, Play-Date-Organizer, Homework Supervisor and Lunch Packer. And so the one that says "Blogger" keeps falling down and rolling away, and I am too busy to chase it. So I must announce that the OV blog, while hopefully not "dead," is going on official hiatus until things calm down here in my neck of the woods.

OV will continue to list our forthcoming events on our website, www.othervoicesmagazine.org and will make any announcements for submission calls or other developments there. We will maintain a link for our blog on the website so that OV readers can check in from time to time to see if we're resuming our dialogue on the publishing world here--and if you know me personally, you can rest assured that if I have your email address, you'll be getting a personal signal when we do.

Thank you--anyone who has visited us, ever--for supporting indie publishing, and for supporting OV in particular. Wish Tod Goldberg luck for the SCBA Awards dinner this Saturday, and if you live in the Los Angeles area, come say hi at one of our readings, listed in the last entry to this blog.

Despite my initial skepticism about blogging, I've missed having time to write here these past couple of months, and will look forward to doing so again!

Cheers,

Gina

OV live in LA

Join OTHER VOICES live in Los Angeles
Thursday, 19 October 2006 – Sunday, 22 October 2006

Thursday, October 19
Village Books, Pacific Palisades, 7:30 p.m.
Editors as Writers: Other Voices Editors Gina Frangello and Stacy Bierlein join Swink editors Leelila Strogov and Cheryl Alu in presenting their own current work.

Friday, October 20
Dutton’s Beverly Hills, 7:00 p.m.
Reading featuring Gina Frangello, Aimee Liu, and Kate Milliken

Saturday, October 21
The Southern California Booksellers Association Awards
Tod Goldberg’s SIMPLIFY, the first story collection from OV Books, is an award nominee. WILLFUL CREATURES, a story collection by Other Voices Advisory Board member Aimee Bender, is also a nominee.

Sunday, October 22
Book Soup, West Hollywood, 1:00 p.m.
Reading featuring Gina Frangello, Tod Goldberg, Rob Roberge, and Holiday Reinhorn.

Hope to see you there!

Second Annual OV Books Bash

Believe it or not, my mother just fell down and broke her shoulder. There is definitely a black cloud hanging over her head this summer . . . though as David says, at least she didn't break her pelvis, so yesterday we had a "Celebration of the Fact That Alice Didn't Break Her Pelvis Barbecue."

With her laid up and my kids starting school tomorrow, I'm even busier than usual and too busy to write anything much here. But (especially for those in the Chicago area) I want to make sure everyone knows about the second annual OV Books Bash this Sunday, September 10, at the Bad Dog in Lincoln Square, 4535 N. Lincoln, at 7pm. There will be food, drinks, 3 readers (Kate Milliken, Billy Lombardo and Mary Cross) and even two bands. All that and not even a mandatory cover (the suggested donation is 10 bucks, but if you're flat broke we still want you there!)

Kate Milliken is in from Los Angeles, so of course we want to show her that Chicagoans is really STILL the "second city," no matter what the population boom of LA may indicate. And this is the first OV event organized by our newish Associate Editor, Marina Lewis, whose huband Matt owns the Bad Dog--so if you have ANY affiliation with OV (read for us, send to us, publish in us, subscribe to us), Marina wants to meet the whole OV family and wants me to let you know that she expects to see you there. She's got long, curly red hair that'd be hard to miss, so go up to her and introduce yourself and say hello! My mom will probably even be there with her arm in a sling, so any of you who feel pretty damn sorry for her after reading about all her health woes here can toast with her to a rapid improvement in her fortune with the beginning of fall.

Okay, so that's it for my blogging for the day--I have to go give my kids a spelling test now (in between writing their initials on every individual crayon in a 64-box . . . don't even get me started on what teachers require thesedays. Whatever happened to the good old days when, if your crayon fell on the floor and someone else wanted it, you just fought in the aisles? Geez.)

See you Sunday!

SCBA or Bust!

Okay, all short story and indie press fans--some seriously good news: Tod Goldberg's stellar collection SIMPLIFY (which was, of course, the first OV Books title) has just been named a finalist for the Southern California Booksellers Association (SCBA) Award for 2006. Tod is up against several of his local colleagues, including OV Board member Aimee Bender for her also-excellent collection WILLFUL CREATURES. As if this news wouldn't be great enough as is, the awards dinner coincidentally happens to be taking place on October 21, during OV's first-ever Los Angeles "extravaganza" of sorts: we have three readings taking place between the 19-22 October, at Village Books, Dutton's, and Borders Westwood, with amazing line-ups including Tod himself (and me), Holiday Reinhorn, Rob Roberge, Aimee Liu, Kate Milliken, Stacy Bierlein, Leelila Strogov and Cheryl Alu. So, capper of all cappers, I get to attend this swank little dinner with Tod, as the editor of one of the finalist books! With news like this--and a reason to buy a new outfit--even I am at a loss for anything cynical to say about publishing tonight.

This is an important victory for OV Books, as a brand new press, in several ways. Remember, this is a collection Tod's own agent (who happens to be really cool, but thinks like agents think) initially didn't even want him to publish with OV Books because we were "too small." But between a second printing, reviews in places like the LA Times and Washington Post, and now this, I have to admit that I'm feeling like we didn't do too badly, and that if OV Books hadn't stepped up, this would probably still be another short story collection collecting dust on an agent's desk or in a writer's drawer. SIMPLIFY is one of those books helping to prove the success of both short stories AND indie presses, and it does it while being a damn good, page-turning read.

But wait, did I say I couldn't think of anything cynical to say about publishing? Well, I lied. Because now that I think about it, even with great successes like these, OV Books has still lost money on this book, remember? This certainly isn't Tod's fault (I've never met a better self-marketer; we learned scads from him) and I don't think it's ours either--our distributor got more than enough copies of the book into stores for OV Books to have made a profit, and we sent out about 100 review and publicity copies and set up events for Tod all over the country. Despite everyone doing everything right, however, we've still only made about as much money as we spent on the first printing (slightly less, actually), never mind the second printing and the events we threw and plane tickets we bought. This gets me thinking--is this ultimately what separates the independent presses from the corporates: that we are over the moon about great reviews and award nominations, EVEN IF we lose money, whereas for the corporates everything is about a bottom financial line? I suspect this may really hit the nail on the head. OV Books will not only count SIMPLIFY as a great success even if it doesn't make a profit--we will turn around and publish ANOTHER book, marketing it just as vigorously and being thrilled by its every good review and its available bookstore presence, even if it doesn't make money either.

Hmm. Something's wrong with this picture, though, isn't it? Because how many great, award-nominated, well-reviewed, outstanding works of literature can OV Books--or any press--publish and lose money on before we . . . well, go broke? So before I start thinking about how . . . success can lead to failure, or something like that, and get off on a cynical riff again, let me suggest something else: if you haven't yet bought and read SIMPLIFY, now would be a great time to do it. And tell your friends to do it. Tell your mom to do it. The equation is pretty simple--the book deserves to be read, and OV Books needs it to be bought if we're going to survive to keep doing this. I mean, come on, we love Aimee Bender and all, but how much fun is it to have Tod up against books published by the big corporates? How much fun would it be if he WON? And how much better if we can keep thriving years into the future so that other deserving books like Wycoff's O STREET can go on to get rave reviews and award nominations too? (And I can guarantee that she deserves it!)

But my cynicism is fleeting tonight--back to what I should wear to this event. I just have to point out the incredible irony that, after never weighing more than about 110 pounds in my entire adult life, I suddenly have my first novel published and end up being photographed for feature stories, doing scads of book events, and going to fancy award dinners only AFTER being pregnant and blowing up so that most of my previous "dress up" wardrobe no longer fits me, including my shoes. Life just doesn't allow a girl much glamour.

Okay, and now for a P.S. that doesn't relate to Tod, or my shoes, at all. For those who follow this blog, you know that I write on it so sporadically that I rarely give much follow-up information on previous entries. However, I have two tack-on pieces of information here that I want to pass along. They are as follows:

1) My mother is doing fine, after her heart attack and stroke in June. It was all an insane ordeal and we're still pretty convinced that it was medical malpractice, but as my friend Dave Greenberg, who is an attorney, says: You only have a medical malpractice case if you can prove some kind of devastating and lasting damage. So while we are rejoicing that my mother is not a vegetable, or worse, this effectively means that we don't have a case. Which is probably a good thing anyway, since if there's one thing that a near-death in the family reminds you of, it's that life is way too short to spend on petty, meaningless shit like taking people to court and trying to get money out of them, and is much better spent on things like taking your mother to get a pedicure or bringing her with you to push your baby in his first ride on a baby swing.

2) I am going to revise my new novel for my agent. As some of you know, I was very resistant to doing this because the reason my agent asked for said revisions was that 4 (corporate) editors all told her my novel was "too episodic" for the market, and I therefore assumed that this suggestion was strictly market-driven, not based on any actual legitimate aesthetic or creative reasons, and that pissed me off, especially after having a conversation while a bit drunk on Jameson's with some like-minded writers in a bar. However, after taking my novel to Beaver Island, Michigan and spending 10 days with it, I have come to the (somewhat embarrassing) conclusion that . . . well, my novel needs some serious work. A bit of this (especially at the beginning) has to do with it being too episodic, as the editors said, but more of it has to do with the fact that the novel has an ending that was both too "busy" and too long, and so I'm pretty much drastically redoing the ending. I recently had a flurry of intense emails with my friend Cris Mazza about this whole issue of what it means to pursue a corporate publishing deal while simultaneously being a champion of the indie presses as an editor, and having published my first novel through an indie press, and the dialogue has given me a great deal to think about. That said, I now realize I should revise this novel before showing it to any editor, at any press. So I've had a rather humbling personal illustration in the lesson: Just Because Corporate Publishing Is Market-Driven (And Possibly Evil) Doesn't Mean Your Book Doesn't Need Work. But thanks to all for your feedback, and let the debate rage on, even if it is no longer exactly applicable to my particular novel . . . at least until the revision is done.