In February 2011, VIDA, an organization for women writers, released what has been called the VIDA Count, a totalling of male vs. female writer bylines for 14 of the top 2010 literary-type magazines. The numbers found the—perhaps expected—much greater representation of male writers in these publications. VIDA has also “counted” female writers in other publishing venues, and has more counts in the works.

Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinksy for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Her poems have appeared inThe New England Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Fence,The Paris Review, The Cincinnati Review, Slate, Verse, Boston Review, and Ninth Letter. She is co-editor with poet Michael Dumanis of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, was published by Sarabande in August 2007. A recent Whiting Award recipient, she teaches poetry writing in Lesley University’s Low-Residency M.F.A. Program and is an associate professor in creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is Co-Director with the poet Erin Belieu of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

Marcelle Heath: VIDA’s 2010 Count has caused quite a stir in the literary community, generating debate about VIDA’s findings on the number of women contributors and reviews by women authors at the top magazines in the country. Many writers and editors were shocked by the glaring gender disparity in publishing. Others, like myself, were (unfortunately) validated by the pie charts: they represented both our personal experiences and deepest fears about institutionalized and pervasive sexism. While many expressed support and offered new ways to include more women, there were some who criticized and dismissed VIDA’s methodology.

What was your initial reaction when you saw the data? Were you surprised by how it’s been received by both the editors at the magazines in The Count and the public at large?

Cate Marvin: A SHORT ANSWER:

I was both surprised and not at all surprised by the numbers. I think I may have hoped to be surprised. That I hoped the numbers would not turn out as they did. Even though I fully suspected they would.

We at VIDA were gratified by the attention the “2010 Count” received, and especially pleased to find that so many editors were willing to re-assess their own “numbers”—because a great many venues have taken it upon themselves to conduct their own counts.

THE LONGER ANSWER:

I didn’t have what one could call an “initial reaction” to the numbers because the process of acquiring the data was so lengthy and time-consuming.

The idea for VIDA’s “2010 Count” was conceived almost immediately once the organization was formed, back in August of 2009, at which point I was in conversation with several female writers; it soon became apparent that the practice of “counting” was nearly uniform among us. I was then directed to Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s essay “Numbers,” which looks at gender disparity in the representation of women in anthologies of avant garde poetry. (This is a terrific essay, by the way, one that I urge anyone interested in “counting” to make a point of reading.)

We at VIDA were still in the process of figuring out how to launch “The Count” when Publisher’s Weekly “Best Books of 2009” list came out. This required an immediate response on our behalf and provided the impetus for our first press release regarding the omission of women authors from prominent “best of” lists and awards. However, we’d always planned to address a number of different venues in our “Count.” VIDA’s “2010 Count” is only one of several we have underway.

We’re presently in the thick of counting The Best American Series, for example, the numbers for which we’ll be posting on the VIDA site mid-April.

The “2010 Count,” in particular, was dreadfully ambitious from the beginning. We pulled together a list of prominent literary venues and review venues; I then made it a personal project to acquire the table of contents for these publications. One assumes it’d be easy enough to access much of this information online; however, the content of a lot of magazine websites tends to be difficult to dissect due to the merged display of print content and online content. Some magazines require a subscription for accessing on-line content. And while one may also acquire access to media content via databases such as JSTOR and Lexus-Nexus, it’s nearly impossible to turn up a decipherable table of contents pages. For these aforementioned reasons, I ultimately resorted to photocopying print versions of numerous TOCs at my local library.

Throughout July and August of 2010, I spent much of my free time counting. I had opted to not put my then 18-month-old daughter in daycare in order to save money. So, during the days I cared for her, I all too often lugged said daughter along with me to the library. During the evenings, while she slept, I counted.

Thus, by the time VIDA’s “2010 Count” appeared, in early February  of 2011, I’d already spent a lot of time with the numbers. And it’s a very troubling affair. Like you, many of my suspicions were confirmed. But I was also pretty surprised at just how consistent the findings were. I honestly didn’t think The New Yorker would count the way it did: the evening I counted the NYer (I think I finally went to bed at 4 a.m.), I remember feeling distinctly demoralized. I’ll admit: I’d entertained hopes of publishing a poem within its esteemed pages someday. Yet, after counting, this aspiration seemed ridiculous. I felt like a bit of a fool for having believed it possible. So, in answer to your initial question, seeing the numbers depressed the hell out of me.

In fact, I often (jokingly) say that VIDA will end up giving me cancer, as my smoking habit escalated with all of the counting I was doing during last summer, so often late into the night, by which I really mean into the early morning.

And it was a bitch to track down all of the magazines. My local library simply wasn’t cutting it. So I finally relented and put my daughter into daycare, headed up to Columbia University’s library, where I was able to find much of what I needed. That’s one heavenly library. Later, I’d have the wisdom to hit the New York Public Library. They have everything. It was fascinating to see the history of certain venues, such as the Best American Short Stories, which was launched as a “yearbook” in 1915. Looking at the authors who were published in the volumes from the inception of the series really struck home the fact that it’s a career making publication.

As I moved on to counting other venues, I began to feel the shadow of cynicism cross over me. I began to develop the suspicion that I was the butt of a huge joke. I’d be in the city, riding on the subway, or sitting in a restaurant, and notice women of all types and ages reading The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Review of Books; photos of male authors seemed to peer out at me from the pages, gloating. I wanted to ask these female readers if they were, in fact, enjoying what they were reading, ask if they noticed that nearly every article they perused was written by a man, that nearly every review addressed a book by a male author. And, if they did realize this, how did they feel about it?

September rolled around and I was back to teaching. I began to procrastinate when it came to counting.  Frankly, the project had become distasteful. I had piles of TOCs scattered all over my house, stacked in my closet, piling up in my office at school.  It was too much! I began to despair as the whether the project would ever be completed.

I then wisely enlisted the help of several women from VIDA. We divvyed up the TOCs and began counting in earnest. We were very careful: at least two or three individuals counted each venue, then cross checked their results with one another.

Some have derided the VIDA Count as “unscientific.” It’s true that we just presented the numbers. But we made every effort to ensure the numbers were accurate. The night before we launched, I stayed up till dawn on the phone with a close friend (and VIDA intern) who has bookkeeping expertise. She re-tabulated all of our data to ensure its accuracy.

By the time we completed VIDA’s 2010 Count, I no longer took offense at the numbers. I know this may sound strange, but I actually found the whole affair funny—no, hysterical.  What were these editors thinking? Or, perhaps they were not thinking. About their readership. I came to the conclusion that the female readership is largely ignored, which is also funny, given that we make up such a large percentage of the their readers (and, as such, we are the primary consumers of their product). If these editors were financially savvy, wouldn’t they include more female contributors? Wouldn’t they review more books by women?

I began to wonder why I ever considered myself an appropriate reader for these magazines in the first place. It suddenly seemed so clear that their content was never intended for me. But this also struck me as absurd, given the fact I’m an English professor and writer; wouldn’t I be among their targeted readership?

The fact is, I often felt bored when reading these publications. (And I felt guilty for being bored!)  Now I know why (whereas before, I felt I ought to be interested). I don’t subscribe to any of these magazines. Anymore.

Just as the 2010 Count was making its debut in February of 2011, several persons from the press contacted me. Before founding VIDA, I’d had very little contact with the media. One individual congratulated me on a “great story.” As a writer, this struck me as odd, because as far as “stories” are concerned, the VIDA Count required absolutely no imagination.

Heath: There are many vital conversations taking place regarding The Count, including the perception that women’s writing is less than: less interesting, less intellectual, less serious, less relevant, etc., etc. In addition, many people have essentialist notions of identity in relation to women professionalizing themselves as writers: i.e., we don’t send out stuff because we’re insecure, we’re not as aggressive as our male counterparts, etc., etc. What surprises me is how little attention is given to the fact that we live in a society that devalues women in all aspects of our lives, that these “essential” ideas about women and men are rooted in the fiction we continue to create—in language, in politics, in literature, and that these myths perpetuate inequality.

What do you make of the disconnect between perception and reality in terms of how women are perceived as writers and the fictional narratives both women and men create to perpetuate these myths?

Marvin: This is a question I’d like to pose to anyone who believes that literature plays a significant role in our culture. It is, in fact, the question that we at VIDA hoped the Count would prompt. But, here, you are asking me to speak to how I understand it. And, to be honest, I don’t. I don’t understand how people aren’t generally taken aback by evidence that is presented daily in media that women are tremendously undervalued, and often dismissed. This is, of course, the root of the problem.

And isn’t it awfully funny that we’re having this conversation in 2011? But it’s not funny, at all. It’s pretty scary, especially if you’re a woman. Even if you’re a woman who’s never intended to write and doesn’t much care for reading.

I personally think that women, as an entity, are quite adaptable, and that we’ve managed to accommodate the falsehood of “equality,” and much of this has to do with being “polite.” We are quite literally trained by society to understand ourselves as less significant than men—and even when we know that we are capable of greatness, we have also learned our place—and we know we will be criticized for being too outspoken or ambitious. From my experience with those who work on VIDA, women enjoy productive discussions, and would prefer to leave the arena when things get unnecessarily combative or ugly. I think it’s time we express our experiences and perceptions candidly, that we raise our objections when we feel them rise within ourselves. Too many women feel uncomfortable expressing themselves. I think the root of this lies in that we fear we’ll be disliked, or that we’ll be shunned. I think we should model the behaviors we wish to see enacted by others. I hope we can more firmly and cogently express our viewpoints, without apology, and that we will work to support one another. We really need to support one another. We need to learn as much as we can about one another’s work, about the different genres we’re working within, because we all share the same obstacles. And I don’t think men are outside this conversation. A great many male editors and writers are themselves deeply interested in bringing women’s voices to the forefront. I think the sooner the conversation becomes “about” gender, and less “between” genders, we’ll recognize that we’re all interested (one hopes) in a shared goal: parity.

Heath: What are VIDA’s expectations and goals for The Count? What are your goals for the organization as a whole?

Marvin: We at VIDA want to create a conversation. Many conversations. We wish, quite simply, to create a forum in which people who are concerned about gender disparity in literature can speak to one another. As such, we are about to launch a “forum” on our website in which members may carry on such conversations.

We’re also about to launch a blog, which we’re calling, after the Sexton poem, “Her Kind.” We plan to invite two writers at a time to conduct an extended exchange of ideas that response to specific questions provided by our blog editors, Rose Ben-Oni and Arisa White, who will serve as curators of these conversations.

We’ve also spoken a lot about establishing fellowships for female writers who are interested in engaging in critical discourse. We’d very much like to provide a substantial stipend, in addition to offering a retreat for such writers at which they would be mentored by writers with experience in this field. We want to help women writers become major players in the field of criticism, reviews, op-ed pieces, etc. It’s become obvious that we need more women presenting their critical prose to the literary world at large.

Finally, one of our ultimate goals is to host a national conference that focuses solely on women’s writing and its cultural reception, and we intend to include the genres of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, as well as playwriting and children’s literature. We’d like to for this conference to be less commercial than, say, AWP or MLA. By which I mean, we hope to offer a flat rate for all participants (rather than providing institutional memberships, which ultimately favor academics). It would great if we could provide housing at a low cost; this might be made possible were we to conduct our conference at a university campus. Most obviously, we would want to provide daycare. We wish to host a more intimate conference, one that isn’t so much focused on networking, as it is on building community.

Heath: I am often challenged to confront and question my own privilege in my work as well as erroneous ideas about women in general.  Often, I fail. What informs your work as a poet and professor? How do you articulate your identity, and what vision(s) do you have for your writing?

Marvin: I prefer that my poems don’t answer to identity; rather, I desire that they create their own identities. The most seductive and wondrously empowering aspect of writing is that one can own the page. I personally work with the assumption that I’m not required to be faithful to the actual.  And, for me, that’s what’s writing’s about. Escaping the body. Becoming autonomous through being anonymous, and thereby finding a space within which the mind and heart may engage the page.

When writing, I don’t think about numbers.

Sources:

A Literary Glass Ceiling?, Ruth Franklin, The New Republic

Submitting Work: A Woman’s Problem?, Becky Tuch, Beyond The Margins

On Gender, Numbers & Submission, Rob Spillman, Tin House Blog

VIDA and The Count Round-Up, Alyss Dixon, She Said What?!!!

VIDA: The Count Roundup, Stephen Elliott, The Rumpus

Originally published at The Review Review as “Sexism in Publishing: It’s About More Than Just Numbers”

Inequality in publishing is finally getting its due attention. About a month ago VIDA released The Count, which compared the percentages of female and male bylines in literary and commercial magazines, revealing devastating data. Recently numerous writers have published related articles on many high-profile sites, including Slate,PBS, Ms. Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Jezebel, The New Republic, The New York Times, and countless others. All over the Internet, writers are compiling lists of articles about sexism, bloggers are commenting, and editors are coming forward to talk about their publishing practices.

It’s an exciting time. Writers are asking important questions: Does my voice count? Am I and are writers like me getting fair representation in the public realm? Have I been held back and/or holding myself back? If I have been held back, why?

Similarly, editors of small journals and larger glossies are taking time to assess the history of their publications, asking themselves difficult questions: Do I fairly represent all voices? Are my reading preferences biased, and is that bias based on gender? Can I do more as an editor to ensure that everyone gets fairly heard? What is my role here, and how can my magazine become more diverse?

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a tangible wave sweeping through publishing. Dare I say, it’s a veritable movement.

All this makes me happy.

And yet, critic that I am, I’d like to pause for just one moment, lest we lose sight of something important: Content.

In the fever over which authors get adequately represented in bookstores, on shelves, in magazines, and in the pages of small journals, it is important that we also consider which characters get depicted within literary works themselves. Which heroes and which heroines? Fighting for which causes? Using which methods? And with what end results?

While editors and publishers might begin to seek out woman writers to balance their contributors lists, I worry that this effort may constitute little more than superficial change, mere window dressing on an otherwise dysfunctional social structure.

Thus I would like to caution readers, writers, and editors against putting too much emphasis on numbers alone. If, for instance, The New Yorker suddenly began seeking woman writers to fill its pages, that would be a good thing. But if these women writers wrote articles and stories that devalued women, that championed the limiting of women’s rights, or otherwise reinforced a patriarchal status quo, I would not call that progress.

Sadly, I can think of numerous women whose books, and the messages contained therein, actually hurt other women. Yes, they are women who are achieving success in male-dominated fields. Yes, they have gotten published. But I cannot say that their writing does much in the way of achieving equality between the sexes.

It’s unfortunate that the conversation should even create this either/or bifurcation. Women, like men, are complex creatures, holding a variety of political views and living across race and class spectrums. Women, like men, have a variety of tastes, and for every taste a different writing style, with different subject matter that interests them. How many women love to write stories from the points of view of men? How many men love to tell stories about women? (No one’s taught me more about what it is to be a woman oppressed by both class and gender than Gustave Flaubert!)

Nonetheless, the conversation has become about numbers for obvious reasons. When looking at the ghastly figures–in some major commercial magazines, women book reviewers a mere 4% of all reviewers–how could we not notice this stark suppression of female voices? How could we, as women, not feel hurt, outraged, demoralized, shocked, and frankly pissed off?

We can and many of us do.

Still, there is more to consider. If we wish to ensure that our reading material remains democratic, lively, relevant, and humane, we must look beyond the numbers.

Editors who have genuinely sought engaged subject matter and varied literary styles among submissions have observed that an equal gender balance arises naturally. This phenomenon was commented upon by Jeanne Leiby of Southern Review, Rebecca Morgan Frank of Memorious, and Joanne Merriam of 7×20, among others. Such editors work hard to produce journals that are not merely of a high quality, but which also display diverse characters in a range of milieus, stories narrated from various perspectives, and poetry in a range of styles. When diversity in content is sought, greater equality appears to be organically attained.

Similarly, writers interested in issues of social justice may begin by asking certain questions of their work: How do my characters define themselves? What gives their lives meaning? Do their struggles exist in isolation, or is society somehow taken into account? Are the characters fully-dimensional, with virtues as well as flaws, or are they composites of familiar stereotypes? Does the story’s end offer hope for change? Does the ending condemn the characters’ choices in some way? If you are writing outside your comfort zone, you may want to consider having people unlike yourself read your work and give you feedback.

Experimental and avant-garde writing often has explicit or implicit political messages. Because this genre usually emphasizes language and texture, deliberately de-emphasizing content, it’s much harder to talk about issues of character, story, or social milieu. The only thing I would suggest is that if you are writing experimental work, be sure to articulate–if only to yourself–your specific vision. Many feminist literary critics have spoken of experimental writing as inherently disruptive to patriarchy, in that it subverts traditional, linear narrative forms. On the other hand, several avant-garde poets have gone on to support Fascismt regimes. Unless you envision yourself as the next Mussolini, experiment with care.

Ultimately, determining the message of a particular work is a much more subjective and nebulous venture than tracking numerical data. In many cases, the more entertaining a work of art, the more difficult to unpack its meaning. Throughout history, the most oppressive political systems have found ways to disseminate ideology through the most beautiful works of art.

It makes sense that questions of fairness would begin with inquiries into how many women versus men are getting published. I do believe this is a start. The numbers revealed by VIDA have been absolutely appalling.

But this cannot be the end of the discussion.

After all, in time what will our nieces, daughters, and granddaughters remember—The story about yet another disgruntled male professor who cheats on his wife, written by a woman? Or the story of a woman who wants more from life than marriage and motherhood…written by a man?

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989

If you asked me about the general ratio of female and male authors included in BluePrintReview—the online literary magazine I founded in 2005, and that is now up to 24 issues—I would be able to give you the answer without going through pages: it’s about 50/50. Same goes for the answer to the question: “What’s the ratio of poetry versus prose?” Again, the answer would be: about 50/50.

These ratios developed during the first months of editing, combined with the plan to create issues that offer a balance of voices and cover a wide array of styles, approaches, and originating countries. This concept has continued since the start, with one exception: the current issue (“micro cosmos”), which is dedicated to flash fiction.

Even though I try for a balance of poetry and prose, those categories don’t appear anywhere. The starting page of each issue includes only the titles of the texts, without telling if it is poetry or fiction or non-fiction. Added to that, up to issue 22 all texts were centered, which blurred the lines between prose and poetry. In 2007, when one of the stories in BluePrintReview was selected by Sundress for their “Best of Net” list, the Sundress editor wrote and asked me to confirm that the text they had selected is a story.

Same goes for the images: there are photographs, digital art, and paintings included. Some photos look like paintings, which again blurs the lines of definition.

Up to summer 2009, there also weren’t any author names included on the on the issue starting page. Altogether, BluePrintReview is very much about not categorizing, about exploring the range of different formats, and the way they overlap.

Then came 2010, and a whole set of questions I hadn’t expected.

The first was: “How many poc (persons of color) writers are included in BluePrintReview?” I arrived at this topic through a Big Other blog post on the role of editors. The blog post itself opened with a quote of an editor about the disproportional submission quality from women and poc, and the quoted follow-up suggestion:

When you go through your back issues/backlist for the big names to list on your website, be sure to put the names of women writers and poc front and center. A publisher/magazine that has a lot of recognizable “minority” names on its website is basically putting out the welcome mat for “minority” writers.

Which lead to another question, put in words by post-author Roxane Gay (editor of PANK): “How on earth can you know someone’s race from their submission?”

I started to look through BluePrintReview from that angle, which lead to more questions: If the author is living in his home country (Africa, Asia, Middle East), would he or she still be counted as poc/“minority”? Or does that only go for authors living outside their home country, where they are in fact belonging to the minority of the citizens?

Which brought me back to the gender theme, and made me wonder whether this theme sometimes is the focus of discussions because it is more visible than other characteristics of authors. At the same time, it’s interesting to see that the internet tends to level certain factors: the place where an author lives, both on a country/continent perspective, and the more local dimension of “part of town.” The social group an author belongs to, their age and appearance, their ethnic background, religion, etc.—all these factors aren’t visible in submissions if they aren’t explicitly stated in the bio. And even the gender aspect can be removed, either by using initials, or by creating an abstract.

One of the reasons why this topic kept churning in my mind was a companion project of BluePrintReview that had launched in March 2010: Daily s-Press, a book blog that features books from small presses. The concept of it: to explore the landscape of small and indie publishers, at the pace of one book per weekday. There were some initial search functions up already, mainly about the book type and format (fiction/poetry, paperback/e-book, etc.). Next to follow were geographical search functions (authors/editors by continents, maybe even countries), and also, a gender tag.

While listing other options that might be interesting, I arrived at age and ethnicity/nationality. Tags like these also would allow to group the books from different angles, and search for authors who have some characteristics in common, for example: authors in the same age-range, authors living in the some country, or authors with a similar ethnic background.

But to get there, I would need to ask questions of the awkward kind: What’s your age? Where do you live? What’s your home country? Do you belong to a minority? (Or: Are you a poc?)

Unsure how to best proceed, I mailed with some author friends. One of the replies I received was about the lingering problems that were connected with ethnicity/race and all the sub-categories this might involve, leading to the suggesting that I rather might use nationality as a context info in the book features, yet avoid search options that reinforce ethnic/racial categorizations.

Another friend pointed me towards an article on politically correct ways of describing ethnic races as suggested by The Guardian:

“Do not use ethnic to mean black or Asian people. In a British sense, they are an ethnic minority; in a world sense, of course, white people are an ethnic minority…

Avoid the world ‘immigrant’, which is very offensive to many black and Asian people, not only because it is often incorrectly used to describe people who were born in Britain, but also because it has been used negatively for so many years that it carries imagery of ‘flooding’, ‘swamping’, ‘bogus’, ‘scroungers’, etc.

The words black and Asian should not be used as nouns, but as adjectives: black people rather than ‘blacks’, an Asian woman rather than ‘an Asian’, etc”

Going through the different viewpoints again, I felt that there are two currents: on the one side, there is more awareness of the racial/ethnic/minority theme, while on the other side the internet tends to move those personal characteristics to the background. Online literary magazine are accessible from all places of the world, and in return, are frequented by writers from different nations—and looking through magazines, if you wanted to “group” or “classify” authors, it would be easier to approach this from the formats they work in; yes, there are some magazines that focus on nationality and gender (Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian-American Poetry, Melusine, or Woman in the 21^stCentury), but there are far more magazines that focus on micro fiction, or poetry, or short stories, or multimedia works—or on theme angles like fantasy, metaphysics, or horror. Following this thought, a poet who lives in the countryside probably has more in common with a rural poet in another country than with a horror author who lives in the same country, but in a large city.

Translated to Daily s-Press, this lead to the decision to focus on the writing, and let the authors speak through their books. The categories now start with format (short stories/poetry/novels), then move to ‘technical’ categories (anthologies, e-books, press with e-zine) and also to thematic groups (east/west, about a place, time and space). Here, I again tried to avoid the usual genre classification (romance, SF, crime).

Categories influence the viewpoint—I was reminded of this again when The New Yorker launched their fiction issue in June. Instead of just calling it “Summer Reads,” they titled it: “20 under 40.” And that’s exactly what the reviews and discussions then picked up on: instead of focusing on the stories and authors, the focus moved to the age categorization, and the whole topic of “youth” vs” “aging”. What almost went unnoticed was the fact that the issue came in a fine balance of 10 male and 10 female authors, and with more than 30% non-native writers included. That’s another effect of categories: they define the directly accessible statistics.

NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards

Which now brings me back to Daily s-Press: I didn’t keep track of the number of books and the gender of authors. But this morning, I took the time and did a count. There are 82 books featured in Daily s-Press so far. The gender ratio is almost even: 27 male authors to 25 female authors (the other 30 books are combined works, anthologies, first issues, etc.). I also set up a new search tag: “race + gender + age.” 12 books fit into this group; that’s 14%. And as numbers only give part of the picture, here some of the books, as doorstep to further reading: NO GENDER:NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (anthology), The Asian-American Literary Review (first issue, with a 20-page introduction on author identity and writing), Traveling with Virginia Woolf by Kristina Marie Darling (e-book), Gaze by Marthe Reed (poetry collection). The  category also includes a feature on the New Yorker “20 under 40” issue.

After going through the Daily s-Press books, I revisited the list of books I read recently. The theme also reflects in quiet a number of titles, not on first glance, but on second: there is anthology of writers from Cuba—some of them live in Cuba, some in exile. Another anthology is from South Africa, with both poc and non-poc writers included. And inspired by a call for revisioned myth and fairy tale (The Velvet Chamber), I returned to my copy of Women who run with Wolves—which I read parallel to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.

“How have these issues and books affected you as an editor?”  Maybe the choice of theme for the next issue of BluePrintReview gives a direct answer to this question—it will be about identity.

Helen Sedgwick

There was a documentary recently shown on television about the life of Beethoven. It was an interesting program that, among other things, showed Beethoven to have been cruel and abusive to several female members of his family. In a discussion about the program afterwards, a friend told me that she wished she hadn’t watched it at all. For her, this new understanding of Beethoven’s character had spoiled his music. I was surprised. I don’t doubt that Beethoven was an arrogant and violent misogynist, but his repertoire still contains some of the most beautiful and uplifting pieces that I know. For me, the music is separate from the man.

And so, when writing about issues of gender in the publishing industry, I think a distinction first has to be made. Do I wish to consider the representation of women in literature, or am I discussing the treatment and attitudes of individuals working within the industry? To my mind they are different, though connected, subjects; I will narrow them down to a particular example taken from my own experience.

Along with Kirsty Logan I co-edit a magazine. It is a new magazine; there is little on our website by way of guidelines. This is in part to avoid becoming over-prescriptive, and in part because writing in all genres on all subjects might potentially be published in the magazine, if the writing itself is good enough. The only information about ourselves we have given on the website is our first names. They are both women’s names.

The majority of writers who submit work to us have the good sense to address us using our names, and to send a polite, if sometimes informal, covering email with their submission. However, we recently received an email from a writer who chose to address us as “You girls.” He said, “Perhaps you girls will like this story.” On reading this address, I passed fairly rapidly through intense irritation to a bewildered amusement. It was patronizing and it was disrespectful, there’s no doubt about it, but it was also a strikingly stupid way to email an editor who you want to publish your work. There is a chance that the author of this email was deliberately trying to belittle us as women—and I don’t deny that there are such people in the world—but on consideration my overriding suspicion is that he simply didn’t think about what he was writing. I must admit I didn’t have high hopes for his story. Writers, of all people, should be aware of the meaning of the words they use.

Here, my music analogy falls apart. Where music can often be interpreted to mean almost entirely what the listener would like it to mean, writing is more explicit. Words inescapably have meaning. One author might, in some cases, have a political agenda; for others, they might be unaware of the full implication of what they write, or might accidentally allow their own attitudes to seep into the writing and color the text. Where these attitudes—whether intended or not—are unacceptable or offensive to the reader, a dislike of the writing can instinctively result.

Nevertheless, in the same way as I listen to Beethoven’s music for the love of his music, I have always said that as an editor (and a reader) I would judge writing in terms of the writing itself, not the author. I often just skim cover emails and rarely read the author biographies I am sent. My decision on whether or not to publish a piece of work does not depend on how much or how little the author has previously published, or on their education, class, race, gender, or sexuality. Nor does it depend on the author’s personal politics. It depends on what the words on the page actually say.

So I put the phrase “you girls” out of my mind and began reading the story as though I had no knowledge of the author. It did not surprise. It was not very good. In fact, allowing myself to consider story and email side by side for a moment, it followed what seems to be something of a trend: Where a thoughtless, ill-considered, or potentially offensive email was used as a cover letter to a submission, the submission itself was often badly constructed, inconsistent and sometimes completely incoherent. In my experience, people who do not consider in any depth the words they use—and the potential implications (be they personal, political, or sociological) of those words—often also write weak, muddled fiction.

But the question remains, if I read a piece of anonymous fiction that I engaged with and admired enough to want to publish, then subsequently read an email from the author that contained attitudes I find unacceptable, should I then reject the story?

If I refused to read the work of misogynists, sexists, racists, or people of any other bias or prejudice with which I disagree, I would have lost out on a lot of inspiring and highly influential literature, from Plato through Shakespeare to Hemingway. In some cases, the writers’ own attitudes do not seem to me to be present in their writing at all. In others, I find the writing engaging despite the opinions it contains. I completely disagree with Plato’s politics and suspect I would have despised the man himself, yet his writing made me want to go back in time just so I could enter into dialogue with him—I disagree with what he says, yet I find it fascinating. Hemingway’s misogyny offends me, but I find some of his short stories so insightful and subtle that I return to them again and again.

But these are examples from throughout history; these authors do not live in our world. When it comes to publishing new fiction, we should be judging it by our own standards. Modern day writers should know better than to behave, talk, or write in a sexist way. Attitudes still need to change, and that is a belief that I represent both in my own writing and in the way I choose to live and treat others. As an editor, I would not publish a piece of writing that contained attitudes I find unacceptable anymore than I would publish a story that I thought was badly written. Literature can inspire and entertain; literature can also change the way people think. I want the fiction I publish to do all of the above. So, would I publish a sexist piece of writing? No I would not. But would I publish the work of a writer who I found to be sexist, if I felt the writing itself wasn’t sexist but was insightful, interesting, and worthy of publication? I think I would, yes. And when, after being published, he received his copy of the magazine, perhaps some of the other stories included would open his eyes a little. After all, as an editor of a new, independent literary magazine, if nothing else you have to be a bit of an optimist.

Kirsty Logan

I am called Kirsty and my co-editor is called Helen. Our names are displayed on our magazine’s website. Our names are women’s names.

Generally, this is not an issue. I do not know if writers notice or care that they are submitting work to a magazine run by two women. However, occasionally writers find it necessary to make note of our gender. They use phrases like “‘you ladies wanted to read more of my work” or “perhaps you girls will like this story.”

I’m sure none of the people who write these phrases are reading this essay, but if they are I’d like to make it clear that if you use such a phrase, I will not like your story. This is true in the same way that I will not like your story if it features dragons or World War I, or if it contains the words akin or ponder. It’s not that I’ll reject your story just because I don’t like you; it’s that the presence of certain elements (such as “you girls,” or dogs, or funerals) set off my Bad Writer Radar. Rejection is nothing personal, except that this time maybe it is a bit personal, because you just made it personal.

Literary magazine editors are not better than non-editors. We are just people who have chosen to spend our free time putting a bunch of stories out into the world because we think they’re amazing enough to share. But we’re also not someone you’re sitting next to in your local pub. Try to show some respect, if you wish to receive respect in return. As editors, Helen and I try to show writers respect. We always use their names rather than using form rejections, and we always check we have spelled those names correctly. If we have anything useful to say about the stories, we will provide comments. We are writers as well as editors, and know how it feels to be on the other side of a rejection letter. We are respectful to writers, and we appreciate respect in return. Referring to someone who you want to publish your work as “you girls” shows a staggering lack of respect.

Perhaps this happens to male editors too. Perhaps they receive emails addressed “hey guys,” suggesting that ‘you blokes’ might like their story. Even then, it wouldn’t be quite the same. Although guys and blokes might be a bit too informal, it doesn’t suggest superiority the way that”‘you girls” does. An equivalent might be “you little boys,” though it’s so hugely unlikely that any writer however disconnected from reality would address editors as “little boys” in a submission letter that it’s not even worth discussing. But then, I would have thought “‘you girls” hugely unlikely too, so perhaps it is worth considering.

By referring to us in this belittling way, writers are suggesting that we are little girls with a little project. “They started their own wee magazine, isn’t that just too cute?” However writers might address male editors, I can’t think of a manner that fully encompasses this attitude. Although I don’t like to think that our gender matters to our work as editors, incidents like this make me want to go by my gender-neutral initials.

There is one way that my gender does affect how I do my editing work, and that is content. I recently rejected a story that the author told me was about, “a woman facing the terrible predicament of not being able to meet a nice man.” Sure, I rejected it because it was badly-written and boring and didn’t fit well with the other stories in the magazine. But I also rejected it because I don’t care about finding a nice man, and I’m not interested in reading about women who consider not being able to meet one a “terrible predicament.” Maybe that’s because I’m a bitter man-hating dyke, or maybe it’s because I’m a demanding reader and do not want to read clichéd and unsurprising literature.

As an editor, I do not care about writers’ gender or sexuality; I’m just interested in exciting short fiction. But I’m a woman and I’m queer and I’m a feminist. As such, I’m more likely to be interested in characters that I can identify with and themes that I agree with. I’m highly unlikely to publish anything misogynistic or homophobic, no matter how well written it is. That’s not to say that I’ll only publish women, or that I only want liberal viewpoints, or that I only want stories about periods and miscarriages and torrid lesbian love affairs. But stories are accepted or rejected based on whether or not I like them, and, with such arbitrary guidelines, it would be silly to claim that my personal life doesn’t affect my judgment. As an editor, I don’t claim to be an objective judge of what is good and what is bad; no editor should claim this. Each editor accepts work that they like, and rejects work that they do not.

Helen and I are not women editors; we are editors who happen to be women. Our magazine is not a magazine by women—exactly half of our first issue is written by female writers and half by men, though this wasn’t planned. It’s also not a magazine for women, though we hope that plenty of female readers will like our content. But it would be facetious to suggest that who we are as people does not affect the work we like as editors. Every editor has subjective views on literature, and that is part of what gives each literary magazine its own tone and personality.

A magazine edited by two queer women might, in theory, have a more female-positive outlook in its content than some other magazines. We are interested in minority voices, but we won’t reject work just because it’s from a heteronormative viewpoint. I do not treat writers differently based on who they are; all I care about is the words they write. I would like to receive the same consideration as an editor.

**

Forthcoming: “You Girls (pt. 2)”—notes from the other half of Fractured West.

Photograph from Copperman's old blog of students from Carver Upper Elementary School

The email from the editor of the literary journal started out promisingly enough, noting that they liked my story very much. I knew that couldn’t be all, for the story I’d submitted was a dialect piece, and I knew from long experience that no editor would accept a story deploying a form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) without some confirmation of authenticity: they would try to verify my racial background and personal history, especially in the absence of publications I didn’t possess because no editor would accept a story written in AAVE without…guarantees. And there it was:

Our editors have concerns about how you colonize this young girl’s voice.

I took a deep breath, wishing polemic came easier to me, and started to type.

My novel was about a naïve, idealistic young Japanese man who went to teach in the rural black public schools of the Delta, and the children he encountered there, sometimes from their own point of view as rendered in their own voices. I’d submitted my fiction on this material to over a hundred magazines, and had almost a 50% personalized, encouraging rejection rate—the better the venue, in fact, the more likely I was to hear back about the merit of the material, though eventually there would be some mention of the ‘originality’ of ‘representation,’ my laudable willingness to ‘transgress.’ If I’d sent a dialect piece, the note would mention the ‘boldness of the formal choices,’ the bravery of my ‘risk with voice,’ the way this was clearly ‘not at all an MFA story.’

For perhaps the first couple years, I was encouraged: I was hearing back from the finest literary magazines in the country. And then it began to sink in: what these editors were commending was the exact features of my work they were rejecting. They weren’t comfortable with my Japanese-American narrator because he didn’t exhibit any characteristics they associated with, as one editor noted, ‘his oriental culture.’ They weren’t comfortable with first-person stories rendered in a system for representing black Delta dialect. They weren’t sure if it was adequately authentic (i.e., Was I black?), and simultaneously, they weren’t sure how to confront unfamiliar representations of race (i.e., Why wasn’t this narrator more ‘culturally Japanese’?).  They weren’t sure if I was ‘reinscribing stereotypes’ or failing to conform to acceptable, established narratives, but they weren’t comfortable with the work. This was the age of Obama, post-raciality and post-identity politics and infinite hope were the order of the day, and this material was too—too something for them. Not easily digestible, perhaps. Not optimistic enough concerning the possibilities of black youth born into poverty. Not quite to their aesthetic. That was it. Great work, clearly something there, but sorry. Just a matter of taste.

As a writer and as a multiracial, Japanese-Hawaiian Russo-Polish secular Jew, I claim the right to know of a young man who like myself went to teach in the poorest and blackest part of the poorest and blackest state in the nation. And I would like my work considered on its merits, and judged in terms of its craft; on the written page, I maintain that craft constitutes representation. No editor has ever told me that my system for dialect is flawed, or claimed a piece failed because I privileged voice above the need to expose a character’s need adequately, or insisted I failed to get at anything that mattered. Those are the right reasons to reject a story, and when I read Alice Munro, Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Andre Dubus, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O’Connor I recognize my ability as a fiction writer is small in comparison to what I aspire to do. I want my work judged on that criteria, not because of societal discomfort about race, or because the editors of a literary magazine have ideological objections to dialect’s potential to reify extant stereotypes of African-Americans.

The question of authenticity, then, especially authorial authority conferred on the basis of phenotype or racial background, is the wrong line of inquiry. I agree with Flannery O’Connor that “conviction without experience makes for harshness.” I would never claim to know the ‘black experience’, or to speak for African-Americans. I do know the lives of fourth grade children at Carver-Upper Elementary in Indianola, Mississippi, who were born into severe poverty.  I spent two years listening to them speak ten and twelve hours a day, five days a week, as I worked to offer them a different opportunity against all odds. I know their voices and their particular experiences, the distance between what a nine-year-old says and what is meant, what can be indicated by averted eyes or a long pause if you’ve known that child long enough and taken the time to listen to them. I have something to say about those children, and about what I lost wanting too much to help them without anything adequate to offer.

After six years of submitting, I have been lucky to finally find editors at The Oxford American, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, Copper Nickel, 34th Parallel, The Arkansas Review, Unsaid and Southword who will publish the work, and the support of a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts to encourage it. I have high hopes. But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.

-Layli Phillips, The Womanist Reader

As a writer, I have thought a lot about “community” and what it means.  I am often hyper-aware of my identities as I write: female, gay, Cuban-American, daughter of exiles. These identities have informed, situated, and contextualized my creative work.  However, at times it has meant isolating parts of myself and the literary community seemed to reinforce that. As a result, a few years ago when I was in college and had become very interested in women’s studies in particular, I stopped writing for a short time and turned my attention to yoga, meditation, and Buddhism. In the texts I studied, I was being challenged to think about impermanence, emptiness, non-duality, things we rarely discussed in academia but which had always concerned me. I suspected this “pause” would change my view of and approach to making art.

It was by examining the ways in which the principles of womanism intersect with yogic philosophy and practice that I began to discover new ways of engaging the body. In The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: “The word yoga (union) implies duality (as in the joining of two things or principles); the result of yoga is the nondual state.” This became a point of entry back into my writing.  I wanted to explore the personal/political/poetic while moving towards embodiment as a writer. I had decided to become a yoga instructor and one of the phrases I learned was “yield before push.” This seemed to be directly related to creative work. Observe first, then articulate. Let the work (like the breath) guide and support you.

Cover for Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality

So what does it mean to write about race, gender, class, sexuality and stay grounded in the body, in one’s desire for psychic/spiritual health? How can a literary community support this? During and after college I did work within the queer community (publishing work in Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality edited by Diane Anderson-Minshall (Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris Press, 2004) and Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology edited by Amy Sonnie (Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Publications, 2000). I have come to believe that identity as we define it, the binaries—gay/straight, black/white, male/female—matter and they also don’t matter. The personal narratives associated with these identities certainly matter but the classifications don’t. The classifications marginalize (and isolate) us and I often explore this question of marginality within the work. In this way, what is under the surface of the work becomes part of the work. As I reveal to a reader my relationship to identity, I also reveal it to myself. It is often on the page that these discoveries are made.

The knowledge that arises from this exploration can move us from complacency to application, for if we desire to engage with the world that sustains our creativity we must not be satisfied with art for art’s sake. In The Womanist Reader, Layli Phillips describes a “spiritualized politics… rooted in the conviction that … the transcendental or metaphysical dimension of life enhance and even undergird political action.” She adds that, “Physical healing is integral to social change for a variety of reasons.  Bodily well-being is the foundation for other forms of well-being…”

This is reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s, The Uses of the Erotic. She writes, “When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us … Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.”

Cover for Audre Lorde’s, The Uses of the Erotic

Much to my surprise, it is in graduate school that I have found a literary community that is not only supportive but that encourages me to take risks in my work. I was apprehensive when I began the MFA at Hunter College; I imagined it would be incongruous with my goals toward embodied practice. Surely I would forget the body, I thought, as I re-entered academia. But I had been actively seeking out a community of like-minded thinkers, a group of individuals interested in writing, and I remained open. I’m now a year in. The group is predominantly women but diverse in terms of age, race, and class. We are all writing nonfiction, focusing on memoir. We are all writing our lives, personal narratives that require us not only to examine identity, but also what that means and how it intersects with the body and with history.

I have also worked collaboratively with a photographer, Lisa Ross, who has been making work in Northwest China for the past 7 years, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The process teaches me many things, including the importance of working in stages, in fragments, and also how all art-making is contingent upon one’s relationship to relationship. We become involved in creative work because we are interested in relating to our subject(s), exploring what it means to be separate from that which we are observing.

What emerges from this kind of “spiritualized politics” that Layli Phillips has described is that the physical and metaphysical co-exist and contextualize each other. By contemplating this possibility as we write we allow the critical mind, the corporal body, and the sacred to mix in ways that bridge theory and practice. For me, identity shifts from a fixed to a fluid thing as I move through it in my work. My work has appeared in various publications interested specifically in issues of identity. I still struggle at times with the notion of the “mainstream,” how my work relates or does not relate to the canon. But because I am a writer interested in the body and therefore in identity, my work will continue to find its home within literary communities that engage with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and spirituality.

*

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

Phillips, Layli. The Womanist Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

In our second installment, below, we talk with Jarrett Haley, editor of BULL: Fiction for Thinking Men about masculinity, violence, gendered divisions of labor, and PW’s list.

—Marcelle Heath

*

Logo for BULL: Fiction for Thinking Men

Marcelle Heath: As a literary magazine devoted to “Men’s Fiction,” you’ve published some fine stories by writers who address dominant notions of masculinity in their work. For example, in Sean Sullivan’s “My Father’s .45” the specter of violence in masculinity is portrayed through the narrator’s cleaning his father’s gun. In “The Winner” by G.C. Perry, the narrator is the silent and repressed father who refuses to help his wife. What are your thoughts on how masculinity functions in these stories?

Jarrett Haley: That I am not a sociologist or gender-studier by trade I should make clear to begin with. This should be obvious given that masculinity—as I see and feel it—I can best describe as some kind of nebulous something at work inside men, a thing of pride and comfort and at times anxiety, no doubt a big influence but ultimately something quiet, unexamined, generally unspoken of or at least spoken around, which I don’t think is altogether a bad thing. I find it kind of interesting in its vagueness, in the way these stories you mention, like others in BULL, make no grand statement about masculinity but just glance at a certain aspect or consideration.

Fathers have a lot to do with it of course, much more than I dare to dive into, but “My Father’s .45” is a prime example. And yeah, there’s violence in that story, but I consider that somewhat case-specific; I think a more universal notion is that of the permanently looming father—the physical loom in one’s youth becoming psychological later in life. The pressure to fulfill—whether put upon or self-originating—I think is widely relatable as opposed to the violence.  In my own case I can’t think of a kinder guy than my old man, but as I sit idly at this computer screen and think of him at my age and his worldwide exploits in the Navy, it’s like the story goes—“I know that he’s behind me and always will be.”

As for “The Winner,” I think it’s charitable to call the narrator “silent and repressed,” as I see that guy as an outright jerk. I suppose he could stand to represent a bastardized form of masculinity, an exaggerated (or not) example of the old guard. But in a story so short I take it that everything is amplified, and I see him essentially as a caricature of that prehistoric mindset, drawn to effect the irony at the end—that what he’s “won” is only a household full of anguish.

Heath: Many of the male protagonists have a conflicted relationship to the domestic sphere. For instance, In Alan Stewart Carl’s “What Our Fathers Knew,” the narrator is a member of a new era of men who are not like their fathers, who help around the house and take care of their kids, but it’s an uneasy alliance. “We can change diapers and snuggle on couches, but we never learned how to stand on the porch, drinking beer, unfazed by each other’s struggles, knowing what we share can’t be taken away by fortune, good or bad.” In the aforementioned “The Winner,” the narrator refuses to participate in the domestic sphere. In Christopher Siciliano’s “Home Furnishing,” domesticity is perilous terrain when the narrator’s wife trades in her sexuality for a couch while cockroaches carry him off. What do you make of how the ways in which women and men negotiate the division of labor in the home are reflected in contemporary men’s fiction?

Haley: Rather than speak for Alan I asked him directly about his blurb, and I’ll try to do him justice in paraphrasing his answer: that unlike some of the fathers of us 70s babies, today

many men are happy to split the power/chores evenly, but they are certainly aware that such equality is pretty new to our culture and, for some men, there’s a sense that something has been lost. I think that ‘something’ is the product of mythical remembrances, but it’s nevertheless a weight or at least a rough texture that they feel as they move through their lives.

I especially like Alan’s expression “at least a rough texture,” which I think captures the nuances at work in the story.

I think the keystone of “Home Furnishing” is found in the line disclosing that the narrator’s wife hides the bills from him, “knowing how it stings [his] ego that [he’s] not a competent provider.” This is a circumstance that’s become relevant now more than ever, and one that’s unique to contemporary life now that a double income has become more or less obligatory. How this affects his household, and how the narrator deals with it and these cockroaches, I find really crafty and fresh.  If Alan is dealing with the slight degrees of difference between the modern age for men and the age of our fathers, “Home Furnishing” is a full-blown 180º from that time and explores the impact of living in it. The overall significance of the story I leave to readers to interpret how they will.

Heath: As you discussed in your interview with Roxane Gay at PANK, women have been underrepresented in your submission pool. In BULL’s submission guidelines, you state: “BULL is intended as a resource and repository for Men’s Fiction, and though we showcase Men’s Fiction exclusively we have no intent to shut out or alienate any manner of reader or author. We invite submissions from any and every writer who believes their work squares with our purpose and aspiration.” What has been the response to BULL? Have you had more success in receiving and publishing submissions by women?

Haley: Since then we’ve had about the same slim success in receiving submissions by women, which doesn’t bode well for much success in publishing submissions by women.  Out of the few we get something clicks every now and then and I’m happy when it does, because I think BULL is all the better for it as far as perspective. But saying “success” here feels a bit squirmy to me, as if it’s something we’re actively trying to do. All we try to do at BULL is put out the best of what writing we receive, regardless of who or where that writing comes from. To do anything otherwise would be corrupt.

The response so far? People are liking us, at least there are those who tell us so, and I’m very grateful that they do. And the majority of people who tell us that are guys, which I think is only to be expected.

Heath: In Laura Miller’s Salon article on the exclusion of women in Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best List, she discusses how women and men have pointed out that although women make up the majority of consumers who purchase books, they make up “about half of the authors on any given New York Times Bestseller list,” and that canonical works by men are still privileged over works by women because male readers perceive these works as not as serious than those by men. Miller writes, “What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition.” What are your thoughts about PW, male readership, and questions of literary merit in works by women?

Haley: I never really knew how pervasive these Best-lists were until I started paying attention to the Internet at year’s end, but I guess that’s just the nature of the beast. It seems to me that anyone making these lists is bound to get in hot water with someone for some reason or another, probably because it’s taking a matter of taste and imbuing it with some kind of qualitative legitimacy. And I guess the further up you go—from your average blog all the way to Publishers Weekly—the deeper and hotter that water gets.  But of course hot water isn’t necessarily a bad place to be on the net, where a buzz of any kind is often the goal.

And I suppose I could throw my hat into the PW discussion here, but I have to admit that when I see the amount of comments on those articles and much of it is exchanges of snide, snarky, shot-from-the-hip vituperation it turns my stomach and I think, Why even bother?

So I’ll just say this:

Anybody who would question the literary merit in works by women because they’re by women is either insane, a bigot, or hopelessly ill informed.  Whether someone consciously or unconsciously gravitates to works by women or men, it’s ultimately an issue of personal preference—if not for the works themselves then for the author or some other factor that meets their taste. The same goes for those who hold a neutral orbit.

I used to work in an ice cream shop. Some people got chocolate, others got vanilla, some got tutti-frutti. It was their choice and they liked it.

As to whether women get their due share of critical recognition and prestige, well, I just don’t have a dog in that fight. Far be it from me to try and guess the reasoning and motives behind what Ms. Miller calls the “literary and critical establishment.” Given that choice of words I assume they’re as crooked as any other establishment.

But as far as canonical works by men having any privilege, there may very well be such a privilege but I don’t see how it benefits anybody but those dead men rotting away in the ground. I can’t see much use for prestige once you’re dead, or really old for that matter, which is about the time any canonization might possibly occur, and hopefully about the time one would have grown out of valuing highly the attendant trappings. I recall seeing Grace Paley read about two or three weeks before she died, and she didn’t seem to care at all about prestige, for her reading or her books even. And when asked something along the lines of what she wanted most in life, she said she wanted to have a cup of tea with a particular friend of hers, which I thought sounded like a very nice thing for someone to want at any age.

Heath: If BULL is for “Thinking Men,” who is the unthinking man and how would you go about educating him, besides having him read BULL?

Haley: I should say first that I cringe at the word educate—BULL makes no pretense of educating anybody. To do so would be arrogance in the extreme.  We make no claim to altruism, and if any occurs it’s accidental and limited to maybe stirring our readers to think, which I believe is something innate and existing prior to education. So think about what? Life, I guess, one’s own and that of others, as it applies to male sensibilities, to the extent that we can interpret them. I suppose this might be a mild form of arrogance as well—the interpretation and picking and choosing of what applies—but more so I think it’s our contributors who dictate those sensibilities in what they send us, and from this I just determine what should represent BULL as a magazine.

So in regards to all this I suppose the unthinking man would be one who lives his life without ever considering why he and others do what they do or feel how they feel, but is just a slave to his reactions. What we hope to offer in most our stories is alternative to this, a starting point for rumination, just like any other art form.

But this isn’t to say BULL doesn’t have its fun or is anti-entertainment. A good read is just as, if not more, important.

Heath: What does the future hold for BULL?

Haley: It’s getting to the point where BULL should sustain itself, or at least try to, which shouldn’t be hard because its means are modest, but which means we’ll have to start selling something.  We’ve got our fair share of bigger aspirations; someday I’d like us to put out books, or whatever the going form is, but I’d like to be able to effectively deliver longer stories, novels and such should we find them, if only because I hear a lot is being passed up due to a rumored lack of market.  But more immediately I suppose there will be a contest somewhere in the cards, an anthology at some point down the line.  For now I’m just happy to have found a means of meeting writers, working with them and promoting their work.  It can be a burden at times and is often overly consuming, but to never be without something to read or someone to correspond with—it’s a large part of why BULL exists at all.

I don’t know how to write about race without becoming irrational and emotional.

I’m a writer and editor and I also happen to be black.

I don’t know how to write about race because it makes me uncomfortable; people get defensive; they make assumptions about me, my creative interests, my agenda.

I rarely write about race. I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I don’t want people to expect me to write about race. When I do write about race, I don’t want people to think I’m doing it wrong. When I do write about race, I don’t write the typical black narrative. Sometimes, I write about Haiti (because I’m Haitian American) and sometimes I write about the black boarding school experience and the experience of being black in academia because that’s my black narrative. Most of the time, I like to write about bad relationships and destructive relationships and shallow people who love deeply. I like to write about sex and flaws and lots of other things.

I often avoid writing about race because people seem to only want to read about race when it satisfies their shallow expectations. This is a frustration I am certain is common to all writers of color.

There is a lot of unwillingness to acknowledge the multiplicities of experience. Funny and true story: an editor once (not long ago) sent me a rejection stating that people aren’t interested in reading about black people from the suburbs but that he would love to see me write something about the inner city.

That attitude overwhelms me. It makes me wonder where I belong, how I fit in, how I can participate in publishing when I’m not this or that, when I’m neither here nor there.

When you talk about race, people have to stand up and declare the ways in which they are marginalized. We can never only talk about race. We have to talk about class and gender and sexuality and every thing but race. We have to acknowledge that everyone holds some kind of privilege and on and on it goes.

This is only about race.

I don’t want to write about race because once you do, you become branded as the angry one. You become branded as someone with a one-track mind or a chip on your shoulder.

There is no chip on my shoulder but I am angry. We should all be angry.

I don’t care about race. I care about getting enough sleep and grading and remembering to get my mom a birthday card and all the other solipsistic minutiae of my life. And yet, I do care about race. I care very much.

When I follow various online conversations about writing I often feel that it is just a bunch of white people sitting around completely uninterested in introducing race into the conversation. Let me be clear—that is their right. Still, it troubles me that there is no visible concern about the lack of diversity in modern letters. And this is not just a concern about including black voices. There are writers of all races and ethnicities, but we don’t hear much about anyone with a different skin tone unless they are the Person of Color Flavor of the Week (POCFOTW) and then they instantly become the spokesperson and go to reference for all things ethnic.

Far too many people are tired of talking about race. They think we’ve moved past the necessity for such discussions or they’re not interested or it doesn’t matter to them and they think such attitudes are acceptable. They think race is force-fed in classrooms and that there just aren’t that many people of color or there aren’t that many writers of color so it’s not something they need to think about.

Those attitudes will not deter me from talking about race.

PANK logo

Toward the end of August, I wrote a blog post for PANK, a magazine where I am the associate editor, to encourage discussion about race and gender in independent publishing. In that post, I clarified that I wasn’t writing about myself because I’ve achieved a fair amount of success as a writer and editor. I was writing about and for the people who look like me who did not, for whatever reason, have access to a similar platform with which to bring attention to this issue.

I was surprised yet not surprised both by the number of people who participated in the discussion as well as the tenor. While each comment gave me something to think about, many of the comments also saddened me and showed me just how bad, how frustrating, how futile things really are. By the end of a long day where I tried, as best I could, to participate in a very active conversation, I was no longer able to speak rationally or coherently. The one thing that lingered in my mind was the ineloquent notion that shit is not okay. Shit is in fact far worse than I have ever imagined.

More than one person implied I was inventing a problem where there was none, as if I have nothing better to do.

When you say the word race, people are somehow unable to interpret the words before and after. All they see are those four letters and the painful histories inextricably bound to them.

Talking about race is not a call for liberal guilt or apologia. To say that people of color are underrepresented in publishing, independent or mainstream, is not an accusation to any person or entity. It is a fact. People of color are underrepresented almost everywhere. Encouraging a conversation about ways in which we might increase that representation within the independent publishing community does not necessitate somehow taking responsibility for the deficit.

As several people pointed out during the discussion on the PANK blog, there’s no real way to know if a writer is a person of color. Names tell us very little. As such, it is daunting to come up with effective ways of ensuring that writers from a broader range of races and ethnicities are getting their words out there regardless of what they choose to write about.

At the same time, this isn’t rocket science. There are many active communities for writers of color. The challenge is finding ways to create relationships with those communities, to encourage those writers to submit to independent publishing markets to make it so it’s not easy to name the one or two black writers or Asian writers or Latino/a writers with whom we are familiar.

I don’t have any answers. That was another theme in the blog conversation—the notion that if I want to talk about race, I should also have answers to these unwieldy overwhelming questions. That’s a rather unreasonable burden. It doesn’t work that way.

As an editor, I want to be as inclusive (and this inclusion goes far beyond race/ethnicity) of diverse voices as possible but the writing always comes first. What I do is hope that we have created an ethos where all writers feel comfortable sharing their work with us and where writers trust that their work will always be read fairly regardless of what they write. I also hope that some day I won’t have to think about race or be angry or wonder if there is a place for me.

In the meantime, I don’t know how to write about race.