Back by popular demand 🙂

MAKING IT POP: Translating Your Ideas for Trade, with Deborah Siegel (er, me)
Tuesdays 11/6, 11/13, 11/20, 11/27, 12/4, 12/11
8:00 – 9:15 pm ET
Format: Online forum + weekly conference call
Fee: $250 ($275 after Oct. 19)

Public debate lacks a sensitive discussion of the complex forces shaping the lives of women and girls. Researchers, nonprofit workers, and savvy writers everywhere have the opportunity to frame public debate about these issues. Too often, however, important work fails to reach an audience outside the academic and advocacy worlds. Writing a trade book is one way to join the debate. To sell a book in today’s competitive publishing climate, one must be able to write engaging, accessible prose that will appeal to a wide audience. These skills can be learned.

Participants will learn from exchanges with New York City-based agents and editors why it’s essential to think about audience and market in a different way, and why you need a book proposal. We’ll explore the differences between popular and academic writing, why a dissertation or a monograph is not a trade book, and how to write an effective book proposal-meaning one that has the best chance of being sold. We’ll also consider the latest aspects of book publicity, focusing in particular on new media. (See what past participants are saying about the course here.)

Space is limited. Please send a note describing your rough idea for a popular book in 1 paragraph to deborahsiege (at) gmail (dot) com, and I will be in touch with further details.

Read more about MAKING IT POP in Women’s eNews:
Women’s Studies Scholars Vie for More Media Turf

My bio is here.

I met Grace Paley–activist, teacher, former state poet, feminist extraordinaire, lover of life–when she spoke on a panel I had organized in the early 1990s. I was in my early twenties. She seemed ageless. Grace Paley was magnificent, humble, and real.

Robin Morgan wrote a beautiful tribute to Paley’s life, invoking Paley’s signature style, for the Women’s Media Center. The New York Times obituary is here. And, for those who have yet to have hear it and for those who already miss it, you can still listen to her voice here, on NPR.

Here are two of my favorites, from her New and Collected Poems:

1. My dissent is cheer / a thankless disposition / first as the morning star / my ambition: good luck / and why not a flight / over the wide dilemma / and then good night to sad forever.

2. A stranger calling a dog whistled / and I came running though I am not an afghan / or a highclass poodle and not much like a city boy’s dog with a happy wild tail and red eyes / The stranger said excuse me, I was calling my dog not you / Ah I replied to this courteous explanation / Sometimes I whistle too but mostly for fear of missing the world I am a dog to whistlers.

We’ll be whistling for you, Grace.

Ok ok, I know it’s a fancypants name for a humble endeavor, but heck, I’m running with it. I mean, if the Tooth-fairy can have an institute….

So GWP Institute is going to be the new label for posts here that offer tips, advice, answers to reader questions, and news about workshops and online courses that I’ll be offering over the next year.

To read older posts, just click on the “GWP Institute” category label on the right side of this blog (scroll down to get there).

Have a question about feminist-y publishing or popularizing academic-y ideas and prose that you’d like to see addressed here? Send ’em my way. I’m deborahsiege (at) gmail (dot) com.

(Does the Toothfairy have a blog?!)

Fire-eating ladies? Contortionists? Huh?!

For those of you as yet unfamiliar with the concept of a blog carnival, do run over and check out the 44th Carnival of Feminists over at Reproductive Rights Blog. It’s one of the places I catch up on greatest hits, all wrapped up in an engaging, organized narrative. I’m all for aggregation.

For the newbies: The Carnival of Feminists is held (usually) on the first and third Wednesday of each month. Hosted by a different blogger for each edition, it aims to “showcase the finest feminist posts from around the blogsphere.” Explains the illustrious Natalie Bennett, a British blogger who blogs at Philobiblon and runs the Carnival of Feminists:

The Carnival aims to build the profile of feminist blogging, to direct extra traffic to all participating bloggers, but particularly newer bloggers, and to build networks among feminist bloggers around the world….Posts that celebrate women’s lives and contributions to society – either current-day or historical – are particularly welcome. Posts will usually have been made in the period since the last carnival. (Only one nomination per blog please.)

This week, Carnival host Cara focuses the current round-up on policy, economics and feminism. (Thank you, Cara, for all your hard work over there!)

Check out what The Guardian had to say about it all last year.

And for a big fat listing of other carnivals, go here.

Does the idea of self-marketing make you nauseous? Try to get over it! Harsh words, I know, but I have to say, for authors in our DIY culture, I tend to agree.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an interesting piece out on entrepreneurship and academe. Writes Philip L. Leopold, an associate professor of genetic medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University:

The entrepreneurial topic that academics are least likely to embrace might be the most important concept in their career: marketing.

To a professor, the term might carry connotations of profit motives and deceptive practices. Insomuch as marketing represents the dissemination of the product, professors should realize that marketing is an essential responsibility of their profession.

So true, especially when it comes to book promotion; publishing houses can only do so much, then they move on. The article puts it all in a larger, and interesting, context for those on an academic track. Read more here.

I heard it at The F-Word, where Jess McCabe writes:

The Guardian is running a competition to edit the Women section of G2 for a week. The competition celebrates the women’s pages 50ths anniversary, and opened back in July (thanks Dollymix), but there are only a few short weeks to enter. If you’re interested, head over to the Guardian pronto to get the full story. You’ll need to pull together:

– Five ideas for articles that you would like to see featured on the women’s pages, outlining each of them in no more than two paragraphs
– 500 words explaining why you would like to be women’s editor and why you would be well suited to the role
– A one-page CV outlining any relevant experience

What an opportunity, huh?

I’m so pleased to start off the day with a guest post from Melinda Parrish, a 22-year old instructor in the English Department at the US Naval Academy. Melinda is based in the Writing Center. Here she is! -GWP

Wendy Shalit’s new book, Girls Gone Mild, is the second in her legacy of literature, which includes numerous articles and online publications that preach abstinence to young girls as the best way to reclaim their feminine identity from the hedonistic, post-sexual revolution culture that currently holds it hostage. She claims that, “the plain fact is that girls today have to be ‘bad’ to fit in, just as the baby boomers needed to be good. And we are finding that this new script may be more oppressive than the old one ever was.”

But, Wendy, by countering the sexual revolution with another sexual argument, are you not just perpetuating the cycle? Whether you’re pro-abstinence or, well, easy, aren’t you still allowing what happens to your “good girl” (wink) define the entire girl? Isn’t THAT the biggest threat to the feminine identity of a young girl in modern society?

It makes me furious to think since the dawn of time, women have been defined primarily by their sex lives. I concede that in recent decades the values table has flip-flopped because of the sexual revolution and some young women may feel pressure towards promiscuity for social acceptance. But I don’t regard Shalit’s counter-argument as an enlightened or relevant one because it leads us back to where the feminists of the late sixties and early seventies started. Aren’t we a sophisticated enough society to progress beyond this issue? Can’t we find SOMETHING to focus on that doesn’t reside between our thighs?

My plea to my fellow young women: stop making your vagina your defining characteristic! Don’t let someone pigeon-hole you as a Madonna or a whore, or allow your life’s happiness to rest solely on the success you achieve in bed; rather, devote your energy into developing your (other) physical, intellectual and artistic abilities to such a degree that your worth as a human being is undisputed, regardless of who you go to bed with!

(If you’re interested in more of Shalit’s work, check out her blog entitled, “Modestly Yours.”)

A quick announcement on behalf of my friend Lori, who is leading a juicy sounding monthly discussion group at the Barnard Center for Research on Women Courses this Fall.

CONSUMING PASSIONS: Pleasure & Politics in Women’s Memoirs, with Lori Rotskoff
Wednesdays, 9/26, 10/24, 11/28, 12/19, 1/23, 2/27, 3/26, 4/30, 6/4, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
BCRW, 101 Barnard Hall
Fee: $315

Here’s the description:

What are the passions, pleasures, and political commitments that fuel women’s lives? In this class, we will discuss memoirs by American women who have embarked on journeys of personal fulfillment, intellectual growth, or political activism from the 1920s to the present day.

And here’s more Lori:

Lori Rotskoff is a cultural historian of American family life. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, and has written articles and reviews for the Chicago Tribune, Reviews in American History, and The Women’s Review of Books. This is her third year teaching at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

For more information call 212-854-2067 or visit www.barnard.edu/bcrw

I’ve had a number of responses to my offer the other week and am delighted to post this week from an English prof at the Naval Academy and perhaps, in addition, a Duke historian. Stay tuned! (And if you’d like to participate as a Guest Scholar-Blogger, please take a look at the guidelines and then email me at deborahsiege AT gmail DOTCOM.)

To kick off the week, here are two nuggets on one of my latest favorite subjects: men.

By way of the Christian Science Monitor last week comes news of a push to bring dads into kids’ school lives. Around the country, many African-American men are embracing a national movement called the Million Father March that encourages people of all races, but particularly black men, to be active in children’s educational lives. Created four years ago, the Million Father March is sponsored by The Black Star Project, a Chicago group working to build strong students, encourage parental involvement, and improve life in African-American and Latino communities.

Meanwhile, back at home, married men do less housework than live-in boyfriends, finds an international survey. But married women do more housework than their live-in counterparts. “Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples-even couples who see men and women as equal,” said co-researcher Shannon Davis, a sociologist at George Mason University in Virginia. For more on this, click here.

(Thanks to via the Council on Contemporary Families for the heads up.)