writing life

Personally, I think we should have Girls Write Now Month! But I’ll settle for a day.

To commemorate International Women’s Day, GWN is hosting several fantastic readings and, in collaboration with SIC (Smart Is Cool) Movement, a fashion show, all at the New School next Saturday, March 8 (5-7pm). It’s a day to encourage girls of all ages everywhere in the world to put pen to paper and explore the beauty and power of their unique, creative voices. And it’s a day to celebrate girls, girl writers, and overall girl awesomeness.

For more information, please contact nikki@girlswritenow.org.

Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo is unleashed into the world again today, in paperback this time. My coeditor Daphne Uviller and I are spreading word through parenting blogs. (If you write for one or are a journalist interested in a review copy, please write CrownMarketing@randomhouse.com, with ONLY CHILD in the subject line.)

On Sunday, right smack in the middle of the Oscars, at 9pm, there was a one-hour show on Only Child on WKCR, 89.9FM. It will soon be available for download from the WKCR website. It’s a This-American-Life style arts show called Studio A, and the host is Michelle Legro. The show includes a long interview with us (in which a preggers-again Daphne tells why she’s having number 2 and I ‘fess up to my newfound embrace of a hoped-for only), a reading from the book, some interviews with oc experts, and some readings by other onlies.

And on April 7, 2008 Daph and I will be teaching a Mediabistro intensive on putting together anthologies, here in NYC. Come one, come all! You’ll learn about the process, from soup to nuts: how to write a proposal, find contributors, manage and edit submissions, work with purchasing editors, make the best use of your in-house publicist, and learn how to self-publicize (yep, no getting around that, case in point). You’ll leave with a timeline in hand detailing the process by which you could reasonably expect to complete a salable anthology. Mediabistro also has a nice lil article on anthology making, by one of my fave ladies Rachel Kramer Bussel, available on their site.

Doing this anthology with Daph changed my life, for reals. For one, it launched me into the book publishing world. Writing my essay for it helped me come to terms with my own experience of being an only child who got divorced. But more than all that, it gave me a taste of writing collaboration at its best. For that, I am forever grateful to our amazing contributors, my agent Tracy Brown, and to Daph.

This just came my way — though the deadline for submissions is March 1, so if you’re interested, better hop to (or ask for an extension):

* Thinking of joining a nunnery?
* Feeling asexual and just want to cuddle?
* Swinging and loving it?

We want to see/hear/read your stories! Audio stories are great, too. CDs may accompany the anthology.

SEND YOUR CREATIONS TO THE FORTHCOMING ANTHOLOGY:

“Desire: A Girl’s Guide to Dreaming – Queer Women of Color Writing Critically on the Erotic” (working title)

We invite people to share their experiences and thoughts on sex, lust, love, relationship, desire, the erotic, being stone, being poly. How do you envision, enact, do sex? And not. This anthology is about opening up language, story, healing.

Is it okay to ask your queer of color fam to cuddle, without it being sexual? What does it mean to touch and connect with people without wanting sex, without it being sexual? What is erotic? How is it lived by queer women of color? If people are looking for liberation in their bodies, in their shared connection with people, what does that look like? What does queer sex feel like, taste like, dream like? What if you could dream your way out of survivor, into thriving, into living and creating intentional relationships that heal, rather than sting, love and push through all the bifurcations of our lived lives. How do you touch your way out of colonization, how do touching and connection become a way of resisting colonization and objectification, and healing from rape, assault, sexual abuse, physical abuse? What language is used? What words are created? When we are in desire, the articulation of the possible, how do we free ourselves, how are we already free where we see traps? Where are you, finally, free? In desire, are you free?

A sense of humor is a must in all relationships; we seek levity and gravity, fun, light energy that is also deep, connected, and profound. Funny stories, essays, and work with a twist all welcome. Send beautiful words, art, funny anecdotes, poetry, images, stills of performances to desireanthology@yahoo.com. The deadline for sending work is 1 March 2008. If you desire a land address for mailing work, contact us at the above e-mail address.

We look forward to hearing from you,
Pak Soo Na and Sherisse Alvarez

It’s almost March, and to kick off Women’s History Month, this Saturday at 2pm I’ll be doing a fireside chat at the Alice Paul Institute in Mount Laurel, NJ. If in the South Jersey area, please stop by!

The Institute is housed at Paulsdale, Alice Paul’s birthplace and family home – a remarkable place. There will be hot chocolate 🙂

More info, and to register, click here.

It’s been one year since the anthology I edited with my one of my other writing halves, novelist Daphne Uviller, came out. And on Feb. 26, the paperback version of Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo debuts. To gear up for part 2 of our book’s launch, Daph and I would like to offer ourselves up as guest bloggers on parenting-related blogs. Any takers?!

I’m posting snippets from a little Q&A we prepared below, so you can see the kinds of topics we can mouth off around on this one. Interviewers are starting to ask us what’s happened in the year since we did that book–which is also of course something we’re happy to muse on. Because a lot happened. Daph went into the project loving being an only, and swearing to reproduce her experience by having an only herself. Me, not so much. I had more mixed feelings about being raised solo was always adamant that I’d have at least 2 kids. Long story short, Daph is expecting baby # 2 this April, and I’ve come to conclusion that I’d be superhappy with “just one.” The reason for our choices? Working with our anthology contributors (all onlies, of course) and taking the lessons we learned from their poignant, diverse essays to heart.

Bottom line: In addition to deepening our own sisterly bond (I’m getting married in Daphne’s backyard this summer), doing this anthology kinda changed our lives.

Excerpts from our Q&A:

Q: In the book’s introduction, you refer to “so many more onlies in this country”. How many is that?
There are an estimated 15 million only children in the US, and a recent cover story in Time magazine suggested that one-third of Americans starting families now will have only one child. In Manhattan alone—the “OC” capital—over 30 percent of all families are single-child families, compared to a national average of around 20 percent. It’s interesting that over the past 20 years, the percentage of women nationwide who have one child has more than doubled, from 10 percent to 23 percent. The reasons for that are many, but the biggest ones are late pregnancy and the fact that it’s more expensive than ever to raise a child to age 18. And it’s not just happening in the US. Birth rates are falling in Western Europe and Canada too. In Europe, the average family size is estimated at 1.4 kids.

Q: Twenty-one writers who are only children: Did you discover anything you all have in common?
A: We have “I’m King of the World” tattooed on the bottom of our feet. No, seriously, we learned from our contributors that we do all have a couple of things in common. We had intensely close friendships, and somewhere along the way, most of us learned to turn friends into family. Many of us were also very good, of course, at being alone. We related easily at young ages to adults (which is a subtler way of bragging that we were all prematurely poised). And as we wrote these essays, we grappled with the question of whether we’ve become who we are because we’re onlies, or whether we would have turned out the same if we’d grown up with siblings.

Q: Did contributors like or hate being an only?
The essays fell into both those camps. Writers in the first category, like John Hodgman, Lynn Harris, Amy Richards, and Janice Nimura, relished onliness wholeheartedly and thrived as the sole recipients of their parents’ time, attention, money, and love. Others, like Sarah Towers, Alissa Quart, and Ted Rose, found themselves struggling constantly against a loneliness that frequently overshadowed the benefits.

Q: Is loneliness the only downside to being an only?
A: Kathryn Harrison writes eloquently about the fickleness of memory: if you’ve got no one to hold you in check, what’s to keep you from re-inventing your past? Or, by the same token, who can help you make sense of your parents’ eccentricities, help distinguish the normal from the abnormal within your family?

Q: Don’t a lot of the advantages you mentioned – the love, the attention, the money – add up to a lot of smothering?
For some people, sometimes, yes. Deborah Siegel writes about how she struggled, even as an adult, to do grownup things for herself, like handling finances. Lynn Harris was sending her laundry home even after college. On the other hand, they had peaceful, joyful homes with a singular kind of support system that a sibling, to some degree, would have shaken up or diluted—but then again, maybe that fear in itself is a very “only child” sentiment.

Q: Well, then, aren’t the advantages offset later in life by the burdens of caring for aging parents by yourself?
A: There’s no question that being an only comes with enormous burdens. You’re the confidant, the caretaker, and the undertaker. The pressure not to fail, or even to be subpar – in your career, in your marriage, as a producer of grandchildren – is intense. But to say that those pressures offset all the benefits is to favor one half of life over the other. Think of all the people who, as children, fought with their siblings or were estranged, only to rediscover each other as adults, just in time to share the burden of aging parents. Is their adulthood more valuable to them than their childhood?

Q: You sound like you’re defending onliness.
That would be Daphne. She loved it when she thought about it at all – which was rare until Deborah brought up the idea for the book. Deborah wasn’t all that content to be an only. Both of us were onlies by default, not design, but for Deborah, somehow, the disappointment transmitted. Her mom remembers returning home after fertility surgery, to be asked by Deborah, “Mommy, aren’t I enough?”

Q: So how did you manage to do a book together?
Contrary to stereotype, we played fabulously together. Only children can be very, very good at collaboration!

Q: A lot of your readers are going to be parents looking for advice on whether they’ll ruin their child by not giving her or him a sibling. Can you give them an answer?
A: The third section, “A Sib for Junior?” addresses that quandary. First of all, both John Hodgman and Amy Richards refer to “deprivation” as depriving their multiple children of the joy of being an only. But while all our writers had varied experiences, there does seem to be one truth that emerges. Kids whose parents weren’t sure they wanted to have kids at all and chose to have a single child as a hedged bet – “one is close to none,” says one writer – seemed to be unhappier as onlies than kids whose parents wholeheartedly embraced the kid scene.

Q: So come on, admit it, aren’t you guys just a little bit spoiled?
A: Vanessa Grigoriadis, in a New York magazine cover article on only children a while back (she’s an only herself), says simply, “[T]here are no set limits on what a parent will give an only child, no pressure from other siblings to split things up. It’s not spoiling, it’s just…life.”

Q: Is there anything else you’d like us to know about onlyness, or only-tude?
A: Yes. Only Child is not just for onlies, or people close to them. Even though our criteria for contributors was that they be sibling-free, they ultimately invoked onlyness as a prism though which to examine the human experience. As one contributor asks, isn’t the only child simply the most exaggerated version of all of us, navigating life alone?

Betty Friedan’s classic started with a survey of her college classmates some years after graduation. Fortysome years later, a book about The Feminine Mystique is starting out with a survey too. This just in from esteemed marriage scholar and friend Stephanie Coontz. Please pass it on — the survey is for younger women who came across the book in Women’s Studies courses as well as for those who read it when it first came out!

Writes Stephanie:

Thank you for agreeing to help in my study of the influence of Betty Friedan’s 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique.” I am trying to get a feel for how people in different time periods and situations reacted to this book, or merely to the general idea of a “feminine mystique,” whether or not they actually read the book. I have listed some questions below, but feel free to tell me anything you feel would be useful, and in as much detail as you choose.

If you heard the concept of “The Feminine Mystique” before — or without — reading the book, how and when did you hear of it? What did it mean to you? How did you react to the idea that there was a “feminine mystique”? Did a relative, spouse or friend read the book, and if so, what was their reaction? Did their reaction affect you in any way?

For people who read the book, can you tell me the year when you read it? Your age at the time? Were you married? Any children? Did you work for pay at the time? If so, at what? How did you come to read it?

Do you remember your overall reaction to the book? Did anything speak powerfully to you? Did anything anger you? What is your most vivid memory of reading it? Did it influence your life or relationships in any way?

Have you ever re-read the book? If so, why? Did your reaction change?

What is your ethnic or racial and socioeconomic background? Your current age and occupation? May I identify you by name if I quote from your response? Unless you explicitly give me permission to use your name in my book, I will not do so, nor will I offer details that might identify you.

I deeply appreciate any help you might give to this project. If there are questions I should have asked but neglected, please let me know that too. And if you have suggestions for other people I might contact, please let me know. You can e-mail your responses to coontzs@gmail.com

Laura Mazer (left) is a powerhouse. She’s also my sister-in-pigtails. We’ll be doing a panel together at WAM!, in Cambridge, in March. Deets to follow soon. In the meantime, if in the SF-area and hungry for the secrets behind writing and selling your first book, I highly recommend this one-day intensive with Laura:

A one-day Media Bistro seminar, February 10, 10 AM-4 PM, Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, with Laura Mazer

Do you have a great idea for a book but don’t know how to go about writing and selling it? Or have you written a book but are stalled trying to get the attention of agents and publishers? Whether you’re just starting to develop your project or have already written the entire manuscript, this workshop will give you all the tools you need to get your first book project written, sold, published, and on the shelves in bookstores.

FEE: $125

To enroll, go to www.mediabistro.com and click on “courses,” or call 310.659.5668, or send an email to: learnwest.info@mediabistro.com

My friend and personal hero Stephanie Coontz is working on a cool new project and I’ve offered to help her recruit. She’s writing a study of the influence of Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. It’s a biography, not of Betty Friedan, but of the book itself – its history and influence over the decades (or, perhaps, its lack of influence after a particular date). Stephanie is eager to hear from younger women, as well as people who read the book when it first came out, about how it impacted them–or in some cases, among those who read it later, disappointed them–then.

If you are willing to talk about this, or can direct Stephanie to someone else who might, you can send your memories directly, or Stephanie can send you a few survey questions. Please address correspondence to coontzs@msn.com.

I’ve been thinking so much about Hillary these days. And lately, I’ve been thinking about how media coverage of an “intergenerational divide” in women’s support of her may be fueling, and not just documenting, discord among women across generations. I’m very eager to see some analysis of the age divide after primary season is over and we’ve all had a chance to chill.

My feelings about Hillary keep evolving. But no matter what you think of her, it’s still hard not to be intrigued by the prospect of a woman in the White House.

As I mentioned here recently, the February issue of More, my new favorite magazine (hey, I’m almost 40!), includes a forum in which I asked women who have themselves accomplished many firsts to weigh in on what a Hillary presidency might look like. I’m pleased to announce that the much extended, online version is now live. Check out the very different perspectives of Margaret Cho, Daphne Merkin, Lynn Harris, Dee Dee Myers, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Suzanne Braun Levine, Mary Catherine Bateson, Marie Wilson, Gloria Feldt, Pat Schroeder, Pepper Schwartz, Jane Swift, Nell Merlino, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Linda Hirshman, Kellyanne Conway, and Seema Gahlaut–and please feel free to share the link! The forum is rich–far richer than the squabbles we keep hearing about in the news–and I feel it’s so very important to infuse substance, even if speculative, as is the case of this forum, into the public conversation. So, have at it. Please join the conversation and share your comments over at More’s site.

And for an interesting More article on Hillary and the age divide, don’t miss “Our Hillary Problem”. Here, Katherine Lanpher interviews Donna Brazille and asks why some older, elite women voters are ambivalent on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. I don’t need to refer you to articles on younger women’s ambivalence, because you’ve probably all read them by now.

So as promised, a bit about my experience participating in the Progressive Women’s Voices Project, a new media training and spokesperson program from the Women’s Media Center to connect media professionals with media-savvy women experts in a variety of fields. Funded by a grant from the NoVo Foundation, the program provides its participants with intensive media training and ongoing support “to promote their perspective and message into the national dialogue.”

Let me first say that the WMC–founded by Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan–is graced with an amazingly talented staff. The joint expertise of our trainers (Carol Jenkins, Glennda Testone, and Kathy Vermazen) knocked my socks off. On camera practice with these women? Invaluable. Learning from women with tremendous experience being out there in the public eye? Priceless. To wit: Board member Gloria Feldt shared savvy wisdom about the importance of embracing controversy, and Gloria Steinem shared an adage that has stayed with me: “Progress lies in the direction you haven’t been.”

The group of participants is in a word, well, powerful. Aside from soaking up massive doses of inspiration from these women and some of the best messaging training I’ve seen, we supplemented whatever knowledge we already had about a range of media tools–including blogging. And, as readers know, whenever I go somewhere where an experienced blogger shares tips on blogging, I like to pass them on. See one, do one, teach one and all that. Emily McCann of The Motherhood and the Been There Clearinghouse stopped by on Sunday to share her know-how with us and here’s some of what I gleaned:

-Want to post images in your blog, legally? In addition to Wikipedia and Photos from the Library of Congress on Flickr, other sources for open source images include Creative Commons, also at Flickr, and Photobucket.

-Seen some term or techy acronym on a blog recently and had no clue what it meant? Check out blogossary, a site billed as the blogosphere’s dictionary.

-Ready to create your own wiki? Check out pbwiki and wetpaint. (Confession: I came home and created one right away. I’m hooked.)

-Lastly, two hugely popular blogs that I hadn’t heard of and sound interesting include How to Change the World Blog, and 37days.

And speaking of changing the world, did you know that more women than men are now online? And also, women are twice as likely as men to pass forward an idea about a campaign or a cause? More on that in a book coming out in June 2008 by another of the weekend’s speakers, Lisa Witter. The book is cleverly titled The She Spot: Why Women Are the Market for Changing the World–and How to Reach Them.

This little report is the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the trainings, each week we participate in an issues briefing conference call, with experts from different realms. This week’s call was with economist and President of Bennett College Dr. Julianne Malveaux. Today, the economy. Tomorrow, the world!

Ok, I’m getting carried away. It’s only been a week in The Program.

I’ll post here when the WMC posts a notice for future applications. To would-be pundits out there: Trust me. If you have the opportunity, this is something you don’t want to miss.