writing life

Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) 2008 conference is coming soon: March 28-30, 2008, at MIT’s Stata Center in Cambridge, MA. Register here.

I’ll be there as part of a panel on publishing feminist books, along with Courtney Martin, author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (Free Press, Simon & Schuster); Amy Caldwell, Executive Editor at Beacon Press; and Laura Mazer, Managing Editor of Seal Press. Here’s the descript:

Public debate lacks a sensitive discussion of the complex forces shaping the lives of women and girls. Researchers, advocates, and savvy writers everywhere have the opportunity to frame public debate about these issues. Too often, however, important work about women fails to reach an audience outside the academic and advocacy worlds. Writing a “trade” book is one way to enter 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—and know how to market it oneself.
 This session brings together published book authors with editors at houses that publish feminist work. Panelists will discuss the components of a successful book proposal. Participants will learn why it’s essential to think about audience, market, and “platform” and explore ways to use new media to garner visibility for their work after publication.

BTW, I just noticed that the WAM! site has posted a slew of facts and figures and links to articles on women in the media. Def worth checking out.

Ok, so I haven’t really participated in memes before (blogger tag, for those not in the know), and I must say: Reading the posts from the people I tagged yesterday just made my friggin day! Here’s just a sampling, and they’ve tagged a bunch of folks too, so what out all over the blogosphere for some “teacher thank you” love. (And thanks to J.K. Gayle for starting it of course!)

Courtney Martin at Crucial Minutiae includes:
2. Papa, for teaching me how to be kind to and curious about every human being on earth
3. Chris, for making me shoot baskets in the alley, teaching me how to roll a joint, and making me feel like the most precious creature on earth
4. Nikolai, for teaching me how to breathe, be present, revel, and say “beef patty”

Elizabeth Curtis at A Blog without a Bicycle includes:
1. My mum, because she raised me to be a feminist without me even knowing it
2. My baby brother, because he is my hero and my role model
3. Ms. Cutrer, because she was the first person to tell me that I was a good writer in fourth grade

Alison Peipmeier at Baxter Sez: includes:
4. Kurt Eisen, also at Tennessee Tech. Kurt is the reason that, when I went to grad school, I decided to study American literature. He taught me about the literary canon and invited me to start taking it down.
5. Cecelia Tichi and Teresa Goddu at Vanderbilt University. As co-directors of my dissertation, these women reshaped my entire brain. It wasn’t always a pleasant process, but it worked. And Cecelia took me on as a personal project, hiring me as her research and teaching assistant, letting me help her run an NEH Summer Institute, taking me for countless coffees and lunches, mentoring me in how to be a scholar and a woman with a life. When I moved to Charleston, she sent me an afghan that her high school English teacher had made for her. She wanted to pass it on to me, and maybe someday I can give it to a special student of mine.

Wow–I got chills.

Tis the season for giving. Yet, as Courtney reminds us over at Crucial Minutiae, the giving and wrapping and consuming and grabbing so readily gets out of hand. This week, J.K. Gayle at Speakeristic reminded me of the value of giving personal and public credit to one’s best teachers. In fact, he created a meme, and tagged me. So in the spirit of giving the gift of gratitude, here are my responses to his question, “Who are the teachers who have most personally influenced you and how?” And this post is a public “thank you!” to them all….

1. Mom, who taught me “This too shall pass.”
2. Dad, who taught me not to be afraid.
3. Sherry Medwin, my high school English teacher, who introduced me to Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickinson and taught me how to write a term paper (“The Voice of the Woman Poet”!)
4. Susan Friendman, Susan Bernstein, and the late Nelly McKay–my dissertation committee members in graduate school–who let a thousand flowers bloom.
5. Grandma Pearl, who died this fall, and who taught me gentle graciousness at the very end of her life.
6. Robert Berson, who taught me I was whole.
7. My cat Amelia, who taught me how to nap.
8. My cousin Howard, who taught me to buy real estate.
9. My writers group, The Invisible Institute, who teach me how to be a writer in this crazy world.
10. Marco Acevedo, who teaches me the most important lesson: how to love.

For those who aren’t sure what a meme is, it’s kind of a bloggy chain letter, with content. So to pass it on, I tag:

Rebecca Wallace-Segall at WritopiaLab
Any of the awesome writers at the group blog Crucial Minutiae
Marci Alboher at Hey Marci, and Shifting Careers
PunditMom at PunditMom
Patti Binder at What’s Good for Girls
Elizabeth Curtis at A Blog without a Bicycle
Alison Piepmeier at Baxter Sez
Marco Acevedo at The Last Palace

Not one, but two calls for you this morning, sent to me via Bitch cofounder Lisa Jervis:

1. Yes Means Yes!

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.

Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on rape culture, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008. Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.

Women and men, published and unpublished authors, are all encouraged to submit essays. Be creative, be forward-thinking, be funny! Perhaps most importantly, we are seeking essays with a pro-active bent that offer new and insightful thoughts and actions on how to dismantle rape culture. No more “No Means No,” let’s think “Yes Means Yes!”

Please submit your essays to yesmeansyes2008@gmail.com no later than March 1, 2008. Essays should be from 2000 to 5000 words, double spaced and paginated. Please include your address, phone number, email address and a short bio.

2. Kicked Out is a new anthology edited by Sassafras Lowrey which uniquely seeks to tell the tales of former queer youth and current queer youth who were forced to leave home because of their sexuality and/or gender identity. This anthology will tell our collective stories of survival, weaving together descriptions of abuse, and homelessness with poignant accounts of the ways in which queer community centers offered sanctuary, and the power and importance of creating our own chosen families in the face of losing everything we have ever known. Kicked Out offers advice and wisdom to the queer youth of today from those who have been in their shoes. Additionally, it provides the opportunity for readers to get a glimpse into the world of those queer youth who as a result of circumstance have to leave home, while simultaneously shattering the stereotypes of who queer youth are, and what they have the potential to become.

Submissions should be between 1,500 and 2,500 words in length and previously unpublished. Submit your piece via e-mail in .doc format to KickedOutAnthology@gmail.com. Multiple submissions per contributor are welcome. Please include a short biography and contact information with your submission. Submissions must be received no later than March 1, 2008. Visit us online at www.myspace.com/kickedoutanthology.

Yesterday I learned that Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild has been named one of the top 20 best sellers in sociology for 2007!

For the record, I am not a trained sociologist but happy to have written a book that is categorized as such. My doctorate is in literature/cultural studies, but disciplines blur these days, and categories do, it seems, too.

Also, I’m booking up for Women’s History Month (March 2008). Bring me to your campus, company, or organization! I love to yap about the book, and talks spawn the kind of intergenerational dialogue I (and many others, I know) crave, so I’m very, very excited and feel quite fortunate to be on the speaking circuit this year.

To book me, please email Taryn Kutujian at taryn.kutujian@gmail.com. (And for the academics among you, as a member of the academic community, you are entitled to a free desk copy, to encourage you to consider adopting the book in your course! If interested, again, please contact Taryn.)

And borrowing a tactic from my fave blog feministing, please share your own shameless plugs in comments. I’d love to hear.

On this rainy grey morning in NYC, I’m putting together a short list of writers residency programs/retreats that are available, by application, during the summers. In addition to McDowell and Yaddo, do you know of ones to add to the list? Please post ’em in comments, and I’ll post the complete list in a post down the road!

Here are some I recently learned about, to get us started:

Well Spring House
Ashfield, MA (pictured above)

Ragdale Foundation
Lake Forest, IL

World Fellowship Center

Blue Mountain Center

My friend and personal hero Rebecca Wallace-Segall landed an op-ed in the Nov. 28 Wall Street Journal about the value of thought-based competitions–like the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards–in schools. In contrast to, say, um, sports, writing competitions aren’t valued. And they should be. Writes Rebecca, explaining the opposition and throwing in an interesting generational spin on it all:

“We don’t want kids to compete individually, put themselves in vulnerable positions as individuals,” explains a leading administrator. “They can compete within teams,” explains another. “So the focus is on community building rather than on personal value.”

But what about Sam’s sense of personal value? Aren’t human beings fabulously varied in their gifts and sensibilities? Excellent teamwork can be important, but is it the only admirable achievement? Should any school in the United States prevent broader acknowledgment of a young, creative mathematician?

Mel Levine, a professor at the University of North Carolina and one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn, believes the impact of the collaborative education movement has been devastating to an entire generation. When students are rewarded for participation rather than achievement, Dr. Levine suggests, they don’t have a strong sense of what they are good at and what they’re not. Thus older members of Generation Y might be in for quite a shock when they show up for work at their first jobs. “They expect to be immediate heroes and heroines. They expect a lot of feedback on a daily basis. They expect grade inflation, they expect to be told what a wonderful job they’re doing,” says Dr. Levine.

Rebecca founded and runs WritopiaLab, a community of young writers, ages 10-19, that revolves around a year-round afterschool writing center and intensive creative writing workshops. Every six months, participants chose to read their polished pieces at Barnes & Noble. I’ve been to these readings. These kids inspire.

And speaking of the Scholastic Awards, a shout out to all those girls over at Girls Write Now who won awards this summer! I’m heading to a GWN meeting tonight and can’t wait to hang with everyone. I made cookies and am carrying a plate of them around today, but I can’t guarantee that they’re gonna last….I’m baad that way.

Those lines I posted from Rebecca Solnit the other day (from her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost) generated additional wisdom from writer friends who have been there too, in the form of emails that lifted my spirits and made me re-commit to keep on going with the proposal writing process, even though I was feeling a bit at sea.

One of my favorite responses came from a dear friend (and a gorgeous memoirist), Mindy Lewis, who teaches nonfiction writing at The Writers Voice and knows a thing or two about process. Mindy and I shared tea and sympathy (and Zabar’srugelah) yesterday, and then she emailed me this, about cultivating the art of being at home in the unknown:

“That’s the spirit! So elusive, hard to get there and stay there, but always the right place to be.”

YESSS.

(Look for Mindy’s next oeuvre, an anthology, in 2009!)

So as I gear back up for the week, a confession: I’m in proposal writing stage–the stage I find most unsettling, as a writer. I hate this stage. It makes me want to do anything else but write, though I know that write is often exactly what I need to do.

Since I know lots of other folks who are in this phase right now too, thought I’d share some wisdom from a writer who is new to me, Rebecca Solnit. A few tidbits from her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

“‘How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?’…The question…struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.”

“[There’s an art] of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.”

“Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found.”

Um, here’s to being at home with being lost?! Anyone else got good some good quotes to share?!

Shifting Careers guru Marci Alboher has an interesting post up today at her NYT blog, on the changing landscape of journalism. Says Marci, who attended a panel on said subject at the Columbia J-School last week,

“I left the discussion convinced that the future of journalism will rely on good storytelling coupled with an ever-increasing array of new technology, and that those of us who don’t embrace the new technology are not likely to survive.” Read more about it here.

Yet another plug for “learning” to blog, I say.
(Photo cred)