writing life

I think I just made a new friend. I’ve met (and adore) Alison Peipmeier, but Marco and I just met her blogging and real-life partner, Walter. They live in South Carolina. Walter, upon learning that Marco is a graphic designer, posed to him the artistic challenge of the century: “Hey, can you design a butthole [sic] out of the Confederate flag?”

The backstory (sorry, bad pun), straight outa Wikipedia is this:

Originally placed [on top of the South Carolina State House dome] in 1962….[c]urrent state law prohibits the flag’s removal from the State House grounds without additional legislation. Police were placed to guard the flag after several attempts by individuals to remove it….In 2005, two Western Carolina University researchers found that 74% of African-Americans polled favored removing the flag from the South Carolina State House altogether. The NAACP and other civil rights groups have attacked the flag’s continued presence at the state capitol. The NAACP maintains an official boycott of South Carolina, citing its continued display of the battle flag on its State House grounds, despite an initial agreement to call off the boycott after it was removed from the State House dome.

I heart Walter. Nuf said.

1. A piece I wrote for the Guardian goes live tomorrow. Stripping poles, charred bras, third-wave feminism, fourth waves, and more. Plus, a photo of me that I haven’t yet seen. Let me know what you think. (Not about the photo, thank you, but the article!)

2. Come say hello next week if you’re in Brooklyn! I’ll be reading from Sisterhood, Interrupted at Barnes and Noble in Park Slope on Friday, Sept. 7 at 7pm. (Thank you, Sam! Karaoke, when?!) Come for discussion, come to say hi, or, come for chocolate. I recently learned there’s this place down the block, called Cocoa Bar, that has rather stellar chocolate cake.

I seem to have caused a little tussle over in Broadsheet’s comments section yesterday, resulting in another Anonymous (not the one I spent part of yesterday answering, I suspect) calling me “babelicious” and a “FILF” (Mom, Dad, please don’t ask), and the original Anonymous challenging my scholarly integrity. This is my first time being labeled with those monikers, and I’m not sure if I should be flattered or freaked. These semi-flattering, semi-lewd comments rarely come up about men who post. Officially irked on that. But challenging scholarly integrity is a trap we all fall into from time to time when we profoundly disagree with someone, so I’m just gonna let that one go.

On a lighter note, as Broadsheet’s Lynn Harris reminds us in her roundup today via AlterNet, it’s the 100th anniversary of the bra! Wait–again, do we celebrate, or curse?

Man, do I need a latte.

Phewph! After spending part of today conversing with Anonymous in the comments section at Broadsheet (love the broads over there!), I’m back here at Girl with Pen. A few quickie updates about two fellow crossover-y types I adore:

Megan Pincus Kajitani, who has participated as a story editor for the forthcoming Daring Book for Girls, has also started a really interesting blog project called Having Enough. Megan asked me to answer 4 questions about having enough in a having-it-all (and never enough) world. Our interview is up now, here. Thank you, Megan, for making me think!

One thing one can never have enough of, of course, is lunch with fine feminists. I’m taking time out tomorrow for lunch with Alison Piepmeier, English/Women’s Studies prof extraordinaire down in South Carolina, coeditor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, and girl with excellent hair. Alison is one of my early bloggy mentors, and for that I’m forever grateful. In tribute, I stole (er, shall we say, borrowed?) the title of this post from her.

Straight from the gals at Broadsheet comes this annoyingly newsworthy tidbit: There has not been a woman author of a Shouts and Murmurs piece in The New Yorker for over three years. The last one was in 2004. Reports Catherine Price,

[W]e just found a link to a blog post from the World’s Fair in which the author takes a break from his academic pursuits to examine the male-female breakdown of Shouts and Murmurs authors. (The post is arguably more amusing than most S&M columns.) His conclusion: “Out of the 133 authors of features under the Shouts and Murmurs banner (in the modern, post-1992 era), 17 have been women. That’s 12.782%.” To put it another way, men are represented in the section at a rate 8 times that of women.

Love that it was an academic who did the calculations. Hate that it’s true. Wonder if , in addition to other (ahem) factors, women are submitting in smaller numbers, as they do when it comes to op-eds? That’d be interesting to find out. If anyone finds that out, please send a shout and a murmur over to G w/ P and we will broadcast the news far and wide.

Are you a scholar (or someone with their fingers on the pulse of current research about women or girls) seeking to enter the blogosphere and give blogging a try? Read on! Hey, if my grandmas (left) can do it, you can too.

Submission Process
Email me a 1-paragraph overview of the post you’d like to propose. When I greenlight it, please send the full post to me at deborahsiege AT gmail DOT com at least one day before you ideally would want me to run the post. Depending on how many submissions come in any a given week, I may not be able to run every post right away. But I will certainly do my best to try. Submissions should be pasted in the body of your email or attached as a MS Word document.

GUIDELINES FOR POSTING ON GIRL WITH PEN

SUBSTANCE. Girl with Pen is about bridging feminist research, popular reality, and the public. Posts should generally fall under this rubric. The best posts are those that are timely, unexpected, passionate, and somewhat personal.

LENGTH. The strongest blog posts read like mini, hypertexted op-eds. Op-eds are generally 700-1000 words; posts on Girl with Pen (and most blogs) are shorter (300-700 words max) and are very quick to get to the point.

TIMELY. Posts must have a news hook. A news hook can be new research (your own, or someone else’s), an interesting news item, an event, an upcoming holiday or anniversary, a happening from pop culture, a popular assumption that’s the subject of current media coverage, or another article that is currently in the news. The news hook must come at the beginning of the post, to capture the scanning web reader’s attention.

UNEXPECTED. Go for the counterintuitive, that little known reality that is the opposite of what we all think! There are so many myths out there about the lives of women and girls. Set us straight. Clarify reality. Go beyond the obvious. Surprise us.

PASSIONATE. Tell us what you really think. If you care passionately, others will. Take a stand. Be controversial. Go out on a limb.

PERSONAL. Personal stories keep us reading. Include a personal anecdote or, if you aren’t comfortable writing about yourself, include an anecdote about someone else.

LINKS. Posts should include links. When submitting a post, if you’re comfortable using the html code for links, please use it to embed your link in the text. If not, please include the link in brackets following the word(s) that you’d like to see in hypertext. Put the word(s) that you’d like to hypertext in bold.

EXAMPLE (w/o hypertext): Take the sentence “Please visit my website for more.” If I wanted the words “my website” to take the reader to my website’s homepage, I would write: Please visit my website [http://www.deborahsiegel.net] for more.

PICTURE AND BYLINE. Be sure to send a jpeg or gif (either a photo of you, or another relevant image related to the post) that you’d like to run with the post, along with a byline that includes your affiliation and anything else you’d like readers to know.

Questions? You can always post ’em in the comments section of this post, because chances are, others will be wondering the same thing. I’ll run additional tips and tidbits in response.

A quick shout out of gratitude to the folks who are posting their favorite blogs by women scholars in the comments section of the post below! Keep em coming! Meanwhile, I’m rushing off to go hear some of my favorite city girls (including Lusty Lady Rachel Kramer Bussel) read at McNally Robinson in celebration of a new anthology from Seal (hi, Laura M!). Come join me, if you’re here in NYC… Here’s the deal:

Single State of the Union: Single Women Speak Out on Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Seal Press)

Monday, August 27, 7 pm, Free
McNally Robinson Bookstore, 52 Prince Street (SoHo, between Lafayette and Mulberry), NYC

The popular media give us shoe shopaholics, ditzy desperados, and wannabe brides forever making cow eyes at The Bachelor. But what do single women have to say about their own lives? In the myth-busting tradition of anthologies like The Bitch in the House, the impressive roster of writers of Single State of the Union set the record straight about the experiences of single women in America. Rachel Kramer Bussel is a popular writer and teacher of erotica and the editor most recently of erotica anthologies Caught Looking and Cross-Dressing. Lynn Harris is the author of the smart New York mystery Death by Chick Lit. Judy McGuire is an advice columnist and author of How Not To Date. Susan Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Lighting Up and most recently Only As Good As Your Word. Join us for a discussion with these and other smart single (and formerly single) women that will give you a new perspective on the single state.

Dear readers: I need your help! I’m compiling a list of interesting blogs by women scholars (you know, like BitchPhD, Feminist Law Professors Blog, CultureCat, Baxter Sez, Afrogeekmom…) as part of my mission to entice even more women scholars to bring their perspective and analysis into the blogosphere. I’m looking in particular for examples of blogs that balance astute cultural, social, or political commentary with a-day-in-the-life. If you have one to suggest, please comment here. I’ll post the resulting list here on G w/ Pen soon.

Guidelines for Guest Scholarblogging are available here.

Do check out the MotherTalk bloggers’ reviews this week of a book called Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity by Susan O’Doherty. Here’s the schpiel: At the age of 42, O’Doherty, a practicing psychotherapist, chose to confront the cultural demons who had been telling her all her life that the only “important” writers were men. She offers tools for managing the stress of trying to do serious creative work while holding down a job and, often, caring for a family. Sounds like, perhaps, a modern lady’s A Room of One’s Own?

Brought to you by GIRL with Pen. There. I just wanted to see if I could use women, ladies, and girls all in one post – there’s an interesting yet familiar debate going on on one of the listservs I’m on about the politics of calling ourselves girl. Dude, I’m fine with it. But I also understand the objections, and how frustrating it must seem to see younger women returning to the diminutive second-wave feminists fought against.

NEW OPPORTUNITY ON GIRL WITH PEN!: If you are a scholar who shares our mission of bridging feminist research and popular reality, is interested in blogging, and would like to try your hand at it, Girl with Pen is your place. Please contact me at deborahsiege@gmail.com for guidelines and parameters.

An amazing Stanford researcher who focuses on various issues around poverty, motherhood, and youth is going to be our first Guest Scholar/Blogger. She’ll be guest posting in this space very soon. She’s got the goods. Stay tuned!