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Tanya Paperny
Tanya is a freelance writer, editor and translator and a teacher of creative writing. She is completing her MFA in Writing and Translation at Columbia University. To read more of her stuff, visit her blog.
I’ve written several posts about gender inequity in the writing profession here at LitDrift. To catch up, read those posts here, here and here.
It’s still hard out there for us ladywriters. Writer-esses? Oi vey.
First we have celebrated (Nobel laureate, ahem) writer, novelist and essayist V.S. Naipaul saying that there is no woman who is his literary equal. I’ll let him do the talking (courtesy of The Guardian piece):
He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.” The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.
Then we have the newly-released statistics, courtesy of VIDA, that analyze the gender breakdown of the authors included in the Best American anthologies in poetry, fiction, and essays. I’ll let the numbers do the talking:
In the Best American Essays Series from 1986 through 2010, the numbers look dire across the board. Works by women accounted for only 29% of those published in the anthology. There was only one year in twenty-five that the number of works by women published in the anthology outnumbered the works by men.
Gender equity in publishing is still escaping our grasp, but with the exciting growth of independent presses and publishers cropping up around the country, perhaps this will slowly start to change.
In 2002, I was a high school student on a four-day retreat with my creative writing class where we took walks in the woods, did lakeside writing exercises and learned how to make handmade paper. Our teacher led us through the various steps, making a wet pulp of recycled materials, flattening it on a mesh screen and decorating with leaves and scraps. I thought it was so neat and quaint but eventually useless because the bumpy sheet was too thick to write on.
Almost a decade later, it turns out there’s a burgeoning movement of artists and writers making handmade and/or hand-bound books and paper as a response to the digital book world.
Evidence of the aforementioned: In the fall of this year, the University of Iowa will launch its new Master of Fine Arts in Book Arts. The first cohort will choose between emphases in Artist Bookwork, Bookbinding, Calligraphy, Digital Bookwork, Papermaking and Printing.
Along with U. of Iowa, there are seventeen members of the three-year old College Book Art Association. Ten years ago, most of these programs didn’t exist and people didn’t think of book making as art.
All this while people continue talking about how e-books may be hurting paperback sales. In fact, it seems they are also inspiring a growing number of small presses to treat book-making as an artistic medium.
There are hundreds of small presses cropping up all over the country, publishing in small volumes, often using handmade or letterpress technologies.
One notable example is Ugly Duckling Presse (UDP), a Brooklyn-based small press that makes chapbooks, broadsides and artist books in their one-room studio. They’ve published over 200 titles in the last ten years and many of the ones they put out have some handmade element, whether it be a letterpress cover or a hand-stitched or rubber band binding.
Co-founder and UDP collective member Matvei Yankelevich says that treating books as art objects is a natural reaction to the digitizing of texts: “Because of the ephemerality of blogs and the internet, people want a reminder of the tactile sensations of reading.”
Since 2000, the number of presses like UDP has been growing and there are resources that support this expanding network. One example is the Center for Book Arts in New York City (many similar centers exist across the country).
According to Sarah Nicholls, program manager at the Center, the rosters for their classes on book making are exploding these days. They get a range of students: from graphic designers tired of staring at a screen all day, to writers who want to learn to make their own books, to teachers who want to get their students more excited in reading by offering kids a chance to make stuff with their hands.
Nicholls sees the resurgence of interest in book arts as part of a larger cultural shift towards valuing things that are made locally and in a small scale (i.e. food, crafts).
Whatever it is, I’m happy to see it, even if it’s just plain ol’ nostalgia. Yankelevich adds, “the romance with efficiency has dwindled.” And he’s right: UDP books are well-made objects that encourage you to read more slowly, to really look at each page.
To look through the UDP digital archive, click here.
Last month I was invited to participate in Piethos, a competitive and totally sweet (literally) reading hosted by Brooklyn’s own Slice Magazine. The terms of the game:
Five representatives of various New York City area literary establishments (blogs, publications, online mags, bookstores) are given a writing prompt 48 hours before the event and have to write something to be read out loud and please a crowd. After anonymous audience votes are cast (and the host C.A.B. Fredricks admits that it’s only somewhat of a popularity contest for whoever can bring the most of their friends to the reading), the winner gets a freshly-baked pie made by Brooklyn’s own (I’ll stop saying that soon) Fat and Flour.
The prompt I received via email a day and a half before the event:
“Write a story based around a movie you have never seen.”
Mind you, anyone who knows me knows that I hate movies. Not only that but I am a nonfiction writer (mostly) and haven’t taken a real stab at short fiction since…probably…high school (that was almost a decade ago). But it turned out to be a wonderful literary challenge and I was actually pleased with the outcome.
While Lauren Spohrer very much deservedly so got the pie (she’s a repeat winner and wrote on a prompt about an older building falling in love with a younger building), I still took this business very seriously and had way more fun doing it than I could have anticipate. (Her piece was totally brilliant; it mixed architectural jargon with highfalutin romance in a way that was more sexually euphemistic than anything I’ve ever heard.)
The piece I wrote (in one sitting of about three hours!) weaves a story about a middle-aged Italian man living in Bay Ridge Brooklyn with the plots of a handful of movies I’ve never seen (or what I guess the plots of those films to be!). Whoever guesses the films included below wins an e-cookie. Enjoy!
I seem to be the resident shit-starter here at LitDrift. So today I’ll quickly follow up on the conversation I launched in earlier posts about gender inequity in the writing profession (read the posts here and here).
Yesterday, Anne Hays wrote a letter to The New Yorker complaining of a gender imbalance in the magazine’s issues and demanding a refund:
I am writing to express my alarm that this is now the second issue of the NYer in a row where only two (tiny) pieces out of your 76 page magazine are written by women. The January 3rd, 2011 issue features only a Shouts & Murmurs (Patricia Marx) and a poem (Kimberly Johnson). Every other major piece—the fiction, the profile, and all the main nonfiction pieces—is written by a man. Every single critic is a male writer.
A lot of writers I know are really weird people. They are not conventional characters. They are introverted, awkward, and often act like wallflowers in social situations, taking mental notes rather than fully participating.
But the holiday season is the great leveler: even the weird ones have to get together in groups with family and/or friends to eat, drink, and exchange gifts.
But writers also have the chance to do their own version of a holiday tradition: the New Year’s Resolution. This is the one time of the year in the U.S. when it is socially accepted even sanctioned to talk about self-improvement. So why not take this somewhat cheesy and unrealistic tradition of promises and make it a literary goal? Why not recommit to your own writing? Why not do more reading? This is a good way to stay weird, since pretty much everyone else’s resolutions will have to do with losing weight and exercise. Here are a handful of literary suggestions:
I don’t mean to rehash the whole “is-the-MFA-degree-in-creative-writing-useless” issue, but I do want to suggest some solutions to one of the commonly cited arguments against getting an MFA. [Full Disclosure: I'm getting my MFA at Columbia University.]
I’ve often heard that MFA programs produce cookie-cutter writers. Because students are all taught by the same professors, reading the same assigned readings (most often, from the mainstream canon of literature), and critiquing each others work within a closed loop, they end up all sounding like one another and like the influences that are hoisted upon them within the courses.
Like I said, I don’t intend to rehash this debate. Instead, I want to propose some solutions I’ve come up with.
If, in fact, people come out of MFA programs sounding like “MFA-ey writers,” with cautious language, similar influences, and a lack of risk and experimentation, here are some ideas of how to diversify your influences while in an MFA program and avoid robotic writing:
Read translated literature. Read works in English by authors from other cultures, countries, languages, and periods of time. Bring in some of that foreign-ness into your English. Push the boundaries of what English is expected to be able to do. Or hell, if you have the skills, just read non-English works in their original language! Certainly the majority of people around you aren’t doing this in most traditional MFA programs.
Translate literature yourself, if you have sufficient language skills. In the process, you’re forced to become super acquainted with another author (do one you admire) and you’ll end up soaking up some of their literary influences, ones that stand outside of the English stuff everyone else is reading.
Read things that might not be categorized, necessarily, as literary. What about the works of oral history by Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich? In reading those transcriptions of monologues by people who survived the Great Depression and the Chernobyl disaster, I learned a lot about dialogue, tone, being sparse, and forcing myself to cut out the unnecessary fat of my paragraphs.
Maintain ties with writers, editors, and friends who are good readers of your work outside of the MFA program. Have people outside your program read your work. Go to readings of people who aren’t your classmates. SheWrites is a great online community for women writers, for example.
Get a part-time job (or dreaded internship) that exposes you to worlds beyond the classroom. Try journalism. Try teaching. Be a grant writer. Work as the editor for a literary journal. Obviously easier said than done, especially in this (transitional) job market.
Take classes or workshops in other genres! Be friends with writers across genres! This is a big one, I think. Who says you can only write in one form? Challenge yourself to try out other forms, and even if that’s not your style, allow the tools and tricks you learn from one to inform the other. Sentences in literary nonfiction have to sing just like they do in poetry. Side note: I found that teaching multi-genre creative writing to high school students made me confident enough to try writing fiction for the first time in years. If I can teach it, hell, I should be able to do it.
Any other ideas?
Thanks to Idra Novey for some of the ideas about translation.
Russiaisonfire. The unprecedented heat wave in much of the Northern Hemisphere means that temperatures in and around Moscow this summer have reached record highs. On top of that, much of the Russian lands are covered in peat (due to natural vegetation but also bad Soviet agricultural practices) which is now lighting on fire along with the dried-out trees.
Voronezh, a city several hundred miles south of Moscow known for its fertile black earth, is now partially charred (see a photograph here).
I can’t help but think about the concept of poetic justice right now. Here’s why:
Voronezh is the city to which Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was exiled to from 1935-1937 after his poem, the “Stalin Epigram,” got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. At first he was crushed (he had even tried committing suicide), but later managed to write some of his most brilliant poems, collected in the “Voronezh Notebooks.” In 1938, he died on the way to a Soviet GULAG (prison or labor camp).
Mandelstam tried to write honestly under a totalitarian regime and was repressed. He almost lost faith in the power and role of poetry (his ironic prophecy before his death: “Only in Russia is poetry respected — it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”). But he still managed to write poems that are now celebrated and translated for their bitterness and their eventual idealism.
Here is one of his Voronezh poems, written in 1935 (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin):
You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
(Another great one is called “Black Earth” but I can’t find it online).
Voronezh is the place of exile for one of the 20th Century’s greatest poets, where he managed to write despite deprivation.
The Soviet government irresponsibly drained these lands in the 1960s for agriculture and mining.
Now they’re burning.
I’m certainly not insensitive to the tragedies of the raging wildfires (much of my family lives in Moscow), but I just had to point this out. It’s too weird when life and poetry meet.
I just taught creative writing for a summer session to a group of very bright and talented 11th and 12th graders. It was a very intensive program, a five-day-a-week gig for three weeks, in which the students studied and wrote poetry, short fiction, dramatic scenes, and long prose (both fiction and nonfiction).
It was very rewarding but also absolutely exhausting.
I got to teach the students a variety of forms, which reminded me that I need not pigeonhole myself only as a nonfiction writer (I started a short story yesterday!). I also got young writers excited by new genres and authors (they loved the idea of prose poetry!). That was totally gratifying.
I would love to teach creative writing at the high school or university level as a career in the future. However, this teaching position took up all my time even though I was only teaching for about an hour a day. My personal projects got pushed to the backburner. I was tired after leading class and trying to remain energetic all the time and then prepping for the next session each afternoon.
This got me thinking about the future again. Since I’m going to need a day job after I finish graduate school (no $200,000 book deals in my future), why not teach creative writing and do journalism to keep my mind involved in writing-related tasks and exercise my writing muscle? Read more »
At seven am every morning, I pop out of bed and drink a freshly squeezed orange juice and eat a zucchini frittata. Before I do any errands or school work, I spend three hours working on the latest chapter of my book. I eat lunch outside while reading volume two of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” In the afternoons, I revise what I wrote the week prior. I have a light dinner and then get back to reading Solzhenitsyn. Before bed, I write in my journal for an hour and keep the pen and notebook on my bedside table in case I have interesting dreams or book ideas in the middle of the night.
Or not.
I’m a graduate student. I have two jobs. I have a forty-five minute commute through New York City almost every morning. I’m usually rushing. I’m not really a morning person. Sometimes I get headaches from staring at my computer all day and I would rather cook a fun dinner when I get home than write anything. I do a lot of writing for school and for my jobs, but I’m not always good at prioritizing my own writing projects.
Scottish comedian and writer Al Kennedy had a piece up at The Guardian earlier this month about a day in the life of a writer:
…I usually compare my life to those of so many other novelists who are (perhaps inaccurately) quoted as saying they “always complete the final draft in my suite at the Carlyle” or “my writing room faces the smaller of our lakes and has a delightfully inspiring view across the Chilterns/Dartmoor/the Swiss Alps/Dollis Hill” or “I always get up at 4am, sip my organic mint tea – dew-kissed leaves fresh from the sunken garden – and then five or six thousand words tumble forth before Freddie and Timmy and the dogs wake up and I have to oversee Marta while she makes them breakfast – she’s from the Philippines and simply doesn’t understand toast” and so forth.
It’s mostly a spoof piece but she manages to be refreshingly realistic. We’re not all going to be able to wake up to the sunrise at our lakeside writers retreat. We’re going to have gigs and side jobs. We’re going to be grumpy in the mornings. We’re going to not want to write all the time, but we’ll force ourselves to because that’s our calling.
What would my own ideal daily schedule look like? Here’s a non-ironic fantasy: Read more »
In 2002, I was a high school student on a four-day retreat with my creative writing class where we took walks in the woods, did lakeside writing exercises and learned how to make handmade paper. Our teacher led us through the various steps, making a wet pulp of recycled materials, flattening it on a mesh screen and decorating with leaves and scraps. I thought it was so neat and quaint but eventually useless because the bumpy sheet was too thick to write on.
The last post I wrote about gender 
I just taught creative writing for a summer session to a group of very bright and talented 11th and 12th graders. It was a very intensive program, a five-day-a-week gig for three weeks, in which the students studied and wrote poetry, short fiction, dramatic scenes, and long prose (both fiction and nonfiction).
