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On Pandering

By Claire Vaye Watkins | November 23rd, 2015 – 09:00 am

This essay, which is featured in our forthcoming Winter issue, was originally given as a lecture during the 2015 Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop.

It was met with enthusiastic applause.

Some Exposition

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Until recently I was a professor at a private liberal arts university in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a little town located at the exact point of overlap of a three-part Venn diagram. Draw one in your mind: label circle #1 Amish country, label circle #2 coal country, label circle #3 fracking country.

The towns near Lewisburg have names like Shamokin Dam, Frackville, Minersville, and Coal Township. You might have heard of a place called Centralia, a modern-day ghost town thanks to a vein of coal that has been burning beneath the ground since 1962, belching up smoke and carbon monoxide, forcing people to flee their homes and poisoning those who refuse. That vein, by the way, is expected to continue burning for another 250 years. So if you haven’t visited Centralia, there’s still time. Centralia is about forty miles from my old house, and people from the Buffalo Valley, where I lived, often took day trips there. So basically all you need to know about this particular region of central Pennsylvania is that we went to Centralia—a smoldering village of noxious fumes—on vacation.

The Buffalo Valley smells like pig shit, puppy mills, or burning garbage, depending on which way the wind blows. It is not uncommon, when hiking, to come across a tarry black field where old-growth forest has been recently clear-cut, the ground still soaked with diesel. This all sounds pretty bleak, and it was, even to me, a person with a high tolerance for bleakness and an affection for abused landscapes. Living there, I can admit now that I’ve fled, corroded a part of my soul. Driving to a neighboring town for a prenatal checkup felt like driving through Capote’s In Cold Blood. During the time I lived in central Pennsylvania the adjective I used most to describe the place to faraway friends was “murdersome.”

And yet the little town of Lewisburg, where this expensive private university is located, is actually quite pleasant. The houses are gingerbread Victorians and stately brick colonials, all turrets, stained glass, and sleeping porches. Market Street is lined with parks and bed and breakfasts and small local businesses from another era—a shoe repair shop, a butcher, a vacuum cleaner repairman, a chocolatier, an independent bookstore, a single-screen art deco movie theater where they put real melted butter on the popcorn. The town square boasts a Christmas tree in the winter, scarecrows in the autumn, and alfresco concerts and community theater in the summer. Every street is lit by old-fashioned globe lampposts, the proud town’s icon. It is a place, as residents often insist, that time forgot.

In short, Lewisburg looks almost nothing like its neighbors in coal-Amish-fracking country, which time has remembered all too well. Obviously, this has everything to do with the university—one year spent at this college, located about three hours from New York City, costs $62,368. Generally speaking the campus can be fairly characterized by the setting of Frederick Busch’s wonderful short story “Ralph the Duck,” a “northeastern camp for the overindulged.” Money from the school, its faculty, its students and their parents props up the local economy. Simple enough.

But the true relationship between the town and the university did not occur to me until one of my students, from Youngstown, Ohio, described how much her mother loved coming to Lewisburg, how each time she visited her mother would say, “Look at that adorable chocolate shop, look at those gleaming lampposts. I just love Lewisburg!” My student, sharper than we give Millennials credit for, told her mother, “Of course you love it. It’s for you.”

What she meant, I think, is that Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, is a town in coal country the way Disney’s Celebration, Florida, is a suburb of Orlando. Lewisburg, and countless other so-called college towns like it, is Bedford Falls in loco parentis. It’s a country-mouse theme park for young people wanting the illusion of distance, wanting the sense of being away on a journey and all the self-discovery that promises. It’s for them, and it’s for their parents, who will tolerate this distance and this freaky looming self-discovery, so long as it comes with the quaintness of the country, the control of a company town, and all the safety that $62,368 can buy.

All to say that for the past four years, I lived in a landscape of pandering.

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Stephen Elliott Comes to Town

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Let’s segue into one of my favorite subgenres of literary gossip: writers behaving badly. What writers’ conference would be complete without it?

It is the fall of 2009 and I’m in the final year of my three-year MFA program. The program is hosting a reading by the writer and P. T. Barnum figure Stephen Elliott, who, in addition to being a novelist and memoirist, is editor in chief of the online literary magazine The Rumpus. The university does not provide him accommodations so our program director passes along his request that someone put him up for the night. I volunteer. Kyle Minor, another writer and an alumnus of the program, fetches Stephen from the airport. Stephen, Kyle, and I have lunch, where we talk about Denis Johnson, our works in progress, and our agents. I’d landed a hotshot agent six months earlier, am still freaked out by how, when I Google her, names like Junot Díaz and Jonathan Safran Foer appear. I have a story coming out in Granta, a collection in the homestretch, and I’m eager to talk about all this with writers who’ve been there. After lunch, Stephen takes a nap at my house while I go teach. I come back and take him to his reading, then to a bar with the other grad students, then to get donuts on our way home. Stephen flirts with me all night and back at my apartment he attempts, with what I’ll graciously term considerable persistence, to convince me to let him sleep in my bed rather than on the air mattress I’ve inflated for him in the other room. I decline several times before he relents, doing so only after I tell him I’m seeing someone. He sleeps on the air mattress, and in the morning we have breakfast and then I drive him to the airport.

Later that day, a friend forwards me the Daily Rumpus e-newsletter, which Stephen wrote in the airport and sent to his subscribers, allegedly a few thousand readers, writers, and fans of his site. Its subject line is “Overheard in Columbus.” Of the visit Stephen wrote:

It was really a great time, though I can’t put my finger on exactly why. It might have been the ride from the airport with Kyle Miner [sic] who’s living the post MFA life with a book of stories out, a couple of kids, teaching classes up in Toledo, finishing what sounds like a fantastic novel and contemplating law school. Or it might have been Claire, the student I stayed with. Or the walk for donuts at 10:30 on a Wednesday night, which felt late in that town, especially on the strip.

I tried to get in Claire’s bed. It was a big, comfortable bed. She said no, how would she explain it to the boy she was getting to know. I said there was nothing to explain to the boy, nothing’s going to happen. It’s like sleeping with your gay friend. But she wasn’t so sure. She had been drinking and I don’t drink. I slept on the air mattress in the other room.

Now, I realize I’m not a special snowflake, that every woman who writes has a handbag full of stories like this. There is probably an entire teeming sub-subgenre titled “Stephen Elliott Comes to Town.” I offer this here partly because it was my very first personal run-in with overtly misogynistic behavior from a male writer, and so perhaps my most instructive. I learned a lot from that Daily Rumpus e-mail (which is a sentence that has never before been uttered). I want to stress that I’m not presenting Stephen Elliott as a rogue figure, but as utterly emblematic. I want to show you how, via his compulsive stream-of-consciousness monologue e-mailed to a few thousand readers, I was given a glass-bottom-boat tour of a certain type of male writer’s mind.

I scrolled up and down, reading and rereading, and through that glass-bottom boat saw a world where Kyle Minor was Kyle Minor, a writer “with a book of stories out, a couple of kids, teaching classes up in Toledo, finishing what sounds like a fantastic novel and contemplating law school.” Whereas I was Claire, no last name, “the student,” owner of a big, comfortable bed. Until my friend forwarded that e-mail to me, I’d been under the impression that since I wrote, I was a writer, period. If I wrote bad I was a bad writer, if I wrote good I was a good writer. Simple as that. I was, I knew, every bit as ambitious as Kyle Minor and Stephen Elliott. I loved books just as much as Kyle and Stephen did, read as much as they did, and worked just as hard to get the right words in the right order. But now I was confronted with Google Groups listserv proof that, to Stephen, Kyle was a writer and I was a drunk girl.

But fuck ’em, right? What did Tina Fey say about sexists in the workplace: over, under, and through. The problem with responding to sexism with Sesame Street is that if you read that e-mail as I read that e-mail, as I was being trained to read—that is, carefully and curiously, over and over—you’ll see something more than the story Stephen told himself about me as a writer or, in this case, not a writer. I saw, in the form of paragraphs and sentences, my area of expertise, how it took only a few lines to go from professional dismissal to sexual entitlement to being treated as property to gaslighting.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I tend to think professional sexism via artistic infantilization is a bummer, frustrating, disappointing, but distinct and apart from those violent expressions of misogyny widely agreed upon as horrific: domestic violence, sex slavery, rape. Stephen Elliott did not rape me, did not attempt to rape me. I am not anywhere close to implying that he did. I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement. No, more than of a piece, it is practically a prerequisite. Humans are wide, open vessels, capable of almost anything—if you read you know this—but you cannot beat the mother of your children, or rape your childhood friend while she’s unconscious, or walk up to a sorority outside Santa Barbara and start shooting without first convincing yourself and allowing our culture to convince you that those women are less than human.

I know that’s an intense analogy. I intend it to be.

Here, Stephen Elliot handily provides a clear illustration of an idea most recently proposed by Rebecca Solnit in her important essay collection Men Explain Things to Me: these things exist on a continuum. Sexist dismissal of women as artists and the assumption of sexual entitlement over them that is necessary to make something like rape okay in our culture—and it very much is okay in our culture—are not separated by vast chasms of principles. Look here, they are two paragraphs of the same story, separated by only a keystroke.

When I said, I’m a writer, Stephen heard, I’m a girl. And, because I was a girl, when I said, No, you cannot sleep in my bed, he heard someone who “wasn’t so sure.” I continued, in his mind, to be unsure, and only the man I was dating—in Stephen’s infantilizing phrase “the boy she was getting to know”—could be sure for me. The story Stephen told himself went: “She had been drinking and I don’t drink.” Because I was not a writer, not a person, I was easily made into a drunk girl unable to tell her own story.

That is, until now.
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Watching Boys Do Stuff

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But you know all this, even if you haven’t heard it recently, even if you haven’t heard it out loud. I am not interested in why Stephen did what he did. I was a women’s studies minor, I get it. What I’m curious about is what I did with what he did.

For years, I thought this encounter was formative. I described it as I have above, a kind of revelation. These days I think, if only. After all, it’s so much gentler to be presented with an ugliness of which you’d been previously completely and honestly oblivious than one you were trying to pretend didn’t exist. The truth is, the fact that our culture considers male writers more serious than me was not a revelation. I’d been getting the messages of Stephen’s e-mail long before my friend forwarded it to me—all women do. We live in a culture that hates us. We get that. Misogyny is the water we swim in.

To wit:

As a young woman I had one and only one intense and ceaseless pastime, though that’s not the right word, though neither is hobby or passion. I have practiced this activity with religious devotion and for longer than I can remember. I have been trying to give it up recently, since moving away from Bedford Falls, since around the time my daughter was born. But nearly all of my life has been arranged around this activity. I’ve filled my days doing this, spent all my free time and a great amount of time that was not free doing it. That hobby, that interest, that passion was this: watching boys do stuff.

I’ve watched boys play the drums, guitar, sing, watched them play football, baseball, soccer, pool, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. I’ve watched them golf. Just the other day I watched them play a kind of sweaty, book-nerd version of basketball. I’ve watched them work on their trucks and work on their master’s theses. I’ve watched boys build things: half-pipes, bookshelves, screenplays, careers. I’ve watched boys skateboard, snowboard, act, bike, box, paint, fight, and drink. I could probably write my own series of six virtuosic autobiographical novels based solely on the years I spent watching boys play Resident Evil and Tony Hawk’s ProSkater. I watched boys in my leisure time, I watched boys in my love life, and I watched boys in my education. I watched Melville, I watched Salinger, watched Ford, Flaubert, Díaz, Dickens, watched even when I didn’t particularly like what I saw—especially then, because it proved there was something wrong with me, something I wanted to fix. So I watched Nabokov, watched Thomas Hardy, watched Raymond Carver. I read women (some, but not enough) but I didn’t watch them. I didn’t give them megaphones in my mind. The writers with megaphones in my mind were not Mary Austin, or Louise Erdrich, or Joan Didion, or Joy Williams, or Toni Morrison, though all have been as important to me as any of the male writers I mentioned, or more. Still, I watched the boys, watched to learn. I wanted to write something Cormac McCarthy would like, something Thomas Pynchon would come out of hiding to endorse, something David Foster Wallace would blurb from beyond the grave.

I have been reenacting in my artmaking the undying pastime of my girlhood: watching boys, emulating them, trying to catch the attention of the ones who have no idea I exist.

dd

On Invisibility

Speaking of things that are invisible: picture me in New Mexico, where I’ve come to teach for a week. Marijuana’s just been legalized in Colorado and a friend from there gifts me a joint. I approach another writer, this one down from Alaska, who is standing alone beside the glowing hotel pool. I make small talk:

I say, So, how long have you lived in Alaska?

She says, Well, I’m an Eskimo, so . . .

I ask if she wants to share the joint. She looks circumspect, which is puzzling to me. I’ve heard her mention Mary Jane before and I’m pretty sure we’re of the same mind about it.

Right here? she asks.

Yeah, I say, looking around for what’s bothering her. It’s dark, only the pool lights glowing, and we’re the only ones outside. The stars overhead are staggering.

She says, But weed’s not legal here.

I note that it’s legal in Colorado, and that Colorado touches New Mexico.

What if someone calls the cops?

They won’t call the cops! Are you crazy? We’re guests of the hotel.

What if we get arrested?

At this point we’re both super puzzled, not understanding each other at all. I’m thinking, Lighten up. People smoke weed in city parks, at music festivals, on hiking trails. The last time I smoked was at a wedding in Maine.

I say, Come on, they’re not going to arrest us for one tiny joint. We’re professors for fuck’s sake!

Okay, she says finally, lighting up. But if they call the cops you better hide me under your invisible cloak of white privilege.

At moments like this, when my whiteness materializes in front of me and I can see it, I am so embarrassed of it and also so angry at myself for not being always as aware of it as I am there in that awkward, painful, absurd, essential moment. I want to unsee it, make it invisible again, and usually I do, because it feels better. I have that privilege.

Others don’t.

I have watched writers go brown right before my eyes. My husband, half Cuban but made much more so on a job interview, is told by a white male scholar specializing in African American literature that his inventing and imagining aspects of Cuba in his novel was “problematic” and that according to this white professor, he got things about Cuba “wrong.”

My best friend, a Basque American, publishes a book set in the Spanish Basque country and Publishers Weekly lauds it “just exotic enough.” My iBooks library categorizes Joshua Cohen as “Literary” and Toni Morrison as “African American.” Think about that for a second: it’s either/or. Meaning, according to iBooks, you cannot be African American and Literary. And it was only two years ago that, over on Wikipedia, American authors whom editors suspected of being in possession of a pussy were removed from the category “American novelists” and relocated to “American women novelists.” These categories—writer or student, writer or girl, woman novelist, Eskimo, Latino, Literary or African American—matter. As Sontag told Mailer, “Words matter, Norman.” They affect the way we live—whether we can smoke a joint beside a hotel pool in New Mexico without fear of being arrested; whether someone will hear no when we say it—and they affect the way we write.

The “little white man deep inside of all of us”

It was Toni Morrison who pointed out that Tolstoy was not writing for her, who said she was writing toward black women. It makes you wonder, Who am I writing for? Who am I writing toward?

Myself, I have been writing to impress old white men. Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati. Not only acquiescence but a beseeching, approval seeking, people pleasing.

But whom do I mean when I say white male literati? Sounds like a conspiracy theory, one of my favorite genres of American storytelling. I mean the people and voices real and imagined in the positions of power (or at least influence) in writing and publishing, but mostly I mean the man in my mind. James Baldwin wrote of the “little white man deep inside of all of us” but mine is tall. He’s a white-haired chain smoker from New Mexico, the short story writer called “Cheever’s true heir.” It is Lee K. Abbot I hear in my mind. This has little to do with Lee himself, a mentor I admire, a writer I adore, whose encouragement has helped land me before you, whose support I treasure. I am not talking about Lee K. Abbott who once turned to me in workshop when I was a first-year MFA with a dead mom, a desert rat without a proper winter coat and in bad need of a thumbs-up, and asked me, because I’d turned in a story he liked, “Claire, who are the great Nevada writers?” And when I sputtered something about Robert Laxalt and Mark Twain he stopped me and said, “No. You are.” I am speaking not of Lee Kitteridge Abbott the man but what he represents. Or rather I am talking about them both, about the representation and the man himself, for didn’t I know he would like that story, about an old prospector who finds a nubile young girl left for dead in the desert?

Glad you like it, Lee. It’s for you.

I am talking about this reading I gave in Montana in the fall when it was so beautiful I almost never went home, where a late-middle-aged white cowboy—let’s call him the Old Sumbitch—waited in my signing line, among the brown-haired girls with glasses, and when he got to me said, “I usually don’t read stuff like this but Tom McGuane said you were all right.” I am talking about being at once grateful for the friendship and encouragement offered me by Tom McGuane but also angry and exhausted by the fact that I need it. The Old Sumbitch would not have read me if Tom hadn’t said I was all right. I am hiding under Tom’s invisible cloak of male privilege. At issue is not Tom McGuane or Lee K. Abbott or Jeffrey Eugenides or Christopher Coake or Chang-Rae Lee, all of whom have offered me guidance and friendship for which I’m tremendously grateful. But why should their voices be louder in my head than that of Karen Russell, a beyond generous certified genius and, with any luck, my future sister-wife? Why should they be louder than Antonya Nelson, who wrote the most illuminating review of Battleborn I’ve ever read? Why should they be louder than Erin McGraw, who read Battleborn in its every incarnation, who taught me how to get a job and keep it, who’s written me about a hundred letters of recommendation and done everything short of hand me this microphone today?

The stunning truth is that I am asking, deep down, as I write, What would Philip Roth think of this? What would Jonathan Franzen think of this? When the answer is probably: nothing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire? I recently finished Roth’s Indignation with nothing more lasting than a sincere curiosity as to whether Roth is aware that these days even nice girls give blow jobs.

I am trying to understand a phenomenon that happens in my head, and maybe in yours too, whereby the white supremacist patriarchy determines what I write.

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!

Here are the lampposts, here is the single-screen movie theater. It’s all an architecture of pandering. It’s for them.

She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write.

dd

A fellow on Twitter says:

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“A lot of young women (not to mention this WM) loved that book. Should I tell them to disregard their reading experience?”

If you like my book I’m grateful. But I remind you that people at the periphery will travel to accept and even love things not made for or toward them: we have been trained to do so our entire lives. I’m not trying to talk anyone out of their readerly response, only to confess to what went on in my mind when I made the book, to assemble an honest inventory of people I have not been writing toward (though I thought I was): women, young women, people of color, the rural poor, the American West, my dead mother.

This is frightening on its face, but manyfold scarier because I thought I was doing this for myself. I was under the impression that artmaking was apart from all the rottenness of our culture, when in fact it’s not apart from it. It is made of it.

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The preceding

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is either an aesthetic/artistic/personal epiphany or my ritualistic prepublication freak-out; perhaps a little of column A, a little of column B. I’ll tell you this: I have not written anything of consequence since my daughter was born. It’s easy to say, You had a baby, you’re busy, it gets better, and I’m really glad to hear from those of you who have said as much. But I wonder if part of the reason I have not been writing is because I have not been seeing. My gaze is no longer an artist’s gaze.

Why would that be? I think it has something to do with the fact that I don’t wander in the desert much anymore. I spend my days with a baby and that, patriarchy says, is not the stuff of art. Once again I am a girl and not a writer. No one said this. No one has to. I am saying it to myself. That’s the terrible efficiency of gaslighting.

After watching Girls for the first time my friend Annie McGreevy says, “That was my experience, too, but I didn’t know it was okay to make art about it.” And maybe it’s still not okay. After doing an event with Miranda July, Lena Dunham tweets this quote from Lorrie Moore, writing on July in the New York Review of Books, “When one googles ‘Wes Anderson’ and ‘fey’ one gets a lot of pictures of him and Tina Fey.”

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About a year ago I had a baby,

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and while my life was suddenly more intense, more frightening, more beautiful, more difficult, and more profound than it had ever been, I found myself with nothing to write about.

“Nothing’s happening to me,” I bemoan to Annie. “I need to go shoot an elephant.”

Annie replies, in her late-night Lebowskian cadence, “Dude, you’re a mother. You’ve had a child. You’re struggling to make your marriage work, man. You are trying, against your nature and circumstance, to be decent. That’s your elephant!” Yet when I write some version of this down it seems quaint or worse. I thought I had enough material for a novel but when it came out it was a short story, and one that felt unserious. I tried a story in the form of a postpartum-depression questionnaire and it felt quaint. Domestic. For women. Motherhood has softened me. I have a tighter valve on what I’ll read and what I’ll watch. I don’t want to write like a man anymore. I don’t want to be praised for being “unflinching.” I want to flinch. I want to be wide open.

I am trying to write something urgent, trying to be vulnerable and honest, trying to listen, trying to identify and articulate my innermost feelings, trying to make you feel them too, trying a kind of telepathy, all of which is really fucking hard in the first place and, in a culture wherein women are subject to infantilization and gaslighting, in a culture that says your “telepathic heart” (that’s Moore on July) is dumb and delicate and boring and frippery and for girls, I sometimes wonder if it’s even possible.

I have built a working miniature replica of the patriarchy in my mind. I would like very much to bust it up or burn it down. But I am afraid I don’t know how. Though I do have some ideas.

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Some ideas:

Let’s punch up.

Let us not make people at the margins into scouts or spies for the mainstream. Let us stop asking people to speak for the entire cacophonic segment of humanity that shares their pigmentation, genitalia, or turn-ons.

Let us spend more time in those uncomfortable moments when our privilege is showing. Let us reflect there, let us linger, rather than recoil into the status quo.

Let us continue to count, and talk, and think about the numbers.

Let us name those things that are nameless, as Solnit describes, the way “mansplaining” or “rape culture” or “sexual harassment” were nameless before feminists named them. Let those names sing.

Let us hear the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. Let us remember that we become the stories we tell. An illustration: I was talking with the writer Elissa Schappell about how much we are both anticipating Carrie Brownstein’s new book. I asked Elissa what she made of this new trend of memoirs by badass women: Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon, Sally Mann, Amy Poehler. Was this trend the result of Patti Smith winning the National Book Award five years ago? Was the trend indicative of a new wave of feminism? Elissa interrupted me. “You keep using that word,” she said. “Trend. It’s not a trend. We are here now. We’re not going anywhere. We are here now.”

Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white fucks at Oxford.

(I will start us off by spending no more of my living breath apologizing for the fact that no, actually, even though I write about the American West, Cormac McCarthy is not a major influence of mine.)

Let us use our words and our gazes to make the invisible visible. Let us tell the truth.

Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.

Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better.

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan

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Posted in Essays, Writers' Workshops

Comments: 119

(90) Comments

michelin says:

November 30, 2015 at 8:45 am

Today, the Dean of our school forwarded this Saunders essay to the entire faculty as a model for teaching. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/my-writing-education-a-timeline

As I read, the text was haunted by your essay. The woman-objects stack: cheerleaders, culinary faculty wife, distressed (not about writing) female student, birthing wife. The male-gods stack. It appears that even nice guys like Saunders give blowjobs.

Finally, it appears that you are referring to Fred Moten’s Undercommons in your last line.No?
michelin says:

November 30, 2015 at 8:36 am

Today, the Dean of our school forwarded this Saunders essay to the entire faculty as a model for teaching. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/my-writing-education-a-timeline

As I read, the text was haunted by your essay. The woman-objects stack: cheerleaders, culinary faculty wife, distressed (not about writing) female student, birthing wife. The male-gods stack. It appears that even nice guys like Saunders give blowjobs.

Finally, it appears that you are referring to Fred Moten’s Undercommons in your last line. No?
Bea says:

November 30, 2015 at 6:56 am

You should read Bujold’s essay collection Sidelines.
She talks about writing SF and life and male characters who “code female” and all sorts of things you might find good brainfood.
Nan says:

November 30, 2015 at 6:51 am

Many thanks – Write it, write it, write it! Your words contribute to my ability to recognize my own privilege, and the blind deafness that limits my perception. Love the hilarity in realizing my best bet for freedom is to let loose of the same ego shit that I’ve been trained to use as the only available defense against that damn little man in my head. Opening up wide, not grasping at anything already-formed, in order to just receive what is as it is, that wide open terrible vulnerability is our greatest strength, our greatest gift as women. No worries Chica, if you are young enough to be having babies, you are young enough to have plenty of books still in you!
SheilaE says:

November 30, 2015 at 1:45 am

This makes me happy to be a poet, since we’re kind of forced to consider this stuff frequently. I recall huddling over literary theory books, considering these ideas during the first year of the MFA. We just kept talking about it, and it’s still a frequent topic of conversation. Also, poets seem to feel slightly less pressure from the publishing world to ignore minority voices (though it still exists). Say what you will about poetry, but we’re pretty active in trying to create a bit more equality.

In any case, here’s the major issue: the “old white guys” that represent English literature are the ones who are still teaching us how to write it. This is one of the central struggles of critics like Monique Wittig and Gilbert & Gubar, and it’s been going on for over 30 years. How do we “burn this motherfucking system to the ground” when doing so would obliterate all literature? I don’t mean the physical objects of literature (books, etc.), but the whole idea of literature and written arts would be gone. The entire world of English language arts is either continuing the tradition of or reacting against the literary canon. Without Shelley, Whitman, Blake, Melville, Dickens, etc. etc. there is literally nothing. The old white guys are the ones who perfected language arts (because they also perfected oppressing other races/genders and suppressing those voices). I can’t tell if I’m making sense. There is no “system” to burn down, yes? Even this essay is part of a literary lineage that, likely, began with an old white guy. It is either reacting against or continuing that lineage, and it is inescapable. There is no “starting point” for literature. The real crime is how the voices of minorities have been suppressed for so long, but we are trying to change that now. The old white guys did the oppressing by quite literally hoarding education. Old white guys have a 2000 year head start.

As to what’s being said otherwise, there is a very real problem with sexism in the publishing world (again, particularly fiction, but certainly poetry too). But I’m not sure the right move is to say “forget all white men because I’m tired of trying to live up to their standard.” On the one hand, yes, screw them. On the other hand, there is no standard. A good writer is an engaging writer. I know white cis male fiction writers who want to write like Toni Morrison. I know a black lesbian who wants to write like Denis Johnson. No matter the case, the idea of “quality” or “engagement” in English language literature has largely been established by white males. That’s the tradition we all learn from and there’s nothing to do about it except try to change it by degrees. And I could even see how it might be very damaging to have a “screw old white literary dudes” standpoint in some ways. Tell this to a young writer and watch them fail. Of course, I’m not advocating that anybody should accept sexism in any way, and I certainly understand the anger behind this sentiment. But there’s technique to consider. And craft. And voice. And all the other things fiction requires, many of which the old white literary dudes have done very well. This essayist does a good job for advocating burning down the old white dude system, however she does so using the very tools that “system” taught her, using the forum she has garnered by becoming a part of that system. We would probably not be hearing from her had she not had success in that system.

To nitpick: it is very, very common practice to treat current students differently from already-graduated-students. This does not justify Mr. Elliott’s sexist behaviors, but in terms of leaving her last name off the email, it makes sense. I have been around many MFA and PhD visiting writers, and they treat current students way differently than graduated students. Generally, they treat current students like they’re idiots and graduated students like they’re people.
Apologues says:

November 30, 2015 at 12:05 am

I’m a privileged white straight male. I always wanted to be a writer, though not necessarily a boy writer. Sorry you spent so much time on really bad writers like Cormac McCarthy, useless writers like Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon, failed talents like Salinger, mannered writers like Dickens and Carver, manipulators like Hardy. Just finished teaching courses on two writers of genius, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson.
Frederick (Fred) Lowe says:

November 29, 2015 at 6:29 pm

I had quite mixed reactions to the essay. To clear the decks, I am white, male, but also gay — also the adoptive father of a biracial (black/white) child and grandfather to her children, who are half Ecuadoran. I was married for 25 years and came out late. I don’t know how Oprah overlooked me!

If nobody knows it, homophobia and sexism are joined at the hip. If nobody knows it, once you adopt or marry an African American, you don’t have a white family anymore.

In a writer’s group this summer, the moderator/guru challenged a writer for using the word “faggot” on the grounds that it was an outmoded epithet. in this day and age. Really?

I just finished reading Elena Ferrante’s fabulous tetrology, no pandering there! She’s just the latest in a long string of powerful female fiction writers I’ve read since adolescence when I read Sigrid Undset. Carson McCullers, Nadine Gordimer, Isak Dinesen, Toni Morrison, Sontag, etc., etc. I fall in with female writers much more easily than with men. ‘Cause I’m a fag? Maybe.

In any case, you have to somehow account for the women who wrote sublimely according to their own lights, not that I imagine that it was easy. (Could it be that this whole MFA business has given hierarchical, read male-dominated or at least male-designed, structures a role they neither deserve nor are well suited because — of inherent institutional biases — to carry out?)

I’m with Tina Fey. Over, under, around — and knock ’em down as necessary, tho’ that’s certainly the last and least effective approach. Sexism is not going to pass away anytime soon, nor racism or homophobia either. So I agree, punch through. And thank your higher power that this is not Iran or Iraq/Syria under ISIS.

A few months back the British LGBT lit journal GLITTERWOLF had a group of LGBT writers compose letters to their 16 year old selves — powerful, wise, sad, playful (never belittle play in your writing), compassionate, funny. That’s your real audience, whether directly or indirectly — sojourners, fellow travelers.
SophieA2 says:

November 29, 2015 at 4:47 pm

A flashback. To the 1970s. Goddam, do we have to do this all over again? Yes, we do.

I hope the fifth wave of feminism (or whatever number we’re up to by now) means that we will be able to buy some nice low-heeled shoes at last. Among other things, natch. A whole effing decade of four inch heels definitely demonstrates there’s a problem.

Also good:’The Only Woman in the Room,’ by Eileen Pollack.
John Meckley says:

November 29, 2015 at 12:03 pm

A friend just shared this with me. What a disappointing, narrow minded view of central PA. The first few paragraphs smack of your piece reflect exactly the kind of stereotypical, uninformed views that you would otherwise seem to rail against. It’s too bad that your time in the ivory tower didn’t afford you (or you chose not to avail yourself of) the opportunity to explore and learn from the beautiful landscape, communities and people that are the central PA that exists beyond the university walls.
E. Kerry Bramhall says:

November 29, 2015 at 10:13 am

First off, you and Rebecca Solnit are two of the five women at my fantasy lunch table. I am currently in the middle of Gold Fame Citrus. It has become my go to for insomniac nights. Also I am in a writing group, of 12 therapists, mostly white women, writing from the margins of our minds for a volume, no, a BOOK of creative non-fiction. Why it isn’t just called “truth” I don’t know. Why we can’t call it a book yet feels tied to our internalized diminishment. As women, and with respect to the men in our group, we have spent at least 10 of the last 12 months struggling with who we are writing for and whether we are “self indulgent”, “too dramatic” or whether we will get in trouble, be hated, trolled on the internet, and eventually lose our ability to practice therapy if we continue to write the way each of us does. With a frankness, a boldness, a level of rage, sexuality and just plain fierceness. We fantasize we will actually be banished from working, being loved, being smart, and forever shamed. Scarlet letter style. Either from our families, friends, and colleagues, or the psychoanalytic police baring down on us for who the fuck knows? It is not the men in the group who do this, it is only the women. Gaslit to say the least…
Published Author says:

November 29, 2015 at 9:47 am

Stephen Elliott did the same thing to me. He tried to kiss me and stuck his tongue in my mouth even though he knew I had a boyfriend. I turned away and it ended up being an awkward good bye hug. It was the first time I’d had a coffee with him. He was already published and I liked his story collection. I was meeting him for to get his thoughts/advice on the industry. This was before I was published. A few months later my book was bought by a NY publishing house and published. A reviewer selected my book as his favorite read of the season and wrote his review on The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott’s online literary magazine. Within n a day, it was deleted and disappeared into thin air. This was not a coincidence.

Claire, Thank you for the courage of sharing this deeply personal and critically challenging essaying. It makes us rethink our roles as both readers and writers and the kind of world we want to build. My favorite line is “let us build our own canon filled with what we love to read.” And I think it’s time to call out bad behavior period.
Phyl says:

November 29, 2015 at 9:10 am

Claire, the sheer quality of writing and level of thinking here in this essay is enough to make your point AND sell me all your books – you are a *great* writer. Oh, yeah, and men who BADGER women to sleep with them, relenting only when told that there may be another male lurking around is … well, let’s just say that women have clearly stepped to the fore in the evolutionary march …
Amanat says:

November 29, 2015 at 6:48 am

What you wrote about totally resonates with me! You totally brought out all the subtle ways in which misogyny exists but is easily dismissed in every day life.
Genevieve Dell says:

November 28, 2015 at 4:57 pm

Brava! Bravissima!
Mary says:

November 28, 2015 at 3:42 pm

Make your own canon filled with what you love to read and leave the rest of us to do the same. You will find that a good yarn will always get our attention no matter who has written it.
I didn’t care for the cartoon. I don’t like violence no matter what it’s meant to represent or who it’s aimed at.
Sophia says:

November 28, 2015 at 3:04 pm

It’s nice to know Watkins’s new book was reviewed by the VERY WHITE MALE AUTHOR: Casey Walker in LARB. https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/ruined-california
I guess, he is the good guy because he liked her book.
Sophia says:

November 28, 2015 at 2:47 pm

NO. The writer is doing the same thing that she is accusing white men of doing.
Grouping white male authors together… are you kidding me? Why would Cormac McCarthy and Nabakov ever blurb the same book as David Foster Wallace? Has she read any of these authors? And what about Virginia Woolf? Flannery O’Connor? Lydia Davis? Louise Erdrich? –Would these female authors blurb the same book? Or are they allowed to have individual tastes and aesthetics?

Writers should write for themselves, first, and worry about readers, second. (Watkins, you want to pander to the “white male author”, how is that anyone else’s problem? And why do you feel you have to? If you didn’t look up to female authors, and that’s everyone else’s fault?) It’s sad that it’s taken Watkins this long to figure out the rule (and no, not having a “good agent” or a “good publisher” does not mean you are a good writer). Good writing is about good sensibility.

Finally, this essay panders to the white female reader, gives her exactly what she wants to hear. (My evidence: the posts above validating this essay because “it speaks [to my] experience”).
Rachel says:

November 28, 2015 at 12:51 pm

I’m right with you, pouring the kerosene and lighting the damn match. Burn baby baby.
Sergio Yepes says:

November 28, 2015 at 11:09 am

Thanks, I’ll start by saying that I am a male from the generation of 1967, son to a socially conscientious family, I was born with no biases, those I learnt while growing, some of them “I am not excusing my self for those biases” I practiced them to protect my integrity and most certainly I did unconsciously.
I did not learn misogyny in my house, I do not consider my self to be a misogynist, but surely there are some attitudes I haven’t been fully observant of, and your sharing of what a female sees, perceives, feels as such, made me wonder, thanks again…
And here I was, thinking that I was the epitome of the renewal of manhood as a brother to womanhood, as champion for the equality between man a woman and your writing helped me find some darkness still in the heart of my manhood…
I’ll share with you two experiences… one about the side of the coin of men and the other about the side of the coin of women…
Let me start by saying that I am the kiss no tell kind of guy, and as an adolescent I found a truth about my own, trace after trace I made a picture about how other men related towards women.
some men built a name for them amongst their friends, by talking shit about what happened between them and girls… (walk hand in hand with a girl and then tell they had the best fuck ever) since culturally all women were bitches back then, why sweat? right? since woman is the devil… well let’s all jump on the wagon of condemnation and meanwhile we get our fuck or not, and make a name, a reputation around them… I saw it, I heard it, I did not practice it… your writing brought this memory back…
The other side of the coin was working for feminists in my country… We were designing the layout for a feminist magazine in Bogota – Colombia, and we as a team were working for one of the big names of feminism in Colombian media-academia-culture.
I was striving to be innovative, being the subject feminism I thought we must led, we mas be avant-garde, we should teach the guys a lesson on how to improve, innovate in the range of academical magazines… wow… This lady showed me wrong… I will never forget her words, “No, we can not make the magazine like this, we will show our magazine to the world of our academic peers and they must approve”, was a political decision or not, I do not know… but reading her articles in Colombia’s press and comparing with this insider knowledge showed a picture that you may read better than me.
Thanks for your insights on misogyny… now I know that I must be more attentive to the surfacing of this monster in my life…
Jim Cricket says:

November 28, 2015 at 7:47 am

“…, I was given a glass-bottom-boat tour of a certain type of male writer’s mind.”

Excuse me everyone, but is the conditional phrase “certain type” getting lost in the shuffle?

And to Kate above who is admonishing (me) to shut up and listen, what exactly does that mean? If I shut up and listen does that mean I have to continue to shut up and listen? I mean, when is it decided that I understand, in you or in me? And does the fact that you (way over “there”) do not in the slightest know me (way over “here”) matter at all to your judgement? Or is it all just about some sort of universal revenge based on this rapist?

I have shut up’ed and listened ever since around 1971 when I was first told to shut up and listen. And life have basically been “shut up and listen” since then, at least to those of us sympathetic enough to shut up and listen. But shutting up and listening assumes 1) that I am ipso facto a rapist like this guy Elliot (whom I have never even heard of until I clicked the link to this), and 2) that I have no values, or if you prefer shared values until I read and re-read political arguments and been first told what values to have. That, I am sorry to say, smells of bullsh*t to me at best, and sadism at worst. Because, in my humble opinion, it’s all this blind machine-gun firing away of political tracts, however well meaning, however well thought out, even however correct, that just leads to more of the same. In the end what do we have? Reason or Trump fascism but with a left/feminist/correcter point of view? Hasn’t anyone taken seriously the end (and meaning) of the film, Dark Crystal?

The reason that rape is a crime is because it is a very bad thing to do to a woman, for all the reasons any pre-feminist, feminist, neo-feminist, post-feminist and whatever wish to posit. Rape was on the books a long time ago. So now, to turn it all into a meme of “little white male”? What else is new? That was done maybe 50, 60 years ago by de Beauvoir, Greer, Abzug etc, and for all I know 50 years before that by lesser known writers. Does this “refreshing new insight” just have to be raised up over and over again? Do you really think this Elliot guy, or – name your favorite rapist here – if even forced to read this would come away thinking any different? I would like to think so, but I’m not as sure as the writer is or all those fawning over this. Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah? Is that really the best way to convince the Stephen Elliots of the world? Or is this just a literary world meets early 21st century politics world illness? Ideology is ideology. And same as it ever was.

If all literature means to van Watkins is whether it is pandering, or a question of what Roth or Franzen might think of what she writes, then I think maybe she needs to either take a stiff drink before writing (in order to shut down her inner politician) or just be honest and go into politics. All I see in her tract is an argument against literature and for pre-conceived notions of it. And the important question to be asking is, if I weren’t the little white male whose image she is conjuring up, would what I have to say be taken any more seriously?
Paul Timmer says:

November 28, 2015 at 5:45 am

One day you will be sorry you wrote this about your mentor who gave you one of the great compliments a writer could give to another writer, male, female, paramecium. Writer to writer. It isn’t clear in this piece especially as it goes on if you are indicting your own pandering, which you will get over, or an entire culture. You should probably concentrate on getting rid of your old tired demons before heading out. The anxiety of influence is no respecter of gender.
Guy Chartres says:

November 28, 2015 at 2:46 am

Everybody panders, even ‘white fucks at Oxford’ [you forgot to add ‘male’] are slavishly devoted to somebody’s idea of the mainstream. What bothers me about this piece is that you still seem to care so very much what other people think. You are a successful writer and you are about to become a *very successful* and wealthy writer – why the fixation on white male power? It seems a ridiculously misplaced, incongruous, “teenaged” obsession for someone of your stature. Sure, be yourself and be true but if you are not going to pander, well, then just don’t do that.

Meta-pandering is still pandering – so stop already.
HSWiseheart says:

November 27, 2015 at 9:17 pm

Ditto to all the enthusiasm for this thoughtful and passionately written statement from the soul. It has resonated and the ripples will undoubtedly keep expanding. May they cause tsunamis of awareness and flood the last bastions of provincially misogynist minds. I thank the goddess that when young Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinam, Adreienne Rich and others were speaking thusly and without apology, I was there to hear them. iIt saddens me that the woman denying and hating culture we live in continues to make this struggle to throw off internalized male dominated sexism such a repetitive one, but it encourages me that essays like yours do come through, and even that a male lover of literature sent it to me. When in my thirties and a young assistant professor at Hampshire College in social science ( with a completly different and patriarchal name that I later discarded ), I was fortunate enough to be introduced to and befriended by Tillie Olsen. Recognizing that my education at Harvard and MIT ( I had made it in the male academic world, which means that I must have internalized that little white man early on) had put me in a state where I needed some soul retrieval….I was suffering with longing for resonance from my environment and, frankly, boredom with reading mostly male writers) Tillie began handing me books by Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and others. At last I re- membered myself and the Women whose voices I had grown up hearing so clearly: Billie Holliday, Anita O’Day, and the very strong and often angry Nina Simone, to name a few. After that , I chose to read books by women and rarely read books by men. I was one of the pioneers of women’s studies in the five college area of Western Massachusetts. Growing up in the American Southeast, there was another obstacle: the entitlement of sons is even stronger than in some other places. I was forty before I confronted my very self important brother who had a madonna/whore split mind, with “You owe me an apology for that (extremely disempowering) remark.” “But I always talk to you like that.” he replied, stunned. “Yes, and you have just done it for the last time, ” I said. And until his mind was riddled by a terrible glioblastoma multiforma, he never did it again, to his credit.. When, under the influence of that dreadful final distorter of the mind and heart, he wrote what I knew was an incredibly distorted and abusive letter, I took it out of the post office box and put it unopened into the trashcan before leaving the post office.
It is up to us to save ourselves and one another. Tillie showed me that. And you write your essay in that great and ancient tradition of women saying NO to patriarchy. Brava, indeed!
Joe Beckett says:

November 27, 2015 at 9:13 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1L0XEgFb00
HSWiseheart says:

November 27, 2015 at 8:55 pm

Ditto to all the enthusiasm for this thoughtful and passionately written statement from the soul. It has resonated and the ripples will undoubtedly keep expanding. May they cause tsunamis of awareness and flood the last bastions of provincially misogynist minds. I thsnk the goddess thst when young Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinam, Adreienne Rich and others were speaking thusly and without apology. It saddens me that the woman denying and hating culture we live in continues to make this struggle to throw off internalized male dominated sexism, but it encourages me that essays like this do come through, and even that a male lover of literature sent it to me. When in my thirties and a young assistant professor at Hampshire College in social science ( with a completly difference and patriarchal name which I later discarded ), I was fortunate enough to be introduced to and befriended by Tillie Olsen. Recognizing thst my education at Harvard and MIT ( I had made it in the male academic world, which means that I must have ibternalized thst little white man early on) had put me in a state where I needed some soul retrieval….I was suffering with longing for resonance from my environment and, frankly, boredom with reading mostly male writers) began handing me books by Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and others. At last I re- membered myself and the women whose voices I had grown up hearing so clearly: Billie Holliday, Anita O’Day, and the very strong and often angry Nina Simone, to name a few. After that , I chose to read books by women and rsrely read books by men. I was one of the pioneers of women’s studies in the five college area of Western Massachusetts. Growing up in the American Southeast, there was another obstacle: the entitlement of Southern sons is even stronger than in some other places. I was forty before I confronted my very self absorbed brother who had a madonna/whore split mind, with “You owe me an apology for that (extremely disempowering) remark.” “But I always talk to you like that.” he replied, stunned. “Yes, and you have just done it for the last time, ” I said. And until his mind was affected by a terrible glioblastoma multiforma, he never did it again. When, under the influence of that dreadful final distorter of the mind and heart, he wrote what I knew was an incredibly distorted and abusive letter, I took it out of the post office box and put it unopened into the trashcan before leaving the post office. It is up to us to save ourselves and one another. Tillie showed me that. And you write your essay in that great and ancient tradition of women saying NO to patriarchy. Brava, indeed!
CPD says:

November 27, 2015 at 1:50 am

Your description of central Pennsylvania and Lewisburg panders to a cosmopolitan, intellectual elite. Essentially, you argue that the rural folk have no capacity to want chocolate stores, movie houses, or independent booksellers, that the only plausible reason these exist in rural America is to serve an urban elite who delights in the surprise of finding them where they least expect it–the otherwise blighted countryside. One wonders whether you actually knew any rural folk during your exile in America’s bush. What violence do you do by dismissing a whole swath of America with your Venn diagram of Amish, coal, and fracking? Do your readers actually believe that the hicks go to Centralia for vacation? Or that their interest in the site is not an occasion for them to reflect on industrialization or corporate greed? To whose fantasies about whom are you pandering, and, worse yet, in the guise of having something emancipatory to say?
Lawrence Black says:

November 26, 2015 at 11:13 pm

Brilliant work, as one would expect. But can I say something? I’m a native of rural Nevada and “Battleborn” felt like a kind of salvation. Claire Watkins seems like the most brilliant and effective writer that Nevada has ever had since Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and yet I feel betrayed by this essay. Am I supposed to assume that she “didn’t mean it” when she wrote the stories in “Battleborn”? She says she wrote them for “old white men” of the traditional literary establishment, so…. If I take pleasure in the stories–if, as someone who suffered through rural Nevada and loved these stories on those terms tries to speak up, what does that mean? Am I part of what Watkins wants to “burn down”? Does it matter if I am a man or not?

The other things I will add parenthetically. How worthwhile is it to indulge in gossip? I didn’t know who Stephen Elliot was until you mentioned him, and one quick Google shows how much of a fundamental douche bag he is. I get that you want redemption / justice / revenge, but you’re better than that.

I’ve never encountered a better Nevada mind as you….
Hannah Mae says:

November 26, 2015 at 11:05 pm

Speaking of naming things heretofore nameless! Yes, yes, a thousand times. What a relief to recognize that it’s the bullshit of the system, so insidious that it’s even inside us- that it isn’t a dreary personal problem, that we are all down here in the murk together, swinging away. How can we not become small in our ambitions? How can we remain kind and considerate of others in life, and yet insist in artmaking on ruthlessly following our own compasses? If the master’s tools have become our tools too, can we figure out how to use them to dismantle this goddamn house anyhow? Fuck the bastards! Write on!
Susan Balée says:

November 26, 2015 at 8:03 pm

What a powerful piece of writing, and true. Glad you noticed the riddle within the enigma — you feel oppressed by men, your friend wary of smoking the joint oppressed by white privilege, no doubt your students oppressed by some of their professors, and loads of people who feel they could have been ‘contenders’ as artists but they were derailed by depression, children, needing to pay the rent, a million other things. Everyone panders to a certain extent because it’s not possible to advance by being an outspoken iconoclast before you have the security to let it all hang out. I read and reviewed “Battleborn” in a fiction roundup that also included Kyle Minor’s “Praying Drunk.” I found both collections excellent. You have a great gift for inhabiting male characters and making them believable. It bothers you that Elliott got away with this misogynistic behavior, but why do you care what he thinks when he’s such a jerk? His own email indicts him. Your writing will return; this piece has primed the pump. Good luck.
Cee says:

November 26, 2015 at 6:24 pm

Wow. This piece was a revelation. As a reader I have always wondered if my true heart-favorite writers have been women because I am giving them “extra points” (wtf what kind of self-gender-hate does that require??) or because of something else. Now I can put my finger on the reason. This makes me all the more sure of my complete lack of interest in seeking out male authors to read when there are plenty more books to support that are written for me/toward me.

Thank you for writing this!
Nate says:

November 26, 2015 at 12:52 pm

I just realized that the appeal of dead authors is that it’s easier to ignore who they were as people.
Jeb Harrison says:

November 26, 2015 at 11:54 am

Dear Claire,

I am a 60-year old white guy, a fiction writer, a Dad, a husband (33 years of wedded bliss), a fellow human being and completely irrelevant in today’s literary marketplace.

If there’s one thing I learned in the PLU MFA program, it’s that there’s almost nothing you can say these days without offending someone and subsequently getting a label slapped onto your sorry ass. The other thing I learned is that labels suck. Your essay does a good job demonstrating these two inalienable truths, enough to get my hackles up. For about ten minutes.

As we were walking down to the beach on this brisk Thanksgiving morning my wife said “why do you read essays by 32-year old women if they only bring you down?” (I read a carbon copy Jonathan Franzen-bashing sentiment on Electric Lit yesterday.)

I said, “It doesn’t bring me down. It makes me angry. It gives me something to say.”

When we arrived on the shore, the first thing I saw were the dark figures of two bottlenose dolphins inside a wall of emerald green water. Several people watched as the two body surfed side-by-side for a minute, then disappeared into the depths. Then we walked down the beach to watch my son ride the waves on his long board, feeling the same excitement when he hung five as I did when I saw the dolphins – a shiver of joy jolted my spine and made my eyebrows quiver. And I thought of you in thirty years, standing on the beach, watching your child surf, praying for the appearance of more dolphin and thinking about all the time you wasted thinking about things that don’t matter.

Go fight your fight, Claire. Beat your chest! Stamp your feet! Write, as they say, like a motherfucker. Grab that spotlight!
David Biddle says:

November 26, 2015 at 8:10 am

What a seminal essay. (Sorry). It truly is though. I would just say for me I’ve seen the writing on the wall for the past decade. Women are the only ones, for the most part, as a group, who read quality fiction in any meaningful way. I have been writing with them in mind since about 2008. I could see how great, established writers would feel like they have to deal with the so-called publishing patriarchy (and colleagues as well), but on the reading side of the equation, women are royalty. (This probably means two unpublished works of mine will never arrive, which is sad, but that’s okay). Thanks Claire Vaye Watkins. And you’re right, burn the motherfucking system to the ground! I hope there’s room for guys who get your vibe.
Ritesh says:

November 26, 2015 at 3:46 am

Fact 1: I didn’t know who is Stephen Elliot.
Fact 2: I read your article, because Google suggested it to me.
Observation: You keep on writing what matters to you and there are enough people who are looking to read honest and truthful writing without have to conform to any belief or rules.
Jon says:

November 26, 2015 at 2:52 am

Bravo. This white man is sick to death of all the “unflinching” (which usually actually means sexually juvenile) white male literature being written today. The last thing we need is more of it. Some alternate viewpoints, concerns, obsessions would be most welcome for all if us readers, whoever we are.
Miranda says:

November 25, 2015 at 11:48 pm

The Stephen Elliot part of this bothers me. While sexism should obviously be taken seriously, we really need to be careful about throwing the term around. I’m all for naming names and so on, but surely we all have a responsibility to wield the power of name shame wisely. Simply seeing someone as a student rather than a writer is not sexist. The writer WAS a student at the time, and Elliot was there in an instructor capacity, so of course he thinks of her as a student. Why is it “sexist” to not describe her as she wants to be described? That’s madness. If I am working two jobs, one as a chef and the other as a writer, and I meet someone in the restaurant, they are probably going to use the chef description when mentioning me to a third party, even though I may feel that the writer side of myself is more important. It’s not sexist, it is just an offhanded description by someone who doesn’t know you very well. The bit about “gaslighting” – a difference of perspective does not add up to gaslighting. Gaslighting, again, is a pretty serious term to be throwing around.
This woman clearly felt hurt by not being written about as favorably as Kyle Minor, who may have been more well known to Elliot, and that’s understandable but, again, not getting equal billing to another (female, it is probably worthwhile to note) writer may not feel great, but it is not sexism. If we are going to have worthwhile discussion of these important topics, and we REALLY need to have worthwhile discussions about this, then we need to apply a wiser filter to the lens, than that of rabid PC entitlement.
Sarah says:

November 25, 2015 at 9:46 pm

I bet you dollars to donuts that if Lydia Davis, Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, Judy Budnitz, Lydia Millet, Elizabeth McCracken, Margaret Atwood, Hannah Tinti, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Rachel Kushner, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Loorie Moore, Kelly Link, Alice Munroe, Cheryl Strayed, Jennifer Egan, Donna Tartt, Amy Tan, Yiyun Li, Jhumpa Lahiri, Annie Dillard, Francine Prose, Annie Proulx, Elizabeth Strout, Louise Eldrich, Alice Walker ever wrote an essay talking about how they sold out their own voice, the only person they would blame would be themselves.
Kathryn Parmeter says:

November 25, 2015 at 8:08 pm

I couldn’t even get to this essay for the first four hours this morning. It broke Tin House’s web site.

Whoa. No more to say. The rest will come as I reflect and digest.
Cinthia says:

November 25, 2015 at 7:34 pm

Oh my fucking god–I love this essay! Thanks so much for writing. Especially love this: “She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write.”
Pleeassee! Let’s all keep writing like women, with our blood and guts and ovaries and childbirth pain, and let’s all know that this is enough, that it’s more than enough, that it’s universal and strong and good and pure, and the hell with what the old white men think or say or write. The world is changing. The dudes have to get with it.
Karl Harshman says:

November 25, 2015 at 5:09 pm

Nice revenge piece!

I have looked down on white men for a while but didn’t really think about reversing the pyramid until now.
Tessa Bell says:

November 25, 2015 at 5:04 pm

Bravo. I’ve been on the planet for sixty years. It never ceases to amaze me how deeply ingrained gender bias is and how deeply we are affected by it, and I grew up in the sixties and seventies when there were new things like birth control and Betty Friedan and we thought the world was going to change.

Instead the cultural myths just keep on rolling, written, produced and distributed by people who have no clue.

I only hope that by the time your children are my children’s age, things will actually be different.
Gary Tracy says:

November 25, 2015 at 4:30 pm

Great essay — I enjoyed reading it, and will continue thinking about it.
Laura says:

November 24, 2015 at 5:37 pm

Upthread, some guy wrote, “You’ve got a good style. Please don’t spend your whole life whining about men. They aren’t worth it, and half of them aren’t assholes, anyway. Try to hang out with the ones who aren’t, and write about people you love. You’ll be a better artist.”

Yeah, because Claire was obviously asking whether you think she has “a good style,” and was “whining,” and was asking what to do about assholes, and asking how to be a better artist.

Damn, boy, are you at all familiar with the concept of mansplaining? What a wholly condescending and silly response to this essay. You know what? If you refrain from handing out unsolicited advice to people who don’t need your help, you might “be a better artist.” Or you might just remain an asshole. Try it and see.
Zuriink says:

November 24, 2015 at 4:57 pm

Compelling story! It is undeniable that society relies and revolves around what each gender says individually, that is, there is nothing in this world that people don’t put into a category, everything is just categorize as to what the world use to be and do many many years ago. Nothing changes from one day to another, that I get. But, not enough people try hard enough to equalized what needs to be equal. That is, we are all to blame for such results, because even the smallest things could alter the bigger picture, meaning, most of the elected famous figures; from writers, players, to celebrities, are chosen by ourselves. Sure everybody is different and you could not changed how people think, in this case anyway, but the world is big enough to have enough female supporters! From any category! Writers!Painters! Anything at all! It is understandable that everybody’s situation is different, but people have the choice to choose who to follow as an example, with reference to your amazing story; which I admire quite a lot. Your writing is quite empowering! Keep it up.
Eleanor T says:

November 24, 2015 at 4:42 pm

To adopt a phrase from my theatre school days, writing this took brass ovaries. Thank you and bravo! Or rather, brava!
Katie says:

November 24, 2015 at 4:29 pm

I fucking love everything that you said. It is a truth that I have not been able to articulate and I am so glad you did that for me. And to all the men on here saying “It’s not because you’re a woman.” or “Not all men”…… Seriously go fuck yourselves. You are literally doing exactly everything that men ALWAYS do when a woman speaks her truth. Just shut the fuck up and LISTEN. It’s not your truth. it’s OURS. It’s not for YOU. It’s for US.
abandoning eden says:

November 24, 2015 at 3:53 pm

I didn’t write anything big, only short little 1 or 2 page pieces, for about a year and a half after my kid was born. I was terrified that I had lost ‘it.’
But now my kid is 2 and a half, and after working on them all year, I just had 2 major articles accepted for publication (I’m an academic in a field that writes articles).

Anyway, it will come back. I’ve also been getting out of the house/away from my baby a lot more this year (leaving her with her dad), and getting better sleep, all of which helps.
Barbara March says:

November 24, 2015 at 3:03 pm

Dear Claire,
I’m a writer, a wife, a mother, a desert rat. I’ve pandered to my colleagues, my clients, my children, my husbands, my horses and myself in my wandering to become visible. It’s too early for resolution. Thank you for your essay.

Barbara March
Founding Director, Surprise Valley Writers’ Conference
Kelsey says:

November 24, 2015 at 2:56 pm

Hi there. This resonated very deep within me, so I thought I’d tell you so. I write, though not professionally, and I realized three or four years ago that I was also writing for straight white dudes. The realization came when I was doing NaNoWriMo and I realized I’d written the better part of a novella without mentioning ANY women. It was a typical “man stands against the elements while bad guys are chasing him” sort of thing, and I had the thought, “Why couldn’t this be a woman? None of the things this far are dependent on him being a man. You can’t even see his face for most of this.” I may yet return to it and make it better, though it would require fighting my own comfort zone, not only in the status quo, but also throwing out about 60,000 words and starting all the way over. Thanks to you lighting a fire in my heart again about it, I think I will.

On motherhood and art, I have a two-year-old (who is happily demolishing a stuffed octopus as I type this), and I suffered from SEVERE postpartum depression for almost a year after he was born. I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that my brain chemistry has probably been permanently altered, though in some ways it’s for the better. I’ve never thought I was terribly maternal, but I find myself being Mama a lot more easily these days. It took me awhile to get writing again, but the last year has been the most productive I’ve ever had, by sheer volume as well as me being pleased with what I’m writing. I guess what I’m saying is that you will get back to writing things you’re happy with; it just might be different stuff than you originally thought you were going to write. Given what we’ve both said about the things we used to write, that can only be good, right?

Oh, goodness. Look at that wall of text. THANK YOU for writing this. Clearly it made an impact. When you figure out how to burn this stupid, limiting system down, let me know and I’ll find my torch.
h. rethmann says:

November 24, 2015 at 2:15 pm

Amen, awesome, and thank you, Claire.
Robyn McIntyre says:

November 24, 2015 at 1:44 pm

Thank you for this.
Kati says:

November 24, 2015 at 1:35 pm

This essay is making me want to write again. Thank you.
Nuge says:

November 24, 2015 at 1:35 pm

I’m noticing a lot of generalizations and assumptions in this post.

“Let’s punch up.”

As opposed to the ridiculous claim of “punching down?” Everything depends on context and not every statement is drawn from some sort of highly influencing social structure.
Louise Michel says:

November 24, 2015 at 12:51 pm

Hey, I just wanted to write to you quickly and let you know how much I liked your piece. A lot of what you’re describing happened in the Bay Area poetry scene two summers ago and escalated into the New York alt lit scene. Women and queer people were coming forward about the sexual violence and unrepentant sexism they had faced from men in their writing networks. One particularly relevant example is with Janey Smith (Steve Trull) who— while curating a popular reading series in SF— announced one of his readers as “This is X [woman], she slept with Y [man]” and the group of crony writermen there laughed. When he was called out as a rapist, a lot of his supporters— particularly in the alt lit and new narrative scene— doubled down, calling the call-out that was posted about Janey a “witch hunt” and asserting that the women who wrote it “should be thrown in jail” for defaming him. I guess I was only 20 at the time, new to the poetry scene, but I watched as people whom I considered literary heroes behave as reactionaries and it made me resolve to die before I ever became that toothless and misogynistic.

Another thing I wanted to add is that ‘pandering’ comes from a Chaucer book, Troilus & Criseyde. The main character, Pandarus, coerces his niece into having sex with a prince. The multi-level action of pandering (etymologically, the selling of a woman to a man by another man) relates back to the form of the book itself: the narrator is *not* Chaucer, but someone who believes in courtly love and that everything Pandarus does is okay. The book also meta-fictively panders because it can be read at face value as a love story (a lot of 1960s editions refer to it as the first great love story) but if you’re reading it that way, you’re reading it wrong. Chaucer meant for it to be a critique of rape culture, and he masked it with a dumb narrator so that he wouldn’t get beheaded. Because of literacy rates then (ce. 14th century) he had to write for men, but the layers of irony and how it is this wonderful and crafty critique of paternalism only came to light really with feminist lit crit onward of the 70s. What he was doing at the time was pretty unprecedented; he manipulated the constraints of authority in a way that was unreadable, closer to modernism than to mid-English medieval lit.

Which, I think, kind of brings me to the point of it all. I don’t know if women can reclaim poetry in the here and now through poems, because poetry is this longstanding edifice of patriarchy, capitalism, and the nation. For women to truly recuperate it, it would no longer look like what we consider poetry, with its fixed cordinates of schools, form, and methodology, because all are attached to the law of value and the shit it has begat (patriarchy, racism, police and prisons and $60,000 universities.) The undoing of capitalism would be the only way to truly change it. When I think of readership, I envision teen girls pouring over my manuscripts in malls they have seized and barricaded, and I try to write for that future militant girl communard maybe to somehow call her into existence.
Gideon Endicott says:

November 24, 2015 at 11:07 am

While I fully acknowledge Watkins’ ownership over her own story, and the validity of attacking real or perceived iniquities in literature and the business of literature — though, the utility of literature (or the business of it) as a proxy for society, or a force for social justice, is a worthwhile question — it’s amusing to see a very-well-publicized prize-winning Literary It Girl name and shame the editor of some who-the-fuck-cares past-its-prime internet zine and then call for people to “punch up.”

Moreover, while Mr. Elliot’s decision to send that email was stupid and tasteless unto vapidity, it seems that Ms. Watkin’s understanding of the transgression is that he didn’t see (or acknowledge) her with the same gravitas that she saw (sees) herself. She had an agent! A good agent! Would that I could attach each bruising of my substantial ego to a larger, unassailable sociopolitical narrative.
mark says:

November 24, 2015 at 10:58 am

I look forward to the day when we can drop race and gender and talk about interesting stories that bring joy and hope to our lives. Besides, white men don’t read fiction, haven’t you heard?
Jay says:

November 24, 2015 at 10:53 am

Loved this! Retweeted this.

You had me at “these days even nice girls give blow jobs.”

Am changing my text-by-dead-white-male-author to one by a woman next quarter.

Seriously, “Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better.”
harlo says:

November 24, 2015 at 9:46 am

While I fully recognize Watkins’ ownership over her own story, and the validity of attacking real or perceived iniquities in literature and the business of literature — though, the utility of literature (or the business of it) as a proxy for society, or a force for social justice, is a worthwhile question — it’s pretty amusing to see a well-publicized Literary It Girl name and shame the editor of some who-the-fuck-cares past-its-prime internet zine and then call for people to “punch up.”
wray cummings says:

November 24, 2015 at 9:46 am

Well said. Thank you.

The births of my children marked the birth of a different me too.
MA Bowman says:

November 24, 2015 at 9:33 am

Ms. Watkins: I never do this sort of commenting, but I was so absolutely floored by the truths you spoke in this exquisite piece that I had to speak. I’m an actor who dabbles as a writer and carry my own White Man Who Must Be Impressed in my head, too. Thank you a thousand times for speaking your truth. I will try to carry your message forward in making my own art and hopefully, one day, we’ll see stories women tell taking their rightful place alongside the ones men tell. Maybe one day, we will have stories about people, without the minimizing specifications of gender, race, orientation, ableism, age, etc. It will be people. Thank you, from my heart, for your words.
Harry Eastwood says:

November 24, 2015 at 9:00 am

telepathic words are a great goal. i long to write like smiley, atwood, leguin and kingsolver.. Cormac is good too.. but he doesn’t take me new places…the angry energy he taps into is accessible with my own testostronic dealings with reality… there is a school of thought that the real art is in creating life from your belly….maybe that reality makes words lose their magic..im stuck in magic word land though…that’s why women smile patiently at me when i mansplain, i do not know dick, but i’m cool with it, why would i want to know dick? …..you chicks have all the cards in reality and now you know it as manwords seem less real to you…you and your magic uteruses, or is it uteri? just don’t let it stick to you… good luck in your fight… i don’t fight anymore, i nap… anger clouds your thinking….
Cheryl Pappas says:

November 24, 2015 at 8:08 am

What a powerful essay, thank you! I connect to so much of what you say here. At the end, though, all I could think of was Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf! She would love this essay, and your writing. And here we are still tackling the white males inside of us. She is my model, even though the DWM are there, too.
Rumpus Fan says:

November 24, 2015 at 8:00 am

Claire, Thank you for sharing your experience. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t defend Stephen Elliott’s character and that he’s one of the last men I’d use in an example for pandering. He’s published the voices of sex workers, LGBT in San Francisco, gender queer porn stars, broke-ass aspiring authors, and published a series by Roxane Gay: http://therumpus.net/author/roxane-gay/.

Yes, the Daily Rumpus e-mail you’re mentioned in was insensitive, and he does tend to overshare from his life. Yes, sexism is rampant in publishing, but I don’t think Stephen Elliott should be the posterboy. There are many more more qualified targets to pick.

I wish you and he would sit down for an episode of Rumpus Radio and discuss these issues. Would be an interesting podcast!
Ivie says:

November 24, 2015 at 7:46 am

I really enjoyed this piece. I recently started writing and while people have been encouraging, there are often comments like ‘I didn’t know you were funny’, or ‘wow, you’re so articulate!’ In their eyes, I can only be one thing; a woman who is demure, or quiet, or uninteresting.I just try to speak up about my version of reality, and so far people have been able to relate to it. There has been a shift in Nigerian literature in recent years to female voices (most notably Chimamanda Adichie) and this has made a lot of people uncomfortable. The truth often does.
Richard Rowley says:

November 24, 2015 at 7:39 am

Impressive. You packed a lot into one short article. Rather than dilute you narrative with any of my own words, I’ll simply say thanks and well written. You have given me much to consider.
Alice, Sophomore at 68 says:

November 24, 2015 at 7:16 am

Hi, Claire (love your name):

LOVED what you wrote…..I have written a poetry book, Sanctuary of the Soul and my memoir; Ghost Child to Triumph……looking for a literary agent….my life story won a scholarship at 60 and I am now a 69 year old Sophomore at Oakland University (live in Rochester, MI). I need to read “Battleborn”—I was born standin’ up and talkin’ back; if you would like to hear my story of standing up (literally) to a church who voted me out of a 31-year membership…name up on a big screen, followed by the words, “Conduct unbecoming a Child of God.”..you may contact me. I fought the good ole boys for 18 months; called to a meeting (18 men, not allowed to have a woman with me and asked, “Are you still having sex with your ex?” I enjoyed the fight. Kind Regards, Alice (overcomer, wounded healer, dancer, singer, author, poet, Vietnam era veteran and sophomore) :) P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!
bm says:

November 24, 2015 at 7:11 am

This was excellent. Thank you.
Elizabeth F says:

November 24, 2015 at 7:03 am

Thank you. I really enjoyed reading this piece. I recently started writing as a way to feel relevant in the dizzying world of mother to three young ones and I have to say, your post articulated so clearly the mansplaining I’ve been facing. I chose to write on topics that are important to me and I fully understand that that is very threatening to some people. I’ve been called a ‘mommy blogger’ in the most derogatory way (by a professional writer who is male, shocking, I know). But, I had started to take the comments to heart, so your piece is a good reminder to dust myself off and continue to tell my story. Thank you.
Rich bray says:

November 24, 2015 at 6:59 am

At the fine young age of 76, I’m just now coming to grips with my childhood. apparently it extended well beyond the physical time it should have. My childhood was filled to the brim with the belief, no it was even deeper than that, that I as a man was important while the woman I had married and had three children with, who finished college on her own, who raised those kids, who became an elementary school teacher, who designed and ran a dual language K thru 6 learning program, did not matter. I grew up watching women be mothers, girls, cheerleaders, girl friends, wives, and women I slept with but never competitors. How could they be, they didn’t matter.
Ellen McSweeney says:

November 24, 2015 at 5:48 am

One of the most amazing things I’ve read in years. This is an important read for women in every art form, for music (my field) suffers from this malaise too. Congratulations on an important piece that will serve as a compass for many.
Jen Agg says:

November 24, 2015 at 5:38 am

A perfect articulation of everything that happens to us all the time. And of my own failings as a hyper privileged white woman and of what it’s like being married to a Haitian man. I teared up a few times (on the rag, BUT STILL). And read every word to my husband, knowing he’d get it, but still, wanting him to. Hope my book doesn’t overshoot the trend….
Cathy Bryant says:

November 24, 2015 at 5:25 am

So much of this resonates with me. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this honest and illuminating piece.
Ed Geldens says:

November 24, 2015 at 4:42 am

Enjoyed reading this essay. Glad to see that you have come to grips with who you are writing for. IMHO, we, men or woman, writers or just office workers, computer programmers and so on, all, whether we are aware of it or not, if we are interested in having our writing ability acknowledged or personal gratification or commercial success writer towards “the powers that be”. Reading you essay it appears to me that like us all, you were not aware you were doing it, but later came to realize it. Although you think it is because you are woman in the writing field, I don’t think that really matters that you are a woman. But don’t get me wrong, being a woman “in a man’s world” definitly is a factor, just like being a black in a “white man’s world” or as you mentioned “..being half Cuban” was a factor. All factors that at the point in our societal evolution must be taken into account in relation to acceptable of our work. In other words we all must bend and write towards whoever, what ever sex, to get what we really want.
On the other hand, if we write because we like to write — period. Or you could say because we like to tell stories. Or because we like to write stories we like to read, then none of the above constraints apply. I am not professional, published or know writer of your statue. It’s really not my goal. I place my self in the categories mentioned above, I like to write (the act makes me feel good, like an occasional cool breeze on a hot summer day does), and I like to tell stores and so on. So I write what, I want the way I want. I would be less than honest if I did not admit that the thought of being able to make large amounts of money from my writing would not appeal to me in the event that somehow something I wrote caused that to happen. I would certainly take the money. But that, again is not why I write. And as I said earlier, if I did take the money I am sure I would have to adjust my view and write towards someone in order to keep it coming. So, in closing I just want to say glad you came to the awareness about why you write! As someone once said, “If you want to write, just write.”.
Tony Bunn says:

November 24, 2015 at 2:02 am

I don’t know whether your essay was written “for me” — old black man, that I am — but I found it a quite engaging read. Literary introspection is fascinating when it’s done with honesty.
sara says:

November 24, 2015 at 12:19 am

Amazing essay. Thank you so much for this.
Daniel Fowles says:

November 23, 2015 at 9:41 pm

You’ve got a good style. Please don’t spend your whole life whining about men. They aren’t worth it, and half of them aren’t assholes, anyway. Try to hang out with the ones who aren’t, and write about people you love. You’ll be a better artist.
Nicole Nelson says:

November 23, 2015 at 8:48 pm

Fantastic post. Just today, I wrestled with whether to further engage with a male media figure about his response (in a private email) to my message complimenting him sincerely and offering gentle constructive criticism. Specifically, I suggested that he feature more female authors on his show, which is very male author-heavy. He responded with anger, aggression, and defensiveness.

You’re probably well aware of both, but Elisa Albert’s book AFTER BIRTH (about those early motherhood struggles) is a book I’d choose over Hemingway any day. And Lidia Yuknavich’s THE SMALL BACKS OF CHILDREN is a fierce examination of art and gender and privilege (among other things). Both in my DIY canon.

Thanks again for this piece, which I will continue to think about.
Edward Morrison says:

November 23, 2015 at 7:30 pm

what a dickhead move, both at night and the newsletter. man. what a douche
Melissa Leavitt says:

November 23, 2015 at 6:50 pm

Consider this more of the enthusiastic applause. I’ve needed to read this since 2009, when I lived my own entry in the Stephen Elliott Comes to Town genre. There’s a kind of lexical sleight of hand done by those who deny their privilege that makes the most bottom-of-the-barrel misogyny feel like an probing critique of all the work I’ll be talked out of writing. Can we do an anthology? Really? My piece is ready to go.
Iain says:

November 23, 2015 at 5:17 pm

I agree with Annie — being a new parent, being a mother, is an experience; a happening. Many experiences, in fact. Look at it with your artistic eye and explore where it takes you. Create and explore new categories along the way. The stories you mentioned that didn’t quite do what you wanted — those are explorations too — I think it takes writing something that doesn’t quite fit what you want to write the story you want to write. Take an existing category and combine it with something like those explorations — hopefully leading to the new spaces you want to write in.

“I am trying to write something urgent, trying to be vulnerable and honest, trying to listen, trying to identify and articulate my innermost feelings, trying to make you feel them too…”

Please do. I’m male, intellectually I know I have privilege, but without stories like you’re suggesting, I don’t really know what it feels like to not have that privilege. I can guess at it but I’ll be wrong most of the time. My most read categories are SF&F; which is a dry dry desert when it comes to finding stories that gives me the fantastic worlds/futures I love reading about while at the same time telling a story _being_ a woman (or any other gender), or non-white, or having a family, or … this list goes on. There are some rare exceptions…make it less rare, please? Provided, of course, it is a story you want to tell and read…

That last is the important thing — don’t write to a category; just write the story you want to tell, write it your feelings and visions. Write it for yourself, your experiences. Whether it lands in a category or not — there’s someone out there that will enjoy the story, someone whom your feelings and ideas will speak to; possibly even give answers or new insight to. More than likely, many someones.

Thank you for exploring,

Iain
Lily says:

November 23, 2015 at 5:16 pm

So beautifully said. Definitely one not just to read, but also to watch. Thank you.
Amy k says:

November 23, 2015 at 4:37 pm

Fuck yeah
sara says:

November 23, 2015 at 4:30 pm

thank you for this.
Diane Gilbert-Snyder says:

November 23, 2015 at 2:23 pm

God, this is an awesome read. Thank you for it.
Eliana says:

November 23, 2015 at 1:53 pm

Sometimes you read something and think, that was all in my head but not so organized or well said. And you realize you can’t forget it that now you have to write a whole different book than the one you were writing. And you realize that you already knew Claire was wise in that stark desert way but now you see that there is more.
C. says:

November 23, 2015 at 1:04 pm

Very curious how/where the author’s new novel fits into this discussion. It surprised me not to see it even mentioned here!
Sarah Madges says:

November 23, 2015 at 12:33 pm

Even though “the fact that our culture considers male writers more serious than me” is not a “revelation” to me, this piece is. I have been pandering in my artmaking for too long. Thank you for this.
Klatsoot Nekry says:

November 23, 2015 at 12:25 pm

Hallelujah. Can’t wait to toast some marshmallows at the conflagration. If you can pardon some encouragement from a dead honkey man, here’s an excerpt from Louis Aragon’s “Adventures of Telemachus” that keeps me warm on cold days:

“…bust everything, you flat-faced ninnies. You will be the masters of everything you break. They made laws, ethics, aesthetics to instill in you the respect of frail objects. Whatever is frail is fair game for breakage. Try your strength just once; after that I dare you not to continue. Whatever you cannot break will break you, will be your master. Shatter sacrosanct ideas, anything that brings tears to the eyes, shatter, shatter, I bring you without charge that opium more potent than any drug: shatter. Doubt is the darkest, the deepest well ever presented to you: falling into it means an endless descent that will provide you for eternity with the charming sensation of going down in an elevator.”
Katie says:

November 23, 2015 at 11:16 am

thank you for this. I will enjoy reading your writing when you are writing for who you want to write to. Don’t discount writing about motherhood as quaint. Parenting done with intention and attention is a fierce and powerful self excavation, just like writing. So writing about parenting can be double power, if you can get close enough to it.
Rex Stock says:

November 23, 2015 at 10:49 am

Great writing. And, as a white male with nearly 60 years above ground, I think this girl might be on to something (my spellcheck wants me to make on to into one word but I’m going to resist it in a manly manner)… If her cloak doesn’t work, I’m sure mine will… Congratulations, Claire, on some really good stuff!