January 23, 2013
Do you know how to be a woman now?
‘”No–I’m talking about the common attitudinal habit in women that we’re kind of…failing if we’re not a bit neurotic. That we’re somehow boorish, complacent, and unfeminine if we’re content.
The way women feel that they are not so much well-meaning human beings doing the best they can but, instead, an endless list of problems (fat, hairy, unfashionable, spotty, smelly, tired, unsexy, and with a dodgy pelvic floor, to boot) to be solved. And that, with the application of a great deal of time and money–I mean a great deal of itme and money. Have you seen how much laser hair removal is?–we might, one day, 20 years into the future, finally be able to put our feet up and say, “For nine minutes today, I almost nailed it.”
Before, of course, starting up the whole grim, remorseless, thankless schedule the next day, all over again.
So if I was asked, “Do you know how to be a woman now?” my answer would be, “Kind of yes, really, to be honest.” ‘
–Caitlin Moran, How To Be A Woman
January 20, 2013
A bad year to be a woman with a reproductive system.
I want to take a few moments to delineate the many ways in which 2012 was a spectacularly depressing year to be a pregnant woman. We’re only a few weeks into 2013 so it’s still too soon to say, but so far I haven’t had to listen to that jangly Rick Santorum song with the lyrics, “We’ll have justice for the unborn/Factories back on our shores…” one single time, and that is progress. Neither have I noted once that a panel of old men (too many of whom with more children than fingers on one hand) have been provided a international platform from which to debate just how much American women’s access to contraception should be curtailed.
And speaking of “debate”, so far in 2013 I have not once had to endure the insult of 91 members of Parliament (including the Status of Women Minister) voting for a say as to the contents of my uterus. I was five-weeks pregnant at the time, and I was absolutely horrified, as well as confused as to why I had not been brought in to provide expert consultation. Surely some expertise might have been necessary. Did you know that there are actually 233 members of Parliament who have not a single uterus among them? The input of a living, thinking pregnant woman into this conversation might have provided some much-needed perspective.
So far, 2013 has been an improvement. It’s been at least a few weeks since a group of Ontario MPPs (not a uterus among them either, note) staged a press-conference supporting a move to stop public-funding of abortion in this province. And while I am sure that several women worldwide actually have died this year because they’ve lacked access to abortion and other maternal health procedures, there has not been a story with the level of tragedy of Savita Halappanavar‘s, who died in Ireland after miscarrying at 17 weeks pregnant when a fading fetal heartbeat was privileged over an actual human life.
2012 was a bad year to be a woman with a reproductive system. I’m talking Handmaid’s Tale territory. When I got pregnant, it was immediately apparent to me that my body had become a national concern, that my womb was now somebody’s territory for staging a shouty “debate”. A woman who was pregnant in 2012 owned herself just a little less, and it was total madness. I really can’t believe we put up with it. My resolution for 2013 is that we not do that anymore.
December 10, 2012
Taking Responsibility
The Canadian Women in the Literary Arts’ Blog launched today with my post “Taking Responsibility for the CWILA Numbers: My Piece of the Pie”.
“For years, I’ve been counting the pitiful numbers of female bylines in Canadian magazines and newspapers, dropping subscriptions in despair, so when the CWILA numbers were made public last spring, the numbers didn’t surprise me. If anything, I was delighted—finally here was quantifiable evidence that I wasn’t crazy or paranoid, that something was amiss. And I was also deluded enough to imagine that the next step would be simple, to suppose that now everyone knew what the problem was that things would start to change.”
October 16, 2012
(Some) Mothers are Writers
On Harriet’s long-form birth certificate, it is written that her mother is a writer. And while I don’t remember much of those blurry days after she was born, when our world was exploded pieces held together with love and hanging on just barely, I remember filling out that form, hunched over my laptop on our coffee table. When we’d got to Mother’s Occupation, we’d paused for a moment. I was three weeks into maternity leave from a job I wouldn’t go back to, from the least meaningful job title in the universe, which was “research administrator.” We couldn’t write that, and besides, I was no longer one. “Why not say, ‘writer’?” my husband suggested, and so we did.
It is often noted as monumental, that moment when a writer learns to call herself as such, when she gathers the confidence, courage and faith necessary to embark upon a creative path. Which I don’t have a whole lot of truck with. I think we sentimentalize these things too much, that we spend too much time with our heads up our asses, and that a woman staring into the mirror practicing calling herself a writer is like Annie Dillard’s writer who “himself only likes the role, the thought of himself in a hat.” I would argue that more important that learning to call oneself a writer is to write and (even better) to write well and to get the work out there so that everyone will know you’re a writer, and what you think doesn’t really matter.*
So this isn’t about how I lied on official documentation and was professionally transformed, never to administrate research ever again. This isn’t about how I learned to call myself a writer, but instead about how everybody’s wrong about motherhood (and by “everybody”, I mean mainly The Atlantic and Newsweek).
Something funny started happening as soon as I got pregnant in 2008. Professionally speaking, research administration aside, it hadn’t been a great time for me. I was a year out of a graduate creative writing program that had failed to take me places, my classmates were publishing books and I was getting rejection after rejection from lit mags. That post-school thing is always brutal, and from creative writing programs in particular. I remember Anne Patchett writing in her memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy how they finished the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had to “write to save their lives” (I paraphrase). It wasn’t working for me. And so when I got pregnant, it seemed like the writing thing was going to be put aside for awhile. At least I would have another focus.
Life, it seemed, would have other plans. Coinciding with my first trimester were some interesting writing opportunities, an invitation to speak on a panel about literary blogging with the Governor General, increased attention to my blog, and some wonderful new writerly connections. By the time Harriet was born, I’d started writing book reviews, had a couple of stories published, and cheques were arriving pretty regularly, even if they were pitifully small. So when I wrote, “Writer” on her birth certificate, I wasn’t entirely delusional. But it wasn’t entirely true yet either.
I suppose it’s still not wholly true, if we’re speaking in terms of finances, because if I didn’t have a husband who worked full time, we’d be in trouble around here. But I’ll tell you this much, because I’m proud of it, and not because it’s the most important thing, because it isn’t: every month, I make our rent. It’s something. Since I became a mother 3.5 years ago, I’ve managed to put together a hard-scrabbled, deeply fulfilling professional life involving writing, editing, teaching and reviewing. And while motherhood has not been integral to this, as though it unleashed some deep creative fount within me, neither has it been an impediment. In fact, it’s helped hugely with the process in practical terms. It gave me a reason to leave my boring 9-5 job. It’s been the inspiration for some of the best stuff I’ve ever written. I’ve made mother-friends who are inspiring writer-friends in their own right. And motherhood has given me the ability to focus, to sit down and get the words out. Harriet has been in playschool since September and I’ve had mornings for working, and I promise you that I’ve not wasted away a single one.
Now obviously, motherhood is not necessary for career success, for many it really does stand in the way, and plenty of writers have really done quite well without kids. Plenty of mothers are also happy enough to be focusing on motherhood alone. Many jobs don’t mix with motherhood quite so tidily. Quite obviously too, our rent is fairly cheap and I could stand to be way more successful. And furthermore, fortune has been good to me. I am enormously privileged. But–
I am thinking about all this now in connection with Jessa Crispin’s column “The Pram in the Hall“, about how fraught is the question of whether or not to have children for creative professionals in particular. She writes, “The reason why it’s so difficult to think through your decision is because people keep pretending like there is one way this motherhood thing could go, when in reality there are millions.” Which she sees as terrifying as it is rife with potential, but from where I stand now it’s mostly the latter. Like everything with parenthood, when people complain about kids being expensive, demands on parents’ time, how you have to give your kids your all, how you just have to have an exer-saucer just you wait, I throw up my arms and shriek, “It doesn’t have to be this way!” There is not only one way this motherhood thing can go. Because life happens. Also, free will doesn’t get taken out along with the placenta.
For mothers, as with women, and as with people (and I’ve made the connection between mothers and people before), there are reassuringly myriad ways to be. We have to broaden and complicate our understanding of what motherhood is and who mothers are if we ever want the conversation about motherhood to be one from which we actually learn something.
*Obviously, I was a child in the 1980s when our education system was robust, my teachers told me I could anything, and my parents underlined this point over and over. So I can afford to be so flippant.
June 18, 2012
How to avoid being a spam-bot and change the world in the process
This is Jessica Westhead. Basically, what I’m saying is: “Do it like she does.”
Two of the things I complain about most often in public are terrible examples of authors promoting their work online and women writers’ lack of representation in the media and in the world, and so it is amazing to me that both of these annoying things can be addressed with one solution.
But I will address the former problem first, those head-bangingly awful incidents in which it’s clear that authors don’t understand that the opportunity to shill their stuff an offshoot of social media engagement and not its primary purpose. Though I’ve met writers who go the other way, who get a poem published in a national magazine and think it’s bragging to put a link on Facebook. It isn’t. Linking to cool stuff is what people do on Facebook, on twitter and on blogs. But it’s when writers cross a line from, “Look at this!”” (link to published poem) to “Look at me!!” (link to published poem posted on twitter five times daily for months at a time, and also spamming link to other people’s feeds) that it gets to be a problem. When you’re a human who’s a spam-bot, you’ve clearly gone too far.
So how do you avoid becoming a human spam-bot? Easy: don’t post the same link more than twice. If you run out of links, do something new, something better. And in between those links, how about you talk about somebody who isn’t you? A book that isn’t yours? If you’re part of a literary community, you can talk about what your peers are up to. If you aspire to be part of a literary community, deposit yourself within it by engaging with that community’s literature online. If you’ve got nothing to do with any literary community, talk about the best books you’ve read lately and– ka-pow– you’ve just situated yourself in (close) relation to those books, those authors. It’s amazing. From these references, your readers will be able to figure out what you’re about.
When you have promotional opportunities– to write guest blog posts, to write your own blog, when you’re talking to a reporter or answering a Q&A– share your attention with other deserving writers and books. When someone puts a call out for book suggestions, resist to the impulse to chime in with “Mine!” and suggest somebody else’s. If there is a readers’ choice award going on, take a risk and champion a book that you didn’t write (which is the point of these things anyway. It’s not a “writer’s choice” award). If your book is up for a readers’ choice award, sit back and let the readers choose. (If you win a readers’ choice that you rigged, you didn’t win anything at all.) Engage with social media not just as a writer, but as a reader. It broadens your approach, and makes you that much more interesting.
And it also serves to promote a culture of readers, of reading. If you’ve already got someone’s attention, they know about your book, so why not suggest another? It increases the odds that whoever is listening will buy two books instead of one. And as a writer, you certainly stand to benefit when people start buying more books. When you reference other people’s books, it becomes less about your book than about reading in general, which is a terrifying leap to take, I know, but if your book is really good, it will only thrive in that healthy bookish eco-system. It means that you’re taking the opportunity to support other writers, and not in that annoying “rah-rah we all stick to together” way, but in that you have a platform from which to promote the work you really believe in, the books you’d like to see growing up alongside your own, the writing you admire.
And if you are a woman (and even if you’re not) and if the writing you admire happens to be written by women, then herein lies your chance to be part of the solution to the problem of women’s lack of representation in the media and the world. You don’t have to be a book reviewer or an editor to do something about it. You just have to be a reader as well as a writer, a reader/writer who champions the work of worthy women writers. Use your power as someone with a platform to shine a light on other books, other works. Support great work, be vociferous in that support, and understand how that support has greater impact when it’s a woman’s great work you’re supporting, that you’re helping to change the game for the better.
June 14, 2012
Enter CWILA
I am inspired, excited and hopeful like I haven’t been in ages about Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) which has apparently been simmering all spring and broke out into the world yesterday with a storm. A response to the American organization VIDA, CWILA has similarly compiled statistics about gender parity in book reviewing, and the results are predictably dismal. Less dismal, however, were particular statistics for Quill & Quire and THIS Magazine, whose parity negates the excuses of others as to why such a thing is impossible. It clearly isn’t. How wonderful.
From the site: “CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) is an inclusive national literary organization for people who share feminist values and see the importance of strong and active female perspectives and presences within the Canadian literary landscape.”
It is an incredible honour to have such ranks to join.
June 7, 2012
Never Mind the Patriarchy Part 2: Myrl Coulter and Helen Potrebenko
Last week, I read Myrl Coulter’s The House With the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers, a memoir of Coulter’s experiences growing up in Winnipeg and being forced to give up her son for adoption in 1968 when she finds herself pregnant. Like Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures, which I enjoyed so much, Coulter shows “what happens when individual lives collide with their particular historical moments.” Unmarried and a teenager, Coulter was sent away from her family and community to live at one of those ubiquitous maternity homes while she waited to have her baby. As an unwed mother, she was treated by disdain at the hospital where her son was born, and expected to move on with her life after the fact as if the story had never happened.
Unsurprisingly, this moving on proves difficult, and the memoir goes on to show how Coulter carried her experience inside her for so many years in silence. Looking back, she questions how her parents could have let it happen, could have sent her away, could have let her give away her son. Eventually, years and lifetimes later, she and her son are reunited, and she’s forthright about the complicated nature of their relationship, and also about her anger at Canada’s closed adoption system that manipulated and wronged so many young woman just like her.
She writes, “…the feminist version of me… was born on a dark night in 1968 when I gave birth to my first child alone in a big crowded hospital. I knew at last that my feminism stems from the invisibility society demanded for unwed mothers back then; I knew that my sense of agency was born in a social order that dictated no one should stop to offer comfort to a frightened eighteen-year-old girl in labour simply because she wasn’t married… I knew.. that being a feminist and being a mother are inevitably connected, like fetus and placenta.” With excellent writing and perfect detail, Coulter paints a rather stark picture of life “back then”, though all of us who have ever been pregnant by mistake are well-aware that the experience carries a devastating stigma to this day.
There was no reason why I picked up Helen Potrebenko’s TAXI! to read next, except that both books had come in at the library at the very same time. But, as in my first Never Mind the Patriarchy experience in March, random books brought forth remarkable connections. Once again, I was reading a book that Anakana Schofield had recommended, this time TAXI!, which Schofield calls her “favourite Vancouver novel” (and you can believe it). It’s the story of Shannon, a female taxi driver in Vancouver during 1971 and 1972. The episodic novel follows Shannon as she philosophizes and longs for revolution, driving the streets of Vancouver with various down-and-outs and scumbags throwing up in her backseat.
Says Shannon, “There are so so few choices for women. They’ve got you in a cage. If you’re bad they tighten the bars around you so you’ve got no space at all. They they give you back the original cage and call that freedom.”
It’s a funny book, but timeless in a way that is tragic. Protesters erect tent cities in local parks, unions are striking, there is social unrest, not enough jobs for young people, and there’s a war going on. “The first time Shannon drove cab drunk out of her mind was the Christmas after the War Measures Act.” TAXI! could have been written yesterday, which is a mark for Helen Potrebenko, but bad luck for the rest of us. Shannon herself would probably not be so surprised, having never suffered any illusions about progress.
May 23, 2012
On not being part of the problem
I spend a ridiculous amount of time being frustrated at the way women (artists in particular) are misrepresented and unrepresented in the media and in the world. It is not even the lack of appreciation for women’s work that bothers me as much as the perpetual lack of acknowledgement by so many critical voices and outlets that women artists actually exist.
So accordingly, I find myself particularly attuned to issues of diversity in my own editing work, whether at 49thShelf, or in another editing project I’m undertaking at the moment. (I wonder: is this attunement a womanly thing? Does it take one to know one?). And it’s hard, it really is. The people I know and the people I like tend to be like me, and it’s so easy to look around this bubble I inhabit and forget it’s not the world. It takes a lot of trouble to reach outside my own limits, my own contacts. It also makes me uncomfortable to consider that a writer might think I was approaching him/her for reasons of diversity– this just seems offensive. Though I suppose that if a male editor got in touch with me one day and said, “Hey, I was just looking over my contributors and realized I’d forgotten about women and this is a problem,” I’d be more than happy to help fill the gap. I’d also probably think that the editor was a pretty classy guy.
But not being part of the problem extends past my work as editor. Though I realize that the problems I’m writing about here are very much systemic, I am willing to take some responsibility for having been being part of that system sometimes. For being that woman writer whom editors approach and never hear back from, of being nervous, intimidated, not brave enough to take myself and my work very seriously, to ask for what I deserve. I am willing to take some responsibility for the number of times I haven’t been brave at all.
But for a while, this has been changing. For an even longer while, pretending not to be scared has been my very best counter to fear, but lately genuine fearlessness has been easier to come by. A huge part of this is being a part of an incredible group of women writers, friends and mentors among them who bolster me. It was after one of our gatherings last winter that I got the nerve up to respond to an editor who was giving me an opportunity I wasn’t sure I could measure up to, that I had the confidence to take myself as seriously as this editor obviously did for having approached me in the first place. If things are going to change, these mentorships and support systems are the best chance there is. It also helped to have read Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which sounds inane, I realize, but there’s that line, “I don’t fucking care if you don’t like it”: seriously, my life has been remarkably better since I got it stuck in my head.
Eventually being brave, which is the same thing as taking responsibility– it becomes a kind of habit, a reflex. It’s the thing you’ve got to do to not be part of the problem. And it works, this whole not being walked over thing, in a way that’s kind of remarkable. It’s a delightful combination of not taking any shit and not giving a shit, and maybe it’s something you’ve got to wait until your 30s to learn, or else perhaps I am just a late bloomer, but the world opens up when it happens. And then you’ve got the strength, the power, the articulateness to continue take on the parts of the problem that weren’t you and which still remain.
April 26, 2012
Funny women
“This is what I used to think about Sherry– wait, that’s not what I meant to say. I never really thought anything about Sherry. Except that she always seemed like a nice person. I don’t know if I would’ve said before this that she was nice enough to give you the shirt off her back, but when you stop and think about it, that’s a lot to ask from someone.” –Jessica Westhead, “We Are All About Wendy Now”
This is from page 3 of Jessica’s collection And Also Sharks. And now is the time when I think we need to start an award for women’s humour writing, because I don’t think the establishment gets it. Also Caroline Adderson, Zsuzsi Gartner (the exchange student riding the tortoise!!!), Heather Birrell (“Geraldine and Jerome”, anyone? So funny: ‘”It’s okay,” said Geradline. “I like your belt.”‘), Anne Perdue, Julie Booker, Anakana Schofield, Esme Claire Keith, Laura Boudreau, Lynn Coady, Suzette Mayr, Carolyn Black (Martin Amis! Remember Martin Amis?).
We could fill a fucking ballroom.
The humour is so dark and subtle though, with all of these women. Perhaps this is what the Leacockians aren’t getting (and when is the last time you laughed out loud at Sunshine Sketches, laughed so hard that you woke up your husband and then insisted on reading him entire paragraphs? Seriously?).
In these books are suicides, paraplegics, decapitations, dead babies, and maimed pot-bellied pigs. And they’re so funny they’ll make your heart hurt. Which is way funnier than heart-hurt caused by systemic discrimination and disregard of brilliant women writers, no?
Ha ha ha.
UPDATE: In all fairness, I see that the list of entries for this year’s Leacock Prize did not include many of last year’s funniest books. Though if I were them, I’d still want to revamp my program to get a broader range of books to choose from.
April 22, 2012
The Famous 5
So many things I love are a part of this photo. Also, we had a really wonderful trip to Ottawa this weekend. Lots of reading on the train, hotel fun, good food, friends, and, speaking of friends, we were the beneficiaries of some amazing hospitality. Long live the Mini-Break!
