Spring Poem | GE Patterson

the world offers this

now    rock light sound feather grass

to love and you do

you love everything at once

cause that's your way, that's your way


GE Patterson

"I Am In The Becoming" | Sharon Mesmer

      — in memory of Lucille Clifton and Lisa Kuhlman


Being human, I have always
entered a tethered moment
to redeem the dream
at the end of time.
But where is my body now?

It seems my scars still attach,
but in the abstract —
just as my stars beat in eclipse,
whatever their nature
and purpose.

It’s true that I would know
this one you are now seeing in dreams,
being in community,
together being broken.
But now I am the one becoming,
becoming now.

While crossing a great ocean
or ascending a throne
we may see ourselves
as the winged
revealers of reveries,
beseechers with open hands.
Or thus I have heard.
And thus I now know.

And where is my body now?
My body is in the becoming,
becoming now.

Sharon Mesmer

Remembering Lucille Clifton

Starting Monday, March 8 at Delirious Hem, with essays, poems, & remembrances by:

Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Alicia Ostriker
Cara Benson
Deborah Poe
Evie Shockley
GE Patterson
Imani Tolliver
Mairead Byrne
naomi shihab nye
Shanna Compton
Sharon Mesmer
Tara Betts
Theresa Edwards

This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like Forum #2

To skip this intro and go directly to the forum, please scroll down to the next post!

Welcome to our second This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like forum, where each day this week you will find new responses.




Featuring:
Monday February 1: Ching-In Chen, Jennifer Bartlett, & Kate Durbin
Tuesday February 2: Juliet Cook & Kate Schapira
Wednesday February 3: Kirsten Kaschock & Michele Battiste

Thursday February 4: Michelle Detorie & Stephanie Strickland

Friday February 5: T.A. Noonan & Theodora Danylevich
Saturday February 6: Amy King & Kirsten Kaschock 2

With more to come!

There are likely as many strains and modes of feminist poetics as there are of feminism, but in reviews, discussions, and even our own manifestos, we often fall into shorthand that fails to explore this valuable friction, our own variations. I'd longed for unpacking, and so issued this open-ended call:

This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like: what branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge? Are there particular feminist tactics you employ? Do you consider yourself a feminist in many ways, but don't particularly involve it in the poetry? Feel free to take liberties with the questions! Short, long, essay, manifesto, whatever appeals to you!

Our first forum was full of such provocative, funny, thoughtful, revealing, and kick-ass work, I thought we'd better run another. We hope you'll enjoy and join in the conversation. If you post on your own blog in response to this conversation, or if you're a poet identifying as a woman, and you'd like to add a post to this forum, please drop a note in the comments!

Curated by Danielle Pafunda

Amy King

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You, Antidotes for an Alibi, Slaves to Do these Things (forthcoming from BlazeVox), and I Want to Make You Safe (forthcoming from Litmus Press). She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College, and co-curates The Stain reading series in Brooklyn, NY.

“My Barbaric Bitch of a Yawp”

She lost all her innocence

Gave it to an abscess

She lost all her innocence

She said, "I am not a feminist"

—Hole, “I Think That I Would Die”

I care but can’t go into specifics just now, no time. I’m busy making poems; you’ll find the details there. My visions in verse. So this’ll be a one-off rant-song to sing along with and jump-start your day to.

I get called a bitch, or a feminist-bitch, at least once a week and, likewise, I often name people to say something about what they’ve just done. “Asshole, just cut me off in traffic.” “Angel, just helped my grandmother cross the street!” So with such proliferation of naming going on, I really don’t get the fear of being identified as or, gasp, calling one’s self a feminist. We know a name doesn’t define our entirety; or as Audre Lorde so aptly put it, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." So they say it’s the history; they don’t want to come across as man-hating hairy dykes. Then they say they know the women’s movement was made up of a wide variety of women (as well as more than a few supportive uncles, fathers and brothers), that those women, who were so often our aunts, grandmothers and mothers, were not evil witches. They say they know that those women won a lot of rights and changed the structure of male-female relationships. But don’t ask them (the “I’m not a feminist but…” gals) what rights those women won, don’t ask them how relations between men and women have changed, don’t ask them how they benefited from the blood, sweat and tears of those unsung feminists…

I am a feminist because I recognize the label isn’t going away; it carries a brave history and it has a future. I love the efforts those feminists made, however misguided or right on they got it over the years. Feminism is a past and feminism is a future. It’s political. Though I’m no politician, I live in a world were my public persona carries real weight. Political implications. What I do defines the label I represent at that moment. What I say gives value to the movements I align myself with. It does not define me; I am defining it. I’m a lesbian, I say, because I need to defend other queer women, but I’ve fucked men. I’m an independent because I want people to have more governing power, but I’ve voted Democrat. I’m an American because I love so much the idealism we’ve advanced on, but I critique the atrocious acts my country commits. If I give up the feminist label to the straining voice against it, to those who insist that the name somehow distorts and pins me down, then I give up the parts of that history, and its power, that are so significant and worth my time and gratitude. And I would be forced to see the world through backwards blinders only. I would be giving up the privilege of working with people who fearlessly butt against the unequal, classist, homophobic, sexist, racist, religious, status-quo-for-the-masses mentality. I would be giving up the empowerment that community inspires.

“And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. … Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.”

—J.K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Speech 2008

Any poet worth her salt knows that, generally speaking, you can do one of two things with language -- You can use your words to reflect what society surrounds us with. You can represent the insipid mainstream culture and repeat it however prettily or dolled up you like. You can distract with pseudo-epiphanies or masturbate to empty language games until you’re living in a vacuum of your own making. Or you can be a creator, you can write the poetry that is not popular because you are saying things that don’t just comfort people and tell them that the way they’re living now is perfect and lovely and oh-so-right. You can either reflect or you can create, at great risk, to improve things, reveal complexities, point out those brilliant chinks in the mainstream armor of duality and western rigidity. You create to show that there is more to perceive, that change is always afoot, that you want to have a hand in what that change should do, that you can visualize a keener, more interesting and diverse world where the roles and lines and tasks relegated to “woman” and “man” are thinning fronts that can no longer support humanity’s advancement. These “confusing” “crazy” creations are often unpopular because they shake us up; the status quo resists because people aren’t accustomed to seeing in radical and as-yet-unfathomed ways, they can’t visualize themselves in the odd pictures such poets are making. We are afraid to imagine other ways of being on a planet dominated by wars, environmental destruction, and the luxury of ignorance. We hope that if we stay very still, don’t move, and speak clearly, nothing will come undone—and we’ll be safe.

“… Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other.”

—Judith Butler

So it is with feminism and poetry, which are movements, hand-in-hand progressions, the visualization of hope and the often-belittled notion of investing in improvement, even *gasp* looking for some moral imperative in context. Feminist poets do not invest substantial attention in that static image of a hairy angry bitch meant to shut us down and squelch our efforts and dry the ink of our pens; we are too busy moving and shaking shit up and asking people to become aware of and check the power structures we participate in and to give up certain power privileges so that we each might arrive at some semblance of equal footing with access to basic necessities and accesses and to share and to look at other aspects of our humanity that we have been told to repress because they’re too feminine. Feminist poets are putting pen to paper where and when it counts and challenging the very core notions of what it means to be human, literally, conceptually, and emotionally. If I blur and confound the line between one more “them versus us” modus operandi, then I’m doing my job and causing people to pause & reconsider the next actions they’ll take: to hit and kill and segregate, or to lean in, study, consider, smell, see, think and breathe shared air—and then act and react.

“I think … that we have not yet become human. Or, I might say, in a different way, that the category of the human is in the process of becoming. What constitutes the human is a site of contestation. There are clashing cultural interpretations about what the human ought to be, and that every time you assert human rights, you are also adding to the meaning of what the human is.”

—Judith Butler

Empathy, you suggest? But isn’t it better to give a good ass beating and take one’s seat higher on the scale? Fuck the hierarchy. It’s not the “natural” order of things, despite the desperate protests of those that sit atop their mountain of things and cling to a misanthropic power. Our current situation is a complex ideological structure designed with all manner of booby traps, many self-policing, to keep us in our places, sequestered in valleys and caves, in our lady and dude roles, scared to say that on the face of it, this scene isn’t right when, across the worldwide board and at its most basic, one gender is still supposed to cow tow to another. It’s even got us scared to say that there aren’t only two genders nor two scripted ways to act: feminine or masculine, for each of us. That’s why so many young people want to talk about fluidity: they’re tapping into how this hostile-yet-invisible way of seeing and being (invisible so that we can’t point the problems out) bars access, holds us in place, tells us if we don’t wear the “proper” dolly clothes or sport manly muscles and strictly maintain aggression as a male norm then we’re out of line and doomed to a life of miserable outcast status. It’s why some can’t even see that women could never just “act like men” to achieve equality (see Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/comment-page-8/) – that kind of “way in” is bogus because the very structure of the way things are doesn’t permit such “feminine” considerations as empathy and mindfulness, in fact eliminates them, and this is why we don’t let mothers engage in ground combat. The social fabric as it stands would simply melt and implode.

Remember in “The Matrix” when Neo is asked if he senses that something is off? That reality isn’t sitting quite right? Well, we word workers are all friggin’ Neo. We’re each “the one” and “the one” and “the one” gathered into a sharp arrow point called feminism, guided and guiding together into every next moment and context. And it’s up to those of us with even an iota of awareness to daringly claim that label and continue to define it and redefine it and work together and add to it and impose on it and make that label act on our behalves—despite what mud is slung and fears are put upon us to slow us down and stop us. Because even the fallout changes and we can learn from that: feminists used to be scared of being relegated to lives of “old maids.” Now we’re just afraid of not being sexy. Just think if Emma Goldman caved and said, “Oh no, they’re forever calling me names, screw the vote. Screw the way I want to live, I’ll just marry and shut up and dutifully light the home fires now.” Like Emma G., poets should catch that mud and work it into the sculptures they want to see. We’re not here to smile and be pretty; we write the poems we want to see in the world, however difficult it is to birth them, however much we are berated, however many want to scare and break us. And to respond to this anger with the act of creation is love itself, that sentimental “feminine” essence, the firm basis from which feminists and poets have been acting together forever.

So goddamn right, this is what a feminist poet looks like – keep on looking and watch me work *or* slide on your typing shoes, join me beneath the disco lights, and sing your barbaric bitch of a yawp with feeling—

“Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women - female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.”

—Hélène Cixous, 1976

Kirsten Kaschock 2

Kirsten Kaschock is the author ofUnfathoms (Slope Editions) and a beautiful name/for a girl (upcoming from Ahsahta Press). She holds a Ph.D. fromUniversity of Georgia in English and is currently a doctoral fellow in dance at Temple University. She lives and writes in Philadelphia.

Artist-as-Mother/Mother-as-Artist: A Metaphorical Resurrection

When we talk about art now, especially radical or experimental art, we talk about war. The artwork achieves, or fails to achieve. It is revolutionary and breaks through barriers, or it falls flat. Postmodern art (of all genres) is valued for its ability to move us forward—to shock, to produce awe. Our zeitgeist is blitzkrieg. Notably, the term avant garde is a military one, and it is precisely this term that makes it difficult to imagine communication with the artist. Either you position yourself behind the vanguard, reaping the benefits of their sacrifice, or you stand opposing them, attempting to cut them down as they hurl their weapons into your culture. The soldiers (the artists) in these metaphors are necessarily silent—and their purpose violent.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” writes:

The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible… (Benjamin 81)

Disregarding Benjamin’s rhetoric of force and penetration, what he is asking for is that languages listen and respond to one another through the translator—an expansion of thought during the act rather than a narrow fidelity to some impossible idea of exact translation.

Metaphors are singular acts of translation. Using the passage above as a template, I would like to suggest that when a metaphor is engaged it has the potential to enlarge either side of the term (as 20^th and 21^st century war has been aestheticized partially through the use of metaphorical language surrounding both art and war), and that—as a result—both of the concepts artist and mother could grow when conceived in terms of one another. I would argue that Benjamin, in the quoted passage, is joining in “the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallologocentrism” (Haraway 176). I, too, would like to join in the epistemological radicalism both Benjamin and Donna Haraway espouse in their different ways from their different times, but I would do so without embracing all they embrace, and I would do so by retaining something he never considers and that she does not choose to retain: motherhood.

In her 1987 essay, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” Susan Stanford Friedman provides the rationale for re-examining a metaphor that has been used extensively and possibly overdetermined. She writes: “The context of the childbirth metaphor is the institution of motherhood in the culture at large” (Friedman 51). I would suggest that, thanks to ever-progressing fertility technologies, expanded practices of adoption and surrogacy, the prevalence of both older and teenage parenting, man-identified mothers, the very real possibility of human cloning, non-traditional family structures, and an epidemic of AIDS orphans on the continent of Africa and beyond, the cultural notion of motherhood has been altered greatly in the past thirty years and is ripe right now for a reimagining through art. Yet despite its evolving forms—motherhood, as a term, carries with it a weighty history some feminists might like, on occasion, to be rid of.

Near the end of Donna Haraway’s glorious essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a model for the way imagination can affect theory, she questions whether the metaphor of reproduction can ever be used as a way forward, out of the binary-positions feminists and others find themselves in:

...organisms and organismic, holistic politics depend on metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of reproductive sex. I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing... We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender. (Haraway 181)

Her answer, then, is no.

But I disagree. What I mean to say is that she can imagine what she wants, and reading what she imagines has made me larger in the best ways, but I do not believe that one arrives at either a “common language” (which she claims not to want) nor a “powerful infidel heteroglossia” (which she does) by throwing out the birth-process with the baby. We have very few tools for transformation; we cannot afford to rid ourselves of one of the most powerful of them—motherhood—even metaphorically, only to replace it with technologies that have proved so alienating to so many and are as-yet available to so few. This is not a good recycling practice. (Biological motherhood, however—one type of motherhood—can be an excellent recycling practice—a new human body produced directly from the materials of the old.)

In Of Woman Born, her 1977 meditation on and investigation of motherhood, Adrienne Rich points out another one of the difficulties of thinking mother:

...the vast majority of literary and visual images of motherhood comes to us filtered through a collective or individual male consciousness... We need to know what, out of all that welter of image-making and thought-spinning, is worth salvaging, if only to understand better an idea so crucial in history, a condition which has been wrested from the mothers themselves to buttress the power of the fathers. (Rich 62)

Rich, unlike Haraway, despite the issues involved is not willing to rid herself of mothers, perhaps because—and this is crucial—she is one. She is physically and emotionally aware of the ambiguities of motherhood, and although she is acutely cognizant that it has functioned as both plague and tool of enslavement for women since the dawn of mythical time—and still does in many places—it has also provided for many of them a reason to continue living in those conditions.

I admit it: I, too, want out of gender and all the exclusions that go with it. Sometimes. But the heterogeneity Haraway calls for in “A Cyborg Manifesto” relies on division (otherwise it would be read as homogeneity). Divisions tend to be hierarchized. Without the primary division between gender(s), another division (race, religion, class—already present in Haraway’s essay in nascent form as an assumed access to technology) would emerge as the primary separator: this I believe. Motherhood, however (once it is pried out from beneath its boulder—its history as a tool of patriarchy), provides a location where division itself can be seen as positive, where division creates heterogeneity without necessarily creating opposition. Why, then, must Haraway negate the mother? The answer may lie here:

An origin story in the ‘Western’, humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism... The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. (Haraway 151)

It is true that motherhood has been drawn by psychoanalysis too large, as a seductive stagnation that must be escaped, the motherwomb—a bodied Eden we cannot choose to remain within. Haraway accepts this formulation and rejects the suffocating embrace of the originary mother in order to hold hands with the machine. I understand this desire; yet, I see in her erasure of that “unity” the same rejection of the mother in the process of individuation that she bemoans. I would argue we can and should take motherhood with us—that we should not allow the mother to remain with those who would draw him/her as landscape rather than agent. In fact, by leaving motherhood behind—we lose a fantastic imaginative possibility for community.

In Christine Battersby’s feminist defense of metaphysics, she attempts to construct and normalize a female (not feminine) subject and then walks her reader through the ramifications of viewing the possibilities of female reproduction as central to the subject:

Rather than treating women as somehow exceptional, I start from the question of what would have to change were we to take seriously the notion that a ‘person’ could normally, at least always potentially, become two. What would happen if we thought identity in terms that did not make it always spatially and temporally oppositional to other entitities? Could we retain a notion of self-identity if we did not privilege what is self-contained and self-directed? (Battersby 2)

Instead of an individual always in the process of differentiating him/herself from the community and the world (the motherbody), Battersby posits an individual who can potentially and occasionally engage in the process of literally creating out of him/herself community, and this community—although genetically similar to the mother—necessarily differs from the individual mother in age and possibly in gender. Motherhood, therefore, produces—unoppositionally—diversity.

As her non-mothering metaphor for producing community, Haraway suggests the “network” for her cyborgs, their couplings multiplying the “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” (Haraway 150). But pain is lost here during the contestation for “for other forms of power and pleasure”(150), the pain of individuation and motivated loss (of releasing control), pain that the metaphor of motherhood—biological or otherwise—would retain. Why keep pain? Adrienne Rich explains Simone Weil’s insistence that not all pain need be purely negative: “But where it is unavoidable, pain can be transformed into something usable, something which takes us beyond the limits of the experience itself into a further grasp of the essentials of life and the possibilities within us” (Rich 158). By losing the pain of childbirth, of potential child-death, the productive grief of teaching independence and sending children forth into the world, Haraway’s cyborgs may gain a nebulous jouissance; however, I do not think the trade of deep, profound and affecting ambiguities (dependence/independence, pain/pleasure, love/anger) for a circuitous utopian orgy is a good trade. In losing the mother, Haraway’s cyborgs lose a source of art.

Rich explains how this potent ambiguity has been coded into the female body, “the terrain on which patriarchy is erected” (Rich 55):

The woman’s body, with its potential for gestating, bringing forth and nourishing new life, has been through the ages a field of contradictions: a space invested with power, and an acute vulnerability; a numinous figure and the incarnation of evil; a hoard of ambivalences, most of which have worked to disqualify women from the collective act of defining culture. (Rich 105)

The conflicted reading of the female body’s relationship to power is the very thing that has made childbirth, in the past, a metaphor for the artistic process while cordoning women off from art with the rhetoric of mutual exclusion: if babies—no books, no paintings, no dance. However, these renderings often have focused on gestation and birth only (Friedman 51-4). In doing so, their metaphorical use has misconstrued motherhood as merely a biological act. This leads to a difficulty in reading differently gendered presentations of the metaphor. As Susan Friedman notes in her essay on the childbirth metaphor for writing, “female and male metaphors mean differently and mean something different, indeed something opposite” (Friedman 75). Might I suggest that expanding the metaphor from artist-as-birther to artist-as-mother would avoid much of the difficulty of the earlier rhetorical model.

An artist painted as mother would be enlarged. The art process would be seen as an endlessly collaborative act, from inception through production. Children are not produced in a vacuum, and although both mothers and artists can toil in isolation, by linking artistic process to motherhood—this would no longer be viewed as the normative or preferable model for artistic production. By linking these culturally feminized acts (art is not coded in the West as a masculine pursuit though it may be male-dominated), it might become more apparent just how undervalued both processes are. By insisting on a motherhood rather than childbirth model, the responsibility of the artist would extend beyond the moment of artistic completion. As Rich notes, “Woman did not simply give birth; she made it possible for the child to go on living” (101). The artist would begin to view him/herself as more accountable for and to the work produced. This is not to argue for a policing or even a self-policing of artistic creation, but simply a new sense of artistic place within the community. It is heresy, I know, to speak against the privileged standpoint of the outlaw—and I am not; I am arguing that the outlaw/artist already has an oft-denied relationship with both his/her artwork and the community that artwork is released into—and that those relationships, like all relationships, grow fuller with tending.

Mother, viewed as artist, would also flower. Motherhood could move beyond a “becom[ing of] our bodies—blindly, slavishly, in obedience to male theories about us” (Rich 102), and become expressively creative. Instead of procreative destiny, motherhood could view itself as a conscious manifestation of continued choosing. I recognize that most women in the world do not have the luxury of equating motherhood with choice, and that is precisely why I think it imperative that a metaphor that fronts that possibility be in use. The label artist would also allow motherhood to rethink its boundaries. If it is possible to be a mother without having ovulated (as in surrogacy), without having birthed a child (as in adoption), after menopause (plenty of these foster and grandmother-mothers), and without a partner (and these), then perhaps it is time to imagine a motherhood beyond the uterus. North American gender roles within the home have been glacially slow to change; motherhood-as-an-act-of-self-expression might help push that change forward.

Is there a problem with the child-as-artwork that follows? Undoubtedly. Yet, this formulation is infinitely preferable to child-as-accessory, child-as-property, child-as-surrogate-self, and child-as-doll—all of which have real currency in our world. It is a discussion for a later time, but suffice it to say that neither art nor children are completely within the control of their creators and that I see the celebration of this fact as crucial to healthy models of both.

In her rethinking our ways of being in the world in this era, Haraway writes:

Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other... The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of western culture. (Haraway 175)

In reinvesting in motherhood, I do not want to reimagine originary wholeness; I want to imagine division and creation with a difference. Motherhood has marked me as other, and I would use it to mark the world. Motherhood is power. Rich partially explains: “The one aspect in which most women have felt their own power—in the patriarchal sense—authority and control over another—has been motherhood...” (Rich 67). Yet, she does not go on to show how mothers relinquish this power, many happily, upon the growth of the child: this element places motherhood in a different relationship to the power s/he wields than the patriarchal model Rich mentions. The origin myths I want to subvert by retelling are of the twin creators—Mother and Artist. By placing them inside one another, like Russian dolls, I hope to expand the potentialities of both.

When Benjamin describes the task of the translator, he describes the task of both mother and artist—to be profoundly altered and enlarged by what they take inside of them. I agree with his reflection upon the transformative aspect of translation: “It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible…” (Benjamin 81) I would like to start exploring the extent.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children (if and as we choose) but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence... (Rich 285-6)

Works Cited

Battersby, Christine. The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Pattern of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. Pimlico ed. London: Pimlico, 1999.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse." Feminist Studies 13.1 (1987): 49-82.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Rich, Adrienne Cecile. Of Woman Born : Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Bantam Books, 1977.

T.A. Noonan

T.A. Noonan's first collection, The Bone Folders, won the Heartland Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Cracked Slab Books. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in No Tell Motel, Everyday Genius, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. II:Mississippi, Phoebe, RHINO, Specs, Harpur Palate, and many others. Currently, she lives, writes, and teaches on Florida's First Coast. "Gloss: Two Interviews" is from her latest manuscript, Petticoat Government.

Gloss: Two Interviews

“What is the proper response of a woman looking at Playboy?” —Denise Duhamel, “House-Sitting”

One.

(from a series of emails between the author and Jaime Malanowski, Playboy’s former managing editor.)

TN: Playboy has a history of publishing risky—some might say innovative—fiction. Would you say that this tradition continues today?

JM: Sure. Just in the last couple of years, along with master storytellers like John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Jane Smiley and Stephen King, we happily published established-but-edgy writers like Chuck Palahniuk and T.C. Boyle, as well as exciting new voices like Sam Lipsyte, Tony D’Souza, Michelle Richmond, and Jess Walter.

TN: Do you have a preferred aesthetic?

JM: For our fiction, we look for plot-driven stories. We want a certain drama in our short stories, and we want vivid protagonists. We want events to take place in these stories, or even action. We don’t want stories to be about a person’s interior life.

TN: Do you think the rise of nonfiction has contributed to the decline in the amount of fiction published in Playboy, or are there other factors at work behind the scenes?

JM: Has there been a decline in the amount of fiction published in Playboy? I don’t perceive one, but there has been a decline in the culture of short fiction. Look to the 1950s and 1960s—there were lots of general interest magazines and lots of writers trying to make a living writing for them. Lots of those magazines—Holiday, Look, The Saturday Evening Post—closed. With fewer places to publish, fewer writers tried to fill the remaining spots. Fewer writers, less quality, less innovation. Short story success depends on an ecosystem of readers, writers and publishers. That system has shrunk—and not so many people miss it.

TN: Your answer also touches on a question that has been brought up by my fiction-writing colleagues—namely, where can short stories find an audience willing to invest the time and attention required. The literary magazines have pretty much cornered that market, but my impression is that glossy magazines are still considered the “mint-maker” for a literary career in prose. That is, once you get your work in a place like Playboy or The Atlantic, you’re pretty much set. Would you agree with this?

JM: It’s an absurd, naïve idea. Very few writers are ever set, by which I mean that their force of reputation is pretty much enough to get them published. Most writers, even ones with long records of achievement and success, are only as good as their next idea. And a person who has been published once in The Atlantic or Playboy? Very good. Congratulations. What else can you show me?

TN: Regarding the amount of fiction that Playboy publishes, my understanding—based on my research—is that Playboy used to publish as many as three stories per issue.

JM: You are correct. Throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Playboy published three or four stories an issue. It is true that many of these pieces were very short and were slight humor pieces. But as recently as 1988 we published twenty stories a year. Even now, in our big December and January holiday issues, we may publish more than one story.

Another reason that there’s less space for fiction is that magazines do lots more service journalism—telling people what to buy, how to dress, where to travel, etc. Also, what people think of as funny has changed. In the past, Playboy might run a funny two-page story, 1,500-2,000 words long, something you’d sit down and read. Today we’re more apt to use those two pages for an article on “How to Have the Perfect Clambake,” or to do something funny that is a lot more visual. Something you’d be more apt to “look at’’ than “read.”

TN: Playboy can—and does—publish some of contemporary fiction’s biggest names. Why, then, does the magazine continue to offer its annual College Fiction Award?

JM: Why do you think? It’s enormously popular. It helps establish a connection between the magazine and students. And it gives us an early look at young talent.

TN: I know that you cannot speak to Redbook’s specific editorial practices because you do not work there. However, I have noticed that while Playboy, a men’s magazine, continues to publish top-notch fiction, Redbook and other women’s magazines have deemphasized their previous commitment to fiction. Do you think this is merely an editorial move to sell issues, or does it has something to do with a change in women’s reading practices and/or the fiction market at large?

JM: Sorry, I have no insight in Redbook’s editorial practices. Based on what I know of women’s reading habits, I’d say women are reading a lot of novels of all genres. And while they also read a lot of magazines, they do not read magazines for fiction. They are looking for a quicker, breezier read, and for service features.

But it’s not just women’s magazines that are deemphasizing fiction. The Atlantic all but dropped fiction a year or so ago. Here’s a thought—call the American Society of Magazine Editors (try to speak to Marlene Kahan) and ask how many total submissions for this year’s National Magazine Awards they received in the categories of Reporting, Feature Writing, Essay, Service Feature, and Fiction. I’ll bet they got thirty or fewer nominations for fiction, and two to three times that in the other categories.

TN: I did contact Marlene Kahan as you suggested, and she said that you are absolutely right. There are far fewer nominations for Fiction in the National Magazine Awards than for other categories, and this has been the case for many years.

Thank you very much for your time and attention; your assistance is much appreciated. Who knows—maybe there’s a bit of nonfiction in this for me.

Two.

(from a series of emails between the author and Stacy Morrison, Redbook’s editor-in-chief.)

TN: Redbook once published fiction by Dashiell Hammett, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis. Has the rise of nonfiction contributed to the decline in the amount of fiction being published in Redbook, or are there other factors at work?

SM:

TN: What is your preferred aesthetic in regards to the fiction that Redbook publishes?

SM:

TN: Certainly you cannot speak to the editorial practices of other magazines, but I have noticed that while Playboy, a men’s magazine, continues to publish top-notch fiction alongside its nudes, Redbook and other women’s magazines have deemphasized their previous commitment to fiction. Do you think this represents a change in women’s reading practices?

SM:

TN: Who are some of your favorite authors to appear in Redbook?

SM:

TN: Does Redbook receive many unsolicited fiction submissions?

SM:

TN: Are the pieces that you do accept mainly by solicitation or query?

SM:

TN: How often would you say that you publish unsolicited manuscripts?

SM:

TN: Does Redbook still offer its annual Fiction Award? If not, why was the award discontinued?

SM:

TN: Thank you very much for your time and attention.

Note: “Gloss: Two Interviews” culls material from a series of emails exchanged in February 2008 between the author and Playboy’s former managing editor, Jaime Malanowski—as well as an unanswered email to Redbook’s editor-in-chief, Stacy Morrison. “Gloss” is not intended, and does not attempt, to reproduce the author and Mr. Malanowski’s complete correspondence. Most changes to the language are cosmetic, grammatical, and/or organizational in nature; omissions are for abridgment purposes only. The author would like to extend her profound thanks to both editors for their insights.