Science Poetry Gift Books! And writing for ghosts
- At December 02, 2015
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 0
Thanks to the folks at the Lofty Ambitions blog for including my book on the five science poetry books to buy as gifts for the holidays! I’m honored to be in wonderful company with poets like Tracy K. Smith and Sandra Alcosser – go check out the list!
I’m a little late on writing about this (lots of doctor and dentist appointments in the last week…) but I wanted to make a little comment on the essay On Pandering that was published up at Tin House.
It made me think about the audiences we write for, acknowledged and unacknowledged. Are we writing for ghosts? Claire Vaye Watkins writes that she has written consciously for an audience of white males, who still sort of rule the literary world, a world where sentimentality is the ultimate sin and everyone wants to be Franzen or Hemingway, to be included in the “literary canon.”
It made me think about who I write for. When I got my Master’s Degree, I literally had no creative writing teachers who were women or people of color – they were all white males with a somewhat formal bent. Did that influence my poetry or who I tried to become as a writer? I think what had more influence on me was working with younger kids in volunteer work, because I remember trying to write a kind of poetry that might be interesting to younger people who mostly didn’t read poetry, who played video games and read comic books – and the result was Becoming the Villainess.
Since then, I got an MFA where I had women mentors as well as male ones. I’ve even taught at an MFA program myself, where I (hope) I encouraged wide and diverse reading. I’ve been published by mostly smaller publishers, and I’ve never been reviewed in the New York Times – I think in a way I’ve been okay with writing somewhat out of the mainstream, being feminist, or speculative, or super-science-y, or whatever would take me out of the running to be acceptable to the white male invisible ghosts out there who decide what is or isn’t acceptable or literary or whatever. Has it hurt not to win the big book prizes, or get reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly? Of course! But I don’t think I would change what I write to gain approval of an invisible set of judges. I’m not really haunted by ghosts. My literary heroes (and heroines) – Margaret Atwood, Dana Levin, Denise Duhamel, Dorianne Laux – all sort of stand out and have their own styles and quirks and that’s the reason I think I was drawn to them. They’re not afraid to be angry or emotional or funny or try something different, and they’ve all found audiences and even acclaim eventually.
Anyway, it’s an interesting essay that makes us think about who we are really writing for, and why, and is that authentic? Is that truly us? Does our writing really represent us or what people expect us to be?