Not Helpless: Women and Poetry and Numbers Trouble
Once again, there is numbers trouble brewing. Yes, though women far outnumber men as readers of books, women who write their own books are in trouble if they expect an equal number of reviews, awards, etc., as their male counterparts. Who are the serious women writers getting overlooked in favor of the Franzen’s of the world? Will we ever hear about them? Will they fade into obscurity because no one will talk about them, no one will even look at their books on the review pile or prize committee nominations?
I want to point out that we are not just helpless victims in this matter. Some of the most influential critics in the country are women. They’re just choosing to write about men’s books. So what can you do? Speak up! Write in the New York Times Review of Books or The New Republic and ask for equity in book reviews. Write your own book reviews and publish them. Make noise about women writers you love and appreciate, especially those who are up-and-coming. I hope one day there will be more equity, or at least that it will be a consideration, among those doling out the prizes and grants and reviews and other things that can make or break a writer’s career, give them hope, keep them from giving up. Until then, we do what we can.
How Do You Know Where to Send Your Work? Questions About Submissions…
A former MFA student wrote in to ask me advice about how I know which journals to send my poems to. It seems so overwhelming, she said. Well, that’s true for me too! Here’s part of what I wrote back – I hope you guys find it helpful:
What you are experiencing is something every writer experiences! I’m literally going through the same thing doing fall submissions – which journals would be receptive to my work? Which poems should I send to which place? It’s nearly impossible to guess correctly. The best asset I have is that I’ve been sending work out for over ten years, so now I know a few editors who like my work and tend to take it at a higher rate than other places – but mostly, I try to read new journals and send to new places, so I don’t even use my collected wisdom! There are so many journals out there – I use Poet’s Market and mark “likely” markets with little sticky notes – I use Duotrope and see if someone’s open to submissions this week that I haven’t sent to – and I shop around in bookstores and try to get lit mags that I’m not already familiar with. I did lit mag reviews for New Pages for a while, which was a great gig, because I was forced to read and review lit mags I would never have found in whatever corner of the world I was living in at the time. Also, I read lit mag blogs, which can reveal a lot about a journal and its editors – or at least its interns. Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and a bunch of other journals have blogs now, surprisingly. Check Facebook and Twitter too – I got to know my new book publisher by following their Twitter, of all things!
Definitely sign for Duotrope’s Poetry Weekly Wire – I get it and I always find one open market to send to from it, one I might not have thought of on my own.
The other thing to think about is that you want your poetry in a variety of markets – online and print, traditional and experimental, Midwestern, Southern, and East or West Coast – to build up a wider audience. So don’t just worry about prestige – also think of audience size, location, and predilections. Try to be diverse! You might also notice a pattern of certain kinds of magazines liking your work, too. Keep track of where you’re sending and when. I keep a photo album of rejections, in case there are notes or patterns or anything I should be paying attention to. (For instance, do journals in the Northeast like your work better than journals in the South? Do university-based journals or independent journals more consistently publish you?)
The best advice, as the lit mag world is constantly changing editors and formats and everything else, is to keep track of the lit mags you want to be published in in some way – either online, or in a library, or by ordering backcopies or hanging out at something like Minnesota’s Poetry Loft or Seattle’s Hugo House (they keep a huge library of lit mags there.) And, of course, picking them up at a deeply discounted rate (or for free) on the last day of AWP – since you’re going. (PS Tell me all about the hip new journals!)
What other advice do you have? Anything I missed? How do you decide where to send your work?
Who’s a zombie feminist poet? I am!
That’s right! Who won the monster poetry contest? Me, that’s who!
http://wewhoareabouttodie.com/2010/09/02/lizzy-acker-monster-poetry-award-winner-is-jeannine-hall/
Seriously, thanks to Lizzie Acker for choosing my poem, which was brought on by a dream about zombie clone women. Because that’s the kind of dreaming I do all the time. And now I get books from Small Desk Press! And to read with some awesome poets at LitCrawl.
Poetry Chain, Productivity, Poetry Monsters and More!
If you’re interested in reading five questions with me at the Poetry Chain Gang:
http://poetrychaingang.blogspot.com/2010/08/poetry-chain-gang-volume-2-jeannine.html
They’ve also recently interviewed Wendy Wisner and Suzanne Frischkorn. A cool project by Michelle McEwan, and thanks to Wendy for suggesting me!
I haven’t been writing as much new poetry lately, but I wrote a lyric essay, a book review, and put together several job applications, so I feel productive anyway. I’m also looking for places to rent back up in Washington State, so that takes some time as well. And I signed the official contract for my second book with Kitsune Books, which makes me feel very happy! The more I work with them, the more I like them.
I won a poetry contest involving monsters, and I’m very happy about it. Will post a link when I can! Really, I should write more poems about monsters. This one involves beautiful zombie clone women.
There has been a dustup in the poetry world about charging for e-submissions. I like e-submissions. I remember when I interviewed for a managing editor position at Missouri Review like seven years ago, I tried to talk them out of charging $3 for each submission, which they had to do because they spent a boatload of money on software and hardware for the project (this is before CLMP had an affordable solution, or submishmash existed.) I said: writers are poor. They said: our magazine needs the money. I didn’t think writers would submit, but apparently, they still do. Since then, I’ve done a lot of volunteering for literary magazines, with bigger and smaller budgets, trying to help them generate subscriptions, sell ads, raise money in various ways. Most magazines (not all) are all volunteer-run, and sell amazingly small numbers of copies. Subscription numbers for most mags are in the hundreds, not thousands. Think about the average poetry book, how it sells – and compare that to lit mag sales. Everyone wants to publish in them, but no one wants to buy them. The business model is tough, especially in a bad economy. Of course, most writers have struggled financially during the bad economy, too. My point is: everyone should have a little mercy.
Congrats To Amanda
Go over and congratulate Amanda Auchter – her book just won the Zone3 First Book Contest!
People Who Move Too Much
Can you believe we’re thinking of moving again? Okay, not just thinking, actively planning. Napa has some of the best weather I’ve ever experienced, but apparently, beautiful weather is not enough to keep us rooted. Do you know I have to drive over an hour in any direction to get to any kind of poetry reading? (With the exception of the Napa Writers Conference, which, let’s face it, only comes around once a year.) If you like olive oil and wine, forgetaboutit – this is your place. But poetry?
So we started making a list of things we wanted to do before we moved, like visit SPD in Berkeley and Muir Woods, visit some of the SF museums we haven’t made it to yet, drive out to Point Reyes. My repeated ankle injuries have made more nature-hikey-kinds of visits difficult this past year, but I think I’m recovering from the latest (some kind of weird tendonitis) and anxious to enjoy some of the amazing scenery along the coast. It was 110 here yesterday, so I think we have some summer left to do these kinds of things. September is San Francisco’s summertime.
Remember I told you I was reading through all kinds of writing about writers? I’ve read two of Lorrie Moore’s short story collections (“Self-Help” and “Like Life”) and I’m reading “How to Become a Famous Novelist,” which is fairly amusing (though male-centric.) Apparently someone said Lorrie Moore was to blame for all MFA fiction students using the second person. I love using the second person in poetry, but I didn’t have anyone to blame until now. I’m trying to write some poetry book reviews, too, in my spare time. And I’m trying a little fiction/personal essay writing.
Speaking of moving, I don’t want to move all my lit mags (and I subscribe to like, two billion) so if you want me to send you a pack of 3-5 fairly recent literary magazines for the cost of shipping ($5 Paypal,) let me know.
Tic tic tic. The clock is counting down our final days in sunny-but-expensive California. The boxes are out. The hunt for a new apartment is on. A PO box has been procured.
New Fall Manuscript Class
Well, my summer poetry manuscript class is winding down, and it went really well, so I am going to offer it again for the fall.
Wish you had someone to read over your poetry manuscript before you send it out to this year’s contests and open submissions? This eight-week class is limited to five writers and will start October 1. It’s run on a private blog and discussion board (so your work can’t be searched or googled) and you will get feedback on your poetry book (or chapbook) manuscript as it develops over eight weeks from both me and your classmates, and you’ll be reading and commenting on your classmates’ manuscripts as well. We’ll cover topics like organization, style, publishing, and filling in the gaps in your manuscript. We’ll do some writing exercises and one (short) book review. It’s going to be $300 for eight weeks. Any questions? Leave a comment! If you’re interested, send a short bio and a sample of your work – a couple of poems – to me at jeannine.gailey@live.com.
Oh yes…you want to know who I am? Well, let’s see, here’s my bio: Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess, published in 2006 by Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book were featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, Verse Daily, and in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She’s also the author of the upcoming She Returns to the Floating World, which will be published by Kitsune Books in late 2011. She won the 2007 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and was awarded a 2007 Washington State GAP grant. She teaches part-time at National University’s MFA program, volunteers for Crab Creek Review, and has published reviews, interviews, and articles for Poets & Writers online, The Poetry Foundation web site, and the 2010 and 2011 Poet’s Market.
The haibun on Ploughshares (and a poem from my second book!)
I’m in love with a Japanese poetry form called the haibun. I teach it in my poetry class at National, I’ve taught it at poetry conferences, and if you’re around long enough, I’ll probably try to get you to write one.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil has a wonderful post covering the basics of haibun on the Plougshares blog and kindly used one of the poems, “The Fox-Wife Describes Her Courtship,” from my upcoming second book from Kitsune Books, She Returns to the Floating World, as an example. Thanks for the shout out, Aimee! I appreciate it and I’m glad to have more props for this very cool (and surprisingly contemporary-feeling despite its ancient origins) poetic form. When can we make an awesome haibun anthology?
Confession: I’ve never been much for a rhyme scheme but somehow syllable counts don’t bother me. Another confession: if you read through my second book and pay close attention, you’ll notice a lot of the poems are in syllabic forms. Am I becoming a secret semi-formalist? The answer: no, probably not.
Links, etc…Book tours, submitting practices, six questions
Ever wonder what it’s like to go on an unfunded 17-day poetry book tour to promote your new book? Me too! Keith Monstesano gives us a blow-by-blow here.
Do you submit your poetry like a girl? Well, stop it. See Kelli’s post here.
Want to ask Kitsune Books’ editor Anne Petty six questions?
I’ve got another tendon injury. This one I can walk with, though I can’t do stairs or curbs, so it’s not as bad as the previous one. Still, I am wondering which tendon spirits I have been angering lately?
I also got my first blurb in. It was beautiful. I feel so grateful to everyone who has ever taken a look at my second book manuscript, to Rene Lynch for permission to use the beautiful cover art, to people willing to say nice things about me and my writing on the back cover of the book, and of course, to the editors at Kitsune. A lot of gratitude.
Kitsune Books special, Fiction Reviews
Go check out the special going on at Kitsune Books (the future publisher of my second book, She Returns to the Floating World) – it’s buy one get one free for the month of August! There’s poetry, essays, fiction…good fun! I’ve already got a couple of books on the way.
I’ve been in a lots-of-reading-but-no-writing kick after finishing a final re-write of “She Returns…” and another revision of my newest MS. Most of the reading has been fiction, and two books I enjoyed particularly were Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey, a book about a young magazine writer who returns to her stuffy-academic home town after her father, an eminent poetry critic, passes away and leaves her the literary executor to a book of poetry. This may be criticized as thinly-veiled autobiography, since the author is the daughter of (still living, as far as I know – see comments) Amherst President and novelist Peter Pouncey. The character is amazingly unlikable right up until the end of the book. I don’t dislike books just because their main characters are unlikable, at least not all the time, and I enjoyed what this book had to say about poetry, about small towns, about the academic world (I’m a professor’s daughter myself, so…) and about the complicated relationships between daughters and fathers. In a satifying conclusion, she both lets go of her father and embraces his influence on her life after a tremendous betrayal by someone close to her. I’d say the last fifth of the book was worth the somewhat slow beginning. The other book was How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson, which was 1. misclassified as YA fiction, and 2. had such a mean-spirited Publisher’s Weekly Review that I instantly felt the need to defend it. It’s really a fun book about class and reading, about the relationship between author and audience. Here’s my review from Goodreads:
“A mashup of plots from soaps like “The OC” and “Gossip Girl,” a dash of “Prep,” some satire of writers/postmodern lit and a bit of characterization from F. Scott Fitzgerald, this book was fun to read on a sentence level and the occasional witticisms were worth waiting for. Much better than the Publisher’s Weekly review would have you believe; maybe they were in a bad mood when they read it, because I found it highly entertaining and the baroque swirls of “metaplot” non-irritating.”
This is another book with an unlikable young main character, who turns into a character I really cared about and cheered for by the end. I would have liked more about the struggling female novelist in the book, actually, and less about the spoiled teen characters (I was a “scholarship” kid at a midwestern prep school for most of my youth, so there’s no shock value in describing that world for me) but that’s probably because I’m craving more books about female writers. There are suprisingly few of them (if you don’t count LM Montgomery books.) If you have any you recommend, let me know in the comments. I’m in a literary fiction mood and want more to read!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
