Happy Summer, VIDAs! The weather is getting warmer, the days longer, and the season of summer reading is here. Start with the VIDA Review this summer, and check out the latest essays and news!
VIDA News
#saferLIT
VIDA is pledging to help make 2018 a year of #saferLIT, and we ask that you pledge to do so, too. Take the pledge to help ensure that the literary community is as safe as possible, free from sexual misconduct of any kind. Pledge to not harass or abuse anyone. Pledge to not be a bystander. Pledge “to do more than just read and nod at this pledge, but to also actively engage in and encourage all of the above actions whenever necessary.” Check out the full pledge at http://www.vidaweb.org/saferlit/. For a guide for presses navigating the #MeToo era, check out the pledge for journals and presses. And remember to use the hashtag #safterLIT on social media to pledge to fight sexual misconduct.
VIDA Responds to Boston Review — Sign Your Name
After multiple women accused Junot Díaz, writer and fiction editor at Boston Review, of bullying and sexual misconduct, Editors-in-Chief Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen decided to keep Díaz on as fiction editor. However, the poetry editors, including VIDA’s own BK Fischer, announced they will step down from their roles in protest. VIDA responded to these reactions in solidarity with the poetry editors who stepped down in protest of a decision with which they did not agree. Please join VIDA in taking a stand and sign your name here if you believe institutions should be safe havens for the oppressed and not their oppressors. And if you haven’t already, take VIDA’s #saferLIT pledge, to encourage journals and presses to prioritize the safety and well-being of all members of our community.
VIDA Honored as Literary Advocates at the 2018 Authors Guild Foundation’s Annual Benefit
“Former Guild President Roxana Robinson presented the final award of the evening to VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Amy King, Lynn Melnick, and Camille Rankine accepted on behalf of the organization. Rankine spoke about VIDA’s commitment to providing a platform for the voices of marginalized communities within the literary community and beyond. “It is essential that we make space for a multiplicity of voices to be heard within its realm—especially when there are many voices in our culture that we too often fail to recognize as valid, and too many whose humanity we fail to comprehend.””
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/vida-honored-as-literary-advocates-at-the-2018-authors-guild-foundations-annual-benefit/
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What The Voices of Bettering American Poetry Are Saying...
Michael Wasson
Check out who has been inspiring Michael Wasson lately, and see what he has been reading and listening to. He says, “Oh, music is such a warm hand to hold.” When asked what advice he would give to emerging writers, in particular those of marginalized identities, he says,“For marginalized identities, discover the deep complexities in who you are & what spaces you & your body occupy. I hope you stay true to your path, your course, your momentum—because too often we are told to simplify & make the work accessible to the reader (i.e. white, hetero, male). This ends up watering down the nuance of the histories that you’ve been trusted to carry through each day.”
-Michael Wasson
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/voices-of-bettering-american-poetry-vol-2-michael-wasson/
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Reports From The Field
Behind the Scenes at AWP with members of The Disabled & Deaf Uprising
We kept talking about it on social media. We spoke and signed at the Disabled & D/deaf Writers’ Caucus. Jess Silfa live-streamed the caucus even though AWP discouraged them from doing so. Jess relayed questions and comments from viewers to the caucus members. Meghan Callahan captioned it from afar. We spoke and signed about the stairs, all the stairs, and the cords that snaked the floor of the book fair, and tripped us. Our wheelchairs could not roll over them. We spoke and signed about how the convention center only had two elevators and they were far from the entrance. The escalators, to the second floor, the book fair level, only went up.
And the shuttle. Where was that shuttle? Maybe they did not expect us to come. Did not want us to come. Unless we could pay extra for the shuttle. One of us called it a “disability tax” and the rest of us started calling it a “disability tax.”
-Disabled & Deaf Uprising
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/report-from-the-field-behind-the-scenes-at-awp-with-members-of-the-disabled-deaf-uprising/
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Native Women Writers Take on the ‘Indian Du Jour’
Native writers must deal with mainstream publishing’s mistaken concepts around Native identity. The white writer who traffics in old, error-ridden, and often destructive stereotypes when writing about Native people is much more likely to be published than a Native writer writing truthfully and realistically about her own culture. And do not let that Native writer even attempt to write about anything other than Native culture and Native people. I am reminded of Native painters I know who encounter critics and potential buyers complaining that there are no feathers or tepees in their work. If you are a Native writer, Native-specific life in the tropes with which settler America is comfortable, no matter how mistaken and hurtful, is your only allowable subject. After all, there are plenty of white people to write about everything else in the world. Stay in your lane.
-Linda Rodriguez
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/report-from-the-field-native-women-writers-take-on-the-indian-du-jour/
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Money, Writing, & Opportunity: A Manifesto
Writers and artists are often urged to keep away from creative fields because they are rarely considered lucrative, and this thinking only furthers our disinclination to discuss money. When we do make the leap, we are told to keep money out of mind, as though our valid concerns will corrupt our talents and the creative process itself. The partitioning of creativity and the necessities of living leaves little room for nuance – it’s a traditional mode of thinking that needs to die. We’re not calculating the line-by-line worth of each sentence as we write, but the aftermath (Where might we publish? Will it pay?) is part of the process as well. We need to create and we need to survive. To bear both necessities in mind is not selling out, and to be called out for doing so is merely another tool to maintain current parameters and prevent change, including the gender pay gap in creative work.
-Dorothy Bendel
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/money-writing-opportunity-a-manifesto/
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VIDA Review Features
Literacy Breaking the Cage
That night I started my research about women who have made it and what obstacles they had to face to get there. I focused on two women: Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth Blackwell. Even though Oprah Winfrey’s story was my basis to write my first important essay, Elizabeth Blackwell’s biography helped me argue that women can break society’s cage. She was the first woman to ever graduate medical school. She was motivated to go to medical school after she had learned that a friend of hers told her she would have felt less embarrassed to have a female physician look after her. As some other women did at the time, she studied independently with doctors before getting accepted in 1847 to Geneva Medical College in upstate New York. Her acceptance was deemed by the student body as an administrative practical joke. She was also mocked by most of the students there, however she trudged through the challenges facing her and became a doctor respected by many of her peers. It took me three days to get the essay done; my teacher was moved by it. She said I was a motivation even to her, that it gave her a spark and opened her eyes in to following her dreams as well. My mother cried through every paragraph, she gave me the longest hug that day; it was the day I noticed that the type of writing I enjoyed was a persuasive essay. Writing arguments gave me strength over facing the world filled with criticism. Even though it looked like a coincidence that she decided to leave him the week I submitted my essay, I always like to think I persuaded her to do so.
-Melat Mengistu
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/literacy-breaking-the-cage/
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Conformity’s Labor & Tips to Make Poetry Events More Accessible to People who are D/deaf or Hard of Hearing
It was a crisis for me. At home, though supported by a husband inclined towards non-traditional gender roles, I felt a sense of failure. I was in too much pain to handle housekeeping, so he, without a second thought, took lead on chores that I’d come to believe were my responsibility. At work, I fell short of “masculine” demands I’d been conditioned to equate with professionalism and strength. Instead, an uncomfortable level of vulnerability became necessary. Though buttressed by my Split This Rock colleagues, my self-confidence, caught in a web of cultural expectations that gave less weight to “feminine” traits, was sinking.
In this new reality of living with disability, how was I to appear “capable” when operating in my full ability demanded disclosing what I could not do? The very act of asking for or needing help from others in a culture steeped in individualism gets painted as a deficit, a weakness.
-Camisha L. Jones
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/conformitys-labor-tips-to-make-poetry-events-more-accessible-to-people-who-are-d-deaf-or-hard-of-hearing/
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Dung-Aw: Conveying the Poetry of Grief
When I want to write of grieving sadness or the everyday heaviness of so many things difficult to express, I think of dung-aw—that wild, inarticulate grief that breaks through the surface in search of sounds capable of carrying it. I think of how we went to tidy up the graves of our dead, and wonder if the language of our daily interactions is another kind of sarcophagus in which the organic sounds of who we were, who we are, have also become entombed.
-Luisa A. Igloria
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/dung-aw-conveying-the-poetry-of-grief/
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Falling to Fly: Letting the Black Female Within Guide as White Supremacy Thrives
On this precipice of the end of the world as we knew it, I charge us to turn to the wisdom of black women around us, to get out of their way and elevate their voices. It’s not only in Wakanda or Ava DuVernay’s reimagining of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time or any given story about white damsels in crisis (Gone With the Wind, The Member of Wedding, The Help) that black women save the day. Spillers reminds us that black women are the greatest gifts America has ever had, the only hope we have to take us into the unknown if we want to come out alive and kicking.
-L. Lamar Wilson
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/20748-2/
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VIDA Reviews
Make Yourself Happy, by Eleni Sikelianos
Reviewed by Laura Carter
As we meander through the book, we find evidence of research and writing that is at times scholarly and at times whimsical. This dual approach is worth noting because it pushes up against our own expectations of what poetry should be. Some of us may be trained into thinking of poetry as neat and tidy, as a package that can be neatly unwrapped, but Sikelianos bursts through all those barriers in this provocative experimental text. It’s not a book that can be easily explicated, though I have tried to do so here. It’s not a book that can be easily written about or “digested,” and it bears reading more than once in order to glean its beauty and wisdom.
-Laura Carter
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/vida-reviews-make-yourself-happy-by-eleni-sikelianos/
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A Book of Untruths by Miranda Doyle
Reviewed by Delaney McLemore
I wrestle with who my father is. Trump supporter. Casual racist. Homophobe. The big three dealbreakers that keep me from being close to a new person. But also: genius. Musician. Philosopher. Writer. How do I write about a person who represents these identities I chastise, while recognizing that he’s been one of my biggest inspirations?
I try to take a leaf from Doyle’s book, to cast my gaze wide: the cigarettes overflowing in my dad’s ashtray. His guitar case in the corner. Hootie the Blue Heeler on the slatted floor. To see the lies that shaped me and my understanding, and see, too, the lies my father has told himself.
-Delaney McLemore
CONT’D--http://www.vidaweb.org/vida-reviews-kingdom-of-women-by-rosalie-morales-kearns/
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CALL FOR VIDA Review Reviews!
VIDA Review is seeking more reviews like these! We love reviews and essays responding to work with an intersectional feminist bent, by women, non-binary people, and gender minorities. We want to highlight and discuss critical and personal experiences with books, magazines, journals, reading venues, publishers, literary scenes, other reviews, or any space you wish to bring attention to. We are also interested in reviews and pieces responding to existing criticism, interrogating how industry and societal bias may have shaped the reception of work by women and gender minorities. Please submit all pitches and essays to Sarah Clark at [log in to unmask]
CALL FOR ESSAYS BY WRITERS OUTSIDE OF THE BINARY
VIDA is seeking work for an upcoming series of essays and micro-essays about experiences in the literary and writing world from people who are non-binary, genderfluid, genderqueer, GNC, agender, multigender, two-spirit or any of the many genders that don't fit neatly into the boxes of “man” and “woman.”
The goals of this series are to discuss the ways that gender minorities beyond the binary also experience marginalization, violence, and a lack of representation because of our genders, in ways similar to or unique from binary women. To refuse to let our stories be lost in literary history and literary discourse. To refuse to let our experiences be erased. And ideally, to imagine what it would look like to fight against cispatriarchal discrimination and erasure in the literary world, and where we belong and find belonging along the way, feelings of being left out, and *how* -- or if -- organizations, magazines, movements, and other spaces promoting gender equity founded on the MAN/WOMAN binary can improve and do right by us. Please submit all pitches and essays to Sarah Clark at [log in to unmask] by June 30th, 2018.
CALL: How have Scandals in the Lit World Affected Literary Practices?
We are looking for essays by writers, editors, and publishers on how your work has been impacted by literary scandals. From presses shuttered by outed abusers, sexual harassment in MFAs, to racist comments by publishers, what are the social and economic costs of misbehavior in the lit world? What responsibilities to writers, editors, and publishers have in responding to and negotiating literary scandals? What are the ripple effects of misconduct in the literary world? What happens when a literary “scandal” fades with time? Please submit all pitches and essays to Marcelle Heath at [log in to unmask]
CALL: Conferences, Feminism, & Your Limitless Self:
Did you rock AWP, Split This Rock, or other conferences with a panel about intersectional feminism in 2018? Or get turned down? Writing a proposal for 2019? VIDA Review would love to consider publishing adaptations of both panels that were turned down as well as accepted. Let's make sure your message gets out into the world, unbound from the constraints of any conferences. We're especially interested in panels that address intersections of indigeneity, race, disability, transness, and panels that talk about how to make the publishing world a more equitable place. Please submit all pitches and adaptations to Sarah Clark at [log in to unmask]
CALL: The Erasure of Women and LBGTQIA Literary Gatekeepers.
In light of Brigid Hughes erasure as editor of The Paris Review, we are looking for essays examine the erasure of women and LBGTQIA gatekeepers in the literary world, including works by and or about gatekeepers whose work has been undermined and/or dismantled by institutional structures; how the omission of women and LBGTQIA gatekeepers intersect with the law; historical revisionism and education; activism and community response to these erasures; and other topics that pertain to the ways in which women and LBGTQIA literary gatekeepers have faced social, economic, and political exclusionary practices.
Thank you for supporting VIDA Review and the voices we publish!
Amy King
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts
http://www.vidaweb.org/category/vida-review/
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* VIDA: Women in Literary Arts - http://www.vidaweb.org/
* Twitter @amyhappens
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