February 1, 2011
VIDA and the Men Who Love Us: Reading and Dance Party

http://bit.ly/VIDAblackcat : Tumblr mate to the Facebook event page / VIDA FB page

VIDA is thrilled to host another badass evening as part of this year’s AWP here in Washington, DC! And do be sure to stop by the VIDA table throughout the week, did we mention how much cool swag we have?

(photo cred)

VIDA and the Men Who Love Us: Reading and Dance Party

Time: Thursday at 9:00pm - Friday at 12:00am
Location: The Black Cat
1811 14th Street NW
Washington, DC

Join VIDA for the most ass-kicking AWP off-site party ever!

There will be fast and ferocious readings by sixteen of the brightest male literary lights—each of them reading work by women writers they admire.

There will be dancing to music provided by the stellar DJs, Mark Bibbins and Adam Boles.

There will be drinking and smoking (out on the freezing sidewalk) and dazzling conversations and interesting people decked out in VIDA-wear and impossibly spectacular pants.

You wouldn’t want to miss it. So please come. And bring all your friends. (And share this invitation too.)

The cost of admission is $10 at the door. Proceeds will support VIDA’s work.

Readings by:

Kazim Ali
David Baker
Ken Chen
Michael Dumanis
Skip Horack
Stephen Elliott
Seth Fischer
Johannes Goransson
Terrance Hayes
Tom Healy
Major Jackson
Paul Lisicky
Randall Mann
D. A. Powell
Bob Shacochis
Ira Sukrungruang

Alex Dimitrov will MC.


feel free to share http://bit.ly/VIDAblackcat & http://facebook.com/VIDAlit

August 8, 2010
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts — One Year Later: PLEASE READ!

(an email to all of you from VIDA co-director Cate Marvin)

Dear Friend,

It’s quite strange to realize it was only a year ago I sat hunkered down in my sweaty apartment writing an email that seemed to blast right out of my head.

If you received this missive, you’ll know I’d spent the evening folding a LOT of laundry – an endless chore made worse by the fact I was not only folding my laundry, but also that of my 8 month old daughter (any parent will attest that the act of sorting a mountain of brightly patterned shirts, socks and pajamas is in itself a certain hell). After projecting myself into the mindset of the narrator of Tillie Olsen’s seminal short story “I Stand Here Ironing,” I allowed myself a couple glasses of wine. This, I believe, was a key factor in my committing the most grievous of email sins.

For not only did I send my email to numerous people— worse, I concluded my missive with a most lamentable statement: “Feel free to forward this to anyone and everyone you think might be interested.”

This email, titled: “As I Stood Folding Laundry: Women’s Writing Now,” (*read it on VIDAweb.org or vidaweb.tumblr) was spurred by my disgruntlement over the fact an AWP proposal I’d submitted—addressing a rhetorical means of dissent in contemporary American women’s poetry—had been rejected. In my email I worried aloud about whether this panel had been dismissed because of its distinctly feminist overtones, while also noting certain trends I’d observed in the literary world: specifically how male literary achievements are so often deemed more important than those of women with regard to publication, criticism, reviews, awards, etc.

While this disparity had long seemed obvious to me, I’d never before had the nerve to speak to it openly.

My email went on to describe my fantasy of creating an association that would serve to unite women writers, across genres, aesthetics, ethnicities and generations. Indeed, in the simple act of conceiving such an organization’s potential, I got so fired up that evening it seemed to me perfectly reasonable that I send my thoughts to every female writer I knew.

The following morning my in-box was full.

In less than twelve hours, I’d already received numerous replies—some from female poets I considered so awe-inspiringly important I was stunned to see their names appear on my computer’s screen; others from women writers I’d never met, who wrote compelling accounts of their own frustrations, each one expressing a desire to create a national forum for the very issues my email had addressed.

I was awed by the response. But I was also afraid. Because I recognized that I’d unwittingly taken on a responsibility to remain true to all that I’d written only the night before. I realized I would not only need to acknowledge the immediate support with which my proposal had been received, but that I must also embrace it.

I discovered that it was due to the poet Erin Belieu’s initiative that my email reached the astonishing number of people it did. It was she who sent my email to some forty established female poets, who then sent it on to the female writers they knew. It was due to Erin’s initial enthusiasm that my email went, as they say, viral, ending up on blogs, listservs and in newspapers throughout the country.

So it only seemed fair to turn to the culprit who had so thoroughly disseminated my thoughts. I didn’t in fact know Erin Belieu well personally, but I knew she had a reputation for gumption and guts, something this fantasy organization was going to need to get off the ground.

One short phone call later and I now had a co-director. It was that day that Erin and I co-founded the organization that began as WILLA, and has now transformed into a different name—VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

[To create a more distinct identity and preempt possible legal issues, WILLA is now VIDA. We are confident that we’ve already begun to grow into our new name and feel that “VIDA” better reflects the vitality of our organization.]

So I write to you a year later from a poorly air-conditioned room while suffering the advances of a particularly persistent mosquito. I still have laundry that needs sorting. However, I can say that my life as a female writer been not only been invigorated, but deeply altered, in the best sense of the word, by the email I almost regretted sending a year ago.

VIDA’s had a great first year. A few of many highlights include our mention in the New York Times for calling out Publisher’s Weekly “Top Ten Best Books of 2009,” and their egregiously “female-free” list. VIDA also hosted a number of readings and conversations, including our AWP Evening of Burlesque, Roller Derby And Literature, which turned out to be just as thought provoking and fun as we’d wanted our debut to be. We’ve recently been asked by AWP to be a sponsor of next year’s conference in Washington DC and are busily scheming to make our follow up just as memorable.

There are many more things under way for VIDA this year: we have a spiffy new website and blog (www.vidaweb.org) with articles and features you’ll want to check out as well as a new Facebook page where you can find out about VIDA events and join the thousands of people there who’ve entered into our conversation. We’re also moving along in planning a national conference for those who want to support and know more about literature written by women. It’s heavy-lifting, but we’re devoted to making this enormous and financially complicated project happen. More information will be coming about this soon.

Thank you for reading this. I hope that you will once again: “Feel free to forward this to anyone and everyone you think might be interested.”

Your friend,

Cate


Cate Marvin, Associate Professor
Department of English
College of Staten Island, CUNY

Co-Director, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts

catemarvin.com
vidaweb.org

[x-posted to VIDA facebook notes]

July 31, 2010
Welcome back to VIDAWEB!

During our summer time chrysalis/hiatus we’ve become VIDA: Women in Literary Arts! Stay tuned for new content and exciting news, our website relaunch is just on the horizon…

very best,
jojo on behalf of the VIDAwomen

April 14, 2010
WILLA at AWP in the press


There WILLA be at AWP by Ru Freeman on April 13, 2010

Is it ever possible to go against the grain, particularly in an industry so thick with sexism that it is a veritable live model of exploitation where the masses who write, read and purchase books (women) support the few who judge, award and critique them (men)? Apparently, not only is it possible, but it can be a whole lot of fun. The first rock-concert styled public reading and national kick-off for WILLA (Women In Letters & Literary Arts), took place at the Denver Press Club last Friday night during this year’s conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), held in Colorado. After two days of panels and readings (approximately twenty-four during each of six time slots; do the math), plus a full slate of off-site events ranging from a reading hosted by several literary journals, Counterpath Review, Drunken Boat, Guernica, and Persea Books to one by Cave Canem/Kundiman to the Con Tinta Celebration which involved one of those rarities in the usually expensive AWP world, free food, and two popular parties on the same night, one by über literary agent, Julie Barer and the other by Granta, one would imagine that participants would feel an eyes-glazed-over effect in their entire bodies at the prospect of listening to 31 writers from 9 to midnight. Instead, through the course of the evening, nearly 400 people showed up….

read on : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/there-willa-be-at-awp_b_535834.html

(wow! your very own WILLAWEB “new media admin.“‘s even get a shout-out in there. flattered to the utmost.)

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Women writers shine brightly at Denver events
A report, with audio excerpts, of exceptional women of letters
by Joe Richey on Apr 12, 2010

The three-day Associated Writing Programs Conference held at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver was dominated by a growing number of Wild Women Writers of the West, academic hipsters, lanky dreadlock sisters, far-out schiksas, budding Leslie Marmon Silkos. It seemed to me they were the liveliest crowd at the conference, and their events were the best attended…

To find the only bathroom I knew at The Press Club, I went through the kitchen and up the back stairs — where I found one hundred or more wild women! It was Women in Letters and Literary Arts’ evening of burlesque, literature and roller derby. I ran back and got Vaughan, and we stood stage left for a half an hour watching one amazing performance and act of poetic bravery after the next. The solidarity and enthusiasm in the room was palpable. It made me think of how it might have been October 7, 1955, when Allen Ginsberg read Howl at The Six Gallery on Fillmore St. in San Francisco, except these were predominantly women — garish, unsinkable women — who told some of the best penis jokes I’ve heard in years…

Among the notable performers there: Erin Belieu (poet) and Cate Marvin (poet), co-founders and directors of WILLA, and WILLA Board Members Kara Candito (poet), Danielle Pafulnda (poet), Susan Steinberg (fiction), Barrie Jean Borich (nonfiction), Amy King (poet) and Ann Townsend (poet and essayist). The night was graced with distinguished writers Carol Muske-Dukes, Antonya Nelson, Kim Addonizio, Patricia Smith and Cathy Park-Hong. Look for more from WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) on Facebook and their website, http://www.willaweb.org.

read the rest!

http://boulderreporter.com/2010/04/women-writers-shine-brightly-at-denver-events/

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From the Ms. blog, “The New Old-Girls’ Club by Danielle Roderick on April 9, 2010

Why can’t we have an organization of female writers … one that would really be a forum for discussion along any lines of the female writer’s experience? An opportunity for women writers to be exposed to everything (or almost everything) that’s going on in our country with regard to women’s literature?
That’s the notion that led Cate Marvin to start Women in Letters and Literary Arts (WILLA) after The Association of Writer and Writing Programs (AWP) rejected a conference panel she had organized on women’s poetry. Marvin sent out an email last August that went viral, opening the door to a much larger conversation and becoming a call to action
read on: http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/04/09/the-new-old-girls-club/

April 9, 2010
blogterview #3 with Camille Dungy / WILLA goes live! is tonight

(WILLA goes live! is tonight at 9pm at The Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Place, Denver CO - http://www.denverpressclub.org)

Blogterview with Camille Dungy - by jojo lazar
(w. copy editing thanks to Das Meff, as Cate & co. are, of course, at AWP! thus leaving me in charge of this tumblr ship!)


Camille Dungy is reading tonight at WILLA’s off-site AWP event, WILLA Goes Live! An Evening of Burlesque, Literature and Roller Derby. Camille kindly answered some of my queries about the many literary projects she’s been involved with including her entries on Poetry Magazine’s blog, “Harriet.” This is my third and last pre-WILLA Goes Live! reader interview. (But these blogterviews are like a fun bad habit, so don’t worry, I’m not quittin’! You’ll see more of them soon.) I hope if these glimpses of writers have piqued your interest then perhaps you’ll do your own web-spelunking of some of the other fabulous women on the pretty epic readers list! And so, on with the show…

Among her many activities and achievements, I read about Dungy’s extensive involvement with the African American poetry organization, Cave Canem. On the Cave Canem site they proudly promote themselves as creators of a safe space for artistic exploration in African American literature for the past fourteen years. I wondered if Dungy was drawn to organizations like Cave Canem and WILLA for the same reasons at all, and if entities that come out of a cultural need appealed to her in the same spirit of safe haven.

Here’s the thing about community: Most of us need it to some degree or another. Some might say that community is needed for self-affirmation. But it’s more complicated than that. In one of her most wonderful and most famous poems Lucille Clifton asks us to “celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life.” She goes on to say, “i had no model.” She had to create her own image of who she would become as a woman, mother, wife, and poet. And this self-creation gave us the amazing Lucille Clifton. And similar self-creations gave us Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and I could go on and on. But, in the two latter cases, we know that each sought some sort of community, whether they were able to achieve it or not. They may have been forging their own poetics and poetic selves, but each of them would have been happy for a little company along the way.

And that’s what organizations like Cave Canem and WILLA and Kundiman and Con Tinta and Lambda Lit and AROHO have allowed. They provide community for people who have become all too familiar with long stretches of going it alone. They provide these brief periods where one can be surrounded by people who share certain perspectives…[And in these environments] some parts of one’s guard can be let down and for a while the psychic energy demanded by carrying that particular part of one’s guard all the time every day can be redirected to something else, something perhaps more useful, the writing of a new poem perhaps. So, I think that my involvement in Cave Canem has provided for me windows of time in which I could redirect my psychic energies and thus write different poems than I otherwise might in those hours and days and weeks. I hope WILLA will provide that opportunity for women writers in one way or another.

Dungy is a co-founder of From the Fishouse, and among other things it boasts a huge online collection of audio clips of poetry with plenty from emerging writers. It is a really amazing place to experience free content in a way that shouldn’t be abnormal (though it is to some, including me)- hearing the voices of the poets themselves! I wondered if Fishouse arose as the integral aural part of poetic culture was losing ground and in general what Dungy wanted to share about the power of the poet speaking aloud.

When Matt O’Donnell and I began From the Fishouse in 2005 there really weren’t any repositories of emerging writers online. There were some great online journals like Drunken Boat, but there wasn’t as much of an emphasis on audio content as we see today. And no big archives like Fishouse has become (we’ve got over 1500 tracks and over 250 poets these days). We believe that the audio nature of a poem is a crucial component of the work, and the From the Fishouse website and anthology honor that fact. I’ve always believed that. Matt asked me to send him audio of some of his favorite poems of mine because he loved to hear me read them, and he was too far away to hear me on a regular basis. Lots of people don’t get the opportunity to hear poets read their work as regularly as those of us who live in cities might, but with From the Fishouse you have something of a chance to hear poets on demand. I’m touring a lot with my second book, Suck on the Marrow, and my anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and so I’m reading out loud quite a bit, but I don’t think that my attitude about the importance of orality has changed. Even before my first book, I was already pretty accustomed to being at a podium from my years of teaching and performing. People like to be entertained. Even if I have something difficult or horrible to share with them, I feel it is my privilege and responsibility to honor their time and make the listening worth their while. The WILLA reading’s going to be pretty great as I believe several of us in the line up think similarly.

I also asked about Dungy’s “Harriet” blogs concerning Lucille Clifton as the deep connection shared with her work was unmistakably present. It reminded me of what my mentor, Rebecca Seiferle called, “building our own poetic (nuclear) family.” I shared this with Dungy, and asked if she had any thoughts, as I am really interested in the ways we learn and merge with the writers we feel mentally and emotionally linked to.

I think I’ve always thought of a sort of family beyond my own family populated by people from whom I can learn. My first book, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, explores family histories, and my idea of family expands beyond my own to include famous and infamous figure and also plants and landscapes. So, the idea that we need to build poetic families is one I completely agree with. We’re not writing only to our peers. I certainly hope not. I write with Sappho and Wheatley and Marlowe and Lorca and Akhmatova and Cavafy and Li Po in mind as well. Theirs are the standards I strive to achieve.

As with Susan Steinberg and Cheryl Strayed I wanted to hear Dungy’s initial reaction to WILLA, if she received Cate’s original email August 2009, and how it affected her. Dungy is quoted concerning feminism in a few of her interviews I stumbled upon and I wanted to know how WILLA fit in with her politics and worldview.

I did get several early version of Cate’s email. From several members of my literary “family.” I responded to Cate through that means. And I also got involved early on in one of the Facebook discussion groups about diversity and inclusion in WILLA. My premise is that if WILLA is going to really make any difference we need to take into account some of the ideas that have been contentious and contentiously ignored in earlier women’s movements. Specifically, the needs and concerns of woman of color and working women (read: not wealthy) have too often been ignored in women’s movements through American history. See: Sojourner Truth. See: Mary Church Terrell. See: Audre Lorde. Wouldn’t it be just amazing if during this new century movement we didn’t have to be exclusive of certain categories of women in order to win rights for certain other categories of women? This remains important enough to me that I want to remain actively involved in WILLA to see if I can help achieve the goals established by women like the ones I named. So, back to the first part of your question, one of my ideas about what feminism can and should mean is a holistic conception of community. This is a conception that includes women of color, women of all social classes, mothers, women who choose not to be mothers, and men. We ought to surround ourselves with men who believe in our goals too. It’s about balance. And when I’m writing and editing and teaching I need to do what I can to achieve that balance in what I’m doing too.

In addition to WILLA Goes Live! Here is some more places you can catch Camille Dungy at AWP:

April 9, 2-2:30: Signing From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems That Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. At the Persea table.
April 10, 12-1 p.m.: Come by the University of Georgia Press table to have your favorite Black Nature poet sign your anthology!

http://www.CamilleDungy.com

Camille T. Dungy is author of Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, January 2010) and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006). She is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), finalist for the 2010 NAACP Image Awards and recipient of the 2010 Northern California Book Awards Special Recognition Prize. She is also co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Dungy has received fellowships from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Dana Award, and Bread Loaf. She is currently an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

April 6, 2010
blogterview #2 with Cheryl Strayed

Blogterview with Cheryl Strayed - by jojo lazar

Cheryl Strayed is reading this Friday at WILLA’s off-site AWP event, WILLA Goes Live! An Evening of Burlesque, Literature and Roller Derby. We’ve been sharing a lively e-conversation on feminism, confessionalism and MFA programs among other topics. I have the honor of introducing her here as my second writer in this week’s series of “blogterviews” showcasing the range of voices and genres you’ll hear at WILLA Goes Live! this Friday. Please read on to learn about Cheryl Strayed in my blogterview #2.

In addition to her novel, Torch, Strayed’s essays have been published in such journals as The Sun and the collections The Best American Essays (2000 & 2003). I read some online versions and excerpts of her work and was immediately taken by her sexual candor and emotional honesty- it all felt genuine and raw while never letting me forget it was being expressed within a tightly-organized essay form. With such bold, personal work I assumed Strayed must have a particular stance and breadth of awareness on the literary world’s opinion on “confessional” writing, and I was eager to hear her take on the fallacy of a woman writer’s inclination towards autobiography.

[As for] confessionalism in fiction and literary nonfiction, and this fallacy that women are more inclined to be writing autobiographically: I think that’s true. I think that women are always perceived on more personal, and thus “smaller,” terms than men. Jonathan Franzen’s (excellent) novel, The Corrections, was read universally by men and women and understood to be a “big” novel that commented on American white middle-class culture in these times, but you know what? It was a domestic novel. It was a novel about a family. If a woman had written that book that’s how it would have been interpreted and it would have been read mostly by women and it would have been considered “small.”

Here’s what I have to say about confessionalism: what the hell is wrong with it? I confess! I do. And the people who like my work are responding in part to that—to the fact that I dare to tell them the truth, that I am willing to be intimate with the reader on the page. Of course, this isn’t to say telling the truth is enough… It’s your writing that will make your work powerful—the writer, on the page, mastering the craft—[and] once you’ve got that down you DO pair it with the truth… Give me the real story any day over some staid piece in which the writer concerns him or herself with not confessing what is actually inside his or her heart or mind or body. Women writers have been trying to shake this confessionalism label for decades, and I’m quite sure it’s a label that has negative connotations only because it’s been associated with women, but I’ll reclaim the term. I’ll confess to you.

These statements are particularly striking as Strayed grew up without any sense of her “right” to tell stories; there were no writer role models in her working class childhood. She said it wasn’t until she went to college that she began to embrace her passion and craft. Strayed attended graduate school when she was thirty; it was only then she felt she could no longer put off finishing her novel and knew she would thrive in the “shelter” an MFA program would provide. I asked her about the benefits of her “self taught” or self-driven years of study, and how this experience propelled her as she did not need to go to an MFA to learn how to write per say.

[With regard to] being a writer on my own before going to grad school: I am so glad I did that. I think it was a great choice for so many reasons, both personal and professional. I took myself very seriously as a writer from the beginning (that would be by about age 19) and I think that being out there on my own as a writer I developed a true sense of myself as a writer. I didn’t have anything to prop me up, you know? So I just wrote and read voraciously and connected, when I could, with others who were writing.

I asked about Strayed’s undergraduate education in women’s studies, as I wanted to know if this was a constant thread in her life interests. I also am asking each blogterview’d writer her initial reactions to the Cate Marvin email that got this WILLA ball rolling.

I do think [my women’s studies education] had a huge impact on just about everything—from my writing to my involvement in WILLA. Or rather, perhaps more accurately, I have always been a feminist and that’s what drew me to women’s studies. I was a curious, ambitious, extroverted, smart child who very early on noticed that things for girls were different than they were for boys and it upset me deeply. So I was a feminist and I went to college and took some women’s studies classes that just totally popped my mind into tiny pieces and I became even more of a feminist. My feminism has changed and grown over the years, as I have. Becoming a mother taught me a lot about what it means to be a woman in a patriarchy. My feminism has become less angry, more forgiving and much deeper over the years.

When I read that letter Cate wrote last year in response to her panel on women poets being rejected by AWP, I connected with it immediately. She was speaking of an experience that was all her own, but it resonated deeply with me—and obviously with so many other women writers. The kind of culture that brought WILLA about is one in which thousands of women writers read a letter by another woman writer and they totally got it. What we “got” was so much bigger than whether or not Cate’s panel should have been rejected. It was this overwhelmingly familiar sense that women writers are being rejected in a million ways that seem to be beyond articulation because they are rooted in a very entrenched, very discreet sexism. WILLA intends to articulate those million things.

In addition to WILLA goes live! Cheryl Strayed will be doing a panel at AWP (at noon on Thursday) called The New Domestic Fiction.

Historically, domestic fiction has meant stories of women, marriage, children and houses. But home and family have changed radically and contemporary fiction reflects this shift. The new domestic fiction includes not only women and kitchens, but men and laundry, even knives. Panelists will investigate this strange environment through the lenses of masculine domesticity, embodiments of the maternal, class, and narrative structure. Panel will feature readings, discussion, and time for questions.



You can read her work and visit her on the web at CherylStrayed.com

Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, will be published by Knopf in 2011. Her novel, Torch, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Sun, Allure, Brain, Child and other places and have twice been included in The Best American Essays.

April 5, 2010
pre-AWP blogterview #1 with Susan Steinberg

Blogterview with Susan Steinberg - by jojo lazar

Susan Steinberg is reading this Friday at WILLA’s off-site AWP event, WILLA goes live! An evening of Burlesque, Literature and Roller Derby. I had the privilege of corresponding with her for this “blogterview” in honor of AWP week; I hope it piques all of you kind WILLA fans/followers/readers’ interest. This Friday is going to showcase a range of voices, so let me introduce you to reader Susan Steinberg.

You can read excerpts of Steinberg’s books The End of Free Love and Hydroplane on the Fiction Collective website. After perusing her profile there I asked about the reviews’ emphasis on her hybrid style of writing. I wondered if this label-defiant voice was intentionally genre-overlapping and/or used to achieve specific emotional atmospheres and idiosyncratic spaces. Steinberg began by tackling the notion of her work as a poetry and fiction hybrid.

I definitely don’t see my work as poetry or inter-genre within the world of literature—it’s fiction—though it has been called poetry often enough. I’m no fan of this, in large part because a) I read a lot of poetry, b) my work would actually be bad poetry, and c) calling my work poetry suggests that fiction is supposed to be this one thing — “realism,” narrowly defined and linearly presented. My work grows out of a visual arts background, and I blame/credit this, as well as my own inability to tell a linear narrative, for the work’s “hybridity,” by which I mean its concerns with language and form.

I inquired about the simultaneous “monomania” of topic alongside a splintering of language in Steinberg’s work as I wanted to know if the fragmentation of thoughts and cultural details ultimately mirrored her sense of the woman’s experience today.

I often use the word “obsessive” (the nicer word is “focused”) to describe the narrators in my work, and I would say that their obsessions and ways of dealing with them are directly related to being female. As we know, it can be an impossible social and cultural role, femaleness, and I’m fascinated by the performance of it—in my work and in my life. But it’s not enough for me to tell a story about fragmentation; I like for the forms of my stories both to reflect and to create the narrators’ fragmented, frustrated states.

Steinberg has her BFA in painting, so I was curious about any cross-pollination that might occur between her visual art and fiction and whether this affected her writerly eye.

My work is more influenced by the visual arts than it is by other writings. Often, I’m intrigued by some aspect of the visual pieces themselves (a way, for example, of telling a story or a way of handling repetition), but more often it’s the risks that the artists have taken.

I was really taken by Steinberg’s strength to stand outside literary influence like this, to be able to see oneself as a writer who isn’t inter-genre out of experimentation or as she modestly claims- an “inability” to write linearly. Instead, Steinberg is armed with the unique voice of a painter that speaks outside typical fiction boundaries.

And as I asked all the women readers I will be blogterviewing this week, I had to know what initially drew Steinberg into the WILLA fold, and if she’d received Cate Marvin’s original call-to-arms email if any of it in particular rang true to her experience as a woman writer.

I found out about WILLA, via an email from Cate and Erin, as I was reentering the world after a year-long academic sabbatical, during which I was traveling, writing, and researching gender and performance studies. In other words, I had spent a year thinking about the very issues that sparked WILLA, but I had only the frustration and no good ideas about what to do with it. I was absolutely thrilled and ready to be a part of an organization that would focus on women writers in the way that WILLA does. And I’m thrilled now to be working with this great group of writers.

In addition to WILLA Goes Live! Susan Steinberg will be reading at a Fiction Collective 2 event on Thursday night. Be sure to check her out, and visit her on the web:

http://fc2.org/steinberg/steinberg.htm

Susan Steinberg is the author of two short story collections, Hydroplane (FC2) and The End of Free Love (FC2). Her stories have also appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, LIT, Columbia, and other literary journals. She has held residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, The Wurlitzer Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, and she was recently Scholar-in-Residence in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. She received a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of San Francisco.

March 16, 2010
Writer profile-let: Isabella Gardner

(Photo of your humble tumblelog-keeper, jojo)
Last week I found myself in the small but lovely selection of poetry stacks the Waltham public library had to offer- I’d already picked up a book on Art Nouveau to sate my writing-from-pictures and drawing-inspired-by impulses, a ukulele method book (to perfect my vaudevillian silliness) and now I was waiting to discover someone/something new- poetry that would move me immediately. I was judging books by their spines before giving their covers the once-over and waiting for (forgive my hippy-ness) “angelic impulse” to guide me. It did. On the bottom shelf I discovered the work of Isabella Gardner (The Collected Poems) and as a Bostonaut I had to know what her relation was to the museum’s namesake (Isabella Stewart Gardner was her great-aunt).

I read the front and back cover-flaps and greedily jumped to the afterword, which I will include below as it actually brought tears to my eyes in my windowside carrel. Her work does not disappoint after all the hype, to boot- but it was her prose that profoundly moved me first. I have never heard someone speak of the work of the poet from such a humanistic/non-lofty vantage (she does not want the reader to see her/poets as oracles, to be sure) while simultaneously convincing me of her otherworldly wisdom. She explains such simple things about the WHY of the art in a complex way I know no one else could have put just so. You know? (She is also ridiculously modest about her intellect!) I was overwhelmed by her mind and what I perceived to be her literary spirit. So here is the afterword/artistic statement unlike anything I’ve read before; I wanted to share it with you WILLA folks. Your tumblelog scrapbook keeper, jojo

p.s. I have since put up her poem, “Sonnet for my acquaintances.”

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THE FELLOWSHIP WITH ESSENCE: AN AFTERWORD

Love consists of this: that two solitudes protect
and touch, and greet each other.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

In so far as I am aware, I have never belonged to any school or coterie of thought or attitude. I have no dialectical approach to poetry. Not being an intellectual, or even cerebral, I work through instinct and intuition, through (or with) whatever I have acquired via my sense, a kind of osmosis.

I don’t believe the poet should write with a cudgel, a lance or a crystal ball. A poet is no wiser, no more compassionate than anyone else; yet I feel that the poet is focused on a particularized participation in the most minute or enormous instants, as well as in incidents of hourly existence. The poet is also presumably gifted with the ability to integrate and synthesize, to make vivid, to heighten and illuminate that awareness. If the poet is ferociously honest, fiercely intent in the act of writing, a poem is made. It may not be a good poem, it may be a bad poem; but it will not be a nothing.

Whether my own or that of another poet, I consider each poem as a separate, particular and immediate end in itself; a totality. However, if one reads or hears twenty or thirty- or even five or ten- poems by the same poet, there should be a recognizable voice, an individuality of tone, cadence and style of action and reaction within the poem.

Certainly, there will be recurring clues to, often proofs of, that poet’s feeling toward those who share the human condition, toward that poet’s life-experience and toward the work itself. The necessary nakedness involved in the act of writing is frightening to the poet, and often to others, and it contributes to a loneliness which in turn is exacerbated by the exhausting struggle to maintain the essential focus at whatever cost. A series of poems, a body of poetry, however small, is a declaration, a proof of a living human creature.

Karl Shapiro, in Beyond Criticism, said it for me when he wrote: “Poetry is the personal particular human truth which cannot be ordered or reasoned or pre-conceived, it can only be lived in life and made in art.” Shapiro went on to say, “the limited personal truth of poetry and art gives the only permanent evidence of human reality we have.”

If there is a theme with which I am particularly concerned, it is the contemporary failure of love. I don’t mean romantic love or sexual passion, but the love which is the specific and particular recognition of one human being by another- the response by eye and voice and touch of two solitudes. The democracy of universal vulnerability.

Isabella Gardner
Summer, 1979

(short bio & book info) ~ http://boaeditions.org/authors/gardner.html

March 13, 2010
VIDAWEB.tumblr table of contents

2010

August 8: VIDA: Women in Literary Arts: VIDA: Women in Literary Arts — One Year Later, an email from Cate Marvin

April 9: (WILLA goes live! reader) blogterview #3 with Camille Dungy
April 6: (WILLA goes live! reader) blogterview #2 with Cheryl Strayed
April 5: (WILLA goes live! reader) pre-AWP blogterview #1 with Susan Steinberg

March 16: Writer profile-let: Isabella Gardner
March 13: reblog from Miriam’s Well: 3 Questions for Rebecca Seiferle
March 9: event details for WILLA Goes Live: A benefit evening of burlesque, literature & roller derby
March 7: event recap, WILLA’s New School debut in others’ words
March 3: allow me to introduce myself, WILLA tumbles into view
March 3: reblog of 02.21.2010 HILO HERO: ANAÏS NIN

February 28: How all this began, As I Stood Folding Laundry: Women’s Writing Now. (aug09 email from Cate Marvin)


content from your humble VIDA tumblewench, jojo lazar.
(image from TheBlackSpotBooks’s etsy)

March 13, 2010
3.8.2010 Miriam’s Well: 3 Questions for Rebecca Seiferle

this is a reblog from Miriam’s Well. I just learned of it via the interviewee, (already a WILLA ‘fan’ on facebook!) my mentor Rebecca Seiferle. In a roundabout way WILLA brought her back into my life; I haven’t seen her since she came to read here in Boston in honour of her book, Wild Tongue which received Grub St.’s 2008 National Book Prize. Rebecca taught me at Brandeis when she was poet-in-residence 2004-2006, and among numerous other accomplishments/biographical fantastical details she has run the online journal The Drunken Boat since 2000. (though I only just learned there is more than 1 of this title…) I really was excited to have this text to share in the willaweb.tumblr- a taste of what I learned from an amazing writer, woman and teacher during a critical stage of my poetic evolution in college. I got so much out of our friendship and her conversations with me on my work/poetry in general- I think the experience was part of what WILLA is all about. so without any more jojo-dithering ado…

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3 Questions for Rebecca Seiferle
March 8, 2010 — Miriam Sagan

1. What is you personal/aesthetic relationship to the poetic line? That
is, how do you understand it, use it, etc.

I feel the poetic line should have an integrity of its own, so that
each line in a poem has a kind of tension and fullness that allows the
line to both extend forward with the syntax of the sentence and to echo
backwards into what has been said before. I often read my poems aloud
when writing and editing them in order to hear the breath of thought
and the rhythm of feeling; what the poem itself wants to say. The music
of free verse is partly the result of the complicated interweaving
between the sentence, with its linear order, and the interruptions of
line break which is connected to breath and the body. I say
“interruptions” but the line break is also a place upon which the line
that follows can hinge, pivot, turn, leap, or where silence can enter
the poem.

2. Do you find a relationship between words and writing and the human
body? Or between your writing and your body?

“The body, the body, the body, the body” is the last line of one of my
earlier poems, and, so, yes, I’ve always felt there’s a fundamental
relationship between words and the body, that the injuries that
language can afflict or oppress with are borne by the body, that the
responsibility of the poet is to take on that weight of language on
behalf of the body/bodies that have been injured by it. Many great
poets have, I think, a characteristic bodily gesture in their poetry,
for instance Celan and the glottal stop, Vallejo and a kind of choking
stutter that doesn’t know whether to swallow the crumb that sticks in
the throat or to spit it out. I think writing poetry for me became
necessary when I realized that most of my own experience, my
sensibility, my perceptions, were inarticulate, a kind of mute
materiality, and geological layers of silence of life in my own child’s
body. Poetry is the language of the body.

3. Is there anything you dislike about being a poet? I’ve always had a
sort of antipathy to ‘being’ a poet, by which I mean, to carrying
around the identity. I’d rather emphasize the activity of writing
poetry and the engagement and encounter that that implies. As a result,
I dislike much of the ‘po-biz’, the aspects of name cultivation and
brand marketing, the friendships cultivated for the sake of the book,
etc, the whole capitalistic enterprise of going around marketing the
poet, ha, and the way in which vital work is often ignored because it
doesn’t come from a recognizable identity, and I mean by recognizable
identity not only a known poet but a kind of work that can’t be
‘recognized’ for not fitting in some niche. And book reviewing, which
in relationship to poetry is often either non-existent or simply
bad–many book reviews are written by friends, colleagues with the
resultant inflation. Book reviews that are critical are often critical
for reasons that have more to do with the myopia of the reviewer,
grinding his or her own poetic axe. To read the book itself is to often
wonder what invisible text the reviewer imagined in its place. I
suppose, though, these small complaints are connected in that they all
the consequence of poetry being caught in a bubble, isolated, by
identity and self-promotion, as if it were useless or a rare disease,
and not a profound engagement and encounter with existence. I’d rather
it was not ‘about being a poet,’ but about writing poetry as a vital
human activity that extends into all aspects of existence.

***

If language is that forest,

we arrive silent–

no alphabets struggling in our wrists or our fingers;

if that word
is a leaf, its edges are needles
which pierce the air,
and, together, our green sheaths
bruise into nothing
but fragrance.

Even the pine cone
is fashioned
in the manner of honey
combed from the dendritic rain.

What you give me
is that light
that gives itself freely,

as we watch the flame burning
out of the mouths and the bellies
of innumerable
bees.

What my hands are saying to your lips is beyond saying
that root word
so seeded
in the marrow of

fire, I can say it only
in the way my face breaks

over and over,
in calling your name.

If the forest was guttural
with animals
and gods,

this is that
most human homing …

you, in the kitchen, singing:
my flesh, my house.

Rebecca Seiferle was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2004. Her
fourth poetry collection, Wild Tongue, (Copper Canyon, 2007) won the
Grub Street Poetry Prize for Best Poetry Collection of 2008. Her
previous poetry collections have won the Western States Book Award, a
Pushcart prize, the Hemley and Bogin Awards, the Writer’s Exchange
Award, and the National Writers’ Union Prize. She has translated two
booklength collections of the Spanish of Cesar Vallejo, most recently
The Black Heralds (Copper Canyon, 2003). Seiferle is the Founding
Editor/ Publisher of the online international poetry journal, The
Drunken Boat, http://www.thedrunkenboat.com. Her text/image “Other”
poems have been published in Pirene’s Fountain, fieralingue (Italy),
and shown at Raices Taller and Dinnerware galleries. She lives in
Tucson, Arizona, and teaches at The Art Center Design College.

http://miriamswell.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/3-questions-for-rebecca-seiferle/

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check out Miriam Sagan’s blog ~ http://miriamswell.wordpress.com

About: I want to add that now that I’ve been blogging for two months I’m looking for guest bloggers, books to review, published poets to interview, and projects to cover. The blog focuses on poetry–particularly of Santa Fe and of the Southwest–but I’m also covering land art, painting, travel, and serendipitous ideas. I welcome your comments and suggestions! Send me your books to review, published poets to interview, art events, and anything about Baba Yaga! I’m also looking for little essays on “where I like to write in my hometowm”–cafes, libraries, nooks, crannies…

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