“Rachel Kushner is in her mid-30s, which means she has not yet reached full stride as a writer. Yet her first two novels have taken her a long way toward huge. How did she do it? How did she go so far, so fast? Turns out it was easy as one, two, three.”
Rachel Kushner Is Well On Her Way to Huge by Bill Morris
But Rukeyser wrote enough to leave her artistic legacy mixed. While there is certainly no native opposition between poetry and politics, Rukeyser’s passion for radical social causes left a good part of her poetry feeling stilted and forced. Especially as the Cold War unfolded, Rukeyser’s worker-centered social protest cast a shadow over her career. She was monitored by the federal government until the 1970s. But her ecstatic love for the fundamental good in human beings, and her faith in the making of a better world, breathes through her work. Her humor gives it buoyancy. “O for God’s sake,” she wrote in a poem called “Islands,” “they are connected underneath…
I had the feeling that my children thought that I stood frozen inside the house while they were at school, only to be reanimated when they burst back through the door at the end of the day. Sure they knew I was a writer, but what did that actually mean to them?
“It is the persistent, damning mischaracterisation of Zelda as ‘insane’ that most needs undoing. The trouble lies in the diagnosis she was given in 1930: ‘schizophrenia’. While today we know it to mean severe mental illness requiring delicate and often lifelong treatment with medications, therapies, and sometimes institutionalisation, in Zelda’s time it was a catch-all label for a range of emotional difficulties.”
I feel like various dead writers are dear friends of mine — from Woolf to Plath to Duras to DFW — their lives and lessons and warnings and urgings are constantly informing my own, challenging my own.
…its woman-centredness also hints at feminism’s dirty secret: that feminists might be feminists because they are supremely interested in themselves, even if that interest is in the shape of self-doubt. While Sheila says that it’s great to be a woman because what a female genius should be hasn’t yet been established, that is also the problem of being a woman.
This is a tricky subject. Bringing up the women’s question — I mean the women’s fiction question — is not unlike mentioning the national debt at a dinner party. “Some people will get annoyed and insist it’s been talked about too much and inaccurately, and some will think it really matters. When I refer to so-called women’s fiction, I’m not applying the term the way it’s sometimes used: to describe a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience. I’m referring to literature that happens to be written by women. But some people, especially some men, see most fiction by women as one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.”
Meg Wolitizer, “The Second Shelf.”
See also: Deena Drewis’s “What we call what Women Write”
Source: The New York Times
It’s no secret how crazy the concept of ‘gendered’ writing makes me. What, Jane Austen has to wear a strap-on to be taken seriously? Female is a gender; it is not a genre of literature.
Elissa Schappell, Author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls, check out her interview with BOMB in this long read. (via bombmagazine)
You might want to complement this fantastic interview with Deena Drewis’ eye opening piece “What We Call what Women Write.” It’s definitely one of the best essays we ran in 2011.
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