So last week I talked about the very cool Chiasmus Media looking for a new co-honcho. This week, The Sun is looking for a Managing Editor. And this gig, no joke, actually pays!
Continuing the coverage of Men Undressed contributors over at The Writer’s [Inner] Journey, the always-honest-and-insightful Rumpus fave, Steve Almond, talks about overcoming inhibitions.
And Steve, along with newcomers like Eugene Cross and veterans like Etgar Keret, was just included on the Frank O’Connor Internations Short Story Award longlist.
In the “What’s Not Fun About That?” category, did you see Adam Levin talking with porn star Kayden Kross over at McSweeny’s?
The new issue of Bookslut is out. There’s always too much to link there to link any one thing without feeling like great things have been left out. Try this and this. They gave Stacy Bierlein, today’s Sunday Rumpus interviewer, some good love, too.
Roxane Gay‘s new Rumpus essay, “Beyond the Measure of Men,” discusses Meg Wolitzer’s recent NYTimes piece, “The Second Shelf.” But really what Roxane is talking about is action. If you want gender disparity to stop being an issue in literary culture, then publish more women. This seems pretty reasonable. It wouldn’t seem reasonable if women were genuinely not writing work as good as their male counterparts . . . but does anyone, other than V.S. Naipaul, really believe that? The issue isn’t even one of the “women’s fiction” category, whatever one feels about that term. Among writers of indisputably “literary” fiction, there still seem as many women as men crafting and submitting work. I’ve been an editor for almost 20 years, in print and online forums, and to argue some gargantuan ratio imbalance seems silly. Recently, a writer I like approached me with an anthology idea. His idea was to publish risk-taking women writers, to “show” people that women are putting out brave literary work. But almost every writer on his list already had a following–their existence wasn’t “news.” Anthologies with this angle have been coming out since the 1970s. Their audience just wasn’t the kind of mainstream/corporate corner of publishing that confers honor on men like Franzen or Eugenides. Other Voices Books publishing another anthology wasn’t going to change that–we were just going to be preaching to a choir. When do we stop feeling we need to “prove” this basic fact that women are producing literature, and just start acting on it as part of everyday life? There’s a lot of complexity here. Some people feel like if they don’t need to prove anything, they can just disengage. That issue extends beyond literature. How many writers of each gender get published in the New Yorker maybe isn’t really something that should keep us up at night. Maybe that’s a high class problem to have. But disparity has echoes everywhere. Which voices are considered universal vs. exotic/Other/specialized is a wider a topic than who’s getting a fancy prize and who isn’t. I get tired of this “women’s fiction” and VIDA statistics debate, too. I just want to write and not be accountable for or to an entire gender or industry. But throwing up our hands and walking away isn’t the answer. Of course no one is accountable for all writing by women or for the sweeping marketing ploys of Big Publishing. Still, literature is a dialogue that spans both directions of history, and artists engage in eternal conversation. In that conversation, we’re all accountable for and to ourselves.
Today, Josip Novakovich is interviewed. You may remember Josip’s Sunday essay on Friendship Addiction.
