Sexism in Writing Programs: David Gilmour is No Exception

I thought I might share some thoughts on MFA programs. As writers of any genre, I think it is important to know and discuss how new writers are taught.


By now most of you have probably seen the disgusting words of writing professor David Gilmour, “I’m not interested in teaching books by women. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth."


His word are sexist, racist and unbelievable to anyone living in the 20th century, but they are not an exception when it comes to the world of writing programs.

 Please find the full story here

I can only speak from my experience. I entered an MFA program 12 years ago, ready to become the next Margaret Atwood (who by the way is a prolific, bestselling, award winning Canadian author like Mr. Gilmour), but what I found when I arrived was not a place that read her books, or taught her.
The break out of male to female professors in my program was as follows: Fiction: 2 male full-time, 1 female adjunct; Non-Fiction: 1 female full-time; Poetry: 1 male full time, 1 female full time and 1 male adjunct.

Pretty even as things in writing go, but notice 2 male full-time for fiction. Those men were my main professors. They were the ones who were going to teach me how to write as a woman and certainly they were equipped to teach writing, but not that. As a result, my literature classes were absolutely male heavy. There were females sprinkled in: Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro but mostly we read men: Phillip Roth, Vladamir Nabokov, Chekhov, Michael Chabon, Chaucer, Homer, etc. ) (You'll notice they were also all white, but this blog post isn't really about that part.)
I never really thought about it at the time. I was so excited to be in a writing program (you have to be accepted based on talent) that I never questioned if I was getting an equal education. Additionally, the sexism in my program was never as overt and possibly my professors didn't even realize it. They were men who both went to Iowa, which if you know about the history of writing programs was one of the first and a boy's club from way back.

I know that has changed now and a lot of amazing women authors are coming out of Iowa, but I would guess that they still read far more men in their literature classes. It's what the old guard want.
So what does what David Gilmour said have to do with me, aside from having in a small way experienced it?

Six months ago, I started writing a book titled Sneaking Candy about a twenty-something woman in a graduate writing program who writes erotic romance under a pseudonym because she is afraid she will not be taken seriously by her peers. I thought at first it would be a book about a woman trying to find her authorial voice, her sexual voice and finding love in the unlikeliest place, but as I wrote it turned into something much different.

Her writing professor and mentor in the book is an awful lot like David Gilmour, and was created before I even knew about the ass that was David Gilmour.
See this excerpt as an example:

Professor Martin's glanced at the syllabus I had created for my class. “This is a little female heavy, Candice,” he said, tipping his head up. His mouth was a straight line, like the punctuation on his criticism.

I bit my lip. Professor Martin could be as irritating as a thong made out of sandpaper.

As irritating as realizing I was wearing a thong made of sandpaper and that I had forgotten to do laundry and had no other thongs to wear.

“Compared to what?” I asked, sitting up straighter in the impossible-to-be-comfortable-in slick wood chairs the university chose to adorn the other side of his desk.

The class was Contemporary Fiction 201 and fine maybe I did choose to teach more female writers, but I was a female writer and I was also pissed off at how underrepresented we were everywhere else.

“It should just be balanced,” he said. “Don’t you agree?” His wavy, hay-blonde hair was slicked back. On the beach it had been loose, flying as he ran to spike the volleyball . I remember thinking that day the exact color of his hair was something that sonnets could be written about. Of course, I’d had more than my share of Mike’s Hard Lemonade so I was feeling poetic—a scary proposition for any fiction writer.

“If there were more men, would you tell me to add more women?” I asked. I wished when he’d given me the syllabus for the class that I was a teaching assistant for I could have told him to make it more balanced.

It was dripping with penises, a Christmas tree adorned with saggy-members instead of garland: Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Faulkner just to name a few. It was a semantic sausage-fest.

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Without even meaning to, I could feel my book turning into the battle cry I believe many women writers and would-be writers feel. I am not less important or valid than you for being a woman, or writing stories that women and young women want to read.

The only reason I could be writing this was because even if it wasn't as overt as what Mr. Gilmour said, it was something I experienced. Something it seems women in writing programs still are.
I hope when Sneaking Candy comes out in December professors like Mr. Gimour might see that there is a problem in what and who is taught in writing programs, that a change needs to come, but probably not because I am a woman.

What To Do With All Those Rejection Slips: A New Take On Passes

I’m a glass-half-full, always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life, positive person. But what is it about a simple form rejection letter that turns us into a weepy, rage-y movie monster version of ourselves?

I’ve collected a rejection slip (okay, email) or two (dozen) in my day. And to comfort myself, I made grand plans for my rejection notes. I loved Stephen King’s method of skewering them on a nail (later a hook when the nail wasn’t long enough to hold them all) on his wall, and I’ve heard of authors who wallpaper their bathroom with them, but I had something prettier in mind.

This:

Paper bead bracelet

Yup. I was going to send my rejections off to the magical land known as Etsy where some craftsperson would roll those insignificant scraps of paper standing between me and a dream and attach them to a bracelet that I could wear to someday book signings as a giant raised middle finger (er, wrist, in this case) to all those who blocked my path. I was going to print out another stack to bring to school visits to say, “See kids? See? This is what it takes to get published these days.”

I have had a change of heart. I'm sure it has a little something to do with having a book deal, but I don't think that's entirely it. The more I’m exposed to the inner workings of publishing, the more I’ve come to realize this one tiny nugget of truth:

It’s. Not. Personal.

No one hated me. I actually don’t think anyone hated my writing either (though there was one agent who hated my MC and told me so without mincing words). It just wasn’t there yet.  I had some more learning to do and some more work to put into it. And I had to learn to see past the “I’m afraid I didn't connect with…” starts and realize that a number of those rejection letters were not form letters and were actually taking the time to point me in the direction I needed to head. Most weren’t rejections, they were just… passes. “Not yet's” or “not for me's”.

Watching my agent and author friends deal with editor passes has been enlightening. My agent will absolutely commiserate and acknowledge that, “Yes, it stinks this editor didn't fall so hard in love with this that she’ll be naming her firstborn after your MC”. But then she'll shrug (I’m pretty sure I can hear that through the phone line) and say, “Okay, here’s what we’ll do next.” Because she knows what I'm learning: that this is just the way it works. Authors get agent passes, agents get editor passes, editors get publisher passes, and somehow in the midst of all that a few books get printed.

So I have a new bracelet plan. (I really, really want that bracelet). My paper beads will include a pass email or even two, because that was a big part of my journey and it was character building. But it will also include the email my agent sent me asking if we could schedule “The Call”. It will include squeely “I love this revision!” notes from my critique partners and conference registration forms and the first page of my signed contract on that fancy Simon & Schuster letterhead and my Publisher’s Marketplace announcement and the letter of thanks I got after my first school visit and definitely a printout of this screenshot of this conversation with my editor:

It will be a celebration of the road to publication and I will wear it proudly at signings and pass it around at school visits to show kids and say, “See kids, see? This is how it feels to get published these days and I hope anyone who shares that dream goes for it.”

Okay, but seriously, readers. Please don't give my book a bad review on Goodreads because you do NOT want to know my plans for those!

What I've Learned So Far

First of all, I apologize for posting this a day late. We had inventory at the store I work at and we've all been running around making sure it would go smoothly.

Anyway...

Negative reviews are something all authors, especially new authors, fret over. We've all read those obnoxiously scathing GoodReads reviews and I'm sure we've all felt terrified over possibly having one of those users write a review for our books. If not, then I commend you for having a thick skin.

The thing about negative reviews, though, is they're inevitable and, if they're well-written, they can be extremely useful. As a writer, I'm continuously growing and learning what works and what doesn't. In these past few months I've seen incredible growth, if I may say so, which makes me happier beyond belief. And part of this new and improved me is, surprisingly, due to some less flattering reviews of my work. So, here are a couple of things I've learned and what I'm doing to fix those issues:

-I gloss over bits of information or action scenes --> Instead of censoring my writing to avoid being too descriptive, I've been working on writing more than I have to so I have a more expansive scene to work with later. It's easier to improve something when there's more to work with, I think. Then again, I've been told my descriptions are spot-on and wonderful, so I suppose this point could be one of opinion.

-My characters drink a lot of water --> In an effort to make mundane activities a little more apparent in stories (I mean, really, why don't more characters have to go to the bathroom??), I made the mistake of repeating certain actions. I didn't mean to, of course, but things like getting a glass of water were apparently too frequent. So, I've been making sure I include less of that and keeping tally of how many times it occurs so I can go back and remove some instances.

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Now, here are a few things I've learned from positive reviews:

-I have a sense of humor. --> I had no idea I could successfully write humor. I like to think I can be pretty funny in real life, but I've aways wondered if my humor came through in my stories. It's nice to know that it does and that I'm not the only one chuckling.

-My use of alternating POVs worked --> I had never written from two POVs before Hunted, so I was worried I wouldn't pull it off, but this is one thing people have consistently pointed out as a positive feature of the book. Yay, me! :-)

-My werewolves are believable --> One of the goals I had for Hunted was to make my werewolves not only believable, but very grounded in reality. I didn't want them to be a sort of mystical occurrence or a scientific mishap. I knew they had to be in between those things and I'm glad to know people are responding well to the realism I've tried to bring to my wolves.

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So, all in all, while I don't like reading negative reviews on my work, I like to view them as constructive criticism and take away as much as I can from them. It's important for writers to use people's opinions to help point out their weaknesses and show them how they can improve. Sometimes we need an outside viewer to open our eyes to our areas in need of improvement, even if that viewer can be a bit harsh.

Besides, you can always go read a glowing review to make you feel better afterwards, haha! :-D

Who's Laughing Now?

This post is inspired by the uber talented Jessie J's song 'Who's Laughing Now?' And the reasoning? Because I think a lot of us can relate to it. Here's the music video if you're interested, but if not, just scroll down and I'll summarise.



In this song, Jessie J talks about how hard school was for her, and how much negativity she got when she aspired to be a singer. And now look at her. Of course, because she's made it, people are coming out of the wood works and pretending to be her best friend, claiming a stake in her fame, trying to piggybank off her talent.

Of course, realistically, not all of us are going to be JK Rowling rich and famous, but this still applies. For example, while we have the supportive family members and friends, there's always someone who tries to 'nicely' remind you that it's a hard world to succeed out there and that you have to be very lucky. We read it in blog posts everyday. You have to be lucky. Talent is only part of it. I know I have received raised eyebrows and looks of concern and pity when I say I want to be an author. The look that says "oh honey, that's a lovely dream, but don't quit your day job." There's even some people who say it! But you know what? It makes me more determined and when I am published, I can sing this song and think that while people excuse their disbelief for concern, I know really it was negativity.

And you know what we do with negativity? We demolish it with positivity. There's one thing blog posts often fail to talk about. And that's the need to believe in yourself. Because if you believe and you're determined, it will happen eventually.

NEGATIVITY - WE BANISH YOU!!

How about you guys? Received any negativity when you tried to tell someone about your dream?