apart: in the midst of

cherylstrayed:

Dear Friends, 

I wrote recently, on Twitter, that I was getting the word “feminist” tattooed on my ass. I was only joking, but I might as well have been serious. It’s true that in all the most important things I am—mother, writer, hiker, wife, daughter, seeker—feminism is at the center. It’s a descriptor so clear and permanent it seems to me it’s inked on my ass whether it’s literally there or not. I’ve been a feminist since before I knew what a feminist was. It’s an indelible part of my identity and it informs everything I do. 

When I first began reading Bitch I marveled at how simple it is, that mission of putting those words—“I am a feminist”—into action. Of writing as activism, of fusing theory and experience and activism into an urgent call that doesn’t politely ask to be listened to, but demands it. In each issue, Bitch speaks in a voice that doesn’t ask permission to be heard. 

It takes guts to be a feminist. It takes nerve to remind people that our world is colored by gender and gender bias, by inequality and ugliness and violence. It is a difficult business, emphasizing that these things matter, that they are not special interests or fleeting causes, that we are informed and affected by them whether we realize it or not, that we carry them with us not because we choose to but because we have to. To read Bitch is to remember that we don’t always choose our causes; some of them find us. 

It takes guts, too, to care. To admit that you want the world to change, deeply and radically into one that values women and values feminism. I care, and I’m asking you today to join me in supporting Bitch Media as they work to be part of that transformation. If you agree that feminism is essential—even if the word itself isn’t inscribed on your ass, or any place else on your body—then please, show your support by making this investment with me. Invest in women; invest in the kind of work that needs to be done day in and day out to make feminism real and current and interesting. 

Invest in Bitch. 

- Cheryl

Cheryl Strayed
Writer, Mother, Feminist

 

rachael-maddux:

Please read this if you’ve at all followed this.

At this point, for me, I’m mostly beyond caring about the feelings and thought process of Chris Jones qua Chris Jones, and more into using this as an excuse to think hard about the roles competition and jealousy and entitlement play into my own writing and my idea of my self as a writer, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as I continue, slowly, to adjust to a mostly-non-creative, mostly-not-writing-focused job. (And I just typed “my idea of myself as a weird” which might be all I really need to know.) 

Here are two parts that really stood out to me, in Michelle’s piece:

When I first read your reply, a great handwringing began in my brain, as I was raised as a woman to doubt myself.  ”Well, if Mr. Big Multiple Award Winner Magazine Writer thinks I’ve stepped out of line, maybe I should check myself.”  When I write something, and put it out there in the world, I do hope it’s the truest thing I could have written.  But I retain some indecisiveness about it.  I do so because this is a culture in which men writing things with heavy use of sarcasm and other features of what is sometimes called “muscular prose,” has as its main consequences that other men write them sycophantic comments and hand them National Magazine Awards.  When women do it, sometimes they get to be Caitlin Flanagan.  But most of the time they just get an exhausting parade of men trying to put them back in their place.

And also:

So my salad days, not spent writing though they were, might have been just as valuable to me qua writer as all your “hard work.”  (Really, “hard work”?  Let’s you and I compare notes with fieldworkers and then see if we can use that phrase again, as writers committed to “the absolute truth.”) So much of the work I had to personally do was internal.  I had to get my head out of the hole I’d dug for myself and start looking around, start being open-minded and generous and empathetic.  The first step was shutting down the spreadsheets in my heart that kept track of all the twenty-three-year-old wunderkinds at magazines and literary fiction imprints.  Because those preoccupations were making my writing bad.  They were keeping it small and petty and ridiculous and interested in scoring points more appropriate to sixth-grade bullies.  Being honest about your feelings is a basic writing tool.  But so is knowing when you yourself are full of shit.  I’m not always capable of it myself, of course. But at least I am trying.

I want to say something to Michelle but I also want to say it to, I guess, anyone who might be following this kerfluffle with any degree of interest as a writer, specifically a magazine writer. Specifically a young, ambitious but perhaps not totally confident magazine writer.

I was nominated for a National Magazine Award last year, in 2010 at age 25 for writing (three music reviews, for Paste, where I was an editor at the time) that I did mostly when I was 24 years old. I was the youngest nominee in the category by several decades; any of the other nominees could’ve been my parents, and most had been writing professionally longer than I have been writing, period. Like, longer than I have been able to string together words that in any way qualify as a sentence.

I did not win and I did not expect to win, although of course I did not expect to be a finalist either. If I had not been the person to pack up all of the materials for the submissions that our editor-in-chief had selected, including my own stuff, I would not have even had an inkling that I was in the running. My very robust impostor complex had me half-convinced that there’d been some mistake or perhaps only as many submissions as nominees in the category. It honestly was a relief when I did not win because I do not know what it would have meant about my assumptions about the world and myself and my skills and work ethic.

It’s not that I think I’m a bad writer—I know I’m a good writer. And I know that part of this probably—in ways deeper than I even realize, and even though I was raised to Believe In Myself, Girl Power, Etc.—comes from Being A Lady and the expectations and rules-about-conducting-oneself-in-the-face-of-success that that entails.

But also, mostly, I have not been writing, at least not professionally, for all that long. I know that I have a lot to learn. A hell of a lot to learn. I don’t even know all I know, you know? And I know that this is true for even the best writers, even National Magazine Award winners, that it’s a lifetime thing and it never stops and there’s no real natural end point, anyway, to being a writer.

The kinds of doubts I have about myself, they’re not the kind that any sort of award would erase. In fact, that’d probably just make them worse. That’s not to say I would’ve been ashamed of the award or that I don’t want to ever win one—I do, it would be really cool! But I do not know that I would’ve liked what winning a National Magazine Award at age 25 would have done to me, in terms of my expectations about the world and myself and how people should treat me and my work.

My skull was still so soft. It still is. I would have been stunned and thrilled and, I’m sure, very motivated to do work I wouldn’t otherwise feel up to or get the opportunity to do. But I know myself and I know I also would’ve been very very scared and overwhelmed and possibly unsure of myself in ways I previously unknown.

Which is why I can’t totally stomach Chris Jones saying this…:

If you tell me that you wouldn’t be happy to win a Pulitzer, or an Oscar, or a National Magazine Award, then I know you’re just trying to make yourself feel better for knowing that you never will.

…and why I’m glad Michelle wrote what she did.

Now and again you have to revisit Erin Michelle Dean’s deconstruction of EGO, of the typical male temperament/personality/self thoughtlessly conjured and sent out into the world by Chris Jones. Damn, I love this woman.