Inter/View: Talks with America's Writing Women
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 1990 Inter/View: Talks with America's Writing Women Mickey Pearlman Katherine Usher Henderson Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Pearlman, Mickey and Henderson, Katherine Usher, "Inter/View: Talks with America's Writing Women" (1990). Literature in English, North America. 56. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/56 Inter/View Inter/View Talks with America's Writing Women Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY PHOTO CREDITS: M.A. Armstrong (Alice McDermott), Jerry Bauer (Kate Braverman, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Josephine Humphreys), Brian Berman (Joyce Carol Oates), Nancy Cramp- ton (Laurie Colwin), Donna DeCesare (Gloria Naylor), Robert Foothorap (Amy Tan), Paul Fraughton (Francine Prose), Alvah Henderson (Janet Lewis), Marv Hoffman (Rosellen Brown), Doug Kirkland (Carolyn See), Carol Lazar (Shirley Ann Grau), Eric Lindbloom (Nancy Willard), Neil Schaeffer (Susan Fromberg Schaeffer), Gayle Shomer (Alison Lurie), Thomas Victor (Harriet Doerr, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, Carole Maso, Marge Piercy, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Irini Spanidou, Mona Simpson), Ellen Warner (Elizabeth Winthrop). Copyright © 1990 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0336 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pearlman, Mickey, date. Inter/view : talks with America's writing women / Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8131-1780-1 1. Women authors, American—20th century—Interviews. 2. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 3. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. (. Henderson, Katherine U. II. Title. III. Title: Interview. PS151.P4 1990 810.9'9287'09045—dc20 90-33308 For Mia Bess Pearlman, Mickey's best and most demanding editor and for Joan Usher Nolan, Kathie's sister and most generous friend "And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women: they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to suc- ceed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard." Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women," 1929 CONTENTS Acknowledgments viii Carolyn See 111 Introduction 1 Laurie Colwin 120 Alison Lurie 9 Joyce Carol Thomas 125 Amy Tan 15 Shirley Ann Grau 132 Gloria Naylor 23 Kate Braverman 137 Gail Godwin 30 Louise Erdrich 143 Joyce Carol Oates 40 Anne Lamott 149 Diane Johnson 49 Josephine Humphreys 157 Susan Fromberg Schaeffer 58 Harriet Doerr 163 Marge Piercy 65 Elizabeth Winthrop 170 Carole Maso 73 Janet Lewis 177 M.F.K. Fisher 79 Irini Spanidou 184 Francine Prose 88 Lynne Sharon Schwartz 190 Alice McDermott 95 Mona Simpson 195 Rosellen Brown 103 Nancy Willard 200 Index 208 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WE WANT to thank those enthusiastic friends who read portions of the interviews and those with whom we stayed on our travels to the interviews: Brigitte and Bliss Carnochan, Katy Gottschalk and John Paul, Jack and Barbara McManus, Gayle Shomer, and Ann and Chris Stone. Katherine Henderson would like to thank the 1988-89 Visiting and Affiliated Scholars of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University, especially Edith Gelles, for their ex- cellent insights into this project. INTRODUCTION MANY HOURS of careful listening have gone into the creation of Inter/View, a forum for the voices of twenty-eight people who have three labels in common: they are women, Americans, and writers. They represent, too, all of the borders that we have systematically attempted to cross—those of race, religion, ethnicity, sexual prefer- ence, marital status, age, "lifestyle," and geography. Given the gener- ous profusion of women writing in America, it was, of course, impossible to include every writer in every place worth listening and talking to. But we did manage to interview writers who are white, black, Asian, and Native American, and women ranging in age from thirty-two (Mona Simpson) to ninety (Janet Lewis). We made a consid- erable effort to represent the country geographically because wonder- ful words by women are being written from coast to coast, north to south; a limited budget made this extremely difficult to do. Many writers, however, live in the Northeast in order to be close to the powerbrokers (publishers, agents, and editors)—among them, Lurie, Naylor, Godwin, Oates, Schaeffer, Piercy, Prose, Maso, Colwin, Winthrop, Spanidou, Willard, Simpson, Erdrich, and Schwartz. The West Coast is also rich in writers—Johnson, See, Fisher, Tan, Braver- man, Doerr, Thomas, Lamott, and Lewis—many of whom talked about the disadvantages of living and writing far from the publishers in New York and Boston. The South and Southwest probably deserve their own collection, but their representatives here are Josephine Humphreys, from South Carolina,- Gail Godwin, who lives now in Woodstock but is from North Carolina; Rosellen Brown, from Houston; and Shirley Ann Grau, who lives in New Orleans. We tried 2 Inter/View also to balance instantly recognizable authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gail Godwin, Gloria Naylor, and Alison Lurie (among others) with first novelists to whom much talent has been given and of whom much production is expected: Carole Maso, Amy Tan, Eliz- abeth Winthrop, Mona Simpson, Irini Spanidou. We expended no effort to include the currently "hot" writer, who is often the creation of an expensive and intensive publicity campaign waged by pub- lishers absorbed by the financial bottom line. Another motivation for doing Inter/ View was our perception that most collections of interviews with working writers are skewed, lopsided, and often wrongheaded: "women writers" are usually tokens, one or two of whom are tucked into a collection with "men writers" (a label nobody uses), mostly, it seems, to avoid feminist wrath. The Pahs Review interviews, for example (called Writers at Work), have been published in eight volumes and include 113 inter- views, of which only nineteen are with women. Each volume includes at least one interview with a woman; no volume includes more than three women. The volume published in 1988 includes eleven men and two women, although in 1989 they issued a separate volume of previously published interviews called Women Writers at Work. Some of those writers are now dead. A careful examination of those texts reveals that the women were usually asked different, more stereo- typically gender-defined questions, resulting in interviews that were markedly different in tone and seriousness and were often less evo- cative and useful. One of the reasons, as Gail Godwin suggested, is that women are more used to revealing themselves, making them "open to ridicule or attack." Many interviewers in these collections conflated the life of the woman writer with that of a female character. As Susan Fromberg Schaeffer remarked, "Nobody inquires about the relationship between a man's latest marriage or affair and what's going on in his books, but this is a regular, chronic reflex action when you read about a woman novelist. If [interviewers and reviewers] did this to men, they would be taken out behind a building and kicked in the mouth." Several of these conversations took place on or near campuses, since even many financially successful writers continue to teach and to maintain their affiliations with colleges and universities: Lurie (Cornell), Oates (Princeton), Spanidou (Sarah Lawrence), Schaeffer (Brooklyn College), Johnson (University of California, Davis), Simp- son (Columbia), Colwin (New York University), Braverman (Califor- nia State-Los Angeles), Willard (Vassar), and See (UCLA). They are, INTRODUCTION 3 with few exceptions, college graduates, several of whom have done graduate work in literature. Some, in fact, have Ph.D.s in American or English literature: Schaeffer (University of Chicago), Godwin (Uni- versity of Iowa), Willard (University of Michigan), See and Johnson (UCLA). Many would feel represented by Josephine Humphreys's comment that "a lot of my narrative, my ideas . come [as much] from my reading as they do from my experience" because these twenty-eight women are a literate group. They refer often to fellow writers, such as Muriel Spark, Henry James, the Brontes, Faulkner, Joan Didion, Melville, Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe, Robertson Davies, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Proust; to Latin American, Russian, and Eastern European writers; and, very often, to each other. Among the twenty-eight are the determined urbanites such as Simpson (a runner), Colwin, Schwartz, who "now can write any- where," and Spanidou, who "stop[s] listening" to the noise of the city when she concentrates, Naylor, who always "has to have a little piece of sky," Maso, who often works at a writer's colony in France, and Schaeffer, whose mother insists she was born saying, "Take me to the country." Others live far from the Sturm und Drang of the cities: Piercy (in Wellfleet, Massachusetts), Prose (in the woods near Kings- ton, New York), Oates (in the woods near Princeton), Lamott (in the woods near San Francisco), Godwin (in Woodstock, New York), M.F.K.