At the bottom of my Wikipedia page is a tag that identifies me as an “American women novelist.” If I were a man, the tag would read “American male novelist.” My gender should have nothing to do with my career, and yet there it sits, tied to my profession, as if the male novelists and I work in inherently different fields.

But one could easily make a cynical argument that we do.

Studies have shown women’s books are priced lower than men’s, women’s fiction is reviewed less often, and published less frequently in literary journals. Even books about women are less likely to win prizes than ones about men. The fields that men and women run through are different indeed: one of them has a lot more rough spots and potholes.

Over the past few months, as I’ve been looking at large text corpora, I often found myself thinking about gender inequality in the writing world. I wanted to collect banned books by men and women for a machine learning project (I planned to train two text-generating models on the different corpora and place them in conversation), but while banned texts by men are fairly easy to find in the public domain, banned texts by women proved much harder to come by.

As I searched for banned texts on Project Gutenberg, which hosts over 58,000 texts that can be downloaded free of charge, I began to wonder how many of the books—banned or not—were by women. One estimate came from Wikidata, where information found on Wikipedia pages—such as a person’s name, gender, or occupation—is stored in a way that’s machine readable. I found about twelve thousand people (writers, editors, illustrators, translators) who contributed to the corpus.

In this subset, men outnumber women by over 5 to 1. Although gender is not binary, I look at the number of men and women because this is the information available, or estimable, using name-based gender prediction tools.

I’d come to Project Gutenberg to find banned books for my bots, but I started to wonder what they would learn about writing if they were trained on this entire corpus. I have read a number of studies that identify patterns in language that are associated with one gender or another.

Researchers from Aalto and Helsinki Universities compared fiction by men and women in the British National Corpus and found that men use first-person plural (we, us) while women use second-person (you and your) more frequently. Men overuse certain nouns (e.g., ‘man’), women certain verbs (e.g., ‘thought’) and intensifiers (e.g., ‘much’ or ‘very’). The researchers note that such differences might be due to the gender of the intended audience, not the author, but this distinction quickly becomes murky.

What makes a book appropriate for one gender or another? When only the girls were invited to author Shannon Hale’s presentation—a teacher later told Hale, “the administration only gave permission to the middle-school girls to leave class for your assembly”, she noted:

“I talk about books and writing, reading, rejections and moving through them, how to come up with story ideas. But because I’m a woman, because some of my books have pictures of girls on the cover, because some of my books have ‘princess’ in the title, I’m stamped as ‘for girls only.’ However, the male writers who have boys on their covers speak to the entire school.”

If the language we use reflects what is expected of us—or if women’s books are only expected to be read by women—the fact that certain words are more commonly used by one gender or another strikes me as a symptom of systemic bias.

Like when I ran several of the essays I’ve written about technology through two different gender prediction systems and was identified as male by both. I suspect there is an imbalance in the training corpus and that I was called a man because the system had learned from the work it knew that men use words and phrases like “machine learning” and “biased data.”

What makes a book *appropriate* for one gender or another?
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I found over two million words of what I called “banned man” literature just by following the links from a single list of banned books. After poking around for a few hours, I collected around 800,000 words of banned woman literature from the public domain. I’d wanted at least a million words for each bot. I decided to revise my original machine learning plan and look at contemporary work instead.

I turned to Smashwords, where some books are sold and others may be freely downloaded, depending on the author’s wishes. On this site, the gender-related glut and shortages were opposite the ones I encountered on Project Gutenberg. I noticed far more women than men offering their one-hundred-thousand-word novels for free.

At this point, however, my interest in gender and language had eclipsed my interest in bot chatter. I was reading papers about statistical tests to determine which differences in word usage are significant and wondering things like how I could get my hands on a really big corpus. This is how I came across the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words from 220,225 texts collected between the years of 1990 and 2017.

I found this corpus dazzling, not just because I discovered my own work in it, but because when I opened the list of included writers and began to scroll through the names of fiction authors (who represent just a subset of the work), I was struck—in a positive way. Was the corpus as gender balanced as it appeared? I wrote to Professor Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, who maintains the corpus, and asked.

“Actually, the ‘balance’ just refers to the overall balance between the ‘macro-genres’ (spoken, fiction, etc) in COCA. As far as gender balance in fiction, I’ve never really designed the corpus to do that,” he said. He pointed me to the work of Doug Biber and Jesse Egbert, who have written about how to make a corpus representative—which is not a simple matter.

I appreciated Professor Davies’s candor, but was left with my question and a long list of fiction authors. I ran the first names through a gender predictor and the estimated ratio of women to men was fairly even. Men contribute more science fiction, women more of what is labelled as “juvenile work.” But I was frustrated by the uncertainty of the estimates.

The names are not always parsed correctly, the prediction just a guess, and I couldn’t see the women working under men’s names—people like George Madden Martin, Max du Veuzit, Lucas Malet, and Henry Handel Richardson, to name just a few. The irony that women, writing under men’s name to be heard, can so easily escape a search for female writers made me melancholy. I wanted to know who was in this corpus. I decided to try matching the names to biographical records in Wikidata again.

Using Wikidata via a tool called OpenRefine I could match just under half of the subset of five thousand names I tried. Not all of the names matched the correct person. For example, Elizabeth Evans—who is the author of six books and the recipient of an NEA fellowship—does not have a Wikipedia page, but she was matched to another person with the same name. As I was interested only in gender, I accepted this match—it seemed reasonably likely that the gender would be correct. Of the matched names, forty percent belonged to women.

I abandoned this line of inquiry, but I was left with my questions: Who is included in our corpora? Who is not? Whose voice am I hearing? What story does it tell? For the English Wikipedia, according to the estimates I’ve seen, over 80% of the contributors are male. The story there—our history—is disproportionately about men, and the biographies of men outnumber those of women significantly (the latest estimate I’ve seen shows just under 18% of the biographies are of women). I suspect the 40/60 imbalance in my COCA gender estimate belongs more to Wikipedia than COCA, but I know nothing more than that I observed it.

In the case of Project Gutenberg, the work is primarily by male authors and any patterns in the language that belong to men are magnified by this imbalance. If male authors use the word “man” more often than female authors do—as the researchers noted in their study of the British National Corpus—having five times more male than female authors gives that word an even greater prominence.

For the English Wikipedia, over 80% of the contributors are male.
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I think about how imbalances in our corpora magnify bias, not just in subject matter (stories about male characters or biographies of men), but in the words we see and choose. The technologies we are using to generate text—from auto-replies to articles—are learning the patterns in the set of texts we give them. And these technologies, in turn, are not only writing for all of us, but imposing the patterns they’ve learned. Not all people who write (or read) about technology are men, but the story the artificial intelligence knows, based on the words and the associations made from its training corpus, says otherwise.

I would love if my gender weren’t tied to my work, or diagnosed and misdiagnosed by technologies that reflect the biases I work against every day. I am a woman. I am a writer. The 1500 words I’ve written here won’t swing the gender balance in any large corpus, but I’m putting them out into the world, and I hope they will be counted.

Helen Palmer Geisel was attending a dinner party hosted by the Johnstons. As the host hugged her, she turned to him and exclaimed, “You don’t know how I needed that!”.

He had suspected her remark was in relation to the increased workload at Beginner Books, a publishing company that she co-founded with her husband, Ted Geisel. Or perhaps, he wondered, there was a more sinister reason. Perhaps her remark was a cry for help, a sign of her increasing loneliness and unhappiness after an almost 40-year marriage that was bound by obligation, rather than love.

Two days later, the Geisels’ longtime housekeeper stumbled upon Helen’s dead body in the bedroom of their La Jolla residence.

A prescription bottle that originally contained one thousand capsules, was now filled with just seven hundred and six. A letter, directed to her husband, was found near her lifeless body. “I didn’t know whether to kill myself, burn the house down, or just go away and get lost,” it read. The morning after, members of their inner circle gathered around the house to comfort the new widower.

Their neighbor and friend, Audrey Stone Dimond, had placed herself in front of the window at the Geisels’ ocean-front property and affixed her gaze into the blurred horizon—perhaps ridden with guilt that their affair, not yet exposed—had contributed to Helen’s untimely demise. Or perhaps she was anticipating the agony that would accompany the accusations of moral corruption that were sure to follow; despite everything, she still loved the man and wanted to be with him.

In less than a year, Dimond divorced her husband, sent her children away to boarding school, and did indeed fulfill her utmost desire—Ted Geisel and Audrey Dimond were married.

The suicide letter that Helen wrote for Ted had been signed off with their secret code. A make-believe law firm named “Grimalkin, Drouberhannus, Knalbner, and Fepp.” If such a playful and rhythmic bouncing of words sounds familiar, it’s most likely childhood nostalgia resurfacing. Helen was the uncredited and largely unknown writer responsible for nurturing the creation of one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century.

To the world, he’s an American icon, but to countless children all over the world, he’s better known simply as “Dr. Seuss.”

A published author herself, she was once widely regarded as his “chief editor, chief critic, business manager and wife.” For interviewers who had an exclusive with Dr. Seuss, their go-to question is why a famous (and married) children’s book author doesn’t have any of his own.

“You have ‘em, I’ll amuse ‘em,” he quipped in interviews with The New Yorker and Los Angeles Times—an understandably evasive answer to a perhaps overly personal question.

But behind closed doors, in particular in a conversation he had with his niece, Margaretha “Peggy” Dahmen Owens, he dropped the decades-long façade and revealed, “It was not that we didn’t want to have children. That wasn’t it.” In The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, the entire book was dedicated to a seven-and-a-half year-old named Chrysanthemum-Pearl.

In an interview with Robert Cahn for The Saturday Evening Post, Ted explained he created an imaginary daughter as a comfort to his wife. This came in particularly handy for after-dinner conversations at their house, when the guests commenced their braggart statements pertaining to their offspring or grandchildren. He would proudly declare that Chrysanthemum-Pearl could “whip up the most delicious oyster stew with chocolate frosting and flaming Roman candles!” and “carry one thousand stitches on one needle while making long red underdrawers for her Uncle Terwilliger!”

For years the name of Chrysanthemum-Pearl had appeared on the Geisel Christmas cards, but then so had Norval, Wally, Wickersham, Thnud and a dozen other fictional infant-like characters. In a conversation between close family members, it was revealed that in the fourth year of their marriage, Helen had been hospitalized in New York due to worsening abdominal pain. The doctors couldn’t diagnose the underlying cause and thus made the swift decision to remove her ovaries, rendering her incapable of ever having her own children; she was thirty-three years old.

Peggy Owen’s son—named Ted after her famous uncle—recently shared his mother’s favorite photograph of Helen with me. Her deep chestnut brown hair is delicately curled in bunches, bordering her warm, softly featured canvas. Her pale blue eyes offer an agreeable gaze, flanked by an authentic, radiant, all-teeth-showing smile—the sweetness intensified by the red hue of her lipstick. To say that Helen was like a mother to Peggy is an understatement.

Peggy’s own biological mother had died when she was only seventeen years old, and the Geisels had welcomed her into their home when she first moved to California. Two years before Helen’s death, Dr. Seuss had dedicated the book, I Had Trouble Getting To Solla Sollew, to her with the inscription, “For Margaretha Dahmen Owens, with love and thanks,” as a token of appreciation for her staying with them while his wife was ill. Helen had struggled for more than a decade with partial paralysis fromGuillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks your healthy cells, which leads to weakness, numbness and tingling.

Two years before Helen’s death, he wrote Peggy, “. . . Yesterday Helen was pretty depressed, but today she’s got her sense of humor back. Besides two baths, she today started Occupational Therapy . . .  starting with lessons on how to dial telephones, unbutton buttons, brush teeth, comb hair, and a first stab at writing.” He solemnly continued,

“Helen sends her love and wants to thank Al for loaning you to us. And so do I. I don’t know how I would have got thru the past two weeks without you. And I can think of no one I have ever met that I would rather have been with during this period. You really took care of everything (including my spirits) . . . and when you left, you left me better organized than I have been since the Spanish American War. Someday I’ll do something for you.”

Before her health had deteriorated, Helen was a talented writer and businesswoman. She graduated from Wellesley College with honors in 1920 and thrived in an environment where the curriculum was focused on languages, literature, and even economics. After graduation, she enrolled in Oxford University, an institution that awarded women degrees for the first time only four years prior to her arrival. Unbeknownst to either of them, Ted Geisel was to also attend Oxford after he graduated from Dartmouth.

In 1925, a young American girl sitting behind a doodling Ted peered over his shoulder and was surprised to see how little he was paying attention to the professor. After being in several lectures with this student, she concluded that he always just seemed to be immersed in his own little world.

A year earlier, she had arrived at Oxford with her widowed mother. Standing at five foot three inches, Helen Marion Palmer, Ted recalls Helen possessing a “certain grace” that was distinctly unique to the other women at Oxford. One day, as she watched Ted illustrate John Milton’s Paradise Lost, she insisted he was on the wrong career path. “What you really want to do is draw”, she said. Her judgment solidified by glancing at another one of his pages, “That’s a very fine flying cow!” University of Cincinnati graduate, Joseph Sagmaster, was also attending Oxford and had introduced the pair having known the both of them personally.

Years later, Ted Geisel would dedicate the book Yertle the Tertle to his friend; legend goes that this honor was perhaps bestowed upon Sagmaster because he introduced Geisel to Helen back at Oxford. Sagmaster himself said this was, “the happiest inspiration that he had ever had.” Their swift romance had all the trappings of Ted’s impulsive nature, with a sharp dash reminiscent of an old Hollywood film. After racing back to Oxford before curfew, Ted proposed to Helen in a roadside ditch after he had taken too wide of a turn on their two-horsepower motorcycle and had accidentally toppled them over.

“So, we became engaged,” Ted said, but for a time it was their secret. Geisel granted his first Saturday Evening Post interview with Robert Cahn, revealing why he became Dr. Seuss, the simple reason he draws the way he does, and the undeniable effect his wife, Helen, has had on his career. Two years ago, a republished article from 1957 had appeared, in which Cahn wrote how the famous author “depends at all times on the level headedness of his wife, Helen” to pull him out of predicaments where his impulse has inevitably led him. Separately, Ted’s sister Marnie had always talked of how Helen had been “a great help to him in his work”.

Around the beginning of 1957, Ted had trouble finishing his Christmas-themed book.

The whimsical tale had featured the “bad old Grinch” who “would try to stop Christmas from coming to Who-Ville.”

In a bid to protest commercialization, the Grinch plotted the sinister mission in destroying any gifts, ornaments, trees and fixings that the Whos had planned for their beloved annual holiday. Then arrived the stumbling block. He wondered how he could wrap it up without injecting a pathetically sentimental ending.

“Helen, Helen, where are you?” shouted Ted from his secluded den into the living room. He planted a sketch and a verse into her lap and continued, “How do you like this?” She shook her head and he was distraught. “This isn’t it. And besides, you’ve got the Papa Who too big. Now he looks like a bug.” Ted rebutted, “Well, they are bugs” to which Helen added, “They are not bugs. Those Whos are just small people.”

Later that fall, How The Grinch Stole Christmas was published.

Seventeen years earlier, he had struggled with another book, Horton Hatches The Egg. At the time, the Geisels were living on Park Avenue in New York City. As Germany began to occupy France, progress on the book was immediately put on hold. Instead, Ted began sketching brutal images of Adolf Hitler, and the benign elephant affectionately named Horton, was momentarily consigned to oblivion. The sudden priority shift didn’t seem to bother Ted, who was quoted as saying, “I didn’t know how to end the book anyway, so I began drawing savage cartoons.” He continued, “I had no great causes or interest in social issues until Hitler.” The conception had originated from an earlier sketch that Geisel had drawn which superimposed an elephant over the branches of a small tree.

He then spent countless days trying to figure out how Horton could have entangled himself in such a way. At that point, Helen swooped in with her creative wit and began brainstorming ways to bring Horton down. In Ted’s words, her pivotal contribution was in the climactic lines that follow the hatching of the egg on which Horton sat on for 51 weeks. Then, suddenly, in an epiphany-like state, Helen and Ted cheered, and cheered and cheered some more.

“My goodness! My gracious!” they shouted. “MY WORD! It’s something brand new! IT’S AN ELEPHANT-BIRD!” Ted claimed his wife is a fiend for a story line and that every idea and every line is worked and reworked until the two of them are happy, coiling into a tight bind their decades-long literary partnership and elevating her contribution as being paramount to everything he’d ever published at that point (14 books in total, including, And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Thidwick The Big Hearted Moose, If I Ran The Zoo, Horton Hears A Who! and The Cat In The Hat). In 1959, Helen once told interviewer Peter Bunzel that “Ted doesn’t sit down and write for children. He writes to amuse himself. Luckily what amuses him also amuses them.”

Her husband agreed and also remarked at his own disbelief surrounding the conclusion, especially considering the absence of forethought during the writing process. “Ninety percent of failures in children’s books come from writing to preconceptions of what kids like. When I’m writing a book, I do it to please Helen and me. But when it finally comes out, I take one look and think, ‘Oh, my God!’” As with most successful writers, Ted was eventually approached by Hollywood. For first-time screenwriters Helen and Ted Geisel, their synergistic collaboration had materialized into an original screenplay titled Design for Death, which chronicled the events leading to Pearl Harbor. It went on to win the 1947 Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary.

However, despite their well-deserved high-caliber Hollywood accolade that many spend years trying to obtain, they were driven away by “disillusionment with the film industry” and instead proceeded to make The Tower in La Jolla their permanent home.

The Cat In The Hat was published through the company they co-founded with Phyllis Cerf at Beginner Books (an imprint of Random House). Helen had, perhaps in an act of defiant independence, used her maiden name to publish numerous titles under the Beginner Book banner over the years, including A Fish Out Of Water, I Was Kissed By A Seal At the Zoo, Do You Know What I’m Going To Do Next Saturday? and Why I Built The Boogle House.

During her tenure, she had displayed her natural business acumen by heading up as Vice President at Beginner Books until her sudden death in 1967. Harry Crosby is a 96-year-old award-winning author, historian, and La Jolla resident whose parents knew the Geisels. In addition, he had spent some time on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego with Helen. “She was a wonderful woman,” he told me. “I mean, really, she was very intelligent, and she was very generous and polite.”

In the background of the phone call, Harry’s wife can be heard nudging him to add that there has been, “nothing written to show how important she had been in getting her husband into all of those positions and getting his stuff accepted.” He continued, “he became as well-known as he was, certainly in large part, because of her assistance.”

“Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don’t know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, ‘failure, failure, failure…’ I love you so much…I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you . . . My going will leave quite a rumor, but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed . . . Sometimes, think of the fun we had all thru the years . . . “

Her unconditional love and devotion to her husband was palpably apparent in her written suggestion to falsify reasons behind her death. Her concern—even at the edge of suicide—was to protect his wholesome image to friends, family, and most importantly, the millions of readers all over the world who have come to know and love the paradoxically elusive and magnetic Dr. Seuss. Most newspaper clippings from the date of her death chose to omit the details surrounding her suicide—The New York Times, from an article dating October 24, 1967, noted that “she died in her sleep.” It wasn’t until years later that the truth surrounding the circumstances surfaced and family members—including Ted’s former mistress and second wife Audrey Geisel—began to confirm it. Carol Olten, historian at the La Jolla Historic Society remarked to me, “suicide was a taboo subject back then.”

Nowadays, when accomplished authors, fashion designers, artists or other public figures exit the world through an act of suicide, their namesake artifacts inherently carry a heavier weight of fleeting significance, arguably even more so than when they had been alive. The day after Alexander McQueen’s death, retailers reported a 1400% increase in sales. Similarly, sales had increased by 600% the day after Kate Spade’s suicide was announced. In an over-simplified and economic sense, it’s a practical display of supply and demand. Years after Sylvia Plath’s death, scholars are still dedicating themselves to her work in order to dissect and apply speculative theories on the beloved author. In 2013, The Smithsonian reported, “…cultural fascination with her continues to burn brightly despite—or perhaps because of—her premature departure from this world.”

Perhaps the posthumous and rapid consumption of these works represents a greater human condition: that we, despite modern society favoring atomization and individualization, have an embedded desire to commemorate a person or a group of people who symbolizes a positive impact on the wider community, expressed through groundbreaking contributions in the arts, humanities or sciences. Conversely, it can be safely said that most, if not all humans, have an intent to leave a similar mark when our inevitable mortality arrives.

When I asked a long-time La Jolla resident and bookstore owner, Laurence McGilvery, on whether or not he had any memories of Helen Palmer Geisel, he told me over the phone that she had the most “seductive gaze he’d ever encountered.” The comment caught me off guard and I was confused—the description he gave was inconsistent to other accounts I had stumbled upon at that point. I asked him if I could continue this conversation over e-mail considering my Australian accent can be a little incoherent at times. Over e-mail, he quickly corrected himself, “The first Mrs. Geisel! I was remembering the second. It was Audrey who looked up at me on our first and only meeting with the most seductive gaze I ever had encountered.”

He doesn’t recall ever meeting Helen, although her husband, Ted, frequently visited his bookstore. Thirty years after Helen’s death, Audrey Geisel (who has recently passed away) had given University of San Diego, California a multi-million-dollar donation that assisted in the library’s extensive renovations. As a token of their appreciation, the library—easily one of the most recognizable buildings in San Diego thanks in part to its unique Brutalist architectural design—was renamed after her and her second husband, Ted Geisel. With an additional lump sum gift in 2015 came a new café inside the library named, “Audrey’s.”

Five miles south, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, lies a small library embedded in its white-walled corridors and in plain black text it reads, “Helen Palmer Geisel Library.” Much like her own demeanor, the space is unassuming, subdued and notably humble. A lack of online search results questioned its existence, but the Communications and Marketing Manager at the Museum had affirmed that there was indeed a small library dedicated to her. No other information could be found pertaining to the library’s namesake. Helen’s work and her contributions to the creation of Dr. Seuss couldn’t be efficiently exploited through marketing campaigns after her death.

Not only was Helen’s death swept under the rug, but that feat could have only been made possible if she publicly claimed title to his revolutionary success, which she never did. Years earlier, with a keen observation over a young Ted Geisel, she nurtured and fostered a man with an undeniable talent that was yet unbeknownst to anyone else but her.

When evidence of his potential came to light to the young married couple, she had effectively made her life legacy about choice, sacrifice and unconditional love. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the choice to stand by her husband’s career and fade into the background was not an easy one.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has been successfully running their multi-million-dollar global portfolio almost 30 years after the beloved author’s death, thanks in part to his second wife, Audrey Geisel, who passed away this year. She was known for her stringent control of licensing partnerships and fierce protection over their intellectual property. Her unrelenting clutch of some of Ted and Helen’s work—coupled with expertly tailored marketing and public relation campaigns—assisted in a generally accepted wholesome and sunny legacy of the famous children’s book author. It’s only in recent years that his sordid minstrel past has unsurfaced and Geisel’s work has come under fire for racist cartoon depictions.

But even with his arguably sordid personal life and problematic societal stances, his legend and life remain largely unsullied and the Dr. Seuss juggernaut rolls along, celebrated year after year, bookshelf by bookshelf. And that’s in no small part to the sacrifices of Helen Palmer Geisel; her contributions have affected the lives of millions of people all over the world, and have sprawled across three generations.

Their niece, Peggy, called her death “her last and greatest gift to him.”

So, you are a woman with literary aspirations. You want to write the Great American Novel or work your way into the elite halls of publishing. You believe all you need is talent, hard work, and a little bit of luck.

You are wrong.

Publishing is a snake pit filled with venomous but charming creatures in rumpled suits. This handy guide* will help you spot the cons, the fakes, and the shady characters you’ll encounter on your journey. You can’t avoid them all, but knowledge is power.

1. The Pig in a Poke. A trite and common gambit. A man of middling talent is given a seven-figure advance and major marketing support for his debut novel. The plot is a blatant rip-off of a previously published novel from a female author. When she points this out, he pokes her in the eye. The literati cheer.
2. The Pyramid Scheme. A few powerful white male editors at major publishing houses buddy up with a handful of white male agents representing a boatload of white male writers. The writers get publishing deals, the agents get rich, the editors get richer and everyone agrees it’s a shame that so few women or people of color are published, but what can they do about it?
3. The Shell Game. Three upmarket, suspense fiction books featuring unreliable (drunk) female narrators top the bestseller list. The authors use pseudonyms like B.F. Warren and L.M. James. Your challenge? To find the one female-driven narrative written by an actual woman. (Spoiler: there is no actual woman.)
4. The Sting. A writer and low-level publishing house employee lies about his credentials, his experience, and his history to blaze his way to a high paying job and a lucrative book contract. When it looks like he might be caught, he invents a health crisis and a series of family tragedies as a diversion. Even when everyone discovers he’s a liar, nothing bad happens to him and he remains wealthy by literary standards. It stings.
5. The Counterfeit. A man writes a memoir chronicling his drug addiction. Oprah tells everyone to buy his book. When the book is exposed as fabricated claptrap, he goes on Oprah for the second time to cry literary crocodile tears. He writes more books, which somehow get published, and he makes a bunch of money, and no one believes he is sorry that he lied to Oprah.
6. The Bait and Switch. A literary maven appears on the scene in your town. She shows up at parties. She hosts literary fundraisers. She offers to read your manuscript, to introduce you to her agent, to get your book into the hands of powerful people if you’ll just donate to this very worthy cause she has invented or put down a deposit on a writing retreat in Italy that is never going to happen. She is a fierce woman with pink hair and cool glasses, so you trust her. She’s not like all the men who’ve lied and scammed their way into your literary heart. Except, of course, she is.
7. The Charm Offensive. A somewhat famous and critically acclaimed author teaches at literary festivals across the country. He says your writing has real potential. He offers to meet with you about your manuscript. But when you meet, he is drunk and his hand keeps drifting to your knee and you understand that the only thing of yours he’s ever read or will ever read is your name-tag, which is conveniently located right above your breasts.
8. The Slow Burn. An awards committee announces its longlist and brags that it’s the most diverse group of writers in the history of the award. Articles are written about the extraordinary inclusiveness of the list. The committee is praised for its open mindedness. The shortlist contains three white men and one woman of color. A man wins.
9. The Spitball. You work at a major publishing house and your boss calls you in to spitball some ideas for marketing the Summer releases. You give him all your best thoughts in a carefully prepared and meticulously researched report. He thanks you and then presents your ideas as his own at the next editor’s meeting. (Just kidding, he doesn’t actually thank you.)
10. The Upchuck. You are in a writing workshop with five men, all of whom insist you could learn a lot by reading the novels of Chuck Palahniuk. You vomit.

* This is not in any way a comprehensive guide. Proceed at your own risk.

As I browsed the University of Texas Press’s fall catalogue, a title jumped out at me: The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel (October 15). When I read the blurb, I became incensed. It was a biography of John Williams, the author of Stoner, the unlikeliest bestseller of the 2000s. Stoner was originally published in 1965 and reissued by NYRB Classics in 2006, and then re-reissued in 2015 in a lavish hardback edition. It was reviewed and lauded widely. In the New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein called it “a perfect novel.”

Stoner is not a perfect novel. It’s not even a particularly well-written novel. You’ve probably read a hundred books like it. It is a methodical, hagiographic piece of fiction about a college professor, a man who plods passively through his life and takes joy only in literature.

William Stoner is born on a farm. He goes to college, becomes a professor at that college, takes a wife, has a child, undergoes professional difficulties, and dies. This is a terrific way to write a novel—to do a character study of a small, mediocre life. But Williams’s mediocrity blurs with Stoner’s until they both lose the reader’s interest. And one or both of them has a frightening carelessness toward women. Stoner repeatedly indulges in marital rape, saying that when his wife shifts against him in her sleep, “he moved upon her.” His wife, in response, “turn[s] her head sideways in a familiar gesture and bur[ies] it in her pillow, enduring violation,” so there is no mistaking these encounters as consensual. Dickstein’s review didn’t mention that. But then, Stoner is aimed toward Dickstein, and not toward me.  

There’s a reason a book like Stoner was re-issued, and a biography like The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel was published.  The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male. This may be occurring almost involuntarily on the part of the editors and critics. In Stoner, a male critic might not notice that Stoner’s wife is relegated to the stereotypes of frigid bitch, and later, crazy bitch. A critic without a disability might not notice that the central villains of the book are both disabled, and that the motives for their villainy are otherwise unexplained. A white critic might not notice that there are no educated people of color in the book at all. He might perceive only that Williams’s quiet, scholarly hero does his duty and loves his literature, despite the schemers who endeavor to ruin him—never noticing the common thread among those schemers.

So, of course Stoner is not a perfect novel. There’s no such thing, but if there were, it definitely wouldn’t sympathize with marital rape or demonize characters who are not cisgendered, fully abled white men. To state the obvious, no novel can be all-inclusive. Committee art is rarely of good quality. But a novel that actively shuts out readers because of their gender or skin color? The time for celebrating a novel like that, for glorifying it to the point of biographizing its author, should be long over.

The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male.
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Yet it still happens. Charles J. Shields, who has also written biographies of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, has done a valorous job with Williams in The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel. But he cannot disguise what’s at the heart of Stoner and what seems to have been at the heart of its author: misogyny, and mediocrity. A recollection of Williams: “He was one of those who felt…that the world is closing in on them, with all these ‘women and minorities’…[taking] the place that they were raised to think is rightfully theirs.”

As a scholar, Williams’s work was backward-looking (despite writing in the fertile 1960s, he had no interest in poetry beyond the time of William Carlos Williams), derivative, and inadequate; a rejecting editor wrote to Williams, “You are overstepping your evidence by about ten thousand miles.” In 1963 Williams caused a minor scandal by plagiarizing Yvor Winters. Shields treats it as delicately as possible. “Williams’ students did know of their professor’s proclivity for borrowing…He had taken shortcuts since the beginning of his teaching career…piggybacking on Alan Swallow’s Wyatt dissertation for his own…compiling a poetry anthology incorporating Winters’ scholarship.”

In the critical segment of his writer’s life, Williams is so unimaginative that he must plagiarize. Meanwhile, as a poet and fiction author, he struggles to find an agent, to find publication, to find a job, to find funding. He often expresses frustration that he can’t seem to get ahead as a writer. Shields tiptoes around it, but the fact is, Williams’s books just aren’t that good. On his first novel, a rejection letter reads, “To us it seems a shame that a writer of Mr. William’s [sic] obvious capabilities and potentialities should have spent so much time delineating a character who is basically not worth it.” Dutton’s feedback: “Unfortunately, we think that…this manuscript is just too long and too pretentious.”

In sum, Stoner is a minor novel by a minor writer. I don’t begrudge its wide readership (people can enjoy whatever they want); I begrudge its elevation, when it is so plainly and seriously flawed, to the point that a single review by a male critic has titled Williams’s biography. The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.

A scan of the NYRB Classics list shows that male names outstrip female names; the same editors who chose to put two editions of Stoner into print within ten years choose mostly men from the annals of out-of-print literature to reissue and promote. Yet the poet Ai, who won a National Book Award, a Guggenheim, and an NEA grant, requires a Kickstarter to come back into print. The Second Shelf, a quarterly publication and online bookstore devoted to out-of-print women’s writing, also needed a Kickstarter to fill the gap NYRB Classics perpetuates. Passing, by Nella Larsen, is obscure (ranked at 10,000 in Amazon sales at this writing), while Invisible Man flourishes (ranked at 1,000).

Twice as many male authors get translated as women; only two houses that commonly publish translated books published more women authors than men in 2017. And just one publisher, AmazonCrossing (!), accounts for 20% of the women published in translation. VIDA continues to shout across the gender gap in publishing for short stories, essays, and particularly criticism—check out the stats for the London Review of Books and, surprise!, the NYRB. As those statistics demonstrate, women writers are reviewed less, and women critics are offered fewer opportunities to review.

The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.
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Stoner is perfect in one respect: as an example of the heights to which a mediocre white male writer can soar when given proper cheerleading. Williams has netted a biography and lasting fame because of the men in publishing and criticism clustered around him, rooting for him. Compare him to Clarice Lispector, a contemporary, who was exponentially more prolific and acclaimed during her lifetime. It took a 2009 biography to push her work into wider acknowledgment in the US, instead of the acknowledgment engendering the biography. Or compare him to Anaïs Nin, whose work is remembered as supplemental to Henry Miller’s, whose extraordinary diary has been published by smaller and smaller presses as interest in her has waned, whose objectively fascinating life has been biographized only once. Or compare him to Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place. She wrote bestselling, salacious melodramas that tapped the repressive sexuality of her era and is barely critically studied at all.

Stoner is also excellent as a standard against which every female writer should push. Per Shields, “Williams could build his fiction around thought warring with feeling, which creates tension, and to suggest that emotions are ineffable, beyond characters’ reach.” This sense pervades Stoner, that emotions are foreign and impossible. I think this struggle was Williams’s, that he found it difficult to enter the weak and confusing realm of emotion and nurture (his own children barely appear in Shields’s biography), the realm in which women stereotypically belong. I imagine that Williams would have found a book like My Brilliant Friend as intolerable as I find Stoner, as there is no place for him in it.

Women are half (or more) of the reading public, and yet books like Stoner are what’s thrust upon us—books in which we will never find ourselves, books whose authors were rightly buried under the weight of their own mediocrity. Books and authors whose obsolescence, whose extinction, are overdue.

While a person’s identity is important to their understanding of the world, it does not define who they are.

“Would you be interested in writing a personal story about dating and disfigurement?” An editor at a well-known women’s fashion magazine asked me in an email. “We’re interested in the ways dating with disfigurement makes you feel unattractive, and how you cope with the challenges of trying to find a partner.” I had emailed the woman to pitch a feel-good article about creative date night activities, and this was the response I received.

I have Crouzon syndrome — a rare craniofacial condition where the bones in the head fuse prematurely. My face is disfigured, yes, but I do not believe myself to be unattractive. Neither does my boyfriend — a man I’ve been in a loving, committed relationship with for nearly three years. I reread the woman’s email once more to be sure I hadn’t missed something — to be sure I hadn’t somehow provoked her comment. Then I stared blankly at the screen, too appalled to form a reply that wasn’t riddled with expletives. Had this woman really asked me to write an article about how it feels to be too “unattractive” to date? Perhaps this is naivety talking, but I believed a magazine targeting women and teenage girls would be aimed at building confidence and empowering women to be strong and comfortable in their own skin — to celebrate beauty in whatever form it came. Instead, the editor reinforced the harmful societal belief I’ve spent my whole life silencing: that I am my physical appearance.

As a writer, it is my job to write about my disfigurement, to break it down in small, manageable, bite-sized chunks of information for individuals without craniofacial differences to understand. I do this to eliminate the stigma of disfigurement. I also do it because the stories in which I talk about my physical differences are often times the only pitches editors accept. Whether I write an article with a news peg, or a separate reported piece about issues unrelated to my physical appearance, I am more often than not asked to change the angle to write about myself, or it won’t be accepted. Either that, or the angle is changed after I sign a contract, and without my prior knowledge or consent.

While it’s great that news outlets and publications are publishing more marginalized voices and telling diverse stories, to be pigeonholed into only writing about one thing is both frustrating and harmful. We are more than one aspect of our identity.

To be pigeonholed into only writing about one thing is both frustrating and harmful.

The lack of diverse perspectives in articles, news, and media is a disservice to the general population. While a person’s identity is important to their understanding of the world, it does not define who they are. To better understand the world, we need to hear unique voices and perspectives. Pigeonholing writers and pigeonholing people means we lose out on the perspectives of marginalized people on important issues and topics, because they’re only ever commissioned to write about their identity explicitly.

This phenomenon has been experienced by women and minorities alike. Alaina Leary, a queer, disabled editor and writer knows this firsthand. “Editors have no doubt asked me to spell out my disabilities even in pieces that are not supposed to be related to disability, most likely to seem woke,” Leary told me. But like many marginalized writers who are used to being defined by one element of who their identity, Leary, who often pitches a wide range of both disability and non-disability related topics, appreciates when she’s able to write about topics without her identity coming into play.

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“One of the best examples comes from The Rumpus, which put out a call for disabled writers but did NOT require my story to have anything to do with disability. I loved that. They were clearly interested in having more disabled voices but not in boxing us into the ‘typical’ disability stories, or even to writing about disability at all. My piece had absolutely nothing to do with my disability and never even mentioned it; it was all about my dad. My editor never once asked me about my disability,” she said.

Still, too many publications fail to recognize the importance of celebrating diversity, and ultimately cross the line into being exploitative. “There’s been at least a couple instances where I was the only LGBTQ writer on staff at a publication and I would get assigned every single LGBTQ-related story, even those I didn’t feel I should be writing, and I was never assigned other topics because I was the only person they felt ‘could’ cover LGBTQ topics. It was nice that they didn’t want to assign these things to straight cis people, since that’s what many publications do, but I felt really pigeonholed,” Leary said.

The fact that writers are being pigeonholed can at least in part be attributed to the overall lack of diversity in publishing. A 2015 study on diversity in publishing by Lee & Low Books looked at data from eight review journals and 34 publishers in North America. Data revealed something that most in the industry wouldn’t find too surprising: The publishing industry isn’t that diverse. According to the study’s results, 79% of people in the industry are white; 78% are cis-women; 88% are heterosexual; and 92% are nondisabled. Data from editorial departments weren’t much better. Eighty-two percent of editorial staff is white; 84% are cis-women; 86% are heterosexual; and 92% are without any kind of disability.

Too many publications fail to recognize the importance of celebrating diversity, and ultimately cross the line into being exploitative.

This lack of diversity affects which stories get written and by whom. While it’s great that the internet and mainstream media have worked to amplify the voices of those who desperately need to be heard, they’ve also begun to stereotype many of us — limiting our identities as people and our work as writers to only one aspect of who we are. Diversity in newsrooms and in publishing houses (and even in universities) would normalize the presence and the perspectives of underrepresented identities. Increased diversity would help people to understand that pigeonholing limits both the knowledge and the cultural and identity perspective that could otherwise be shared.

On one hand, marginalized groups deal with inaccurate representation. On the other hand, when we do write about our own stories to highlight larger cultural and societal issues, we often become labeled and the scope of our work becomes limited.

To make matters worse, we’re often expected to work for almost no money. Many well-known publications — including several that work primarily with marginalized writers — pay just $50 for pieces over 1,000 words. “Freelance isn’t free, and it’s ridiculous that a media juggernaut like Condé Nast repeatedly accepts stories and then ghosts writers, never to publish their work or pay them for services rendered. And when these writers are paid, it is often pennies to the dollar when compared to non-marginalized writers,” Alexis Dent wrote in her article “Is Conde Nast Exploiting Marginalized Writers?” Dent’s article includes screenshots from numerous marginalized writers who were taken advantage by large publications who could’ve easily afforded to pay them.

Why Isn’t ‘Ebony’ Paying Its Black Writers?

“It’s offensive that marginalized writers are being treated so horribly. What’s the point of being #woke if you’re actually still contributing to an environment that puts POC, queer, and nonbinary people down?” Dent wrote.

Still, for many marginalized writers, financial need outweighs the frustration. In a report from the Center for Media Literacy, Carlos Cort wrote the following:

“In recent years minorities have achieved a long overdue media presence. But crucial issues of portrayal and participation remain to be resolved. And once inside the door, problems continue — personal isolation, difficulty in entering upper-level management, lack of influence, career hazards. Minority journalists often face the dilemma of balancing their social commitment to provide better coverage of minority communities against their fears of being ‘ghettoized’ to the ‘minority beat’ and thereby having their professional careers restricted. Minority actors find themselves caught between the need to find roles in which they can hone their craft and earn a living, and the recognition that many of these roles may contribute to public negative stereotyping.”

Freelancers often can’t afford to speak up, for fear of being blacklisted by other outlets. I am one of these writers. But though I write about my physical appearance, medical condition, and occasionally dating, I will never write about myself or anyone else as being too “unattractive” to find love. I don’t care what byline it costs me.

Though magazines and editors may try to tell some of us that we do not fit their mold, I will not conform to anyone’s small-minded definition of beauty. I will not limit my myself or my work. I will proudly take up space and write the stories I believe in, because my disfigurement does not, and will not, define me.

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Writing to me is a lifestyle, not a profession.

Among the grotesque glut of online clickbait, “how to” stories have come to adopt something of a bad rap. And it’s easy to see why: Often, these pieces are superficial, fluffy, and not actually conducive to helping someone do or be better, which is kind of the entire point.

Dakota Kim’s “how to” stories are the exact opposite of such drivel.

At once searingly personal, thoughtfully nuanced, and productively challenging, Dakota’s pieces for The Establishment — “How To Survive A White Workplace As A Person Of Color” and “How To Talk To Your White Best Friend About Racism” —are “how to” stories at their absolute finest.

Driven by compelling anecdotes and hard-earned acumen, these stories invite readers to live a better life rooted in the principles of intersectional feminism. Consider, for example, this essential insight:

“Readers of color, it’s better to have extremely difficult talks in a real friendship than to ignore the issues and pretend they don’t exist — all the while feeling alone, unhappy, and confused privately. You are actually doing your interracial friendship — and, IMO, the world — a disservice by shielding it from reality.”

Or ponder for a moment this crucial knowledge-drop:

“You owe no one your ‘extracurricular’ self, unless you feel comfortable sharing and want to do so. This Onion article may assist you in faking a really boring weekend watching Scandal when what you really did was stage your own radical musical, attend an anti-ICE protest, party with your favorite band, and throw a food pop-up.”

Dakota, far from adding to a heaping pile of useless nonsense, is making shit better through the power of her wisdom. And when it comes to, well, every type of writing, that’s kind of the entire point.

Read below for Dakota’s thoughts on kimchi, The High Priest of Pop, and writing as a lifestyle.

You can generally find me writing in Hello Kitty pajamas on an Airbnb boat/treehouse/futon while listening to chillwave and house.

The writers that have most influenced my life are Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Octavia Butler, Paul Auster, Rebecca Solnit, and Thich Naht Hanh.

The TV character I most identify with is “Bong-soon” in Strong Woman Do Bong-Soon.

I think paying writers in “exposure” ensures an entry on Who Pays Writers?.

The coolest thing I’ve bought from money made writing is a trip to Korea and Japan for me and my mother.

My most listened to song of all time is “Purple Rain” by Prince.

My 18-year-old self would feel tickled about where I am today.

I like writing for The Establishment because the editors are supportive and smart, and the community is loud, thoughtful, and critical.

If I could give the amazing people who sponsor stories anything in the world to express my gratitude, it would be jars of my homemade kimchi served by baby kittens on Jeju Island.

If I could share one of my stories by yelling it into a megaphone in the middle of Times Square, it would be “How To Talk To Your White Best Friend About Racism.”

How To Talk To Your White Best Friend About Racism

If I could have one type of food for the rest of the my life, it would be Korean homestyle food.

The story I’m working on now is about native Hawaiians learning leadership and sustainability on an organic farm.

The story I want to write next is an essay about how rollerskating kept me out of teen mischief.

Writing means this to me: a lifestyle, not a profession.

If I could summarize writing in a series of three photos, they would be:

Hello dear comrades,

Establishment co-founder and editorial director, Nikki Gloudeman, is teaching a class on the (complicated) essence of the pitch. Just how the hell do we choose the stories we do, you wonder? How can you stand out and craft the perfect pitch for editors when they’re largely grumpy, overwhelmed, and wading through the beautiful shit-storm of ideas writers are sending every. single. day?

Wonder not dear writers, for Nikki has all the answers!

OH! You’ll also get personalized feedback on pitches, as well as a detailed guide to pitchin’ post-seminar.

What are you waiting for?! Tune in, get published.

‘I would be the love child of Lisa Simpson and Animal.’

Every once in a while as an editor, you receive an essay in your inbox that knocks the wind out of you. I will never forget receiving one such essay from Ari Honarvar.

In the aftermath of Trump’s Muslim ban, the piece reflected on immigrating from Iran to the U.S., and the striking parallels between both homes. Even in its first raw draft, the story stunned me, coupling raw, vulnerable honesty with deep wisdom and clear-eyed prose. Still to this day, I think about it often.

I’m A Refugee From A Banned Country— This Is My American Story

Since then, I’ve had the honor to work with Ari a few more times, and her work — including the nuanced “What Happened When My Travel-Ban Supporting Neighbor Met With Refugees” and revealing “Poetry Saved Me In Iran — Could It Save Us From War?” — has never lacked the potency or urgency of that first unforgettable piece.

I remain ever-ready for Ari’s next extraordinary story in my inbox…and to have the wind knocked out of me.

Below, Ari shares her thoughts on poetry icons, rice bowls, and the novel she’s working on now.

The writers that have most influenced my life are…Do poets count? Hafez, Rumi, Forough, Gibran. Also Voltaire and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The TV character I most identify with is…I would be the love child of Lisa Simpson and Animal.

I think “paying writers in exposure” is tacky.

If I could share one of my stories by yelling it into a megaphone in the middle of Times Square, it would be “What Happened When My Travel Ban-Supporting Neighbor Met With Refugees” (although megaphones aren’t my thing, so it would be a visual equivalent).

What Happened When My Travel Ban-Supporting Neighbor Met With Refugees

My 18-year-old self would feel verklempt about where I am today.

I like writing for The Establishment because it’s such a clean and professional platform and the editors are wonderful to work with. Plus they have a diverse pool of writers who they treat well.

If I could only have one type of food for the rest of my life it would be a rice bowl with veggies and avocado.

The story I’m working on now is a novel about a 9-year-old girl surviving life in war-torn Iran with the help of a mysterious storyteller.

‘I’ve never been more secure in the knowledge that this is what I was always meant to do.’

It’s a terrible cliche to say a writer is an “editor’s dream,” but, well, here we are saying it — for there is truly no more apt a description for Sam Riedel. It’s not just Sam’s clean, compelling, incisive copy that makes her dreamy — though certainly that helps. It’s also that she’s so damn lovely to work with, responding to edits with thought and care, and just generally coming off like a really cool, thoughtful person.

It’s no wonder that we’ve worked with Sam so frequently over the last year and a half, eagerly accepting her pieces on the ever-fraught fight for trans rights; her critical examinations of pop-culture phenoms like Ghostbusters and It; and her sharp exploration of issues like sex work unionization.

You could call Sam a jack of all trades who few writers can hold a candle to, and who makes editing a piece of cake.

Hey: Sometimes, the cliches are true.

Read below for Sam’s thoughts on her favorite manga, her pasta obsession, and the Nicki Minaj/Beyonce collab she just can’t get enough of.

The writers that have most influenced my life are: K.A. Applegate, Kate Bornstein, and John Keats.

The TV character I most identify with is Sailor Moon.

I think “paying writers in exposure” is predatory capitalism at its pettiest.

The coolest thing I’ve bought from money made writing is my hormones. (Second place: a rad sketch of Tim Drake, the third Robin, by Babs Tarr.)

My most listened to song of all time is “Feelin’ Myself” by Nicki Minaj ft. Beyonce.

My 18-year-old self would feel astonished about where I am today.

I like writing for The Establishment because my voice is always celebrated, never censored, and I know the editors have my back.

If I could only have one type of food for the rest of my life it would be pasta. Tricolor rotini is like 50% of my diet anyway.

If I could share one of my stories by yelling it into a megaphone in the middle of Times Square, it would be “Why Trans Activists Can’t Trust the Left.”

Why Trans Activists Can’t Trust The Left

Writing means this to me: I’ve wanted to spend my life writing since I was 8 years old. When I go days without writing — due to brain problems or circumstance — I tend to get sad and upset, conscious of the fact that I’m not doing my job. Even when I was writing about things that meant nothing to me, I found comfort in the simple fact that I was writing. Now that I’m building a career based on meaningful work with value for my community, I’ve never been more secure in the knowledge that this is what I was always meant to do.

‘I don’t think I would be able to process thoughts or feelings without writing.’

Great writers function as guides, taking your hand and gripping it tight as they navigate you through their narrative, even when there are unexpected turns or ventures deep into the woods. If you feel lost while reading, it’s because the writer has released their grip, forgetting to keep you close.

Anne Theriault knows how to never let go.

In part, this is because Anne is so finely skilled; her command of structure and language is superb, ensuring readers stay fully invested in what she writes. But there’s more to it than that — Anne’s stories are also captivating because she writes with such an evident sense of wonder and curiosity.

Don’t believe us? Check out her history-rich treatise on the feminist power of witches, or lengthy and free-ranging dialogue with a Catholic nun, or thoughtful exploration of America’s long legacy of hate through the lens of a road trip.

While you’re at it, go ahead and read this and this and this and this, too. With a guide like Anne, you’re sure to enjoy the journey.

Below, Anne shares her thoughts on ballet, changelings, and Canadian bagels.

You can generally find me writing in a public library on a macbook air while desperately trying not to check Twitter.

The writers that have most influenced my life are Sylvia Plath, Colette, and Rosemary Sutcliff.

I think “paying writers in exposure” is a symptom of how our society undervalues the arts and also just plain unethical.

The coolest thing I’ve bought from money made writing is ballet lessons. Is that cool? I’m not sure. It seems cool to me. [Editor’s note: Yes. It’s cool.]

My most listened to song of all time is “Metal Heart” by Cat Power.

My 18-year-old self would feel pretty ok, I think, about where I am today.

I like writing for The Establishment because they pay decently and they’re always into my weirdest pitches.

If I could only have one type of food for the rest of my life it would be bagels and lox, but specifically Montreal bagels.

If I could give the amazing people who sponsor stories anything in the world to express my gratitude, it would be a signed first-edition copy of their favorite book.

The story I’m working on now is about reading Girl, Interrupted during my stay in a psychiatric ward. You know, a really light puff piece kinda thing.

The story I want to write next is about changeling mythology.

Writing means this to me: Writing is how I figure things out. It’s like taking a tangled skein of wool and slowly unsnarling it until I can lay it out in one straight line to get from the beginning of a thought to the end of it. I often don’t properly know how I feel about something until I sit down to write about it. I don’t think I would be able to process thoughts or feelings without writing; it’s really that integral to how I interact with the world.