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.

When I was in college—an experience I barely survived—a desperate friend gave me a book to read. It was the now-ubiquitous An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, a memoir of a psychologist’s life with bipolar disorder and how she struggled with diagnosis and treatment. I enjoyed reading about someone who was so very, very much like me.  Jamison’s book is the reason I sought treatment for mental illness. And since becoming a disability activist, and someone who studies disability memoirs, I’ve read thousands of words on message boards that say Jamison’s book, or another psychiatric illness memoir, gave a person the courage to seek help.

The friend who gave me Jamison’s book later told me that his secret motive was for me to have just such an epiphany. I didn’t mind his interference at the time. I was, after all, in desperate need of an epiphany. Before getting treatment for bipolar disorder, I wouldn’t sleep for weeks at a time. I’d make reckless decisions without thinking of the consequences. Then, without warning, the reverse would kick in: I’d be unable to get out of bed; I’d miss days or weeks of classes; I couldn’t concentrate or care about homework. It was, in retrospect, not an easy way to succeed in college, or even to survive.

So I was grateful for the book, for the help I got, for the medication that I still take, now, years later.

I’ve never stopped wondering about the disability memoirs that come out each year and what they mean to us, as disabled readers. I also wonder what the memoirs mean to nondisabled readers, whose motives might not be so kind.

When I became a rhetoric professor, I published an article, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the Ethos of Psychiatric Disability,” about psychiatric disability memoirs (the kind of article that no one reads, in a journal that no one has heard of). I argued that people with psychiatric disabilities were able to reclaim their authority as speakers, and as members of society, using what I called the “mood memoir” genre.

Mood memoirs provided a way of saying, “I still have control over my own story.” Even, “I still have control over my own life.”

In studying mood memoirs, though, I discovered that the genre has certain limitations. Authors must meet specific reader expectations: readers expect to be inspired, to read about overcoming disability, and to read coherent, truthful narratives. Memoirs that don’t conform to these conventions of inspiration, overcoming, coherence, and truthfulness are often rejected by readers. They either don’t make it to the bookshelves in the first place due to publisher gatekeeping, or when readers don’t find what they’re looking for, they rake authors over the coals.

In the past, in order to rebuild credibility in a normate-dominated world, disabled memoirists sought hyper-verisimilitude. After all, if our disability supposedly damaged our perception of reality, what better way to prove our doubters wrong than by hewing to the doubters’ own standard of truth?

But today, disabled writers are pushing back. Today, we’re recognizing that the normate memoir genre doesn’t fit disability stories. And not only when it comes to truth, but when it comes to everything.

Memoirs of disability are often studies in suffering. But what I’ve found in my research is that normate readers don’t actually want to read stories of suffering—not by itself, at least. They want suffering-plus. They want some form of Aristotelian catharsis—a release.

Aristotle, in the Poetics, defines tragedy as “a representation of an action which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…and through the arousal of pity and fear [effects] the [catharsis] of such emotions.” It’s not enough to read a story that arouses pity and fear—a tragedy (such as a disability memoir) must also provide the catharsis of these emotions in the reader, or the story has failed. At least by normate standards.

Normate readers who read disability memoirs want to cleanse themselves of their feelings of pity for and fear of disabled people.

But the normate reader’s demand for catharsis leaves disabled authors in a bind. To hew to the demand for normate truthfulness, a story might not have any redeeming qualities except for the disabled writer’s ability to tell the story in the first place. A suicide survivor who is alive and writing has already overcome a lot, but for this genre, which requires catharsis for the reader, mere survival is not enough. To meet the normate reader’s demands, there has to be more. There has to be redemption. The author has to “get better.” The sine curve must come all the way up again.

But what if there isn’t any redemption? What if, after the suffering, all the person makes out with is her life? Those stories are too depressing, aren’t they? No one will want to read those, will they?

Or will they?

A suicide survivor who is alive and writing has already overcome a lot, but for this genre, which requires catharsis for the reader, mere survival is not enough.
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In 2015, I published a long-form essay about motherhood and suicide. My essay was a little dark, sure, but so is everything else I write. I pointed to a massive, multi-year study of parental suicide attempts and their effects on children published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “Its findings show that having a parent who attempted suicide, even controlling for other factors, ‘conveys a nearly 5-fold increased odds of suicide attempt in offspring,’” I wrote, and added, “You might not see it if you aren’t looking for it, but one of the subtexts of this study is motherhood, along with its favorite hobgoblin, guilt.” Motherhood and guilt? Yes.

In the study, the researchers addressed some weaknesses in their research, including that their “probands are mostly female,” but they didn’t get into why mothers might try to kill themselves more than fathers.The point was, this study actually had a lot to say about gender and parenting. So, I wrote about my own suicide attempt and my own family, my own disability and my own fears. And it provided no catharsis.

Readers’ responses to my essay were strong, mostly positive.

The few negative responses, though, policed the piece in familiar ways:

“i don’t know. i mean, obviously i’m glad my mother chose to have children, or i wouldn’t exist! but i think you’re kidding yourself if you think living with someone who oozes unhappiness doesn’t have an impact.”

“You have nothing to feel guilty about if you do not use your suicidal [sic] as a threat to your children, but some parents do.”

“But I would gently suggest that you talk to your kids about your depression and suicide attempts only after consulting with a good therapist who specializes in working with kids.”

“It’s hard to have a parent that, through no deliberate fault of their own, isn’t a [sic] one hundred percent available support for coping with the trauma you have. It gets so much more complicated when they’re the source of all that [shit.]”

I knew, objectively, that these commenters weren’t talking about me, Katie, the person who wrote the piece, because they do not know me. I wasn’t the source of all that shit. The parents of the commenters were. Why were they so angry at me?

Because I’d broken the genre rules, and they were punishing me for it.

Let’s go back to Aristotle, to his triangle of rhetorical aims.

My intended audience was others like me, who’d considered or attempted suicide, and who might also have been parents or considered becoming parents. I also knew I’d be reaching others beyond that group.

My intended purpose was to reveal my darkest fear, and by doing so, help others who shared that same fear: that I’d harmed my children when I’d considered suicide.

So far so good.

My writerly persona, though—that’s where I failed.

The normate expectations for the mood memoir include redemption. The writer must suffer, and then find redemption. It’s the path of Aristotelian tragedy. But I didn’t apologize for nearly dying of suicide, or for the risks the JAMA study says I now pose to my children. I was not sorry. In fact, I was angry. I was furious that maternal suicide disproportionately affects our children. Maternal everything disproportionately affects our children. The burden on mothers is way too high—from what we can eat when we’re pregnant to how we parent our infants and toddlers. Everything we do is monitored, studied, checked, and regulated.

And then the researchers dared to throw up their hands: Why do more moms try to kill themselves than dads? It’s beyond us.

I had a deadly illness. It nearly killed me, but I survived. I refused to apologize for it.

The result? Some readers were mad I hadn’t been sorry. I hadn’t been remorseful for the harm my suicide might cause my children. They told me to get therapy, that I would hurt my kids, that I should feel guilty.

Repentance is what readers expect of disability memoirs. Repentance brings redemption. Redemption brings catharsis. For readers.

But my disability story isn’t for your catharsis.

The writer must suffer, and then find redemption. It’s the path of Aristotelian tragedy.
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I’m merely part of a trend of disabled writers dismantling normate genres.

Karrie Higgins took on normate veracity with her essay “Strange Flowers,” when she took to task doctors and teachers and more, all of whom let her down, doubted her and mis-treated her. An angry reader, “Coco,” attacked the truth of Karrie’s story. “This work is more like magical realism inspired by some real events but woven into a fictional and surreal landscape,” Coco wrote. “So my mixed feelings come from using the shock value of a supposedly true first person narrative.”

In her essay, Karrie tackles truth as she struggled to put in order the evidence of her brother’s sexual abuse of her: “I walked the galactic paper trail like a labyrinth, but the sequence felt wrong, even though I obeyed the strict chronology dictated by the documents. I didn’t remember my life in that order. I was not even sure things happened in that order, even though the documents said so. Maybe the order people discover things is the order they really happen.” In attacking “truth,” Coco merely reinforced Karrie’s project of questioning truth-telling itself.

Porochista Khakpour, in her new book Sick, also challenges normate memoir rules, as the New Yorker notes: “‘Sick’ is a strange book, one that resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs—in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way.” As the review points out, there is a disability memoir genre that normates expect, one with a clean storyline and transcendence. Khakpour has kicked the genre to the curb.

Kay Redfield Jamison wrote an important, groundbreaking book that created the space we needed. In the decades since then, we’ve been changing the rules of disability memoirs. Some readers have resisted this change. They’ve gotten angry.

But disabled writers are not here for your genre expectations, not anymore.

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The thing about poetry is that it’s kaleidoscopic, protean, malleable. It’s an art form often very open to projection; what one wants to see is often what one might see. Unlike prose — which, arguably, is exponentially more interested in conveying a clear idea or image — poetry is delightfully layered and fractured, inviting interpretation like a beautifully wanton stare.

This is not to imply that the poet doesn’t have a crystalline agenda, a maybe-convoluted but meticulously rendered journey that they’ve honed and polished with the maniacally deft precision of a master watchmaker.

This is all to say that one doesn’t typically get to float their interpretations to the poet-wizard behind the curtain; usually us logo-philic peons are left wandering the shoals of a poet’s brilliant wordscapes, never quite knowing just what they meant.

It’s a blissful ignorance, but an ignorance nonetheless.

But 2018 has already granted me a tremendous gift; I’ve been able to read a tremendous collection of poetry — behold the glory that is July Westhale’s Trailer Trash — and converse with the aforementioned poet-wizard about all my quandaries, all my grief, all my admiration.

When pressed to talk about how this book came about, July insists that “art is very clever — it happens unconsciously, writing does.” She says that she was actually writing a very different collection about historical figures — Virginia Woolf primarily — when she received a fellowship in 2015 at the Vermont Studio Center.

She sat herself down on the floor, fanned the pages and pages of poems around her, and began indexing everything.

Suddenly she realized, “this was not a book about Virginia Woolf, it was a book about ’80s and ’90s Southern California chemical warfare and poverty. I had spent three years on this manuscript before that, but once I realized what it was really about, it took me a month to finish. I knew exactly what to do with it.”

Trailer Trash is distinctly July’s story — a harrowing tale of grief, childhood, and loss. But it’s also about America, God, and poverty; the collection nimbly toggles, with the grace of a feral cat, between the “I” and the Universal. “You want your readers to be asking questions,” July told me.

And we are.

What can poetry do for a memory that prose can’t? For me, I have always been obsessed with rendering the truth as beautifully as I can — meaning there are decided boundaries that I have to operate in. I need those boundaries. With poetry, storytelling seems boundary-less in that, to me, when you are Telling a Story or Describing a Memory you can render it exquisitely in so many ways. How on earth do you decide how to tell it…

JULY:

I would argue that poetry — at least in its inception — was actually the most boundaried art form. The fundamental difference between poetry and prose is the white space.

One of the things about canonical poetry — although it’s primarily old white men — is that it teaches you how to break all the old rules.

This book has a lot of religious existential crisis. I grew up in the southern baptist church tradition. Hymns are written in ballad forms. Rhyme and meter create hypnosis in the body. What I love is understanding rhyme and meter and poetic forms as they traditionally exist…but using radically different content. Write a sonnet about fisting someone — that juxtaposition.

Image has always been my greatest strength and my greatest weakness — my mentor in grad school use to call me a metaphor making machine. It’s poetically useful in that I think a lot about the world in the ways one thing represents something else. But if you just have something that’s made up of images there’s no there there.

The thing about poetry too is that it’s very economical. You have to figure out how to go a long way with very little. Everything is extremely intentional. Words aren’t there by accident.

‘Poets are really amazing liars.’
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Are you a dogged 3-hour-a-day writer/thinker or do you dash things off on napkins and notebooks as they come to you? Or are you somewhere in the middle…do particular feelings or stories gnaw gnaw gnaw at you to be told? Is poetry a purging?

I do journal a lot…and I do believe in a pretty well-worn path of getting the junk out of your brain. And I go through periods of hyper-productivity — intense reading and then intense writing. I do write a lot. I am prolific. The vast majority might not be good, but that’s not the point.

I will say, I’m a neurotic person — everything has to be just so. Down to the pencil. Right now I am in a period of intense writing. This last year was amazing in terms of publications, but it was so focused on editorial, marketing, tour planning — it didn’t leave a lot of bandwidth to create new stuff. I don’t know what’s coming next. I guess I’ll just start writing now and then I’ll know in a couple years what it will be about…

I’m always curious when folks write memoir — and indeed “Trailer Trash” feels like a deeply personal and familial collection. How much restraint do we “owe” to those in our life that we write about? When are our stories our own to tell?

This is an issue I will have to sit down with when I write memoir. These poems are autobiographical, but they’re still poetic representations of it…they’re still translations of experiences.

Even though I write a lot about people in my life that are living, like my sister…a lot of people I am writing about are not living. Honestly this is a bigass book about my mom. And she’s not living. A lot of these memories exist through the dishonesty of hindsight. I also experience some privilege in that the people in my family don’t really read. They’re just not readers. So there’s a lot of privacy for me — that is both exciting and a bit heartbreaking.

Richard Hugo says in Triggering Town, “you owe your emotions everything and the truth nothing.” You’re not writing a news report. But don’t be an asshole.

Our stories are always our own to tell. Folks who are marginalized already have enough people telling them not to speak or erasing their words. I don’t want to live in a world where people are telling other people not to tell their stories…

I mean, christ, me either, but I still kind of lose sleep about it.

So…how much time does this collection represent? What was the most difficult and wonderful thing about this book of poems? How do you know when you’re “done”?

The whole collection in total took about three years. The most difficult thing about this book was actually the editorial process with the editor — Ann Dernier — who is an amazing women. When the manuscript was accepted she said, “I’m going to work with you”…and she really pushed me in a couple of poems to expand into broader meanings.

A lot of the poems were more finished than others, which is an arbitrary allocation but…the ones she was pushing me to edit were the ones that were the most emotionally difficult for me, which makes sense right? When you’re close to something you can’t write it in the same surgical way — it’s nothing that’s imagined or distanced.

Retelling the story of when I heard my mother had died [in the poem “Dead Mom,” or “How News Travels in a Small Town”] was excruciating for me. I was trying to write a la Szymborska’s poem “Identification.” Ann kept pushing me and pushing me and the result is great, but it’s not a poem I’ll read at readings. I don’t think I’ll ever read it again. It’s the one poem I’ve ever written that feels like too much.

And the best part….?

The best thing about the book for me is that it’s a book about class. Poetry is often considered to be an academic sport. An elitist sport. Something that belongs to people with privilege even though in America we have an amazing canon of poets who write about work. Like Philip Levine. I feel extremely proud and excited that my first full-length collection is all about a very specific kind of wrecked and ravaged agriculture — a kind of poverty that exists in abundance in this country.

What kind of child were you? I know a bit from reading your essays, but did reading play a role in escaping what seems to be a goddamn difficult childhood? I think for myself, escaping, or immersing in books, felt very different than realizing I could write myself. And in truth, writing is the opposite of escaping for me. It’s delving. When did you know you wanted to write? What’s your relationship to words?

I was a strange child. Dreamy and very much in my own head. The white space around me was filled with grief. There was very little I did or could do to alleviate that. I had imaginary horses and I would charge people to ride them. I was six. My [adoptive] mother made me give the money back but…I think there was an aura around orphans which was driven by the media at the time. A lot of the mainstream characters in ’80s and ’90s literature were orphans…which isn’t so anymore.

No one wants to hang out with [orphans]…but they’re also powerful. My mother died in 1991. Time marches forward. I was like one of those plants that grows around the cement instead of smashing through it.

I got my love of reading from my birth mom…I think that because I had a really rough childhood, especially my early childhood, I was expected to be an adult a lot of the time — the adults were not doing a great job of being adults. Reading was absolutely an escape.

Reading became a thing that was mine — it was a hangover from my life with my birth mom that I brought to California with me.

I would love to talk about specific moments and themes in some of the poems themselves…

The opening poem — “Ars Poetica” — is just gut-wrenching…it’s one of my favorites in the collection.

It feels so beautifully loaded, all wrapped up in this gauze of the Fairytale. Love has betrayal baked into its guts I suppose. I also feel as though one self is murdering another self? Which is perhaps something we all do, but maybe without that seemingly cruel level of calm. How much do you think about the first poem setting the tone for the entire book?

Excerpt from “Ars Poetica”

One would like to see oneself walking through the forest as two girls/ along a creek, the golden carp under the ice like blurred poppies.
The tall, hooded girl will extend a basket, offering bread and water, a kindly/ face and a thick cloak…

We can assume systemically — not anecdotally — that all choices in a book are intentional. This is a kind of poetry manifesto. The poem is about two girls walking in the woods. They both share some of the same resources — it’s a beautiful setting, and then…that’s the way the poetry process works. Things work until they don’t.

I guess that writing and brutality go hand in hand in ways that we don’t want to admit. This poem is almost like a legend — it’s not a disclaimer and it’s not apologizing, but it’s a way to read this book.

Excerpt from “Tomato”

… “Once I was a hothouse gone to seed
in a trailer park in Blythe, the sky
vermillion in airlessness, in suffocating
sunsets of dust and pesticides,
our food dead and gone. The dinner table
was the color of a beetle trapped in sap.”

Can you talk a bit about the evolving role of religion and faith in your life…there is a tremendous amount of religious wrestling and imagery in this collection.

Excerpt from “Crop Dusters”

…Our melon fields have been blessed by the Lord.
We and our canals are filth waiting to be turned to loaves.

The role of religion is one that is complicated, but complicated in the same way that it’s complicated for anyone who is raised religiously. I feel grateful to the church for rhyme and meter and reverence and music and sound.

I’m not a religious person myself, but I think the presence of it in this book is actually more about the ways in which religion and poverty go hand in hand. We live in Christian country and many poor agricultural rural parts of this country are extremely religious.

In rurality, everything is amplified.

Violence in these rural plains settings — like the brutality and anguish of the murder of Brandon Teena [the young trans man who inspired the film Boys Don’t Cry] in Nebraska — affect us in a way that it wouldn’t have set against the skyscrapers in New York City. We assume there will be violence in a city. It’s not that we’re desensitized…but. We have a false sense of security.

I am trying to parallel this idea of faith and whatever God is…and say it’s more resonant and more omnipotent in rural places because of the amount of actual space that faith can take up. But also in the fact that rural places mean poverty and poverty comes with an assumed sense of devote-ness. The world isn’t giving you anything…so that must be the lord’s way.

I want to show how religion and poverty inform and touch upon one another in a way that is so starkly American.

This poem feels like a kind of forgiveness, which again, feels like a return to a kind of faith, to a kind of religiosity. This idea of people formally and publicly receiving forgiveness for their sins…

Excerpt from “Saguaros”

Blythe rises in welts.
It pinches California and my mother,
the menstruating horizon between the two….

For truth, I say I remember
this mother, the mother of my nights
bringing home a jackrabbit,
pulling a tooth trap from its pelage to slit
the pregnant belly, knowing
the body to be a stasis and the desert a hell,
and the knife the only bridge between the two.

This entire book takes place in the desert. If we’re talking about the ways that landscape can highlight emotion…the desert is a place where you live or die. You better be prepared to inhabit this entirely uninhabitable place for humans.

And that’s a helluva thing to be brought into. But I still feel at home in the desert.

The desert is really volatile. It can change temperatures radically in just a few hours. It can be completely clear and full of light…and then suddenly pouring. Nobody does thunderstorms like the desert.

When insects sing in the desert it takes up everything. Frogs and crickets and coyote in the desert — just the sheer volume of it. There is so much out there that is able to yell that you haven’t seen! It’s not insignificant that the relationship between the speaker and mother is all about survival.

The odds are against your survival.

This collection is chock full of menses and menstruation. Why/how does all this uteral lining play such a poignant role in this collection? How does it — besides literally — dovetail with motherhood? With your own potentiality as Mother?

Excerpt from “Etiquette”

My granddaddy is a man of God.
He drove a busted truck, the color
of menses, through Death Valley.

As for menstruation…I think that these are visceral things we’re talking about and they deserve something visceral. There is unrealized potential in periods.

My mother was bedridden the entire 9 months and gave birth alone. It’s incredible to me. She wasn’t with my stepdad and my family didn’t even know that she was pregnant. She was very estranged from my maternal family. They were very WASPy and didn’t talk about things and I have the feeling that my mother was someone who DID talk about things…

Men. Holy moly. WHAT DO WE SAY ABOUT THE MEN IN OUR LIFE DEAR JULY. But this poem felt tender to me. It also felt like a kind of forgiveness in the way he was willing to try and make Blythe, California beautiful when you both knew full well it was a lie…

Excerpt from ‘Wake’

The Colorado River is getting big
in the britches, stepping on Blythe
like that. All wild goose and border.
Some country, hey kiddo?
The lie uplifts us. Our cotton
hasn’t been watered all year, and our towns
are blossoms of mosquitos.

I like American literature a good deal because of its spareness. The things we can say about it and the country in the voice of the public…the poems come out kind of plain, but that feels intuitive.

You are driving along…then suddenly the water is up to your door handle. You can’t do anything else. You just wait. You go to this place that is exceptionally dry — in front and behind, you think you see water. A flash flood waiting to wash you out.

We were trying so hard not to talk about it. About her.

So many of these poems tackle poverty and the potent (non)presence of food. I loved this powerful and tangled conflation of momentarily communing with God, accepting one’s fate while also ascending/transcending your being somehow…

Excerpt from “Cootie Catcher”

We ate the carp, carp is poor
folks’ food. We take communion
regularly. This is no different.

Riddle me this world. If God is the main farmer here…and he’s heading up agricultural production, which in turn is the machine that creates food…I guess then we turn that food back into his body and we eat it? But in this idea that the meek/poor inherit the earth…we end up eating ourselves.

My uncle was found dead where we went fishing. I became obsessed with this idea of something that seems harmless, but isn’t. We ate fish from those canals all the time…there is a cyclical nature of depending on God for food. Which may or not may come, but when it does we turn it into communion….

Memory, memory, memory. How deceptive, how haunting, how lovely and terrible it is to hold all of these stories behind our eyelids…

I often look at young beautiful photographs of my parents, and think, why why why couldn’t I have known you then? Look! You’re joyous. You’re light, buoyant — you are yet to be what I know you will become. The photographs just about break my fucking heart.

How much did you talk to family, look at photographs, revisit your old haunts to be haunted in writing this book….?

Excerpt from “Meditation on a Lost Photo Booth Picture”

…Though I am not there, I feel the center/ of there, of theirs. As if they knew,
preemptively, that they would not be able/ to see me in this unfamiliar place, at the desk of
my life,/ and thought to take this picture so that they, too, might participate. I know this/ is
self-indulgent. I know this is arrogant. I know/ these are stories I tell myself as I fall asleep,
fearing death or impermanence./…

In 2012 I gained access to this storage unit that had all of my mom’s belongings in it…when she died in 1999, my grieving stepdad just put all her things in there and locked it up.

I went out there during Thanksgiving 2012 and went through all these belongings and it was a profound experience of agony for me. Having lost her at such a young age there were so many ways in which I didn’t feel like I knew her. And in this way, I got to know — acutely — everything I had lost in losing her. It was devastating, but also an amazing gift. I had baby pictures. My mother was also a writer — she wrote me letters. And photos. And these things of her — I didn’t get too much but what I did get are my most prized possessions.

I had complex PTSD from childhood trauma…this book was written with the research of memory and experience. People in my family don’t know what happened — she was so estranged at the time.

I was looking at a photo when I wrote that poem.

Even though these poems are based in autobiography, they are actually about things much larger than me. My hope is that people who have been othered or don’t have class privilege or find a lot of solace in poetry or songs or hymns…people who have experienced trauma or not…that wide gamut of people will find themselves reflected in the work.

Ultimately it’s a book about triumph. It’s not a book about grief. It’s about the ways in which people triumph in the the things they are asked to do. By God. Or by society. In thinking about it, this isn’t so much my memoir or my story but one way of thinking about these very complex identity questions in relation to the impoverished American landscape.

What’s next on your radar…what are you keen to write or do next?

A book of micro essays, something similar to Ann Carson’s Short Talks.
I think people poo-poo prose poems…not out-loud, but…

Why is that you think?

I think because there’s this erroneous idea that it doesn’t make use of the one thing that poetry has uniquely going for it — i.e. white space. Efficiency. If you’re talking about prose poetry, how are you delineating — literally — between prose and poetry. The answer is, you don’t have to.

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.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

“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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]]> https://theestablishment.co/for-many-freelance-writers-food-stamps-are-the-only-way-to-get-by-a34542bf58e8/ Wed, 29 Nov 2017 23:05:06 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2869 Read more]]>

In the current media climate, writers often must rely on government assistance.

Wikimedia Commons

Erica Langston went on food stamps after finishing a yearlong teaching fellowship in spring 2014. Twenty hours a week working at a ranch — and 15 hours writing — couldn’t pay the bills for the full-time grad student. Langston, a freelance journalist who was previously a fellow at Audubon and Mother Jones, says she couldn’t have focused on writing without government assistance.

“That upsets a lot of people,” she tells me. “The ability for me to step back and say, ‘I’m going to focus on writing. I’m going to continue to pursue writing.’ I don’t know that I would have been able to do that without food stamps.”

Until fall 2015, Langston was among the handful of freelance writers across the country relying on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). While statistics on writers specifically are hard to find, an estimated 12% of freelancers in the Freelancers Union, a national labor organization, used public assistance in 2010. Langston, meanwhile, estimates that a quarter of writers in her circle have used or applied for SNAP.

And these numbers don’t even fully reveal the extent of the situation. Some freelancers are eligible for food stamps, but don’t use the benefits. Others are just a few steps away from qualifying.

The need for public assistance reveals how society fails to value professional writers and their economic struggles. As outlets ask freelancers to write for cheap or free and struggle to pay them on time, some are forced to turn to SNAP to get by.

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

Many factors fuel freelancers’ financial burden. The internet offers a glut of writing gigs but a dearth of good pay. Reporting on fields like human rights remains underfunded. Income is inconsistent. The “golden age for freelancing” in the 1990s has faded.

Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich saw her rates at one major publication drop by a third between 2004 and 2009. To boot, some outlets spend little on writers relative to their profits. According to Scott Carney, author of the Quick and Dirty Guide to Freelance Writing, the lucrative media conglomerate Condé Nast spends just .6% of its revenue on writers.

The fault lies with readers, too, who have come to expect access to news sites sans paywalls, essentially demanding that writers perform free labor for their enjoyment and edification.

Under such conditions, it’s little wonder that — according to a 2016 Contently survey — 35% of full-time freelancers make less than $20,000 a year.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

And it’s not just that wages are low; at the same time, living costs are increasing rapidly. According to a recent report, more than 21 million Americans, a record number, spent a staggering third or more of their income on rent in 2014.

To take but one example of how these forces manifest for freelance journalists, Ryan McCready estimated on Venngage that a writer making $0.25 a word would have to write 13,340 words in a month — about the length of Macbeth — to live in Portland.

Troublingly, this paradigm in turn keeps marginalized people from being able to become freelance writers in the first place. Langston sees being able to live paycheck to paycheck and pursue her passion of writing as a privilege; she has a graduate degree and a partner to fall back on during tough months. Not everyone enjoys such luxuries.

As outlets ask freelancers to write for cheap or free and struggle to pay them on time, some are forced to turn to SNAP to get by.

In a cruel bit of irony, even stories about poverty are often written by the financially privileged—it turns out those in poverty are too poor to write about being poor. This not only pushes out perspectives that may have not been considered, it can drive away readers who assume the news is elitist.

In an article for the Guardian, Ehrenrich wrote:

“In the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a number of people who are at least as qualified writers as I am, especially when it comes to the subject of poverty, but who’ve been held back by their own poverty . . .

There are many thousands of . . . gifted journalists who want to address serious social issues but cannot afford to do so in a media environment that thrives by refusing to pay, or anywhere near adequately pay, its ‘content providers.’”

Veteran journalist Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, who worked as a parking lot attendant before reviewing books for the Washington Post for a decade, has seen firsthand how publishing shuts its doors on the under-privileged. He goes to writers’ conferences, he says, where he’s asked where he got his master’s degree; he has just a high school diploma. Magazine editors ask him to put $3,000 or $4,000 in reporting expenses on his credit card, so they can reimburse him — but he doesn’t have a credit card. Recently, a colleague asked him to Skype; he couldn’t drop $200 to fix his broken computer, so he asked her if they could talk on the phone instead. She almost seemed insulted, he notes. “And ironically, that person wanted to do a story about poverty.”

Another downside to low-paid freelance writing is that many are pushed away from crucial reporting because they can’t financially justify the work.

Veteran investigative journalist Christopher D. Cook says he started mixing contract writing with editing and teaching to get by. This diverse income keeps him off the food stamps he once relied upon — but it also means he’s unable to do as much investigative work as he once did.

“That’s a terrible position for society to be in, where it’s not economically feasible to have investigative reporting,” says Cook. “It’s central to our society and our democracy to have people be able to survive as journalists.”

When Predators Exploit Freelance Writers

It looks like this issue will only become more dire in the coming years; as experts expect half of the U.S. workforce to freelance in some capacity by 2020, the Trump budget plans to cut SNAP by $190 billion over the next decade.

So what can be done to support writers and their work?

Carney thinks that freelancers could do more to advocate for themselves, to negotiate a fair, well-paying contract once their story’s accepted. After going without health insurance for a decade, and at times having $12 in his bank account, he says valuing his own work helped him reach middle class.

“The world isn’t essentially fair. You get more if you fight for more,” he says. “If freelancers are willing to sell themselves for pennies on the dollar, then magazines are happy to take advantage of that.”

I’m Too Busy Being Poor To Be Creative

But of course, real progress can’t happen without changes to the system itself. Some suggest safety nets like guaranteed health-care coverage, a universal pension, and more grants for struggling freelancers. Currently, PEN America is among the few groups that offer emergency funding to writers.

Others say freelancers should unionize, or online outlets should experiment more with new revenue streams to have money to pay their writers more.

Workers’ rights attorney Paula Brantner adds that freelancers should be able to file wage claims, like employees. They should have a remedy beyond suing in small claims court if they aren’t paid for the work they do.

And Wellington thinks the government should offer everyone who makes, say, $25,000 or less annually a food allowance.

At the same time, we need to talk more candidly about the financial realities of freelance writing, and work toward the crucial de-stigmatization of poverty.

We need to talk more candidly about the financial realities of freelance writing.

For freelancers like Erica Langston, food stamps aren’t part of a lifetime of poverty, and due to lingering societal stigmas, it can be tempting to try to create distance from the chronically impoverished. This reveals a deep-seated classism that holds both the publishing industry and society back.

In 2015, Langston tried to use her electronic benefit transfer card at the grocery store, but the company had just changed the system, and the clerk had to put it in manually.

“I felt so uncomfortable in that moment. I was holding up the line. I handed over my food stamp card. I don’t know if anyone noticed. I don’t know if anyone gave a shit. But I had this internalized feeling that I was being judged because of that. And I even felt guilty because I wanted to explain in that moment, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. This is just temporary . . . ’

The fact that I would feel the need to explain that says a lot about the system in general. I mean, it’s temporary for me, but it’s not temporary for some people, right?”

Langston is one of many freelance writers who remain a step away from struggling to put dinner on the table. Others already can’t feed themselves. As the gig economy rises and government assistance wanes, will companies find a way to meet independent contractors’ basic needs?

And more importantly, what will happen to media if they don’t?

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/writer-of-the-week-dakota-kim-54b045cb9a59/ Mon, 27 Nov 2017 23:46:06 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2875 Read more]]>

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.