Emma Donoghue’s latest novel Room tells the story of Jack and his Ma who live in a locked room that measures 11 foot by 11. As Jack reaches his fifth birthday, he begins to ask questions concerning their surroundings, provoking his mother to reveal to him that there is a world outside of their room.

Q: The story of Room is told from five year old Jack’s perspective. What was the inspiration for adopting a child’s voice and how did your approach compare to writing from an adult perspective?

A: I would never have tackled such a story except from the novel perspective of the child: a five-year-old’s vision seemed to me to offer possibilities for making this a really interesting story. It was really no harder than using an adult narrator, because every individual voice needs to be crafted, and every narrator has their limitations; it’s always a matter of trying to suggest more than the narrator understands.

Q: I read elsewhere in an interview with you that the story of Room came to you quite quickly. Is this always the case when it comes to your writing?

A: Sadly, no: although I often get an initial idea fast, it usually takes a lot of chewing over before I find the right shape or angle for a novel. Room was unlike any of my other works in that it really dropped into my lap and I knew at once that this was a story people would care about.

Q: Your writing has contributed to many different mediums of expression, such as novels, short stories, plays for stage, radio and screen. Do you find any of these disciplines you have turned your hand to more pleasurable, or more fascinating than the others?

A: Well, they all have their satisfactions, some (I’m thinking of literary history) quieter than others. The most exuberant times I’ve had have been with a theatre company in rehearsal, but overall fiction is my favourite, perhaps it’s because it’s the one in which I get to control everything!

Q: How does the practice, sources for inspiration and the creative process of writing novels, such as Room, compare to that of writing literary history, such as Inseparable?

A: The research for works such as Inseparable is tiring but demands less of me personally; the novels are faster but I have to put more of myself into them, they’re more of an emotional marathon. When I write fact-based historical fiction I get to wear the two hats of researcher and novelist in turn, which is great fun.

Q: The premise of Room, a mother and son locked away from the outside world, sounds disturbing and eerie on paper, yet the innocence of Jack, and the love between him and his mother suggests otherwise. What inspired you to use this notion of extreme isolation and take it down such a tender path and revelatory path?

A: The initial trigger was reading a few headlines about Felix Fritzl, who was five when he encountered the outside world for the first time. But I knew that what I wanted to write was a purely fictional story so I stepped well away from the Fritzl and other cases and came up with my own scenario which in many ways (e.g. the presence of natural light) is much less horrifying than the real ones. My aim was to simplify and ameliorate a kidnapping scenario so that the emphasis would be on the issue of freedom versus safety: the question of whether Ma can possibly give Jack what he needs for a happy childhood.

- Laura Cude

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Working as a columnist and reporter since the 1970s, Rheta Grimsley Johnson has witnessed the reshaping of the newspaper industry. From issues of nepotism, the inclusion of women in the newsroom, to the ultimate dwindling of print journalism in the face of new media giants, Johnson covers many sides of the newsprint in her most recent memoir, Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: a memoir (New South Books, 2010). And, in spite of the new virtual media, she remains loyal to the tangible—to the ink on her fingers created by print journalism.

“I’m finished with memoirs,” Johnson says, while laughing. Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming is an unlikely title for a journalist who lives in the self-titled Fishtrap Hollow, but Johnson isn’t interested in presenting you with a glossy magazine image of Barbie and her world of Dream Houses. Johnson has a soft voice but is straightforward, like her writing style. She gazes into your eyes, a direct look.

As she writes in her memoir, “We weren’t ever going to dress, look, or live like Barbie. Our Dream House would come with utility bills…. Ken might take the Dream Car and run off with Midge…. A Country Picnic always had rain and ants. An Enchanted Evening could end in an unwanted pregnancy. (…) There should be a Barbie outfit for that. Disenchanted Evening.”

Given her tongue-in-cheek style, Johnson’s next revelation about promoting her memoir is surprising. Johnson says, “This has all been bizarre… surreal. Women have shown up to readings and signings dressed as Barbie. They’ve obviously not read the book. They think it’s about Barbie dolls. I don’t know what’s going on,” she says bewildered. She goes on to say that she’ll write about it later, and I suspect that she isn’t quite finished with writing memoirs.

Johnson and I have met in a hotel restaurant and are seated at a small round table. She is a guest speaker at the Clarksville Writer’s Conference in Tennessee. I place a small mp3 player in the center of the table and Johnson gives it a sideways stare. I press record, explaining that I’m uncertain of how this one works—it’s new, another type of technology. For back-up, I have a notebook and pen that I also place on the table and we begin discussing what it has been like for Johnson to watch the newspaper industry change rapidly over the course of three decades. She started her writing career on a manual typewriter and says that she was “damn proud” of being labeled a feminist, first while writing for her college newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman, and later as a columnist. To be a liberal feminist in the South could be a case of double profanity, depending on the town. Johnson is also a humorist, a third obstacle, and one that she slightly altered and even delineated from. She admits that the rural South was behind the progressive cities and towns of the US, and that’s why her work as a journalist, for many newspapers throughout the South but especially for Memphis’ The Commercial Appeal and Atlanta’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution two of the South’s oldest daily newspapers, is even more intriguing.

In the memoir, she is at once proud of the feminist label and questioning of it, and that duality shows her remarkable honesty. At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Johnson took over a famous column written by Lewis Grizzard, who died in 1994. He was a beloved humorist in Georgia, and Johnson received “hate mail” for her liberal slant. Of course, she toned herself down considerably and was eventually restricted to only news within Georgia.

So, she reached out to Americans living below the poverty line, dusted off their “whatnot” shelves, and became a voice for people who wouldn’t have otherwise told their stories. She’s known for her objectivity and compassion, and was one of three finalists for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in commentary. Her curiosity embodies not only the momentum of chasing previously unheard stories, but also the challenge of working hard for ideals that often fail to live up to our expectations.

Johnson searched for journalistic gems before she had even finished college at Auburn. Rheta and her first husband Jimmy Johnson pursued the idyllic dream of starting a weekly newspaper on St. Simons Island. There, she used “antique type-setting equipment, cantankerous machines called Justowriters.” After their relentless pursuit of journalistic ownership fell flat, Rheta and Jimmy settled into full time jobs at The Monroe Journal in Monroeville, AL, where they overlooked the nepotism policy at the time—that spouses could not work together, and often the woman in the pair was asked to resign. Eventually, the couple did face the problem at another newspaper; fortunately, Jimmy created the cartoon strip Arlo and Janis, while Rheta traveled as a reporter and columnist throughout the South and often abroad.

Aside from her journalism career, Rheta’s story has many unexpected turns for the reader—a bewildering divorce, the unexpected tragedy of her friend and lover Barry’s suicide in her driveway, and finally discovering love and companionship with her second husband Don Grierson, a retired journalism professor. She had intended to write a funny book, one that chronicled her Christmas celebrations. However, she had only written three chapters when Grierson died, and the book changed. It continues to carry the initial humor, but took on an unexpectedly serious tone. Finishing the memoir helped Johnson to process some of her grief.

“I was in some kind of zone, I’ll tell you,” she says about writing the memoir. “I was grieving, and it is honest. I had done thirty years of columns and always held back a little, and all of a sudden it seemed like it didn’t matter about being diplomatic or pretending to be something that I wasn’t.”

She is disappointed to see the dwindling of print journalism and calls herself, “an old newspaper hack” and says, “That’s okay. I’ve had a nice run. I’m just not interested in recreating myself for the new media. I know it’s legit. I know it could be done…. I’ll write for newspapers as long as they exist, and then I won’t write.”

“Everyone has to find their place, what they’re good at whether that’s longer novels or short stories,” Johnson says. “I’ve been at it long enough that I know my niche and do it well, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Indeed, not only has the medium of journalism shifted into the virtual realm, but in the memoir, Johnson also reminds us that the subject matter of “news” has altered into an obsession with celebrity culture, in print media as well. She tells a story of having lunch with several new reporters in Atlanta, fresh on the presses graduates, who are discussing celebrities that they’re covering and one particular celebrity becomes the focus of the conversation. At some point during the lunch, Johnson realizes that she’s the only reporter who doesn’t personally know the celebrity.

“On anything that’s been written about me, the bottom line is that I am a newspaper person,” Johnson says. “That’s what I’ve done everyday of my life for 35-years. These books have gotten a lot of attention, but I guess they’re not as defining to me as what I’ve done. Anna Quindlen had that great title, Thinking Out Loud, and that’s important to me. And, people discount that. They think if something’s not between hard covers, then it’s not writing. Well, I beg to differ. If you give it your all and roll out of bed everyday to write… that’s been my life’s work. I enjoy being able to be more expansive, but the 750-word essays that I would do four times a week in Memphis and later in Atlanta, that has defined me and kept me going. It’s still what I do, not four times a week anymore,” she laughs. Before we leave the restaurant, Johnson reminds me to press stop on the mp3 recording of our interview and to save it. I suspect that she’s more technologically curious and adept than she desires.

Johnson has won numerous awards in journalism, from the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award in human interest reporting to an induction into the Scripps Howard Newspapers Editorial Hall of Fame. Johnson has written three other nonfiction books. Her first memoir is Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana (New South Books, 2008). America’s Faces (St. Luke’s Press, 1987) contains a collection of human-interest stories and articles. Johnson also wrote the authorized biography of Charles Schulz, Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz (Pharos Books, 1989).

Currently, Johnson is a syndicated columnist for King Features of New York and her columns appear in newspapers across the US.

Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: a memoir, published by New South Books, is available now.

Buy the book Amazon

Shana Thornton-Morris serves as Managing Editor for Her Circle Ezine’s Books and Literature section. In addition, she writes interviews, features and fiction. She also teaches composition and literature courses, chases her husband and daughter, and runs trails with her dog Mojo.

Harper Paperbacks, 2010

With gripping suspense and graphic honesty, Sofi Oksanen breathes life into “a world of brittle paper [and] moldy old albums emptied of pictures,” to create a tapestry where past meets present, and the shadow of war stands starkly against the prospect of peace. In her debut novel Purge, Oksanen explores various forms of loss—loss of innocence, of freedom, of national pride, and of love—in a manner that demonstrates the depth of human resilience.

Purge centers on the elderly Aliide Truu and her charge Zara, who turns up at Aliide’s unassuming home in Estonia, bloodied and desperately seeking refuge from her former life as a sex slave. Though their paths appear to intersect coincidentally, Oksanen slowly reveals the disturbing connection between the two women through a series of flashbacks.

The novel begins in the year 1992, when Aliide and Zara engage in their cryptic dialogue and the older woman struggles to open herself up to the younger. Oksanen then abruptly introduces the Estonia of the Soviet era, during which Aliide learns to live quietly and simply under the heavy hand of the government. The reader is also transported to Zara’s past. Succumbing to the allure of earning money in Western Europe, Zara leaves her home and lands in her captors’ snare.

The suffering that both women endure may cause readers to redefine, and certainly to broaden, their perception of rape—that is, what it means to be robbed of physical and psychological purity, and to be humiliated to the point where security can only be found in distrust. Oksanen’s vivid language exposes the atrocities committed under the USSR through the lens of a feminine world altogether intimate, nurturing and tragic.

At the same time, Purge is a story about storytelling; Oksanen’s choppy format creates apprehension in the reader, as it becomes increasingly clear that there is more to Aliide and Zara than they are willing to divulge initially. By deliberately holding back key pieces of information and moving the reader in and out of layers of time, Purge is truly an adventure in itself.

Ultimately, what Oksanen has achieved is a multilayered drama about the vitality of the Estonian spirit. Certain characters seem to personify disappointment in the Allied response to their plight; and yet, despite the imminence of physical and spiritual death in post-World War II Europe, such darkness is eclipsed by the magnificence of survival.

I’m beginning to think of that question as a luxury for either the unpublished writer who is still finding her way to her voice, or the superstar writer who can pretty much take charge of her own career and write whatever the heck she wants.

Let me backtrack a little: I can’t put the hard work, soul-searching and sheer hours into writing something that’s really not what I want to write. Every book I’ve written, whether it has ended up being published or not, has been something I’ve felt passionate about.

That said, as I am becoming more and more of a career writer (I quit my dreadful day job three months ago and haven’t looked back), the question of the market and how much a writer should consider it when planning projects, has become much more real to me.

I write historical fiction for adults and young adults. What’s more, at least to start with, my books were about musical subjects, because that’s my background. I spent a good chunk of my adult life in graduate school getting a PhD in Music History, and I discovered so many incredible stories, so much rich material, that if I mined it forever I would never exhaust it.

But it’s not a great time out there for mid-list writers like me. I made a career shift a few years ago when my agent suggested I write a young adult novel, since my adult novels tended to have heroines on the brink of adulthood going through something that gets them to the next stage of their lives. I thought about it, terrified at first that I wouldn’t be able to appeal to younger readers, and discovered something buried in me that reveled in reaching back to explore the emotions and thoughts of a teen. After the first YA novel, I was hooked.

I’d left the ending of that novel, The Musician’s Daughter, up in the air a bit to allow for a sequel, which I already had formed in my mind. I wrote it and submitted it to my publisher as the option book. To my complete astonishment, they didn’t buy it. They wanted another book from me, but weren’t sure about marketing a sequel.

I’m a pretty resilient person, and I soon thought of another subject that fascinated me, but it really took me away from music for the first time. Anastasia’s Secret was a rewarding exploration for me, and it opened me up to more possibilities. In the YA world, maybe I didn’t have to stick closely to music history, which was my “brand differentiator” in the adult world. Hmmmm.

I’m pleased with where my YA novels have taken me so far. The Musician’s Daughter has been nominated for several awards, something I never expected. But the huge success of writers like Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, or Shannon Hale is still only a pipe dream for me.

And that makes me think. Are readers simply not as interested in the things I want to write? I could no more write dystopian fantasy than fly to the moon. I admire those writers immensely, but I’ll never write the way they do. But I would be kidding myself if I claimed not to wish for more success, more readers, for my stories. I find myself reading other writers like an archeologist, digging into the prose to try to figure out what it is that has ignited so many imaginations, and wondering if I could do that with my own preferred subject matter.

I haven’t found the answer yet. But I’m up for just about any challenge. I like to think that each book I’ve written has helped me grow as a writer. And you know what? It’s actually kind of exhilarating to discover that my career as a novelist doesn’t have to be tied to my expertise in music history.

So I’ll end this blog post with a secret: In addition to the book I’m under contract to write for my wonderful publisher, Bloomsbury USA Children’s, I’m working on something pretty frighteningly different. I don’t know yet if it will work, or if it will ever be published, but just doing it has reminded me that the only restrictions on our creativity are the ones we put on it ourselves.

What do I want to write? I want to write something that will push me beyond the limits I thought I had into a new world, a new audience, and new insight about myself. That’s the real joy of writing: what it teaches you about your own capabilities. I feel like a marathon runner of words. An Olympic gymnast of plot. A major-league baseball player of character development.

I’m stoked.

Susanne Dunlap has published two adult historical novels, Emilie’s Voice and Liszt’s Kiss, and two young adult novels, The Musician’s Daughter and Anastasia’s Secret. Her next book, In the Shadow of the Lamp, will be published by Bloomsbury USA Children’s in April, 2011. Susanne lives in Brooklyn, is the proud mother of two adult daughters, a doting grandmother, practically lives for her dog Betty, and loves to ride her bicycle.

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Harper Paperbacks, 2010

A hotel is the perfect setting for Strauss’ characters; eight women passing through the lobby and rooms of an impressive and impersonal hotel. Like hotel rooms, bodies may come with standard fixtures, and one can never tell who is living inside. The characters in this book feel free in their own heads, as they do in their hotel rooms, to wallow in their neuroses, fetishes, and poisonous feelings just as long as the outside world doesn’t notice. A hotel room can always be wiped clean of a person’s presence, their mess; nobody cares about their pain.

Strauss’ doesn’t flinch at all when taking first one, then another woman under a magnifying glass. While I think it is brave to tackle such psyches head on, I quickly felt disinterested in her main character, Morgan, the hotel’s manager, who gets the first few chapters of the book. Morgan, bereft by her sister’s death nearly 25 years ago, is a dispirited, destructive person – monotonously so. She regularly enters occupied hotel rooms and tries on guests’ clothes, takes their beauty products and prescription medication. It’s not a simple case of sticky fingers. Rather, it seems she is trying to penetrate their privacy, getting to know them in the way she wishes somebody would do with her, force a connection with her, and bring her back to life.

The succeeding chapters each deal with one of the other seven women and we don’t get back to Morgan till the very end. Here, Strauss hits her stride. The other characters are just as richly developed, if not more so. They have more interesting quirks and stories. Anne, for example, a borderline (she confirmed online) obsessive-compulsive concierge, was both frightening and entertaining all at the same time. Not entertaining in her OCD ways, but entertaining in that she goes beyond the walls of the hotel: into the city, on a date arranged online. And Trish: The back of the book will tell you she is consumed with envy for her newly skinny, newly engaged best friend. But that hardly begins to describe the bundle of pain and aspiration this woman seems to be.

With a plot, this could have been a great novel. The elements are there: great characterization, crisp writing. But instead the book is really a collection of short stories that uses Morgan as a thread to function as a novel. Generally this works very well, though at times it feels forced. The strongest thread through these stories is really the uniformity in their voices. Though heard from different points of view, it’s the same voice whether it’s being told from the first person or a close third person. Even the unusual second person perspective is an ill-conceived notion in this case.

The other women are well-developed in varying degrees. Strauss is a skilled writer, that much is clear. She knows how to create a person on a page. If only she had given them room to breathe, perhaps asked Morgan to move over a little and make some room for the other lovely, lonely, damaged women.

Inanna Publications, 2009

Butterfly Tears is a collection of fifteen short stories which oscillate between China and North America. Through memories, dreams, dialogue and the sparing use of symbol, these short stories speak of the almost unendurable hardship suffered in the “Cultural Revolution” of Mao’s China as well as the shock and bewilderment experienced by Chinese immigrants in North America as they struggle to come to terms with the new world they have found themselves in and the loss of the old world they have left behind.

The stories are simply told and move effectively and seamlessly through time and place. Throughout the pieces, we are given sometimes glimpses and sometimes enduring images of a lost world, of a new world as seen through the immigrants’ eyes, and of the relationships caught between both worlds. It is intriguing to learn about the Cultural Revolution in China and to see how ruinous and stultifying those years were. At times it is almost hard to believe the extent to which individual freedoms were suppressed. In several stories, public denunciations occur. In “Ten Yuan”, for instance, a man is denounced for telling a joke, and in Twin Rivers, a woman denounces her own husband. The paralyzing fear of the regime is an ever-present undercurrent in these stories, and some scenes seem almost prototypical of Orwell’s 1984.

There is a distinct feminine and feminist perspective in the stories. Many of them deal with women who cast off traditional values – Confucian or Maoist – to begin a new life in North America where they must confront unexpected challenges and troubles in family relationships. In “Butterfly Tears”, for instance, childhood memories of a crazed old man abandoned by his wife, entwine with an old Chinese myth of thwarted love and with disturbing dreams to torment a woman who is about to separate from her husband.

While later stories deal with the conflicts and fortunes in the relationships of Chinese women who struggle to adapt to North American society, many of the early stories take place in Mao’s China. One of these, “Yearning”, is an effective and gripping tale of escape from Communist China, and in “Frog Fishing” a very realistic and sickening denunciation is portrayed. “Twin Rivers”, straddling both worlds, is an effective story of jealousy, revenge and shame, which echoes and reflects an earlier tragedy.

This collection offers the reader many captivating cameos of the Chinese/North American experience as seen through women’s eyes. The stories are believable and direct and do not fail to engage the reader with their weave of dream, memory and often surprising turns of fate. Especially intriguing are the stories and scenes set in Mao’s China, which give us a rare glimpse in to the dark and frightening world of the Cultural Revolution, the totalitarian nightmare which in some way or another haunts every one of these stories.

Zoe S. Roy was born in China and was an eyewitness to the Red Trror under Mao’s regime. Her short fiction has appeared in several Canadian magazines. She currently lives in Toronto where she works as an adult educator and writer.

Main Street Rag, 2007

We’re often trained to think of titles as the entryway to the poem; after all, it’s the first thing the eyes (are supposed to) land on when first encountering a poem. Some of us (renegades that we are) choose to save the poem for last or to meet it somewhere in the middle of our reading, a sly glance upwards that says “hmmmmm. . . now what is this poem doing?” Sometimes the title is a place-holder, sometime it’s a key to the workings of the poet’s mind. In Maureen Alsop’s debut book, Apparition Wren, the title of the collection works as the latter.

Alsop’s poems are wicked, irreverent, often tender with a sly edge; yes, sometimes they’re abundant in their play, and she goes after this decadent language with intense vigor. They very often perform as the title of the collection performs, as a little mystery with logic built in: what is an apparition wren? Is it similar to an apparition of wrens? Is it the apparition of a wren? Is it the voice of someone startled who accidentally left “of” out of the equation? Is it a child speaker? A dialect? I’m still not sure, but I certainly enjoy the topsy-turvy smashed up world the title (and the poems themselves) toss me into.

In “Autobiography of Fresh Oil” Alsop takes on the voice and attitude of oil that has seemingly lain itself on a road and is interrupted by a farmer, who drives his tractor over the oil. Of course, this angers the oil, after all, it’d lain itself out to be sunned!

Where the oiled road tapered into a bend
past shaded oak, I flat
lay myself on it. I burn
under the gravel sun. Until

a tractor come: he, farmer
of cornfield, say Fuck; yes (1-6)

The poem takes many a surreal turn and the voice of oil becomes muddled, less slick, abbreviated, and damaged: “I want/to enter him into me in repulsive way”, “But//blank my speak”, “A breeze//punish me”, “Later, I squeal//to the good doctor” (17-18, 21-22, 25-26, 31-32). Eventually, the oil “come[s] to know/nothing/of [it] self” (43-45). This is Alsop’s Apparition Wren at its core: ever-turning, ever-searching, ever-leaping.

In the oft-quoted poem “Daguerreotype Portrait of Woman and Bird” (itself a mine-field of style and tone, attitude and experiment (beginning with a six-line stanza on one page, moving to a 3-stanza 11-line poem on the next page, a 4-stanza 16-line poem on the next page, and followed by two pages of stanzas that alternate from solid structures to shifty foundations)), Alsop throws in 8 lines (3 stanzas) of backward slash marks to indicate “thinned ink” that had been “cramped” on paper:

// //////// //// //
//// // /// ////// /////

///////// /// //// / ///// ///// /////// ////////
//// /// //////// / /// ///// //////

/// /////////,
//////////////////////////
/////////////////////////
//////////////////////// (42-49).

I had the great pleasure of meeting Maureen Alsop recently. We took a walk together and laughed at the funny names of plants and agreed that poetry, often, is the intense desire to laugh with and play with language, to interrogate it, to twist it and sharpen our tongues on it. Apparition Wren, with its multiple voices, its attention to detail, and its hybridity of contemporary languages and archaic diction certainly masters the art of poetry that makes one want to work hard to get to the heart of every word.

When people ask about my occupation, my answer is usually a conversation stopper. They do not expect to hear that I research porn, and, after the inevitable jokes, most people are actually fascinated to hear what I have to say about the harms of porn. Of course, not everybody agrees with me, and what often follows is a spirited and lively conversation. It is amazing how many people have stories to tell. Some tend to reveal too much and then regret it. My former dentist, for example, told me about how he liked to spank his wife but then, at my next visit, terminated me as a patient because he said I had a “difficult mouth to work with”! I have had complete strangers write long letters to me about their masturbation history, and one even cc’d the president of my university.

Some of these letters are actually very moving, because they are from men who feel that their porn use is out of control and they don’t know how to stop. Others tell me how porn led to divorce or bankruptcy. And then there are the women who write to say that their partner’s use of porn is a form of betrayal. My suggestion to them to seek help feels inadequate in light of the desperation these people are feeling.

There are also those who enjoy throwing insults at me, but after twenty years I have grown used to this. I have been accused of being a man-hating feminist, a prude, anti-sex, and a book-burning zealot who wants to control how people have sex. What makes dealing with these insults difficult is that a good proportion of these critics have never read my work. Debate and disagreement are the lifeblood of scholarship, but how can I engage with someone who is basing his or her arguments not on my actual work, but on what they think anti-porn feminists have to say? And of course the most likely source of these stereotypes is the media.

The media often caricature us as angry feminists who think that every man who reads porn is going to turn into a rapist. No anti-porn feminist I know would ever make such a claim, because we believe that the effects of porn are often subtle, even barely detectable. But in order to make this case to the public, we need airtime—and for anti-porn feminists this is a rare commodity indeed. I was once a guest on a show on MSNBC that was self-described as an investigative account of the porn industry. For 50 minutes they offered up a glamorous version of the porn industry, but when they came to me in the last 10 minutes, I was swiftly dispatched because I said the show was an example of shoddy journalism.

All of these negative reactions, however, are far outweighed by positive ones. I get emails from people all over the world thanking me for taking on the porn industry and being willing to speak publicly about a topic that generates so much emotion. I am very grateful for these emails. But—to be honest, and knowing what I know about porn—I have no choice but to keep speaking out. Silence would mean capitulation, and as long as there is a porn industry, I will be an anti-porn feminist.

Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. She has been researching and speaking about the porn industry for over 20 years. For more information on her new book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, please visit her website at: http://www.gaildines.com/.

Create a piece (short story, poem, etc.) inspired by this excerpt from the poem Loba: Parts I-VIII by Diana DiPrima:

“like pearls
in the road
she
dances”

Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).

In February of this year, my first book, a collection of short stories titled Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums was published. The stories are all connected. The connectedness happened first by accident. And I thought I’d made an idiot mistake. Eventually things got better.

I wrote the bulk of the book in grad school and at the start of my MFA program. I thought that collections of short stories should be a medley, a book of examples of the many things the writer can do. Like an actor’s reel, but in words. I had amnesia about reading and loving Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and David Shickler’s Kissing in Manhattan, both collections of interconnected shorts. A handful of stories later, into what would become Drenched, I noticed that I kept writing about the same thing (love—finding, losing, longing for it, and the magic that occurs in the pursuit of it). I thought of Lorrie Moore’s short story “How To Become a Writer.” At a college cocktail party, the main character is asked what she writes about and her “roommate, who has consumed too much wine, too little cheese, and no crackers at all, blurts: ‘Oh, my god, she always writes about her dumb boyfriend.’” —a line I’ve always loved but then suddenly identified with in a caught and embarrassed way. I considered my stories and noticed that the narrator and main character in several of them (lazily? uninventively? persistently) felt like the same woman. I’d intended for her to be several characters, different in each story. For whatever beginner or scaredy-cat reason, I thought she couldn’t or shouldn’t be the same. That would prevent the collection from being varied. I panicked and my brain turned twelve and it said: never put too many songs by the same artist on a really good mix-tape. I felt like I was making the worst mix-tape. And what’s most horrifying about thinking I’m writing the wrong thing is the thought of having to dump everything and start over.

I eventually outgrew my panic. I reminded my brain it belonged to an adult and I told it to relax and to not confuse writing with mix-tapes. Then I experimented with this recurring lady narrator and imagined all the stories as parts of a whole—a single world where love and grief and water cause extraordinary things to happen. Like a discovery game, I found and developed the points where the stories could overlap or connect. This game stitched the stories together to give them what started to feel like a cohesive texture.

In the end, that character I was so worried about narrates three of the ten stories in Drenched, and makes a cameo in two others. All the stories are connected by character or event or place, and the second half of the book follows a genetic line through several generations. In the way that single short stories occupy a defined space and have a particularly satisfying heft and shape (like a bocce ball or a souvenir sack of ocean glass—this feeling of dense weight I can palm is something about short stories I love most), connecting all the stories seemed to do this to the collection as a whole. Made it feel solid and contained and like a point on a map I could find and visit. This felt really good.

Marissa Matarazzo is a fiction writer and author of the recently published Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums (Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her short stories have appeared online and in literary journals such as FiveChapters, The Nervous Breakdown, Faultline, and Hobart. She has won several writing prizes and earned her MFA from UC Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Thesis Fellowship.

www.marisamatarazzo.com

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