Recently, Claire Vaye Watkins visited the University of Idaho campus as the first author of the Distinguished Visiting Writers series hosted by the UI English Department.
Watkins is the recipient of the Guggenheim Award, a faculty member at the University of Michigan and the author of the short story collection, “Battleborn” and novel “Gold Fame Citrus.”
Although “Battleborn” is one of her most critically acclaimed works, the author admitted it’s a collection that she didn’t write for herself.
In a lecture, originally given at the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop, turned personal essay titled, “On Pandering: How to Write Like a Man,” Watkins expressed her short story collection was driven by her need to prove herself to her male writing professors — “I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So natural, then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment.”
Watkins said she felt the need to prove herself through writing what the literary world expects more from men than women, “Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental.”
Her admission is powerful on two distinct levels: the first is in identifying misogyny within creative writing circles in particular. The second is that writers can be, and are, influenced to produce writing that isn’t created intrinsically, but rather, to please another or to prove a point. These two levels can be, but aren’t always, related. It’s important to recognize both nonetheless.
Identifying that sexism exists within the world of literature isn’t to say that any male who ever puts a pen to paper and calls himself a writer is inherently sexist.
My time as a creative writing major at UI provides evidence contrary to the idea. I’ve had a number of male professors and peers in both literature and writing courses who I never felt perpetuated the culture of male superiority that can be found in literary circles. This isn’t accusing all men, or even one man. Identifying misogyny within the field of creative writing is calling out an overarching culture that’s been cultivated by decades of the predominant voices in literature being that of heterosexual white males.
Today, there are a number of critically acclaimed female authors, Watkins among them, who are thought of as successful because they can “write like men,” because their prose is honest or straightforward or gritty. Misogyny within the world of literature is thinking that when women write successfully from a male’s perspective or write dark or write gritty, they’re writing like a man, but when men produce a work that’s sentimental, tender or nostalgic, they’re also writing like a man.
It’s a cycle — the works of women are compared to a standard set by men because male authors dominated the field for so long. As creative writing students emerging into this environment, we can work to change this culture. We can take steps to stand strong in how we write and for whom we write. I can say, “I’m a sentimental writer whose a sucker for romance and that has nothing to do with my anatomical composition or sexual identity.”
Writers will always face pressures when producing a work, but it’s important to remember that not all critics can be pleased and that at the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves: Why are these stories important? Who are we telling them for?
In the essay, Watkins said she didn’t want to deny readers of their personal responses to “Battleborn,” that it was OK if people connected with the pieces, that there was nothing wrong with women enjoying her work, it was just that “Battleborn” wasn’t composed of the stories she wanted to tell or written for the people she wanted to write. “I’m not trying to talk anyone out of their readerly response, only to confess to what went on in my mind when I made the book, to assemble an honest inventory of people I have not been writing toward (though I thought I was): women, young women, people of color, the rural poor, the American West, my dead mother.”
Young writers shouldn’t be driven by the need to prove one’s self to others. Rather, they should be driven by a need to tell a particular story and to tell it with purpose, to write for whom they please and to share an experience with the world in a way that’s unique to who they are as a human.
Corrin Bond
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