Lidia Yuknavitch recently interviewed Chiasmus authors Maya Sonenberg and Kat Meads about the current state of women’s fiction in the United States. Sonenberg is author of Voices From the Blue Hotel and teaches fiction writing and women’s literature at the University of Washington, where she also directs their distinguished creative writing program. Meads is author of The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan Benedict Roberts Duncan and a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient.
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: both of your books deviate from the mainstream currents of women’s fiction in this country–differently, but potently. why? meaning: why did you decide that the forms and motions of mainstream fiction in america, particularly the stuff written by women, didn’t quite accommodate what you needed/wanted to ennunciate?
MAYA SONENBERG: I think my work deviates from both the mainstream and post-modern currents of fiction in this country, and that would be fiction written by both women and men. As a young writer, I was completely committed to fiction that was highly experimental and (I thought) unemotional. I raged against what I saw as the same old domestic story being written over and over again. At some point, I allowed myself to admit I felt bored and disengaged when I read much highly experimental work. I had no desire to return to the lie of traditional “realistic” fiction, but I realized I did want to engage my readers on many levels at once—intellectual, emotional, political, metafictional, societal—and most importantly to move beyond being merely clever. I’ve been figuring out how to accomplish this ever since.
KAT MEADS: I wanted Kitty Duncan to play around with the idea that the imagined is more real than the real. And I also wanted to play off of conventional biographical and autobiographical structures. She was born here, she grew up there, she did this, she did that and here it is: the sum of a life, wrapped up nice and tidy. Except of course life isn’t tidy, and fiction doesn’t have to be. Mo, the narrator of the novel, alerts you going in that she’s making stuff up. But will the reader be drawn into her version of events, regardless? There’s also an index, a kind of narrative in and of itself. So lots of twists and curves and doublings. Not very mainstream-y, any of it.
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: do you feel good, bad, or ugly about the state of women’s fiction in our country just now? my personal answer would take many turns, take many pages, and double back on itself…
MAYA SONENBERG: I feel both dismayed and joyful about the state of women’s fiction in our country—two quite opposite feelings and most certainly not anything in between. When I allow myself to care about the state of most commercial publishing, I feel quite dismayed, not really by the domestic dramas big houses publish by women because, of course, many of these are fine and some even wonderful, but more by the fact that this is what women are still “supposed” to write—write anything metafictional or emotionally dark and you’re sunk. On the other hand, I also feel joyful, even proud, of much fiction written by women in this country. I see a growing band of women writers who really do bridge that divide between the intellectual/experimental and emotional realms. When I read Carole Maso, Kate Braverman, Joanna Scott, Maureen Howard, or Kathryn Davis, and a slew of others, I think there’s great hope for writing.
KAT MEADS: Whew. Big question. As did many women writers, I cut my teeth on Stein, Barnes, Bowles, Woolf. So those writers, you might say, formed my expectations. I later fixated on Jean Rhys and Shirley Jackson. Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. Lois Gould and Laura Riding. Beryl Bainbridge and Emma Tennant. I’m a diehard Nancy Lemann fan. I think Noy Holland is doing very interesting work. And Kate Bernheimer. What usually gets labeled “subversive” or, God help us all, “difficult” is more and more the province of the independents—maybe a good thing. I think there are a fairly healthy number of women doing what I’d call language experiments in prose just now. For my part, I’d like to read more experiments in structure.
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: do you feel at all squeezed by the box-o-man-fiction paraded around in this country…do you feel like you have to keep some lifeline to it? do you feel you have utterly untethered yourself from it?
MAYA SONENBERG: If by “box-o-man fiction” you mean the perpetuation of the ideas that violence is “important,” that only “big” books are important, and that only men can write “big” books, then, yes, I feel squeezed. I felt particularly squeezed when the NY Times Book Review came out in May 2006 with its cover article “What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years.” (Hell, probably most writers in the US felt the same way—men and women.) While Toni Morrison’s Beloved topped the list, it was only one of two books by women and only one of two by writers of color in the final 22. Out of the 124 judges, only 36 were women. There were books on that list I’ve loved, but the incredibly limited outcome (6 books by Philip Roth, 3 by Don Delillo, 2 by Cormac McCarthy) only reinforced my feeling that any such “best of” list does a disservice to the vitality and variety of fiction being written in the US.
KAT MEADS: Unless you’re living on another planet without Internet access, I’m not sure how you can be totally unaware of the market definition of contemporary fiction. And if you are aware of it, you are affected by it in one way or another. But I think the point you made, Lidia, a couple of years ago on an AWP panel, speaks directly to this question: you find your tribe. And once you find your tribe, those in it are the ones you look to for inspiration, criticism, challenge and all that fine stuff. But you do need to find your tribe—not always a quick or easy process.
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: both of your books take “voice” on as a site of politics (in my opinion). reviewers are often stumped by this, particularly when it comes from women writers. what have you to say about voice in your fiction?
MAYA SONENBERG: While stories in my book take on politics in a variety of ways (issues of masculinity and femininity in stories like “Wanting What We Don’t Want” or “Memento Mori”; identity politics in “Throwing Voices”; or Supreme Court nominations in “Baby 1995″), I didn’t start out thinking about “voice” as a site of politics. Rather, I wanted to pursue this area of technique I didn’t understand. For a long time, I’d rebelled against the idea that the first person point of view was automatically more “intimate” than the limited third person. Since I’d dismissed this notion, I wanted to figure out exactly what first person POV was good for. For me, it turned out that first person voices were a good way to express raw emotion—or the opposite of that: suppression of emotion—and to create character through voice. In other words, diction and syntax themselves create character. Since one of the other aims for Voices… was to explore deep emotion, this turned out to be a pretty good fit. Only while writing “Throwing Voices” did I realize the political implications of this pairing, and I do mean political in a broad sense here. Writing in a real first person voice other than one’s own necessitates great expenditures of empathy and understanding, something the literal politicians in our country could certainly benefit from doing more often. This is one of the reasons I remain drawn to fiction even in the midst of the ongoing hoopla of memoir. It may, ultimately, be impossible to understand what it’s like to be someone else, but it remains worth trying, and fiction gives us, as readers and writers both, the opportunity to make the attempt.
KAT MEADS: I find it extremely weird when readers and/or reviewers report “liking” or “disliking” the voice of a novel. Voice is just another one of fiction’s tools. Part of the overall design. Serving the whole. Conveying a novel’s themes. Getting across the author’s larger purpose. Voice has a fictional job to do. Is it doing it successfully, yea or nay? That’s how it should be judged.
Although Kitty Duncan is the heroine/anti-heroine of Kitty Duncan, we hear about her via Mo, so Mo’s is the voice to believe or disbelieve, the voice shaping (and filtering and censoring) the tale. At the time of the story’s telling, Mo is no longer the naïve, obedient girl she once was. The scales have dropped from her eyes, so to speak. She’s much more aware of her limited options, as a woman, of her era, in the South. Of every woman’s limited options, including Kitty’s. So there’s disillusionment but there’s also knowledge. Does knowledge entirely divorced from disillusionment exist? I’d argue no.
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: how important/unimportant is it for women to publish with independent presses?
MAYA SONENBERG: Very—and even more important for women (and men) to go out of their ways to READ fiction published by independent presses. For those of us who teach, it’s particularly important to widen our students’ horizons so that they don’t think they all need to write like Philip Roth in order to be published or read.
KAT MEADS: It’s been my experience that the independents are much more willing to let a book be what it is. They don’t try to happy it up or dumb it down or insist characters “redeem” themselves or refashion the whole manuscript to fit some known and comfortable/comforting niche. They give literary fiction its due. They respect an author’s intent. Terrifically important, all of that. Lidia saw right away that Kitty Duncan was, at its core, a dialogue between two women: one timid, one semi-brave. Lenin’s mother-in-law is the main character of the novel I’m working on now. Lenin? He’s of secondary—if not tertiary—interest. If I were to take such a novel to something other than an independent, odds are I’d be asked to concentrate a bit more on Vladimir. But the story I want to tell focuses on Krupskaya’s mother, Krupskaya herself, Inessa Armand, Alexandra Kollantai and Fannie Kaplan, the zealot who put three bullets in Lenin. The rebel femmes.
