Welcome to So to Speak
So to Speak, founded in 1993 by an editorial collective of women MFA candidates at George Mason University, has served as a space for feminist writing and art for nearly twelve years. So to Speak publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art that lives up to a high standard of language, form, and meaning. We look for work that addresses issues of significance to women’s lives and movements for women’s equality and are especially interested in pieces that explore issues of race, class, and sexuality in relation to gender.
Poetry Contest Winner Anne Marie Rooney: On Reading Women Writers
For the past year I’ve been reading nothing but women writers. Well, almost nothing—a couple of weeks ago I found a book of Dennis Cooper essays at a small and wonderful bookstore across the street from Zabar’s, and those have been keeping me very happy. And I read a certain bibliophile’s-wet-dream-of-a-bestseller within days. But these digressions aside, it’s been women, and it’s been a world.
This is staunchly intentional. Call it a syllabus of my own devising. For I’ve realized that though I’ve been in school for most of my life, and a lover of books for just as long, all talk of literature and learning has, still, left me wanting for a viable example: how to live life as a writer? As a woman writer? As a feminist writer? As a queer writer? As Adrienne Rich reminds us, our lens, our qualifiers, our “address” in this world only get more particular from here. How to point home?
A teacher once told me to find my literary family. “Who are your kin?” she asked. Pause. I answered Mary Ruefle, who has long been one of my favorite poets. But even so, this quick name didn’t feel quite right. In the basement of the library, later, looking, I found a book: Angry Women. Clearly it was coming home with me. An interview in, I realized I had to own it. And how many paths it’s since set me on.
Lauren C. Ostberg, nonfiction contest winner, speaks about “On Hair”
I’ve wanted to write an essay called “On Hair” since 2006 or so. I researched it in a disorganized, fairly passive way for a few years — looked it up in the index of The Golden Bough, reread Samson and Delilah, pretended to be Rapunzel on a turret in Central Park, that kind of thing. When I sat down to actually write it, my list of possible topics was ludicrously broad — how, exactly, did Bluebeard relate to my split ends? Why did I find myself particularly susceptible to the charms of people complimenting my eyebrows?
So I moved onto more focused research that would pull me out of my own (consciously idiosyncratic) experience: facial hair. Casual interviews are particularly useful to me, partially because they get me out of my head, but also because they mask my social ineptitude. For about a year, I had three go-to questions about beards, and, coupled with my tape recorder and reporter’s notebook, that was sufficient license to strike up a conversation with anyone in my eyeline.
Anytime I’m writing (or even thinking) about physical appearance, I acknowledge that I’m really dealing with self-presentation, which, in turn, is tied up with gender and sexuality. My brand of feminism is not much more sophisticated than the “whack-a-mole” approach to discrimination that I mentioned in my essay. I serve the feminist cause by being a powerful, purposeful woman, not by trying to figure out my position in and relationship to a collective experience. I’m not one to talk theory, or really participate in broad-based activism, but I am prepared to attack any barriers, socially imposed or otherwise, that get in my way.
“On Hair” is mostly about me trying to get over the barrier of physicality, especially in the gaps where “intellectual appropriation,” my preferred strategy, won’t fill in the gaps. In a further grasp at intellectual appropriation, I guess, I’m writing letters about my experience as a nude model for a friend who, in exchange, is writing me letters about her webcam performances. We’re still working on the analysis and presentation-for-publication of these letters, but it’s been very illuminating to have another set of body-mind relationships to explore, not to mention different ideas about sex, power, and feminism.
My most enduring feminist influence is probably Eavan Boland, an Irish poet who made a project of reanimating the “heaving-bosomed faeries” and raped Queens of poetry written during the Celtic Revival. I wrote my senior thesis on a few of her poems that imbued these once-passive characters with agency; I was also really delighted by the way she slipped between the mythological past (women on the River Styx) and the domestic present (Dublin suburbs), because poems like “The Pomegranate” were visceral and accessible enough that I could share them, and the ideas contained in them, with my mother.
Though Boland’s project is explicitly a feminist revision, she, like me, seems less interested in collective, embodied experience, and more interested in intellectual exploration. The final stanza of “Anna Liffey” begins with the phrase “In the end/ it will not matter/ that I was born a woman” and ends with “in the end/ everything that burdened and distinguished me/ will be lost in this: I was a voice.”
I hope that I am, too. Thank you for reading.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Did you enjoy what you read? Share your thoughts with Lauren C. Ostberg by commenting on her post. To read her story visit our Subscribe page to request a copy of our newest issue! Look forward to poet, Anne Marie Rooney, post on Wednesday.
Guest post by undergraduate writer Paige Impink
Filed under: Lesson Plans, Post by: Alyse K, Starring Local Feminists, Uncategorized
Last semester, while teaching an undergraduate section of Introduction to Creative Writing at George Mason University, I had the pleasure of working with Paige Impink, a very talented young writer. Out of Paige’s many beautiful pieces, I found myself especially struck by the simultaneously humorous and biting feminist themes in this poem, “Digest Cosmopolitan,” which Paige collaged from a newspaper and from Cosmopolitan Magazine. It’s my honor to share the poem with you here. Read on after the poem to hear Paige’s reflections on her own writing, as well as the feminist readings and ideas that influenced her.
……………..-Alyse
“Digest Cosmopolitan,” by Paige Impink
to write about Africa
…………and the sizzling, sinful things they’re craving right now.
Don’t the critical conditions of democracy
…………look so sexy?
A term was invented for ‘powerless social groups’
…………that no man can resist, and
political attacks misread
…………the 10 things guys wish you knew.
Pragmatism may be a useful way of understanding
…………the colorful smoky eye made easy, but
nuclear power is not the answer for
…………why so many men are suckers for skanks while
a Palestinian peacemaker
…………has pecs of steel.
In any case, France has never undertaken
…………what a lipstick can’t.
Judge Joanne Omang speaks on Nonfiction Contest Winners
1st place—On Hair by Lauren C. Ostberg
This piece showcases an original idea and a droll exploration of a whimsical subject, all factors that make it fun to read. It has original phrasing and images that kept stopping me in admiration. The writer clearly luxuriates in puns and adroit comparisons in a highly personal way, although she keeps the reader guessing about just who this quirky person is and where the piece is headed. The citations of actual research and sociological theory about beards are an admirable surprise that give unexpected depth to the article, adding to the illusion that the writer is just wandering around the subject, poking into a book here and there, musing on her findings and relating them to her life. We’re just along for the ride. And a painless and comfortable ride it is, proving that any subject at all can be made entertaining, even absorbing, in the hands of a skilled and thoughtful wordsmith. I want more from this budding talent, and soon.
Honorable Mention —A Quarterlife of Love by Adriana Páramo
So if radioactive particles have an energy half-life, love is so energetic it has quarter-lives, right? The author describes in various ways the various males she loved, again in various ways, in the first quarter-century of her life, exploring love’s “colors, shapes and flavors.” Her pithy thumbnails bring each of them swiftly to the mind’s eye, with rue and acid and sweetness in appropriate doses. If she often conflates sex and love, who hasn’t? Images of wet and dry give every encounter a tactile reality, especially the drunken Jimmy she marries and leaves, and the one she shouldn’t have pushed away. Not quite every word counts here, just as some men count in her tally more than others. They grow more sophisticated as the author does and so do her critiques. Her evocation of Shiva’s consort Parvati hints that she’s alone now, bringing the story full circle. I’d like to see her bring her penetrating eye to a biography, a political issue, a subject in the larger world.
Honorable Mention—Economics of Love by Leslie Tucker
A sixty-ish woman reflects on her lifelong search for connection, finding with amazement that her dynamic second daughter doesn’t seem to need the same kind of tie. Who is that creature I spawned? The author describes her own rebellious youth with free-spirit images right out of Hair, and then the shift to the suburbs her parents clearly programmed her for, the predictable divorce, the lonely interim and the happy ending with the right guy at long last. It’s a three-hanky story just made for the silver screen, and daughter #1, all but born in a backpack, seems to have taken it to heart. But the restless mother dismisses her in half a sentence (“Lisa was married and living in Illinois,”) focusing on daughter #2, child of the suburbs, who now has other ideas. Pride in the daughter’s moxie wars with anxiety over her love life. I look forward to future pieces where the author gets a bit of distance and focuses her analytical talent on a subject beyond herself.
On Reading and Teaching “Gurlesque”
A simple scan down the table of contents of Gurlesque provides a snapshot of what the movement/aesthetic/poetics is all about. Some of the titles include:
Blowhole
dream life in a case of transvestism
First Date and Still Very, Very Lonely
This Is a Fucking Poem
Uh
Boobs Are Real
A Thousand Virgins Shout Fuck Off
Damsel In Undress
Porpo-Thang
Surly Piggies
A Window the Size of Granny’s Forehead
Sunday Morning Cunt Poem
Gurlesque (2010), edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, who coined the term at a 2002 talk at Small Press Traffic, features the work of 18 poets and eight visual artists–all producing extremely exciting, invigorating work.
As Glenum and Greenberg describe it, in introductions to the book as well as in Greenberg’s 2002 talk, the “Gurlesque” is an aesthetic theory exhibited in the work of several contemporary young women poets that blends a “postmodern” sense of humor, burlesque, camp, kitsch, and performance to comment on gender, sexuality, and the body in today’s society. Think third-wave feminism in glittery red combat boots. Greenberg writes that Gurlseque poems are:
“…tender and emotionally vulnerable but also tough, with a frank attitude towards sexuality and a deep, lush interest in the corporeal, and that this came through in poems that were “dolled up” in a specifically girly kitsch: this work seems to share an interest in the “femme” side of feminism.”
In short, the messages/themes/ideas/commentaries in these poems take the form of feminist performances, flirtations, middle fingers, stripteases, and peep shows. While the artists share a similar aesthetic in the tone and “attitude” they adopt in their work, their approaches vary widely: from the tender, surreal narratives of Matthea Harvey to the fragmented family narratives of Geraldine Kim to the “female grotesque” (Glenum’s words) of Ariana Reines.
Current Issue
Fall 2012
-
Subscribe
Sample Copy | $7
Fill out our Subscription Form
1 Year Subscription | $12
2 Year Subscription | $22
Send a check or money order to: ATTN: Managing Editor
So to Speak
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MSN 2C5
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
Please make checks payable to George Mason University.Sister Journal
Phoebe
A Journal of Literature and Art
