Open Book: Jorie Graham on Balancing Parenthood and Poetry

I'm a fan of Slate V's Open Book: Writer's on Writing—a collaboration between Slate and the NYU Creative Writing Program. Check out their most recent video interview of Jorie Graham in “Balancing Parenthood and Poetry.” I love the image of Graham rubbing her pregnant belly on Emily Dickinson's grave!

Living Overseas and Maid Wages

A good friend of mine used to joke that "only boring women keep clean houses," and being anything but boring myself, I have always vowed to pay someone to do my cleaning if I could ever afford to do so. But I got a rude awakening when I triumphantly posted in my Livejournal that I'm paying my new maid 500 ringgit a month for eight hours a week of labor. To see my actual cost, divide that by 3.5. When I posted that blog, I did so with the idea that my American friends would be jealous, a rare occasion because having a maid is one of the few perks of living in Malaysia. Instead, my friends informed that this 40-yr old woman will be make $4.46 an hour, making me a sweat shop slave driver. The money I am giving her is what she asked to be paid for the amount of work that she proposed to do, though, so what that amount meant hadn't entered my mind. And I have the air conditioning on with NPR's All Things Considered in the background. Surely she could do worse.

My conscience was unsettled, though, so I decided to check up on whether she's getting a good part-time wage for Malaysia. Actually, it appears that house maids are doing pretty well according to this salary guide. There currently is no minimum wage in Malaysia, but look at this article which proposes a minimum wage of 1,200 ringgits. My maid earns almost half of that for eight hours a week. If she has two other houses, she's doing better than that, and if she works 40 hours a week, she's making almost double what authorities here think is a living wage. Despite what you might think, by paying maids so highly, we are empowering these women in a market where their unskilled labor would earn far less in other sectors.

But if all of this is true, then why do I feel like I am doing something wrong? I boycotted Nike shoes and Taco Bell tomatoes back in the day because of labor abuses. Of course, my house cleaning is hardly a matter of out-sourcing U.S. jobs or paying illegal immigrants less than locals. In fact, I am paying her more because it's possible to get Indonesian girls to work for you full-time for 500 ringgits. But do I only make myself feel better by saying "Oh, but someone else is worse!" Or am I legitimately doing what any overseas employer does, which is to pay the local going rate? Methinks I doth protest too much.

Why my life is like Goodfellas

Ok.

Did you ever see the movie Goodfellas? Remember the scene when Henry Hill had to make the sauce, pick up his brother from rehab and get a cocaine deal ready? Remember how hectic and insane that day was?

Well, my life as a single mom who works is kinda of like that everyday, (except of course the dealing and doing drugs part).

It involves getting a 6 and 5 year old up, fed and ready for school and usually finishing a deadline for a side client, while going to my real job at a marketing firm, dealing with a staff of Tibetean nannies, housekeepers and other random people I must pay.

There is always a drama with either my ex-husband, a client, the police (someone recently tried to break into my house) or my kids. Some days my youngest decides randomly that she is "not welcome at school" (her words, not mine.)

Or I have been asked to write some "out of the box' thinking for a large packaged goods client, that is of course really code for give me something safe my specific demographic of 24-92 moms would like.

Through it all I have taken the approach, that my life is like a game show or Survivor. If I guess all the clues correctly, or outsmart the competition, I will win a calm orderly life, in which I will be able to garden, cook dinner for my kids and read all of those books that pile up and actually volunteer for school and other things.

But until then...

Pub Crawling: Well, how did I get here?

I am a female pushing 30, who moved 300 miles away from the place I've always lived, and who finally, half a decade after graduating college, has embarked on what can tentatively be termed a "career."

Yes, I am a publishing newbie, but I don't feel terribly new. Honestly, sometimes I just feel fucking haggard. And I've only been here 4 months.

I have an advanced degree and hold numerous honors that would be too ostentatious to list here, but I swear they exist. For 3 years I helped manage and run a nonprofit organization. I co-founded a magazine, interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winners and artists and filmmakers, and edited countless manuscripts and articles. People in my old hometown knew who I was. I was occasionally quoted in the local paper in articles about the "local literary community." The neighborhood sandwich shop knew my "regular" (turkey on wheat with American, lettuce, tomato, dollop of mayo). For a while, it seemed like I was moving up the ladder. Making the most of myself. Achieving my potential. Writing for a living. Receiving sandwiches without saying a word.

And now: I am back at the bottom of the totem pole in an entry-level position in a town where nobody knows me and nobody cares. I am several years older than numerous people in more senior positions, I make less per hour at my current salaried position than I did when working full-time as a temp, and I wonder if trying to start a career in publishing right around the time the economy has imploded is just a sign that I am another one of those cliched failed writers who has made a stupid mistake.

What made me do it? Why did I give up what I had and think it would be wise to re-establish myself in a new state and a new industry as a new kid when I am anything but new? Is it a mistake? I'm still trying to figure it out, but at least, for your reading pleasure, I'm not planning on keeping it to myself.

XXOO,
Pub Crawler

Review of The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones

Judith Jones, at least to me, is one of those women in publishing. You know, those ones. You've heard their name somewhere, only you can't remember where. Maybe on NPR? You know she's responsible for something to do with...oh, cookbooks...publishing...you're pretty sure she's really important. Recently I picked up a copy of The Tenth Muse at the library feeling I ought to get to know a bit more about what this woman has done for publishing and also for cooking.

Suffice to say if there was a great discovery to be made, Jones quite likely had a hand in it. It was Jones who brought The Diary of Anne Frank to publication and, as if that weren't enough of a career accomplishment, Jones who championed Mastering the Art of French Cooking into its publication. Jones chronicles the process of working with Julia Child to present a recipe for a French baguette because, at the time, no such thing was commercially available in the US, and both women believed French bread to be crucial to a fine French meal.

Jones's memoir reads like a who's-who of the genesis, not only of American cooking (Marion Cunningham. MFK Fisher, Edna Lewis, Jams Beard) but of the great expansion of regional and international cookbook authors (Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, Hiroko Shimbo, Lidia Bastianich). I was surprised to see that Jones keeps constantly abreast of the changes in publishing, food trends and food history in this country, pausing to mention Michael Pollan or Eric Schlosser in a local chapter on local eating and cultivating a garden.

While I would have liked to hear Jones discuss her position in publishing with some regard to feminism or women's issues (perhaps especially because she dealt primarily with cookbooks, and domesticity is already a murky issue for women) I thoroughly enjoyed the book overall. Jones has changed the character of many households through her continuous contribution to culinary writing and her memoir is a quiet pleasure for any fans of food. For anyone wanting to learn more about Jones, Michael Ruhlman has a good interview here and the New York Times has a great profile up here.
If these names sound unfamiliar to you, check them out next time you're thinking of googling some Food Network show or whipping up a Rachael Ray suggestion.

CERN Rap

It's just too good.

Babes for Breastfeeding

I learned about Babes for Breastfeeding (BfB) in my latest eagerly awaited Fit Pregnancy magazine. The basic premise of the non-profit is to bring together "celebrities, corporations, foundations, fashion and advertising to create a cultural acceptance and celebration of breastfeeding" to help new moms feel less guilty and embarrassed about breastfeeding. They also offer advice about how to be successful, prepared, and informed.

All of this sounds great, but in spite of myself, I became enraged when reading Kim Acosta's In the Spotlight article about the organization in Fit Pregnancy. Acosta says (citing the co-founder of BfB Bettina Forbes) "Lack of visible, positive role models and conflicting advice are two reasons many women don't success at breastfeeding." This comes right after the accusation that only 11% of women who gave birth in 2004 succeeded in breastfeeding exclusively until their infants were 6 months of age. "Women don't need more pressure and guilt," says co-founder of BfB Danielle Rigg, "they need to see people like themselves who incorporate nursing into their lives."

In my opinion, the issues surrounding overall breastfeeding success have much less to do with the lack of glamorous breastfeeding role models than they do with socio-economic factors, like whether or not the mother has to return to work full-time after her maternity leave. Or for that matter, whether she gets a maternity leave at all (there's still no nationally-mandated paid maternity leave in the U.S.). Perhaps she has to work two jobs. In cases like those, how can a mother exclusively breastfeed for the first 6 months of her baby's life?

Feminism is about having the power to choose. It is widely known that babies benefit from breastfeeding, but its just not an option for some families. I resent the guilt and pressure moms feel to breastfeed. I have seen many of my own friends relentlessly berate themselves because they cannot sustain breastfeeding.

Here's an idea: organizations like BfB should fight for longer, mandatory paid maternity leaves rather than spending their time recruiting celebrity nursers.

Support the Small Stuff: Juno

Brook Busey-Hunt went from working in a cubicle to stripping a la stage name Diablo Cody to blogging on The Pussy Ranch to writing a memoir called Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper all by the age of 28. It isn't a traditional path for a screenwriter, but it's the way this particular Midwest girl got to Hollywood - and her first film Juno comes out this week.

Juno might be one of the best films out right now for a number of reasons.

1. It is not a war film
2. It is not begging for an Oscar (although it might get nominated for a couple)
3. It is an indie film! We love indie films!
4. Killer soundtrack

5. Great cast
6. Funny!

But probably the best reasons are the lead actress, Ellen Page, and aforementioned Brook Busey-Hunt, who now goes by Diablo Cody, and who penned the script for this film. The premise of the film is pretty basic: high school girl gets pregnant, decides to keep the baby and then put it up for adoption. The boy who impregnates her is Michael Cera, from this summer's blockbuster Superbad, and the adoptive parents are played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman. It sounds simple, but Cody's script is fast paced and Page delivers the lines effortlessly. It is refreshing to see an actress and a film that can be smart and funny, and not in your face, especially at this time of year when the Oscars are right around the corner. And this film will certainly re-launch Page's acting career and grant her celebrity status; Diablo Cody's name will soon pop up in many opening credits. She is already working on her next projects, another book and a pilot for a Steven Spielberg inspired TV series for Showtime. She isn't pretentious - she knows she has a talent and shes putting it to good use.

Since this is an independent film, it is only on limited release this week, in NY and Los Angeles. When this movie finally is nationally released, go see it. Even if it is not in your nearby theater, find where it is playing and go see it - that's the only way to get other theaters to pick it up. And trust me, it's definitely worth the $10 ticket price.

A Holiday Hassle: Gifts at Work

Don't get me wrong, I love the holidays, and I love giving and receiving gifts. But after all the hassle my office has just gone through deciding how to give the gifts (yankee swap vs. secret santa), the merry has melted right out of the thing. There are so many rules to consider, so many feelings to potentially hurt. Like when the big boss takes the best gift out of the hands of the lowliest office worker, because that's how you "play." Or when the poor Jewish person is forced to trade gifts as a Secret Santa (my office elected to go with Secret Snowflake, instead). Or when someone opens your carefully selected, deprived-you-of-sleep yankee swap gift and says, "What kind of gift is this?"

Frankly, I could do without anything from my co-workers. It's enough for me to take a few hours out of work, eat some good (enough) food from our contracted caterer, and chat with everyone. But some are very adamant about it; last year someone floated the idea that rather than give each other gifts, we collect gifts for a charity. Nice idea, was the response, but we should still do yankee swap, too (and we did, so I bought two gifts instead of one).

Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Blogging through the Culinary Underbelly

This year, for the second time in my writing life, I thought about participating in Nanowrimo.

When I did Nano before, in 2003, I wrote an awful 50,000 word genre novel. I didn't pretend it was serious work, but I was proud of the accomplishment. There's something intimidating about a novel--all that time, and all those words, namely--and in a month I had created one.

This year, working upwards of 60 hours a week, Nano just doesn't seem feasible, at least if you are also trying to get some sleep.

While I spent the last week of October stressing about logistics--Could I do it? How would I carve the time out of my schedule to write? What shape would the novel I had in mind take, and how would I link its disparate pieces together?--I allowed an even larger, scarier question to form in my mind.

Was it still the best way to get my writing out there? Is the novel, in our current society, a valuable product? Is it the best use of my time, of my reach? Hardly new ideas, I know. While we've all been talking about print culture being dead and how no one ever buys novels anymore, we're still waiting for the rise of e-books and their ilk, and we may wait a while more.

About a month ago I was sending out a piece of flash fiction to online journals. I'd worked over the piece and was fairly happy with it, but couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't "worth" sending out to print journals. I submitted the piece to over a dozen journals and within four days it was accepted. I'm not saying this to brag, but because the experience was just so shocking. Another writer in my writers' group, Jamey Genna, shared that she's also been getting a lot of flash fiction placed recently. There seems to be an energy around the form that isn't present around longer stories. What we want to hear, what we have time and space to hear, is it changing? Where do you read, and what do you read? If what we are after as writers is to affect other people, or to get out stories out there, how do we make the novel relevant and critical, and not an artifact?

This time, these questions are coming out of my experience as a blogger. Some time back I started an anonymous food-writer blog (and subsequently became un-anonymous), and while it's audience is not large by any means I do have some readers, many of whom are also in the culinary industry. An old Emerson professor of mine Pamela Painter always stressed the importance of giving your characters a good, unusual job because the wealth of useable details was such a gift to your story. By becoming a pastry cook halfway through my course in Emerson's MFA program I essentially gifted myself. While there are many food blogs out there in the blogosphere, the voice of the chef is still rare.

As inimitable Bay Area pastry chef/writer Shuna Lydon wrote in a guest-post on writer Michael Ruhlman's blog, what it means to be a chef is still a story largely created not by us, the people in the kitchen. What really happens behind those doors is not Top Chef and it's not represented accurately. I have a unique story to tell now, and I have a voice that tells mostly true stories, and I have learned a little something along the way about appropriate content.


Chef culture finds its way into my fiction, and this Nano novel that I wanted to write would have taken chef culture as its focus. But it seemed more important to blog. To write flash fiction. The food blogging sphere is being mined for book deals. Maybe you've heard of Julie Powell's Julie and Julia, but do you know Gluten-Free Girl? Confessions of a Restaurant Whore? Conversely, authors such as Maryusa Bociurkiw, whose novel Comfort Food for Breakups is by turn both funny and wrenching, are turning to blogging as a promotional tool once the novel is published.

There are different kinds of stories we tell in blogging and in print. There is an immediacy at play in blog posts that does not translate well to the slow pace of fiction. But somehow, as I've let a part of my writing work be through blogging--and writing about the work I do, in which the voices of women and of queers are hardly well represented--is informing and changing the writer's work I do. Blogging is no longer a sidebar to my work. It is part of my writing identity. Perhaps, troublingly at times, the most important and far-reaching part.

A Car Accident and a Baby

So it has been a while since I've posted, but when you hear my story, you'll forgive me.

I am pregnant with my first child (due April 30th), and though I am utterly thrilled, my husband and I didn't exactly plan the pregnancy. Being the crazy person that I am, I decided that I would get a second (third??) job and work as hard as I could for as long as I could to make some extra cash..afterall, we all know how expensive babies are! So I was happily working an extra 15 hours a week for TripAdvisor, bringing in some dough, and feeling proud and capable.

But these things catch up with a person...especially when the first trimester of pregnancy makes you extremely tired all the time. I was walking home from the subway, rushing to be home in time to start my second job. It was dusk. I was using the only 10 minutes I'd had free all day to call a friend, and...dun, dun, duuuuun...I was hit by a car while crossing the street.

I got a concussion, some stitches in my face, a bruise on my hip and some nasty swollen, strained knees, but the little one was fine...protected by my belly and by the amniotic fluid.

But all of this is just background for my amazing revelation...I just don't need to do everything by myself. I am looking at the last 6 months of my life where I'll have time just for myself, where I'll be able to lie on the couch all day watching movies on Sundays if I want to, where I'll be able to go out to a movie with my husband without finding a babysitter. So damned if I am going to waste it working 60+ hours a week for a few extra bucks.

If you need me during the next 6 months, you can find me reading (I am currently reading The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coehlo, and it is fabulous), knitting (check out my newest endeavor, which I found on Knitty.com), catching up on my sleep, and enjoying alone time with my (existing) baby (a.k.a. my husband Andy).

Yay for selfish Julia. She deserves at LEAST 6 months of my life, right?

Olympic Games and Sex Work

In a WeNews article yesterday, correspondent Wency Leung reported on sex workers founding a brothel in Vancouver to help with the aid of “cleaning up the city” in time for the 2010 Olympic Games. Let’s try to put a dialogue of the politics of sex work aside (prostitution is legal in Canada but solicitation is not; while the co-op brothel if being founded by female sex worker advocates, the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter has voiced dissent on the subject along with escort agencies threatened by the potential competition). The tourist trade surrounding an international event must both represent the city/nation as being “civil” while offering an abundance of debauchery for actual visitors at night. Leung reminds us that an estimated 40,000 female sex workers traveled to Germany during this year’s soccer World Cup. National events like the Olympics become a spectacle, where gender, race, and social politics are perhaps forced to momentarily surface, which makes me wonder why sex workers in Vancouver are finding a safe place only when it’s fitting to national interest...

Right Hand Rings Pit Marriage Against Career

In the search for my own engagement ring and an ethical diamond, I came across a peculiar trend: the right hand ring. Ads and websites urge women to "celebrate your success" with a diamond ring worn on the right hand. (Now single women can join in the fun of owning a diamond and show their individuality and empowerment -- through blind commercialism! That supports slavery!)

Like Art Editor Julia, I loathe ad campaigns that encourage pamper-spending for women. And obviously, the promotions occasionally insult women's intelligence. This Generous Gems page actually tries to convince you that right hand rings are fitted differently from left-hand ones.

My personal annoyance aside, I think the most interesting part of this trend is the way that it equates marriage with a successful career. Right hand rings are supposed to showcase a woman's monetary success, while presumably left hand rings showcase her skill as a mantrap.

I find this distinctly unsettling. Marriage and engagement rings are part of the private sphere and of a tradition that extends back through time, while careers are part of the public sphere, and for women at least, a relatively new concept. By extension, the right hand ring suggests that career women are married to their careers, and as such unavailable/unable to engage in marriage. Reminds me of the horrifically-insulting-to-women-everywhere Forbes Article "Don't Marry Career Women."

Furthermore, I'm not sure we should celebrate when anyone becomes a workaholic, married to their jobs. Careers are not replacements for a rich private life, whether that life includes marriage or not. And yes, we should celebrate success, but why not do so with a plum 401(k) that sustains long after a person has lost the will to work?

The Girls Next Door, A Guilty Pleasure

In general, I'm not susceptible to reality TV (unless it involves cooking), but I have to admit that even though I don't make a point of watching E!'s show The Girls Next Door, I find myself flipping to it during commercials with shocking frequency.

The show is "reality" fare that follows Hugh Heffner's three girlfriends' lives in the Playboy mansion. Of course the reality presented does not resemble the reality I live in, but is strangely compelling nonetheless.

So why do I, a self-proclaimed strident feminist, get sucked in?

In a certain way, the very substance-less nature of the program appeals to me -- Kendra, Holly, and Bridget are doing exactly what popular culture tells our women to do:

• Define their value in relation to men;
• Consume, consume, consume;
• Spend a lot of time exercising, waxing bikini lines, putting on makeup, and vamping for men.

To watch the girls on screen is to see my psyche as I might be if I bought in to the standards of beauty and consumption that our culture elevates. For this reason, the show both fascinates me and sickens me.

On the other hand, the girls have each made shrewd calculations and sacrifices to get where she they are -- these are not ditzy girls who lucked into the gig. In the episode "My Bare Lady", Kendra goes out to buy real estate, talking about how her boob job was her "first investment", noting that it's paid off. Holly starts an internship with Playboy, and we see her willingness to be involved in the production of porn, which she views as a creative act that finally puts her where she wants to be: in the director's seat, while Bridget uses the show's fame to jump start her second career as a voice actress.

I don't mean to suggest that the series' approach is either degrading or empowering -- it seems as though both sensibilities are mixed together. The girls are the perfect product of our consumer-oriented and sex-obsessed culture, but they are also real women trying to make money and build names for themselves.. This paradox is what makes me watch.

See Jane Fold

Word in the fishbowl is that Jane magazine is folding. Jane was founded by Jane Pratt who also founded the defunct Sassy Magazine--a cult favorite among 80s teens. If Sassy was the edgy, sarcastic girl who developed before all the other 8th graders at the sleepover, Jane was the equally sarcastic, slightly jaded, tell-it-like-it-is best friend to the more mainstream women's magazines out there. With Jane gone, there leaves a hole in the market, and a need for a fresh new voice from the modern American woman.

To me, this is the voice of a woman who enjoys kick boxing as much as salsa dancing, reading postmodern fiction as much as shopping for party dresses, and creating great art as much as appreciating certain pop culture guilty pleasures (SexyBack, what?) She's the type of woman who will check her lipstick in the glass ceiling before smashing it with the stilettos she got on sale.

Who is this woman to you?

Jostling pregnant women

Grrrrrrr.

Isn't it just common courtesy to offer your seat on public transportation to a pregnant woman who has just stepped on? I recently started taking the T to work again (for those of you who aren't from Boston, that's the subway), and boy did it make me angry when not one, but two pregnant women had to stand, attempt to hold on to the bar, juggle a briefcase, and try to protect their precious bellies from the jostling of the busy rush hour T traffic. I was standing, too, or I would have gladly given up my seat for them. But it amazes and disgusts me that so many commuters "pretend" not to notice (nose in a book, furiously texting on their PDA, or sitting with their eyes closed) when a pregnant woman gets on.

I swear I almost ripped a man's head off this morning when he didn't offer an obviously pregnant woman his spot. I gave him the evil eye and shook my head disdainfully at him, but he didn't seem to notice that, either.

Is this view anti-feminist? Some men would say so. Afterall, why should they give up their spot for a woman? Isn't it first come, first served on the T? I suppose that the woman doesn't have a right to the spot, and she should not be treated as ill or weak just because she's pregnant, but hell, why can't people be a little bit nicer? It isn't about being a woman in this case, its about being a person who is carrying a heavy load, whose feet might hurt, or who might be feeling nauseous or exhausted. I'd give up my seat for her.

Boston needs to tune in to Tokyo. I read on Feministing that last summer, Tokyo rail companies began handing out badges to pregnant women who take public transportation.

Pretty brilliant if you ask me. Sounds like a good way to shame all of those serial ignorers into paying attention and doing the right thing. And even without the badges, don't let me ever catch YOU reading or daydreaming so hard that you don't notice someone who is right in front of you, or your ass is grass.

Betty in the Sky

Ever watch a flight attendant giving the safety spiel before takeoff and wonder what s/he's really thinking? Well, now you can find out--or at least get a good idea.

Betty's a flight attendant who puts together a fabulous little podcast about flying the friendly skies. She's upbeat and frank, and great at capturing the strange, irresistible, sometimes gross details of the job (like the mysterious "water" that dripped on a couple of passengers for an entire flight. Only after they'd landed did the flight attendants realize that someone had put their two pet ferrets in the overhead bin.).

The background music is occasionally a tiny bit repetitive--but other than that, the show is well-made and entertaining, and it gives you that satisfying feeling of having just heard a good bit of gossip.

For those of you who like it analog, this new book by Kathleen Barry talks about the history of the profession from its ambiguous beginnings to the present. For more info on Femininity in Flight, and an interview with the author and with Betty, check this episode of the Diane Rehm show.