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A friend posted a picture of me from her wedding, and all I can see is my stomach. I’m with friends, wearing goofy hats for the photo booth, having fun, but I don’t care. Something about the way my body is contorted, or how that slinky polyester is the most unforgiving, or how the waistband of my nylons cut across my middle, but there it is: the bright blue fabric rippling like thick waves over the uneven surface of my bulging gut––an oozing, distorted potato.

Wow, I think. You’re fat.

Mona Awad’s fiction debut 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a novel in thirteen vignettes about the experience of being a woman dealing with body image issues or simply put: The experience of being a woman. At the time I saw that wedding photo of myself, there were probably thousands of women online at the same time, also looking at photos of themselves, also thinking the same thing––no matter what those women actually weigh.

The post Review of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

I wrote about my goal to read 50 books by women in 2015 for Wellesley Underground! Not only did I write about my experience, but I also some how managed to list my TOP TWELVE FAVORITE BOOKS that I read last year.

Need some reading recommendations? Check it out.

The post 2015: All Books By All Ladies, All the Time appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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In the ninth of her series of interviews with women who write nonfiction, E.B. Bartels speaks with historian and writer Nancy Hewitt.

Nancy Hewitt has authored, co-authored, and edited of many books on women’s history. She is the author of Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York 1822-1872 and Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s, which was the winner of the 2002 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for best book in southern women’s history from the Southern Association for Women Historians. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2000-2001) and was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge (2009-2010). Currently, Hewitt is an Emeritus Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Nancy Hewitt appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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In the eighth of her series of interviews with women who write nonfiction, E.B. Bartels chats with prolific author Patricia Beard.

Patricia Beard has written nine books of nonfiction, including After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905 (Harper Perennial, 2004), Blue Blood and Mutiny: The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley (William Morrow, 2007), and Growing Up Republican: Christine Whitman: The Politics of Character (HarperCollins, 1996). Most recently, Beard has published a novel, A Certain Summer (Simon & Schuster, 2013). Additionally, she has written hundreds of magazine articles and essays as the former features editor of Town & Country, the former editor-at-large of Elle, and the former styles features editor of Mirabella magazine.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Patricia Beard appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Originally published on October 14, 2015.

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In the seventh of her series of interviews with women who write nonfiction, E.B. Bartels converses with historian Martha Hodes.

Martha Hodes is the author of three books: Mourning Lincoln (Yale University Press, 2015), The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (W.W. Norton, 2006), and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (Yale University Press, 1997), and the editor of a collection of essays, Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York University Press, 1999). The Sea Captain’s Wifewas one of three finalists for the Lincoln Book Prize, and White Women, Black Men was winner of the Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History. Hodes has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Whiting Foundation, and she served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Germany. Hodes is also an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and has consulted on many documentaries, museum exhibitions, and radio and television shows, including the 2010 documentary The Loving Story about the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia. She is Professor of History at New York University.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Martha Hodes appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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In the sixth of her series of interviews with women who write nonfiction, E.B. Bartels speaks with bestselling memoirist and opinion writer Jennifer Finney Boylan.

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders(Broadway/Doubleday 2003) was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. A novelist, memoirist, short story writer, and an advocate for civil rights, she is the author of thirteen books. Boylan also has been a contributor to the op/ed page of The New York Times since 2007; in 2013 she became Contributing Opinion Writer for the page. She serves as the national co-chair of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, the media advocacy group for LGBT people worldwide, and serves on the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Boylan is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Jennifer Finney Boylan appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Post originally appeared on Wellesley Underground on August 8, 2015.

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It is an honor to converse with E.B. Bartels whose work appears extensively in close to two dozen publications. Most recently, she graduated with an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Columbia University, where she founded Catch & Release, the literary blog and online magazine of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. At Wellesley, she won the Jacqueline Award in English Composition for her essay “Russian Face,” which you can now read in the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35. In addition to being a prolific writer, E.B. is a teacher, a photographer, and was also an alumna editor for our very own Wellesley Underground.

Image credit: Janna Herman

WU: You were a Russian Language and Literature major and Studio Art minor at Wellesley, though you also wrote extensively for the college’s student life magazine, Counterpoint.  What were your biggest influences from Wellesley on your writing? Did you know you wanted a career as a writer back at Wellesley?  How did you find yourself in your major and minor?

EB: My falling-in-love-with-writing story is pretty boring––it’s the same old thing that so many writers tell: I loved books as a kid, I started reading at a super young age, I wrote extensively in journals throughout my adolescence, I did independent writing projects in high school, blah, blah, blah, you know how it goes. I was so smitten with writing that I actually enrolled in a class at Wellesley in summer 2005––the summer after my junior year of high school. It was Writing 225 with Marilyn Sides, and it took place in a very warm room in the back of Clapp Library with a mix of students ranging from current Wellesley students to adults from the town to other precocious high schoolers such as myself. I loved that class and Professor Sides, and when I got into Wellesley, there was no question in my mind that I was going to be an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing, with maybe a Studio Art minor because I’d always loved photography too. I was even all set to ask Professor Sides to be my advisor. Done and done.

But then, at the end of my senior year of high school, I went to hear one of my favorite writers ever––the playwright Tony Kushner––speak at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. Afterwards there was a book-signing, and I went up to Tony Kushner and gushed all over him about how much I love his plays and how much I also love writing and I just wrote a play that my friend directed at our school and I was starting college in the fall and I was definitely going to study creative writing––and he interrupted me. Don’t major in creative writing, he said. I thought I heard him wrong. He went on to tell me to study anything else, to study everything besides writing, or I would be mechanically good at writing with nothing interesting to say. I took this advice very seriously, and when I arrived at Wellesley, I enrolled in Russian 101 to fulfill my language requirement. I immediately fell in love with the language––puzzling out Cyrillic, fantasizing that one day I would be able to read Anna Karenina in the original (LOL)––and I realized that majoring in Russian would give me the excuse to travel abroad and travel abroad far away, which was something I desperately wanted to do since I grew up in a town not even twenty minutes away from Wellesley. I thought that studying Russian would give me plenty of material to write about, which it did.

I started writing for Counterpoint while I was living in St. Petersburg my junior year. Some of my good friends from ‘09 were on the Counterpoint editorial staff and gave me a monthly column which basically was “E.B. Rambles On About Something Relating To Russian Culture For A Couple Hundred Words” and I loved it. I enjoyed feeling that I was still part of the Wellesley community while so far away, but I also loved the deadlines and trying to come up with a new, exciting topic each month, and I enjoyed getting to develop my own voice and sense of style. When I came back to Wellesley my senior year, I took the only creative writing class I ever took in college––Travel Writing with Professor Sides, in the same hot room at the back of Clapp as that summer class––and it blew my brain. Before that I had thought oh, I’ll do the Russian Literature PhD route which most Russian majors seem to pursue, or I thought I would go into translation, or maybe get an MFA in photography, but Professor Sides’s travel writing class made me remember how badly I had wanted to be a writer before I got to Wellesley. So as I panicked about what to do next, I applied to be an AmeriCorps Teaching Fellow at a school in Dorchester. I worked at Mother Caroline Academy for two years, teaching fifth and sixth grade girls English, Literature, Social Studies, and Art, and that sealed the deal. Seeing eleven-year-olds freak out with excitement about writing spoken word poems or coming up with their first-ever short story made me remember my own love of writing, and so that was that. I applied to get an MFA.

WU: Did you notice a difference in the community between Wellesley and Columbia?  What was it like being in a co-ed writing environment as opposed to a women’s college?

EB: Columbia is known for having one of the largest MFA writing programs, which is part of why I chose it. I knew that if I ended up at a place like Brown, where you have all your workshops with the same four other people for the two or three years of your MFA, I thought I would lose my mind. And, though I didn’t realize it going into getting my MFA––I thought I was getting the degree just to become a better writer––the whole point of going to graduate school for art is to develop an artistic community. An MFA degree is no guarantee of employment, and a lot of artists out there are very anti-MFA––feeling it’s a waste of money and time and that you can be a perfectly successful artist without one, which is true––but in getting my MFA I met a whole lot of amazingly wonderful fellow writer friends, and it was as if this big hole I had in my heart that I hadn’t realized existed was suddenly full. Suddenly having this gang of friends who just got it when I didn’t want to go out for drinks because I was finishing an essay, or who would want to sit at a bar all night and talk about their favorite memoirists or how they were having a moral dilemma writing about their family or ex-boyfriend or whatever, it was incredible. I say get an MFA just to find those people. They’ll let you bounce ideas off of them, they’ll listen to you cry about getting rejected from McSweeney’s again, and they’ll edit your writing forever.

At Columbia, the writing program is divided into three genres––Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction––and while some people complained that such a large MFA program gets very competitive, I found that seemed to apply to some genres more than others (cough, Fiction). Nonfiction was this big, emotional family––maybe because right away in workshop we were sharing some of our darkest secrets and feelings in our pieces and it was like Group Therapy Lite––and there were thirty-five of us, so there were enough people to mix up who was in your workshop and classes each semester, but few enough that we knew each other all pretty well by the end. Also Nonfiction felt a lot like Wellesley, because, more so than the other genres, Nonfiction was mostly women––I think it was something like thirty women and five guys in my year. My thesis workshop with Lis Harris was all women, and it was awesome.

Though something I did notice about being in a co-ed environment––and I’m talking about all the genres here, not just Nonfiction––was a divide in the confidence between the men and women writers. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all of the men or all of the women, but I noticed that often the men were much more confident about their writing, with no doubt they were on their way to being the next Jack Kerouac or David Foster Wallace, while many more of the women seemed to suffer from Impostor Syndrome––feeling they didn’t deserve to be in the program, not sure how they got in, totally unsure if they would ever make a career of this whole writing thing. I definitely fell in the latter category. I have my MFA, and I still feel like a total fake. I feel like a fraud being featured in this series on Wellesley Underground––I have been forcing myself to say “I’m a writer” when people ask what I do, as opposed to defaulting to whatever my paying day job is at the time: “I’m a babysitter” or “I’m a teacher” or “I’m an intern at a literary agency.” But fake it ‘til you make it, right?

WU: Your focus at Columbia was creative nonfiction.  Can you explain a little what this is and what inspired you to pursue this track?

EB: I chose nonfiction because I realized I needed to stop lying to myself. In high school I would sometimes write “short stories” which were stories inspired by my own family’s lore, and then I wrote this play about a grandmother, mother, and daughter who have coffee together once a week and talk a lot and occasionally get into big blow out fights, weirdly just like me and my mother and grandmother, and I realized that fiction isn’t my thing. I think every writer starts off thinking that to be a Real Writer you have to write The Next Great American Novel, but then as you get older, you start to notice all these other amazing types of books out there, and you start to think, hey, maybe I can write The Next Great American Biography or The Next Great American Collection of Essays. All the writing I did at Wellesley for Counterpoint was all in the personal essay and travel writing camp, so when it came time to apply for my MFA, I only looked at programs that offered nonfiction, and Columbia has one of the oldest and established creative nonfiction programs, which is another reason why I chose to go to school there.

Now, to clarify creative nonfiction: no, I did not go to Columbia Journalism School. (The number of times I have to tell people this over and over blows my mind.) And, no, I am not working on a “novel.” But I understand why it’s confusing, because what I do falls somewhere in between––not that I make things up, no, none of that James Frey garbage, but that I take real information, real stories, real people, real things from the real world, and write about them in a way that reads much like a short story or a novel. You find a way to take the events of an ordinary life and order them and structure them in a way so they build on each other to make a plot that is exciting to read––just like in a novel. I like to think about it like this: fiction writers are composing music in a room that is silent––making up everything as they go, while nonfiction writers are composing music on a very noisy, crowded, loud street––filtering the din to hear only the sounds they want for their piece. A way I like to try to explain the difference between journalism and creative nonfiction is that journalism is like the video footage they show on the local news to get the information across, while creative nonfiction is like a Ken Burns documentary. Though I think a lot of journalists would have beef with that statement, and, to be truthful, there is a lot of overlap––I’ve read articles in The New York Times, which would probably be called journalism just because they’re in a newspaper, that are as gorgeous and artful as any memoir or personal essay.

WU: You write a column Non-Fiction by Non-Men for The Fiction Advocate.  Can you tell us a little about the writers you have interviewed and this experience?

EB: Why, yes! Thank you for asking about my Non-Fiction by Non-Men column. Ahem. (Yes, that’s a link. Click it. Thanks.) I began the column because a personal mission of mine is trying to read more books by underrepresented groups of writers––women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. I am continually horrified by the statistics that VIDA puts together each year––in so many major publications, male writers continue to outnumber women by vast proportions, not to mention how many more books by men get reviewed than books by women, let alone books by white people than books by people of color, let alone books by straight people than books by LGBTQ people. It’s depressing. And at one point in grad school someone asked me to name my favorite writers, and I realized that the group I had quickly rattled off (Nabokov, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Chekhov) were all white men. So I thought to try to do my own little part by showcasing some really incredible women writers of nonfiction in this column. So far I’ve interviewed biographer Patricia O’Toole, historian Andie Tucher, former New Yorker staff writer Lis Harris, and Cris Beam, who has written about queer/trans issues and also the American foster care system. Upcoming I have an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson whose book Negroland: A Memoir comes out in September, and also one with Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose memoir She’s Not There was the first bestselling book by a transgender American. I’m constantly in awe by these women––by the work they’ve created, the junk they’ve had to put up with as women in a male-dominated field––and I love that this column gives me an excuse to ask them a million questions about their lives and careers. It’s very comforting for me, personally, to hear their stories and advice because it quells my own anxieties about trying to make it as a writer.

WU: You are currently working on two books, one based on your MFA. thesis.  Can you tell us a little about these projects?

EB: My MFA thesis was a memoir and historical narrative about my family’s small business––an insurance agency in Somerville, Massachusetts that has been in our family now for almost a hundred years. While the business has barely changed, our family––and the city of Somerville––has evolved significantly around it, and my thesis was about how a family can evolve from factory-working, fresh-off-the-boat immigrants, into privileged, upper class, Ivy-League-attending artist types through this one, tiny, prosperous business. The book is about how hard people work to protect themselves from all kinds of loss––saving up money, obsessively going to doctors, buying expensive insurance policies, checking and double-checking and worrying about every possible worst case scenario and thinking you’ve got it all covered––but how, in the end, you can’t protect yourself from everything. Loss, and death, are inevitable.

My other project is actually about loss too. This book project is a collection of linked essays about all the pets I’ve had, and all of the unfortunate ways they’ve died. Three of these essays have already been published on The Toast under the series Dead Pet Chronicles. But in addition to my own personal stories, I’ve been researching all the varied and wild ways that people mourn their animals––pet cemeteries, taxidermy, mummification, artificial diamonds made from cremated ashes. It’s amazing what people do for their pets. Though, I think the thing I like the most about working on this project is that as soon as I tell anyone about it, it’s like being the priest at confession––people open up to me about hamsters trapped in walls and puppies they ran over with cars and fish they replaced without kids knowing.

WU: Is there a particular essay that you have written that has the most significance to you?

EB: “Freedom, My Dear” was published on The Butter. The fact that it was published on The Butter alone is hugely significant to me––The Butter is the sister site to The Toast, run by amazing essayist Roxane Gay. The fact that Roxane Gay, whom I worship, read my essay, and, not only that, liked it enough to publish it––I died a little with joy when that happened. But more so than that, writing “Freedom, My Dear” was a really important experience for me. The essay started out as a total mess––all these different ideas stemming from an experience at the Russian Baths in New York––and I was really lucky to have one of my best writer friends and editors-for-life, Ariel Garfinkel, go through at least half-a-dozen drafts as I tried to figure out what I was saying. I would like to point out that several other writer friends also read drafts of this essay, and for them, I am forever grateful as well, but Ariel not only helped me figure out structure––she also patiently pointed out flaws in my logic and thinking and gently helped me see when I was actually making some unintentional but extremely transphobic comments about women’s spaces. Writing that essay made me examine my way of thinking, and my own inner prejudices and biases, and try to understand how to fix them. And even so, the end result wasn’t perfect––one commenter on the essay pointed out that I had made some assumptions about trans women’s genitalia, which I hadn’t intended to do, but I had nonetheless. That essay, to me, is the perfect example of how writing can help you figure out not just how to say something, but how to think and what you think, and how we are all always growing and learning as people, no matter how old we are. Also, writing that essay made me really appreciate having honest and kind friends/editors like Ariel who are willing to provide a safe space for me to try out ideas and call me out on things.

(And now go read Ariel’s essay on Salon. It’s incredible.)

WU: Do you participate in visual art projects as well?

EB: Alas, since college, not so much. While teaching at Mother Caroline Academy, I did do a photography project of my students’ accessories, but besides that, I’ve really been focusing on writing exclusively for the past three years. I’m still a visual learner––I will forget something entirely unless I see it written down, and I draw these crazy charts to try to figure out the structure of my essays and writing projects––and even while I’m writing, I’m always thinking of visual components to complement the work. My thesis was full of photographs and scanned letters and doodles and artifacts, and it’s very hard for me to separate words from visual components. Similarly, most of my photography, painting, and printmaking projects in high school and college involved words. For example, I took a lot of photographs of graffiti around my high school and then did double-exposure prints of the words overlapping with other images I had taken. Words and images go together for me. My dream is to find an agent/editor one day who supports my visual art drive and will allow me some say in illustrations/photographs in my book. But that might be a pipe dream. Publishing houses have whole art departments for that stuff.

WU: What is the most important message you try to communicate through your writing?

EB: One of my professors at Columbia said that every writer has a theme or subject that they just can’t shake, and that every one of a writer’s works can be traced back to scratching at one idea. I guess, at least with my two book projects, I am trying to understand how people try to protect themselves from––and later cope with––loss and death. I also want to understand and show the role that humor plays in the darkest times. I love a good black comedy. As my grandfather says: what’s the difference between a Russian tragedy and a Russian comedy? In a Russian tragedy, everyone dies. In a Russian comedy, everyone dies happy.

WU: You are also an extensive reader.  Any recommendations for WU readers?

EB: Yes! I have so many recommendations! I set a goal for myself that in 2015 I am trying to read fifty books by women, with a majority of those books by women of color. You can check out my blog for updates on the challenge and to see the twenty-seven books that I have read so far in my 1st Quarter Check-In and 2nd Quarter Check-In posts. Also, follow me on GoodReads to see what I am reading in real time!

WU: What plans do you have for your writing future?

EB: Short-term––I will be teaching middle school again this fall, so I hope to learn how to balance the demands of working full-time in a school with making space for my own writing and reading because, to be honest, I think making time for my own writing and reading makes me a better teacher––what example are we setting for students if teachers are not continually in the process of learning themselves as well? I also am applying to writing residency programs for school vacations and next summer. Long-term––I want to finish one of my book projects so it feels strong enough to begin to query agents, so then I can obtain an agent, create a book proposal, find an editor, get a book deal, the whole glamorous thing. And, eventually, one day, I hope to be able to teach writing at the college or graduate school level, because I find, selfishly, that I am a better writer when I am also teaching. Students give me creative energy and drive, plus they hold me accountable––I can’t go around telling them to write if I am not writing anything myself.

WU: To continue to follow E.B.’s writing, check out her website, her blog, and her Twitter.

The post Wellesley Writes It Interview appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

In case you forgot: My goal for 2015 is to read 50 books by women, with the majority of those by women of color.

In terms of numbers, 50% of fifty is twenty-five books, and, not only am I on track, I am ahead of the game at the moment––I just started book number twenty-seven this morning! This is a good thing since, as some of you may know, I will start teaching full-time at the end of August and will have less time for free reading (and also will have to read a lot of additional books for work––many of which, I’m guessing, will not be by women). So let’s get right to this update so I can get back to my books.

Here’s what I’ve read since my 1st Quarter Check-In:

13. The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard: Last I left you, I was about halfway through this collection of essays. When I finally got to the famous essay, “The Fourth State of Matter,” I was reading on a bench in the sun (despite the cold, as it was early April) outside of the Cambridge Public Library. I’d heard a lot about this essay, and in my typical cynical sense, I was prepared for it to be a let down or just a medium after so much hype from so many people. But I finished that essay, sitting on the bench in the sun, in the cold, and I felt gutted. I felt like Jo Ann Beard had ripped all my organs out and threw them in the snow. I haven’t had that powerful of a reaction to a piece of writing in a long time, and I walked back to my apartment from the library engrossed in thought, feeling like an empty shell, sort of listlessly drifting. It was an awesome feeling––awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring, not necessarily in the sense that I felt really good. In summary: read The Boys of My Youth for “The Fourth State of Matter” alone. Or just read “The Fourth State of Matter.” You have to.

14. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine: Much like “The Fourth State of Matter,” I had heard a lot about this book before I read it––I had even heard Claudia Rankine speak at the AWP Conference in Minneapolis this April––and, again, I was not disappointed. I was completely blown away. I love how Claudia Rankine defies any sort of straightforward genre––this book is at once personal essay, poetry, cultural criticism, art criticism, history, and myth––and how she incorporates her own personal story as a Black woman in America with the larger story of racism in America. I feel like I’m just rambling right now, but the point is that I can’t really explain this book, but it is one of the most powerful, intense things I have ever read in my whole life. You just have to read it to get it. Also, this book confirmed my feelings that everything that Graywolf Press publishes is pure gold.

15. Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron: I was beginning to feel like a failure of a Wellesley alumna for how little Nora Ephron I had read. Yeah, I had seen You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. Yeah, I’d read some of her profiles and essays, but I had yet to sit down and read through one of her books. And I’m so glad that I did––my favorite thing about getting to read a whole group of Nora Ephron’s journalistic essays in a row is to see how even when the first person narrator is absent, her personality and dry, witty tone is evident. I finished Wallflower at the Orgy and immediately wanted to start I Feel Bad About My Neck, but then I got worried that “fifty books by women” would quickly turn into “fifty books by Nora Ephron.”

16. Nothing To Do With Me by Sarah Xerta: As a prose writer of nonfiction and a personal essay junkie, I’m not drawn to a lot of poetry, but I am trying to read more of it because it helps my brain think about language differently. I picked up Sarah Xerta’s book because I had the pleasure of meeting her at the AWP Conference, as she is friends with my buddy Tuck, and I am so happy I read Nothing To Do With Me because Sarah Xerta’s poetry was an incredible reminder about the beauty and intense power of concise language and specific words themselves. So many of these poems are like a quick blow to the head––they left me dazed and reeling and amazed. Sarah Xerta is a genius, and, as I know from having the good fortune to meet her, a lovely human as well. A really great book by a really great person.

17. Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson: I heard that the new reboot of Ms. Marvel had cast the superhero as a teenage Pakistani Muslim girl from New Jersey, which I thought was pretty awesome, and I wasn’t disappointed by the series. I love how Kamala Khan is just an average teenager, dealing with friendship angst and school drama and strict parents with high expectations. This book was a fun break from some of the heavier work I have been reading, and what I loved the most was that Kamala Khan wasn’t a “strong female character.” She is just a girl, who can be strong, but also can be weak and confused and unsure of herself. In summary, she is just a regular old girl, to whom I am sure a lot of teenage girls can relate. I would have been obsessed with the series in high school, for sure.

18. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange: I had seen parts of the movie For Colored Girls, but I had never read the original poem-play that inspired the film. I’d like to take a moment here to remind all of you (and inform those of you who don’t know) that once upon a time I was really into theatre and writing plays, and I think in the third quarter I want to try to read some more plays by women, because reading for colored girls stirred up something inside of me that remembered just how powerful words can be when paired with movement and action. This poem-play in particular is simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking, and the way that Ntozake Shange has seven women perform the words of her poetry––it is inspiring. This book is also an incredible resource for understanding just how race and class play an enormous role in feminism.

19. China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston: I never said that I would read fifty books by fifty different women, and I am glad about that, because I am obsessed with Maxine Hong Kingston. I heard about China Men in a lecture at the AWP Conference on imagination and speculation in nonfiction––about how Maxine Hong Kingston was able to craft these beautiful, vivid, incredible stories based on the little information and few concrete facts she had about her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather’s experiences as Chinese immigrants in the U.S.A. Clearly she done her research––the book is full of rich details from the time periods––and she has read the stories of men similar to the men in her family, but the way she is able to float between myth and legend and fact is goddamn INCREDIBLE and something to be admired. I can’t wait to read The Woman Warrior next.

20. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson: Everything I wrote about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen can pretty much apply to The Argonauts, except that instead of exploring race in America, Maggie Nelson is exploring gender and sexuality. Again, Maggie Nelson completely defies any kind of standard nonfiction form––she has poetic vignettes mixed up with philosophical analysis interspersed with personal anecdotes. What I really love though is how Maggie Nelson uses her own family’s tale––her relationship with the gender-fluid Harry Dodge, Harry’s son from a previous relationship, and the son that she and Harry have together with the help of a sperm donor––to explore gender, queerness, and the concept of family. Once again, Graywolf kills it.

21. Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan: I got into the Israeli graphic novelist Rutu Modan because I used to intern at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in New York––the agency that represents her. Exit Wounds is Rutu Modan’s earlier book, and while I enjoyed it a lot, I think I liked her newer book The Property more. However, it’s completely worth the read, and I like how her stories always seem to involve some element of family mystery––the things left unsaid, the things you have to figure out after someone dies, the things that get forgotten.

22. Ms. Marvel, Vol. 2: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson: This is the second installment of the Ms. Marvel reboot. Kamala Khan’s adventures continue, and I found Vol. 2 just as enjoyable as Vol. 1 (see my review above).

23. Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks: I’d like to take a moment to shout out to my friend, fellow Wellesley alumna, and fellow writer Diamond Sharp, who compiled this really great list of Black feminist books for The Root. In an attempt to try not to be less of a Problematic White Feminist and to diversify the group of women writers I read (sorry, Nora Ephron, you’re great and all but…) I have been using Diamond’s list for recommendations, which included Gwendolyn Brooks’s classic (and giant) collection of poetry and prose-poems. Again, like with Sarah Xerta’s book, it was exciting to read poetry and get into a different mindset about language, but don’t pick up this 500+ page book and think “Oh, poetry! I’ll fly through this!” You have to sit with Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry. You have to read her poems, and then reread them, and then think about them, and then go back to them again. The hardest thing about Blacks, though, was how much of Gwendolyn Brooks’s critique of sexism and racism is still 100% completely relevant today. Reading it in 2015, I often felt like her poems were about current events. It was a depressing feeling.

24. Beloved Beasts: Animal Mummies from Ancient Egypt by Salima Ikram: So when I set my reading challenge for 2015, I didn’t say I would only read books by women in 2015, because I figured that I would have to read some things for my writing research and for work that were written by old white dudes––basically just anything I am choosing to read this year as a “free reading” type book needs to be by a woman to hit my goal of fifty. But! Lucky for me! I’ve been doing lots of dead pet research for some new essays, and in reading about animal mummification, I’ve had the chance to read a lot of Salima Ikram‘s work, which is awesome, because she is a total badass. She is a professor of Egyptology at the American University of Cairo, and she has more or less on her own taken on reviving and restoring the Egypt Museum’s collection of animal mummies through the Animal Mummy Project.

25. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde: Just as with Maxine Hong Kingston, thank god I decided not to read fifty different women writers, because I want to go and read everything Audre Lorde has ever written. The day I actually started Sister Outsider––a book I had heard so much about and had been planning to read forever––I was interviewing Cris Beam for my NON-FICTION BY NON-MEN column on Fiction Advocate (stay tuned for that interview to go up later this month), and she mentioned that her favorite quote of nonfiction by a woman writer was Audre Lorde’s line: “Your silence will not protect you.” Remember how I felt reading “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard? That’s how I felt reading all of Sister Outsider. I had chills the entire time. Again, just like with Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks, I was distraught by how much of what Audre Lorde was writing about in the 1970s is still 100% applicable to today’s problems of racism and sexism. I underlined and put stars next to most lines of the book. Audre Lorde articulates so clearly, beautifully, what it means to be a truly intersectional feminist and a good person, and I am going to write out and hang one million quotes by her over my writing desk. I want the whole text of Sister Outsider tattooed all over my body so I never forget a word. In her essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” one line in particular (though there were so many lines I loved) I think sums up what I am trying to do with my fifty books by women goal:

…where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

26. feminism is for everybody: passionate politics by bell hooks: Just like Sister Outsider, I know that this book will be one that I return to again and again for feminist guidance. While bell hooks uses more academic jargon than Audre Lorde, and I love how Audre Lorde bases so much of her feminist theory in personal stories, bell hooks does a great job at breaking down complicated feminist ideas into fairly simple, colloquial language and summarizing the history of the movement, where we need to go from here, and arguing why feminism is beneficial for everybody. This book is an excellent manual for anyone who considers themselves a feminist (which should be everybody) or an ally of women. Read it!

27. She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan: This is the book I just started this morning. I’m not very far along at all (page five), but I’m really excited about this one because I recently interviewed Jennifer Finney Boylan for my NON-FICTION BY NON-MEN column. Look for that interview in September, and in the mean time, read her memoir along with me!

Now for the statistical tallies. I think I am doing a little better than I was in the first quarter. Trying to stick to this resolution, I’ve really noticed how much of an effort it takes to read books by under-represented groups––not that there aren’t as many great books out there by women, people of color, and queer people as there are by men and white people. Trust me, there are TOO many great books out there by women, people of color, and queer people; I have massive, massive, massive piles of books by women to read all around my apartment right now and am feeling overwhelmed by all the fantastic recommendations I’ve received. But it’s interesting that when people don’t know about my resolution, and they recommend a book for me to read, more often than not it’s by a white man (ex: Stalin’s Children by Owen Matthews), and if they do know about my resolution, more often than not it’s by a white woman (ex: How To Build A Girl by Caitlin Moran). Books by white people get a lot more attention, and, therefore, they’re the books more people know about, and, therefore, the books that more people recommend. This is something I knew before this year, but it’s certainly an important reminder to see it played out so obviously.

Anyway, out of the fourteen books I finished reading this quarter, seven were written by women of color. This is not the majority––as is my goal––but again, like last time around, it is a solid 50%. I need to do better with that. Though one area where I have improved is reading more books by queer women. Though I didn’t explicitly state this goal in my New Year’s Resolution, I also want to read more books by queer, gender queer, and trans women because reading books by queer, gender queer, and trans women makes sense if my goal is to read books by under-represented groups of writers. Only one book from my first quarter was written by an openly queer woman, but this time around, out of the fifteen books mentioned in this post, four were written by openly queer, gender queer, or trans women. That’s not great statistic-wise, but it’s an improvement.

So, again, IN SUMMARY: I’m doing okay, but I could be doing even better.

P.S. If you can’t wait until the end of the third quarter to see what I’m reading, follow me on GoodReads.

The post 2015 Reading Challenge: 2nd Quarter Check-In appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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I began to seriously question whether or not I want to have kids one Wednesday at 9 p.m. while having my hair checked for lice. I was sitting in a black swivel chair, wearing a leopard-print hairdresser cape, as an older woman meticulously worked through my scalp with mint-scented conditioner, baking soda, and a fine-tooth comb.

The post Sixteen Writers on the State of My Uterus appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

In case you forgot: My goal for 2015 is to read 50 books by women, with the majority of those by women of color.

In terms of numbers, 25% of fifty is 12.5, and I’m right on track––halfway through book number thirteen. However, some may argue that I’ve cheated a little by including a couple of young adult books and graphic novels. Plus I also read a short story and an essay that were masquerading as books, so maybe I’m not doing quite as well as I thought, but you all can decide for yourselves and judge me in the comments.

Here’s what I’ve read so far in 2015:

1. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison: I am totally in love with badass women essayists, and Jamison is at the top of my current list. She does that thing that I love of combining a personal experience with historical/cultural research and commentary, and I think Jamison is brilliant at it. So many excellent essays in here, but I think my favorite was “In Defense of Saccharin(e).”

2. Embroideries by Marjan Satrapi: Satrapi is the author of Persepolis, her memoir about growing up in Iran after the Iranian revolution. Compared to Persepolis, Embroideries has less of a straightforward narrative storyline––the book depicts a group of women who are friends, family, and neighbors, drinking tea together and sharing stories from their lives. The dialogue is energetic, and I enjoyed bouncing between the different stories and learning about the lives of women in Iran.

3. The Tarantula in My Purse and 172 Other Wild Pets by Jean Craighead George: I read this entire book out loud so many times to the Babysitting Charge that I felt I had to count it. George is an epic YA author, and I had never read any of her nonfiction before, but I loved seeing where she got the inspiration for so many of her YA books. Who knew she had so many wild pets of her own? My only complaint: no wolves. I mean, isn’t she most famous for her YA novel Julie of the Wolves? Sheesh.

4. The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith: This was the short story disguised as a book. I got halfway through the story and realized that I had already read it when it first appeared in The New Yorker, and I had simply been deceived by the cute little single-story European edition. Great job, marketing team. (Okay, I guess it is a stretch letting this one count, especially since I had read the story before.)

5. Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay: I still can’t stop thinking about this book. Gay discusses so incredibly what it means to be a human––a well-intentioned, messy, flawed, contradictory human. I really loved the personal essays in this collection. A few of the reviews dragged for me, especially when they were about something I hadn’t read or seen and/or don’t care about, but, over all, I wanted to start rereading this book as soon as I finished. I think that Gay’s version of feminism should be adopted as essential feminism. I hope it becomes mainstream feminism. Plus she made me feel better for identifying as a feminist but also loving Jay-Z.

6. Yes Please by Amy Poehler: Poehler is the best––smart, thoughtful, brutally honest, and hilarious. There were times while reading that this book that it felt rushed, as if Poehler’s agent and publisher had been thinking HEY HURRY UP WE GOT TO GET ON THIS WOMEN IN COMEDY MEMOIR BANDWAGON ASAP (see: Bossy Pants by Tina Fey, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me by Mindy Kaling, etc.) But I was willing to forgive that, and some of the chapters that felt more like filler (the lists, the haikus), just because I love Poehler so much. I might be biased though, because I think you will especially appreciate this book if you’re from the Greater Boston Area. It brought back so many memories of my teenage days at the Burlington Mall and childhood birthdays at Chadwick’s. Yes, I do love Poehler, even if I am from Lexington, and she is just “Burlington trash.” (Rachel Dratch knows what I’m talking about.)

7. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I’ve been in such a nonfiction black hole for the past two-and-a-half years, that it is always fun and refreshing when I read a novel for a change. This is such a great story, with characters I really cared about and grew to know. Plus Adichie is funny as hell and sharp and smart, and I love her commentary on race and racism in America, woven into the plot so seamlessly and thoughtfully. I get what all the fuss was about. This book is excellent.

8. Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on Their Decision Not To Have Kids, edited by Meghan Daum: I wrote a whole review of this anthology for Fiction Advocate that will go up on April 16. Stay tuned.

9. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh: This book is neurotic, weird, amazing, and perfect. Just read it. Any way I try to explain it will sound crazy––it’s not quite a graphic novel, it’s not just illustrated essays, it’s something much more. I still laugh to myself just thinking about the chapter about how dogs don’t understand moving.

10. Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter by Nina MacLaughlin: I think this book is my pick for favorite so far of 2015. I’m definitely biased because I’ve met MacLaughlin, I think she is awesome, and we also went to the same high school (good ol’ Noble & Greenough––she was class of 1997, I was class of 2006). BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT I don’t care, this book is SO FANTASTIC. Perhaps I loved it so much just because this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: how writing is all in your head, your eyes on a computer screen, how out of touch you are with actual reality, and also trying to find other work to balance out all the writing that uses a different part of your brain, that makes you feel good and happy and accomplished in another way, maybe a job that gets you outside…. MacLaughlin seems to have found the perfect balance, and has written a kick-ass book about it all. Plus, just like Jamison, MacLaughlin adds in so many interesting historical and cultural elements to her own personal story. I know all about the history of screwdrivers now!

11. If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan: This is another book written by a Nobles alumna––Farizan was class of 2003, and she was a senior when I was a freshman, and so, of course, I always thought she was super cool. Now I think she is even cooler for having written this book. This novel has a great message about staying true to who you are, despite horrific circumstances, but also about how life doesn’t always have a fairy tale ending. I was thrilled while reading it to see a realistic and thoughtful book for young adults as opposed to so much of the saccharine happily ever after YA crap out there. So much stuff marketed to young adults is dumbed down and superficial, and kids pick up on that and hate it. They can handle important, heavy subject matter, and, in fact, already think about it, even if a lot of the stuff targeting them doesn’t show it. I think it’s great that Farizan has taken intense, big issues––such as sexuality and gender identity and feminism and politics––and put them in a book for kids.

12. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: This was the essay disguised as a book. In fact, it’s actually Adichie’s famous TED Talk about feminism––expanded and edited––bound beautifully. Whoops. Again, probably a stretch to count this, but Adichie is brilliant and eloquent and every god damn person in the WORLD needs to read the 48 pages of this slim little book.

13. The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard: Currently reading this one. I’m about halfway through this collection, which every person who writes nonfiction ever has told me to read. No, I haven’t gotten to the essay “The Fourth State of Matter” yet, but I hear that’s the really good one.

As for my goal of reading a majority of books by women of color, I need to do better. Out of the twelve books I’ve finished reading, six were by women of color, though two of those were by the same woman (Adichie). As for the essay anthology (Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed), out of seventeen contributors, only three were people of color (17.6%), and saying that I’ve read 6.176 books by women of color is just pathetic in a grasping-at-straws way to hit the majority, so I’m going to let that one go. Besides, three of the seventeen contributors in that anthology were men, so if we’re splitting hairs here, in that way, I’ve also only technically read 11.824 books by women so far in 2015. Yeah. Let’s not do that.

IN SUMMARY: I’m doing okay, but I definitely could be doing a lot better.

P.S. If you can’t wait until the end of the second quarter to see what I’m reading, follow me on GoodReads.

P.P.S. This is not an April Fools Day joke.

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