Women Poets on Mentorship arrives!
From Rachel Zucker (and Arielle Greenberg):
Women Poets on Mentorship is a collection of 24 essays by young women poets about living women poets that have inspired or mentored them. The essays are funny, articulate, touching, and sometimes gossipy.
From the jacket:
The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women's poetry.
We hope this anthology will be of great interest to poetry enthusiasts, feminists, readers and writers (and we hope everyone in the world fits into at least one of these categories!).
Here is the link to Amazon.
The link to the University of Iowa page.
Please buy the book and buy another for a friend. And, if you like it, consider writing us a short amazon review (we've heard that helps with sales). If you are interested in teaching the book or reviewing the book, please let me know and I can pass your request along to Iowa.
Thank you all so much!
Rachel (and Arielle)
And in case you're wondering: Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker, Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel, Miranda Field on Fanny Howe, Katie Ford on Jorie Graham, Daphne Gottlieb on the Circle of Mentorship, Matthea Harvey on Anna Rabinowitz, Kirsten Kaschock on Being Non-mentored, Joy Katz on Sharon Olds, Katy Lederer on Lyn Hejinian, Valerie MartÃnez on Joy Harjo, Erika Meitner on Rita Dove, Jennifer Moxley on Susan Howe, Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye, Mendi Lewis Obadike on Toi Derricotte, Danielle Pafunda on Susan Wheeler, Kristin Prevallet on Anne Waldman, Cin Salach on Maureen Seaton, Robyn Schiff on Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Kathy Lou Schultz on Myung Mi Kim, Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley, Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido, Elizabeth Treadwell on Paula Gunn Allen, Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton, and Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock
posted by Danielle at 3:01 PM
6 Comments:
D.
I love your piece in the book. I have been thinking about this question. You write that ' women are still raised to mother.' This is something I more or less agree with. But, what about women with disabilities who are expected not to mother -- or seen as to weak to mother. Are these women better or worse than the sterotyped woman? How do we get rid of all myths?
Love, Jen
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sheesh, post-airplane syntax! Okay, a slightly more coherent reply :).
Thanks, Jen--good point you bring up...and I suspect in some way this nasty subcategorizing of disabled women as those not adequate to motherhood serves to reinforce the bad faith, bad cultural, and bad science arguments that suggest, among other things, mothering is an innate animal skill females have by virtue of female body.
Anyhow, I don't have a ton of information about this, but I wonder if it also depends on which disability and which family, which country and which decade. And there are women with chronic illnesses, physical, or mental challenges who are celebrated when they risk their lives to achieve motherhood. I bet it has a lot to do with the social manifestation of the disability (ie, how does the average joe feel about this particular disability, how easily does the average joe pick up on its presence).
I don't think any of us women gets to be better or worse, but maybe we do get to bust the mold to the best of our various abilities? I'm sure as heck not mothering the way I was raised to do! For myth-killing, I'm hoping a batch of noise-crazy poems add to the arsenal...if we new breed of breeders are constantly laboring and producing (ha!), all that language and all them kids gotta shift the balance some.
One hopes...
And thanks for the kind words--can't wait to get MY hands on a copy of this grand anth!
xo,
D
D.
I'm so sorry I missed your reading. You have to get the antho. It's great.
I guess part of the problem with people understanding disability and the so-called disability movement is that disabilities are too various. Deaf people, for example, consider themselves a separate culture, which is arguable because they have a language.
Anyway, I'm talking about cerebral palsy, my disability. To my knowlesge, I've never been seen as a super-crip in terms of mothering. Many strangers hit me with more like -- how did you do that! And aren't your husband and kid disabled. Many people seem to believe an able-bodied man wouldn't even marry me!
All one has to do is a quick google search or look at B&N. There are thousands of books on raising kids with disabilities. I have yet to find one about a disabled mother or father.
I'm not looking for sympathy. Just to show the wider perspective.
I hope you're rested.
JB
Thanks, Jen. Yeah, I think my contributor's copy is floating around in the mail yet...I should buy extras, anyhow!
Could you write that as yet non-existent book? On mothering and/or parenting with disability? Memoir, essay collection, anthology--whatever you did, surely it'd be welcome and, yes, definitely widen the sadly narrow perspective! Not that you don't have enough projects on your plate ;), but it'd be a thrill!
I'm trying to design a women's studies class on mothering to teach somewhere down the line--would love to contact you for input granting I have a slot in which to teach it! Even a little interview would be awesome-- Ay, yi, yi, I'm a project junkie, too!
D
D.,
Yes! By all means, contact me anytime. It sounds like a great class. JB
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