FIELD REPORT: Lying in a Ditch on a Stormy Day: on submission and women and artmaking

March 12, 2011

[first published here in slightly different, abbreviated form on February 10, 2011 on the Catalysis Projects blog.]

When I was a teenager, some fortuitous creature slid me a copy of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”

Since then, I’ve been mesmerized by the indefatigable pursuit for a practical space for private creation and cogitation, with a door that locks. My first studio was the lower limb of an apple tree – when I got older and heavier I graduated to a maple tree – then a steamer trunk, a closet, a semi-abandoned sweatshop, my lap, the bathtub, back to the wall on a hallway floor.

Nowadays my studio is located on an upper floor in a 1920s building in downtown Los Angeles, with huge chickenwired windows peeking into the bleached out well of a courtyard. I have always considered chickens to be my muses: like many of my most beloved beings and a large percentage of disposable humanity, chickens have wings but cannot fly, are largely underestimated, and many exist confined to institutions where their gifts and beauty go unrecognized.  They find scraps in the dirt, yet somehow bear eggs from dust and stones. There is a majesty in that.

Perhaps it is the chicken wire windows of my studio that draw me into this vista with fantasies of transcendence.

A studio is a great place for scraps. A great place for conjuring eggs from dust and dirt.  The studio is the manure pile in the slaughterhouse of art: mostly shit and indignity, but very rich in nutrients.

My studio view is all soot stains and a century of half-articulated smog. Cool hues of concrete and charcoal asphalt. A monochrome obstructed light. All the chemicals are in flux: every visible surface is oxidizing, peeling, rusting, dissolving. Somehow, I find this galvanic activity very exciting.

It’s because of Virginia. Her command for studio is unconventional:

“Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch.”

Required qualities in a studio: confusion. Height. Fury and indifference. Great clouds ever-changing. The smell of sulphur. Everything sinister and lost. Broken off. Bowled up.

And I forgotten. Perhaps that is the most important part – the humility of beginning with scraps and growing shoots from the muck. Of finding promise and perhaps transcendence in ignomy and struggle and mistake: the fecund darkness of living invisibly underground.

Yet – next to me on my workdesk is a glorious bit of deliciousness. It’s a rejection letter sent to Gertrude Stein by a publisher.

I think it’s very much appropriate this week, when VIDA released its new report about the endemic bigotry in “the publishing industry,” and the publishing industry responded that women just won’t submit.

As the Guardian writes, “The gender imbalance at the heart of the British and American and indeed global literary establishment has been laid bare by a new study confirming that leading literary magazines focus their review coverage on books written by men, and commission more men than women to write about them.”

In essence, women are writing, but their work is not seeing the light of day in major magazines, including Tin House, where my own work has been published. Then again, many publishers later confess they are startled to learn the name Quintan is ultimately attached to a woman.  As though I’ve pulled off some expert con.

It takes a whole different kind of con within the industrialized publishing business to propel the words of men into the spotlight, and the words of women to the charnel house.

One retort to the VIDA report – made by smug and odious editor Peter Stothard of the Times Literary Supplement, suggested that in general women don’t read at a very high level and furthermore don’t know how to read quality literature, so why allow them to review quality books?

I offer him a sulphurous and sinister “screw you.”

Guardian books editor Claire Armitstead writes: “My own feeling is that there is an issue of confidence among women writers.” Hm. In a facebook chat group, Tin House editor Rob Spillman suggests that men feel more empowered to send their submissions to him directly, whereas women send their work through the official submission channels, where it’s more likely to be delayed and overlooked. He suggests that men will think a half-baked story is glorious, send it in, and wake up to find it lauded and laureled and awarded – while their female counterparts are still dithering about the semicolon.

It’s women’s fault, they say. Women should submit more.

Submission. Since I first began teaching women writers, I suggested that submission is never the order of the day.

So must we believe that women don’t advance as artists because we don’t submit enough? To lowered odds? To an endemic segregation? How much submission is enough? How low must we go?

They mean, of course, submit our work to publishers. Right. What a thoughtful reminder not to keep our little dreams locked away in our hope chests with our tampons, ragdolls and cooking aprons.

These are tired, un-credible alibis in the editor’s quest for misogynistic absolution – “some of my favorite writers are women! my daughter is a woman! I used to like L7!” – publishing is still a segregated industry, with women writers consigned to women readers, and the male writer deemed best at representing the literary expression of humanity.

But what about chickens and institutions, eggs and dust and ignomy? What about lying in that ditch on a stormy day. What about this idea of women artists and submission.

It’s important to “submit” work. Without being submissive. Gertrude Stein didn’t get where she got by listening to fools like Arthur C. Fifield, whose role in advancing literature is surely as pathetic as the creature at the Times Literary Supplement. She created her own universe, her own world – conjured it and make it happen.

Much like a chicken creates an egg from dust and scraps.

Shortly after I read A Room of One’s Own, someone gave me Alice Walker’s retort, with her call for all women (not only wealthy white women) to have studio space. Today is her birthday, and her consistent efforts to get all women to the table is especially resonant.

Let’s have all the chickens out of the slaughterhouses and into studios.

From within the fury and bowled up sulphurous confusion of the studio, it’s good to be forgotten, but only while mucking around in the manure pile. Only while making roots and sprouts and shoots and seeds.

Studios should be locked and then unlocked. When the work is done, send it out, ladies. Push it out with all the deep-sinewed muscles of determined gut.

Afterwards, let’s send all the chickens out into the street.

I love the ridicule of this rejection letter, sent in derisive rebuke of Ms. Stein, who shouted her poems into the streets of Paris unabashed, furious and sinister and helter-skelter. And look where it propelled us.

Back to the studio, back to the stink of sulphur and the confusion, the height, the indifference, and the fury.