Enter the Octopus

After reading Jeff VanderMeer’s post praising the work of women in fantastic literature, I thought that it might be nice to interview as many of these significant authors as possible for their take on writing, their own work and sexism in their chosen field. The following is part one of an ongoing series. Please note that each author received the same set of questions.

Interview with L. Timmel Duchamp

Would you mind introducing yourself?

Hello, I’m L. Timmel Duchamp, aka “Timmi.” I’ve been writing fiction for about thirty years. I made my first sale in 1989 and have probably had close to two million words of fiction published since then. I’ve been nominated for a lot of awards and won none. I write a fair amount of nonfiction. And I’m the publisher/editor of Aqueduct Press, which publishes the work of feminist writers– Ursula K. Le Guin, Gwyneth Jones, Vandana Singh, Wendy Walker, Nicola Griffith, Rebecca Ore, Nisi Shawl, Kelley Eskridge, Eleanor Arnason, and many others.

In 1981, after I’d finished the first novel I wrote (begun as a joke, to entertain my friends and fellow graduate students in History). My pleasure and excitement in learning to write fiction as well as the gratification of seeing so many people caught up in the world I had conjured in that novel, impelled me to put all else aside (including my dissertation and academic career) and dedicate myself to writing fiction. I entered an autodidactic apprenticeship, which unexpectedly ended in Fall 1984, when I wrote the first novel of the Marq’ssan Cycle.

Dense and layered. Sensual. Playful. Heavily reliant on images for expressing what cannot be directly communicated.

I’ll limit myself to nine: Dorothy Richardson, whose writing taught me about shifting levels of consciousness and focus in writing narrative with viewpoint characters as well as how to use observations about setting as expressions of affect; Virginia Woolf and Hélène Cixous, whose writing taught me that sentences need to have not only texture and rhythm but also shape; Isak Dinesen and Grace Paley, whose writing taught me how to structure short fiction; Joanna Russ and Monique Wittig, whose writing taught me to creatively address the problem of agency for women characters; Octavia E. Butler, whose writing taught me that it’s possible to depict strong women who though they cannot overcome overwhelming circumstances nevertheless can achieve more than mere survival; and last but not least, Samuel R. Delany, whose writing taught me not only how to convey complex sociological and political information about my characters and their world without resorting to infodumps but also that intelligently realized characters often lack such information, and that that lack can make a tremendous difference both in how they can or can’t communicate with others and in the options available to them.

Delivering affect.

Figuring out when to stop scraping away the details that get in the way of readers creating their own versions of the
stories I’m telling.

Usually, it’s whatever I’m working on at the moment.

I don’t think I can answer that question as written, because the issue of the biases women writers face is extremely
complicated. Part of the problem, as Virginia Woolf noted almost a century ago, is that women tend to engage with a literary tradition that few men recognize, and tend to write from a perspective and address subjects that aren’t fully intelligible– or interesting– to many male readers. This problem continues today. It is a well-known fact that while most women who read for pleasure read work by both men and women, most men who read for pleasure read work mainly by men. As a result, many of the conventions and tropes women writers engage with and challenge are unfamiliar to most male readers. And so they don’t get what’s interesting in work by women. I think this discrepancy has become more apparent and increasingly frustrating (and baffling) to younger women writing because– unlike someone my age– they’ve grown up in a world in which overt sexism is simply not acceptable.

I don’t think it’s possible to make generalizations about “all” women. But I do believe that most writers who are white women face two kinds of barriers that writers who are middle-class white men usually don’t face. The first kind of barrier concerns the obstacles women must face to taking themselves seriously as writers. These obstacles may be only subtly present and barely recognizable in their social reality, but they are typically strongly reinforced within, through internalization of the pervasive social attitudes that tell women that their only really serious job in the world is taking care of other people as well as the spoken and unspoken belief that only men can be great artists: adding up to the general attitude that therefore women ought not to squander the time and energy that rightly belongs to their loved ones. Women writers face a second kind of barrier: difficulty achieving the kind of traction that their male colleagues often take for granted. When the work of women writers is hailed for its excellence, it is always, perhaps unconsciously, viewed as an exception. (Literary history is filled with such forgotten exceptions.) Perhaps the biggest question of all is when the perception of heft and integrity and originality that has always been accorded to important male writers will be granted to important women writers as well and not vanish within a few years after the end of their writing lives.

Since there are as many mediocre women writers as men writers, I’m not exactly sure what you mean. At their best, women often write aslant, as the feminist critic Jane Marcus has noted. (Many would say this is a weakness, of course, since it is what often renders good women writers unintelligible to some male readers.) And at their best, they often (though not inevitably) draw on an emotional intelligence that many (though certainly not all) men lack.

The same as what? I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.

As a writers: to write many more novels, stories, and essays. As a publisher: to help make interesting writing by women more widely intelligible.

A novel with the working title “Deep Story.” I’ve committed myself to trying to finish it in the next six weeks, during Clarion West’s “Write-a-thon.” (For anyone interested in sponsoring me, please see my website or Clarion West ’s write-a-thon page.)

Where can we go to learn more about you?

You can find out more about my me by reading the often lengthy interviews I’ve linked to on my website <http://ltimmel.home.mindspring.com>, by checking out my WisCon 2008 GoH speech (also available on my website), and by reading my blog posts at Ambling Along the Aqueduct, the Aqueduct Press blog <http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com>, where I post often.

Some of it is available for free download on my website <http://ltimmel.home.mindspring.com>. Fantastic Metropolis has two of my stories in its archives. Several novels an a collection of short fiction are currently in print. (Information about these and where to purchase them is also available on my website.)

I’d like to urge men who read fiction almost exclusively written by men to broaden their horizons and stretch their
imaginations by making an effort to read work by interesting women writers. (Jeff’s well-known and lesser-known lists of his favorite women fantasists would be a good place to start.) And for those who haven’t been reading work by women for very long, I’d urge them to sample as widely and broadly as they can. The more work by women a man reads, the more he will “get” stuff that was previously unintelligible (and therefore seemingly uninteresting). I’m not saying you have to start from Sappho, Christine de Pisan, Margaret Cavendish, Madame de Lafayette, and Fanny Burney and work on from there. But please do realize that these writers have just as much to say as Homer, Boccaccio, Spenser, de Laclos, and Richardson.