Brief interviews with Women Writers of the Fantastic #7: Rachel Swirsky

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 Rachel Swirsky

Would you mind introducing yourself?

I’m Rachel Swirsky. I hold a master’s degree in fine arts in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, which I completed this spring. As far as genre schooling credits go, I went to Clarion West in 2005, and it was a pivotal experience for me. I write pieces that I’d consider messy or controversial, often with political themes. My work has appeared in Subterranean Magazine, Interzone, Weird Tales, and Fantasy Magazine, among other places. I’m also the editor of PodCastle, the world’s first audio fantasy magazine which puts reprint fiction up for free listening at http://podcastle.org.

When did you first consider yourself a serious writer?

I’m told that I announced when I was three that I was going to be an actress and a novelist, but I didn’t take up writing seriously until I began attending the University of Clarfornia at Santa Cruz as a junior. I took several writing classes there, including with feminist science fiction writer Roz Spafford, which helped me see myself as a writer. Later, when I went to Clarion West in 2005, Octavia Butler suggested to all of us that if we wanted to be successful writers, then we needed to start taking ourselves seriously. That was the point at which I stopped seeing myself as someone who would be lucky to sell a few stories, and started allowing myself larger hopes. Before that, I wouldn’t have had the courage to apply to someplace like the Iowa Writers Workshop which has an intimidating reputation, both for admitting intense writers, and also for expecting its students to be adherents of Carver-esque realism.

How would you describe your writing style?

I’m interested in things that are messy and controversial, and often political and confrontational. I don’t always write in that fashion, but it tends to be the center of where my interests lie. I believe that  writing style should suit the aims of individual stories, and so consequently I try to vary my style from piece to piece. My default voice is perhaps more dense and poetic, but I also like playing with simpler inflected character voices and sometimes even dialogue-driven scenes written in transparent prose.

Who are your strongest influences?

Numerous, of course. Octavia Butler stands out as someone whose writing I’ve always loved, and I was exceptionally lucky to have been able to study with her at Clarion West in 2005. Andy Duncan was another of my Clarion West teachers who had a large impact on my writing. I studied with Daniel Alarcon at Mills College for a semester, and he was a pretty big academic influence as well.

Some other writers whose work has inspired me: Toni Morrison, Tanith Lee, Nalo Hopkinson, Mark Danielewski, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Terry Pratchett, Gregory Maguire (Wicked is an astonishing piece of writing)… others…

Carolyn Martin Shaw, an anthropology professor of mine in college, is definitely one of my strongest influences. She’s not a creative writer by vocation (although I believe she’s written a couple of plays), but she had a strong effect on the way that I think about the world, and thus how I represent it in fiction.

What is your greatest strength as a writer?

I tend to have lots of ideas. I’ve always got more ideas than I have time to write them.

What is your biggest weakness?

I’m sure I’d answer this differently from day to day. I sometimes have difficulties with dialogue and plot. As Octavia Butler said to us at Clarion West, “Writing is hard.” Jeez, it is. And it stays hard. For me, anyway.

On this particular day, at this particular moment, I’d say my biggest frustration is with my perfectionism about language. I sometimes want to hack through pieces fifteen, twenty, more times, to try to get the words right. That process works pretty well for poetry and short pieces, but it’s hard to employ on longer projects.

What is your favorite piece out of everything that you’ve written?

Probably my favorite piece is “A Monkey Will Never Be Rid of Its Black Hands” which recently appeared in Subterranean Magazine. It’s online here: http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/winter-2008/fiction-a-monkey-will-never-be-rid-of-its-black-hands-by-rachel-swirsky/

As a woman, have you ever experienced sexism, bias or exclusion in your chosen field?

Well, one thing that occurs to me is a reaction we occasionally get to the magazine I edit, PodCastle. I’m female; my slush editor is female; we have a line-up of scheduled stories with almost exactly half male authors, half female authors, and also half male narrators, half female narrators. In short, we’re a female staff running a magazine with an almost equal gender split (last time I ran the figures, anyway).

About a month after our launch, we heard a lot of controversy about how the magazine was “by women, for women,” despite the fact that at the time our sister magazine Escape Pod had aired fourteen stories out of its last sixteen with male narrators. Recently, we were called an “estrogen-fest” by a dissatisfied commenter. It’s frustrating to me that Escape Pod can have a male editor, a male slush reader (who’s not working there right now), and air episodes with a broad skew to the male, and not receive comment about that, while PodCastle does. To me, that points pretty clearly to the fact that male is stlil considered the default, while female is othered.

To be fair, the comments about this have mostly tapered off since May, except for the “estrogen-fest” comment.

Do you think that there are some common barriers that all writers who are women face?

I agree with what Nisi Shawl wrote, but I’ll add that there are some factors that I believe prevent women from writing as much as men. The group of women seems to experience a lot of attrition between something like college writing classes and the professional world. It’s hard to know why that happens, but some of the theories I’ve heard posit that women have more trouble being taken seriously in the arts. What they do is seen as a hobby by others, and thus it becomes more difficult for them to take it seriously themselves.

Also, women tend to have less free time than men. Studies have shown that in addition to taking up work outside the home, they also tend to work a second shift of housework, not to mention childcare. I think some people tend to think of these things as elective pursuits, but really, someone has to do them, and often that’s women. Even for women who survive the hurdle of dismissiveness, the time may just not be there. I’ve sometimes seen this with married couples I know who are both writers. Over time, the men will continue to write, while the women gradually take on more of the necessary domestic work and consequently write less and less. That can happen with all the best intentions, to wonderful, eager, egalitarian-minded people. It’s a pattern that’s supported by systemic societal values. It’s easy to slip into.

Are there any common strengths that women bring to the craft of fiction?

Again, I agree with what Nisi Shawl wrote. Nick Mamatas has also made the point that in American culture, reading tends to be feminized; women make up most of the country’s readers. Consequently, it’s not really surprising that morea beginning women writers than men writers (in my experience) seem to have the excellent command of prose that can only be found among people who read voraciously. That’s not a biological difference, in my opinion, just a social one — and luckily, it’s easily remedied.

Over all, do you think that the writing and publishing communities are healthier, worse, or about the same for women writers?

I’m not sure what you’re using as your comparison point. For women than for men? Now than in the sixties? Now than in the nineteenth century? Compared to other industries?

I do believe that pervasive, systemic sexism exists, both within the field of publishing as well as outside of it. At this point, I would guess that most discrimination is probably unconscious, and related to one of two effects — 1) the studied tendency for women and men to rate something with a woman’s name attached to it as less well rendered and effective than the same piece when it has a man’s name attached to it, and 2) the ways in which sexism has, over the centuries, shaped cultural conceptions of what is good writing. For instance, our bizarre elevation of active characters paired with a fear of passive characters — I don’t think it’s coincidental that this mirrors cultural assumptions about male and female behavior.

What are your longterm career goals?

I’d like to write a novel. Long work has so far been very difficult for me, but I’m hoping to break through that barrier at some point.

What are you working on now?

I have several goals for the summer:

1) Completing several short stories and a novella that are destined for specific markets.

2) Completing enough fiction that I can put together a viable proposal for a short story collection.

3) I’m participating in the Clarion West write-a-thon, which is a project where Clarion West alums get sponsorships for marathon writing in order to raise money for the workshop. It’s sort of like a marathon using keyboards. In case anyone feels the desire to sponsor me (and donate money to the fantastic project that is Clarion West), my write-a-thon website is here – http://www.clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/RachelSwirsky.

Where can we go to learn more about you?

My website is http://rachelswirsky.com. I write a personal blog at http://velourmane.livejournal.com and sometimes participate in the feminist blog Alas, a Blog at http://amptoons.com/blog/.

Of course, I also put a lot of myself into the magazine I edit, PodCastle, including recording introductions to many of the stories. That’s at http://podcastle.org.

Where can we read your work?

I’ve had work in several print magazines and anthologies, including Interzone, Weird Tales, Subterranean: Dark Fantasy, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Fantasy 2007, Best American Fantasy 2, and so on. However, I’ve also been fortunate enough to have some work published online. Here’s a smattering:

“Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind” at Subterranean Online: http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/summer-2007/fiction-dispersed-by-the-sun-melting-in-the-wind-by-rachel-swirsky/

“Scene from a Dystopia” in Subterranean Magazine: http://www.scalzi.com/subterranean_issue_4.pdf

“Heartstrung” in audio at Pseudopod (originally printed in Interzone 210): http://pseudopod.org/2008/03/28/pseudopod-83-heartstrung/

“Mirror Images” in Fantasy Magazine: http://www.darkfantasy.org/fantasy/?p=545

“Skyscrapers” in Flashquake: http://www.flashquake.org/archive/vol6iss4/fiction/skyscrapers.html

“A Letter Never Sent” in Konundrum Engine Literary Review: http://lit.konundrum.com/prose/swirskyr_letter.php

The floor’s all yours: is there anything else that you’d like to say?

Thanks for taking the time to compose this interview! I hope my responses are at least somewhat interesting.