Am I Serious Enough For You or, More Importantly, Myself?

From a conversation posted yesterday at Tinhouse between authors Lidia Yuknavitch and Kate Zambreno:



LY: Can contemporary women writers achieve literary or artistic legitimacy? On whose terms? Toward what end? This is a question that troubles me, or a question I think should be endlessly troubled...

KZ: It troubles me too. Although I can't speak for all contemporary women writers, just myself. This new idée fixe of mine--to be taken seriously as a writer--also, to someday write a truly great work, and then I will be taken seriously. But--I don't know if I will know if a work is great, perhaps that's not something I can decide or know as the writer, and perhaps these ideas of greatness or genius are oppressive terms anyway, about approaching perfection or success, when I've always been more interested in failure.

And what does that even mean--a serious work? Sometimes I feel exquisitely that if I never wrote about femininity or feminism, about emotions, especially depression and anger, never wrote from the first-person, I would be taken seriously as a literary writer, but I keep on returning to these themes in the work. I mean, there are certainly some contemporary women writers that achieve a great deal of literary legitimacy and recognition, and occasionally in the mainstream, and I think many are incredibly deserving. But I have absolutely no misconceptions that American trade publishing is a meritocracy, and in my opinion most of the important work being written in the United States today is happening in the small press, sometimes at a very micro level, and this is because the demands of the market, especially for the massive audience of women readers, are not the best recipe for prickly and urgent literature.

The question of "what is serious work" is what really captured my attention in this exchange as it is something that I think about quite frequently with my own work. In writing about aviation I am generally always serious--it's a serious topic--and yet I do not think as a literary writer of aviation I am taken very seriously. I don't mean that people dismiss my research on this subject but rather that when writing about something perceived as technical, it is easy to dismiss an author as other than literary.

Basically, writing about aviation is considered by some as more the nuts and bolts of writing and not the MFA-type of indepth analysis that literary writers appreciate. (And I won't even get into the issue of being a woman who writes about a male-dominated field.)

As a reviewer, I am granted far more respect as serious when reviewing nonfiction for adults then writing anything about YAs or children. This does not surprise me, although I wish it did.

I have felt in the past few months, that aspects of my writing (as a reviewer) have been deemed worthy of easy dismissal by others. This has left me disappointed in those who passed such casual judgements. I do not agree with their definitions of "serious" or how one must write to be deemed worthy of the title "serious writer".

It's a term that is best expressed in the eye of the beholder, I think. Just as so many other subjective terms are.

(And for the record, how anyone could deem Zambreno or Yuknavitch as anything less than serious is impossible for me to believe.)