Believing in Literature

I have always passionately loved good books—good stories and beautiful writing, and most of all, books that seemed to me to be intrinsically important, books that told the truth, painful truths sometimes, in a voice that made eloquent the need for human justice. That is what I have meant when I have used the word literature. It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do—which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

All my life I have hated clichés, the clichés applied to people like me and those I love. Every time I pick up a book that purports to be about either poor people or queers or Southern women, I do so with a conscious anxiety, an awareness that the books about us have often been cruel, small, and false. I have wanted our lives taken seriously and represented fully—with power and honesty and sympathy—to be hated or loved, or to terrify and obsess, but to be real, to have the power of the whole and the complex. I have never wanted politically correct parables made out of my grief, simple-minded rote speeches made from my rage, simplifications that reduce me to cardboard dimensions. But mostly that is what I have found. We are the ones they make fiction of—we queer and disenfranchised and female—and we have the right to demand our full, nasty, complicated lives, if only to justify all the times our reality has been stolen, mismade, and dishonored.

That our true stories may be violent, distasteful, painful, stunning, and haunting, I do not doubt. But our true stories will be literature. No one will be able to forget them, and though it will not always make us happy to read of the dark and dangerous places in our lives, the impact of our reality is the best we can ask of our literature.

Literature, and my own dream of writing, has shaped my system of belief—a kind of atheist’s religion. I gave up God and the church early on, choosing instead to place all my hopes in direct-action politics. But the backbone of my convictions has been a belief in the progress of human society as demonstrated in its fiction. Even as a girl I believed that our writing was better than we were. There were, after all, those many novels of good and evil, of working-class children shown to be valuable and sympathetic human beings, of social criticism and subtle education—books that insisted we could be better than we were. I used my belief in the power of good writing as a way of giving meaning to some of the injustices I saw around me.

When I was very young, still in high school, I thought about writing the way Fay Weldon outlined in her essay, “The City of Imagination,” in Letters to My Niece on First Reading Jane Austen. I imagined that Literature was, as she named it, a city with many districts, or was like a great library of the human mind that included all the books ever written. But what was most important was the enormous diversity contained in that library of the mind, that imaginary city. I cruised that city and dreamed of being part of it, but I was fearful that anything I wrote would be relegated to unimportance—no matter how finely crafted my writing might be, no matter how hard I worked and how much I risked. I knew I was a lesbian, and I believed that meant I would always be a stranger in the city—unless I performed the self-defeating trick of disguising my imagination, hiding my class origin and sexual orientation, writing, perhaps, a comic novel about the poor or the sexually dysfunctional. If that was the only way in, it made sense to me how many of the writers I loved drank or did drugs or went slowly crazy, trying to appear to be something they were not. It was enough to convince me that there was no use in writing at all.

When feminism exploded in my life, it gave me a vision of the world totally different from everything I had ever assumed or hoped. The concept of a feminist literature offered the possibility of pride in my sexuality. It saved me from either giving up writing entirely, or the worse prospect of writing lies in order to achieve some measure of grudging acceptance. But at the same time, Feminism destroyed all my illusions about Literature. Feminism revealed the city as an armed compound to which I would never be admitted. It forced me to understand, suddenly and completely, that literature was written by men, judged by men. The city itself was a city of Man, a male mind even when housed in a female body. If that was so, all my assumptions about the worth of writing, particularly working-class writing, were false. Literature was a lie, a system of lies, the creation of liars, some of them sincere and unaware of the lies they retold, but all acting in the service of a Great Lie—what the system itself labeled Universal Truth. If that truth erased me and all those like me, then my hopes to change the world through writing were illusions. I lost my faith. I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.

I think many lesbian and feminist writers my age had a similar experience. The realizations of feminist criticism made me feel as if the very ground on which I stood had become unsteady. Some of that shake-up was welcome and hopeful, but it also meant I had to make a kind of life raft for myself out of political conviction, which is why I desperately needed a feminist community and so feared being driven out of the one I found. I know many other women who felt the same way, who grew up in poverty and got their ideas of what might be possible from novels of social criticism, believing those books were about us even when they were obviously not. What the feminist critique of patriarchal literature meant was not only that all we had believed about the power of writing to change the world was not possible, but that to be true to our own vision, we had to create a new canon, a new literature. Believing in literature—a feminist literature—became a reason to spend my life in that pursuit.

There are times I have wondered if that loss of faith was really generational, or only my own. I have seen evidence of a similar attitude in the writing of many working-class lesbians who are my age peers, the sense of having been driven out of the garden of life, and a painful pride in that exile though still mourning the dream of worth and meaning. The feminist small press movement was created out of that failed belief and the hope of reestablishing a literature that we could believe in. Daughters, Inc., Know, Inc., Diana Press, Amazon Quarterly, Quest, Conditions … right down to OUT/LOOK. All those magazines and presses—the ones I have worked with and supported even when I found some of the writing tedious or embarrassing—were begun in that spirit of rejecting the false ideal for a true one. This was a very mixed enterprise at its core, because creating honest work in which we did not have to mask our actual experiences, or our sexuality and gender, was absolutely the right thing to do, but rejecting the established literary canon was not simple, and throwing out the patriarchy put so much else in question. Many of us lost all sense of what could be said to be good or bad writing, or how to think about being writers while bypassing the presses, grants, and teaching programs that might have helped us devote the majority of our time to writing, to creating a body of work.

The difficulty faced by lesbian and feminist writers of my generation becomes somewhat more understandable if we think about the fact that almost no lesbian-feminist writer my age was able to make a living as a writer. Most of us wrote late at night after exhausting and demanding day jobs, after evenings and weekends of political activism, meetings, and demonstrations. Most of us also devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to creating presses and journals that embodied our political ideals, giving up the time and energy we might have used to actually do our own writing. During my involvement with Quest, I wrote one article. The rest of my writing time was given over to grant applications and fund-raising letters. I did a little better with Conditions, beginning to actually publish short stories, but the vast majority of work I did there was editing other people’s writing and again, writing grants and raising money. Imagine how few paintings or sculptures would be created if the artists all had to collectively organize the creation of canvas and paint, build and staff the galleries, and turn back all the money earned from sales into the maintenance of the system. Add to that the difficulty of creating completely new philosophies about what would be suitable subjects for art, what approaches would be valid for artists to take to their work, who, in fact, would be allowed to say what was valuable and what was not, or more tellingly, what could be sold and to whom. Imagine that system and you have the outlines of some of the difficulties faced by lesbian writers of my generation.

As a writer, I think I lost at least a decade in which I might have done more significant work because I had no independent sense of my work’s worth. If Literature was a dishonest system by which the work of mediocre men and women could be praised for how it fit into a belief system that devalued women, queers, people of color, and the poor, then how could I try to become part of it? Worse, how could I judge any piece of writing, how could I know what was good or bad, worthwhile or a waste of time? To write for that system was to cooperate in your own destruction, certainly in your misrepresentation. I never imagined that what we were creating was also limited, that it, too, reflected an unrealistic or dishonest vision. But that’s what we did, at least in part, making an ethical system that insists a lightweight romance has the same worth as a serious piece of fiction, that there is no good or bad, no “objective” craft or standards of excellence.

I began to teach because I had something I wanted to say, opinions that seemed to me rare and important and arguable. I wanted to be part of the conversation I saw going on all around, the one about the meaning and use of writing. The first literature classes I taught were not-for-credit workshops in a continuing education program in Tallahassee, Florida. When I moved to Washington, D.C. to work on Quest in 1975, I volunteered to help teach similar workshops through the women’s center, and in Brooklyn in 1980 I joined with some of the women of Conditions to participate in a series of classes organized to specifically examine class and race issues in writing. Working as an editor, talking with other lesbian and gay writers, arguing about how fiction relates to real life—all of that helped me to systematically work out what I truly believed about literature, about writing, about its use and meaning, and the problematic relationship of writing to literature.

Starting in 1988 in San Francisco, I began to teach writing workshops because it was one of the ways I could earn rent and grocery money without taking a full-time job and still be able to write as much as possible. But teaching full time taught me how much I loved teaching itself, at least teaching writing, and how good I could be at it. Sometimes my writing classes gave me a great deal more than rent or groceries; sometimes they gave me a reason to believe in writing itself.

If you want to write good fiction, I am convinced you have to first decide what that means. This is what I always I tell my students. They think I’m being obvious at the outset, and that the exercise is a waste of time, as it could be if I did not require that they apply their newly determined standards to their own work. Figure it out for yourself, I tell them. Your lovers will try to make you feel good, your friends will just lie, and your critics can only be trusted so far as they have in mind the same standards and goals that you do.

I have used one exercise in every writing class that is designed to provoke the students into thinking about what they really believe about the use of literature. In the beginning, I did not realize how much it would also challenge my own convictions. I require my students to spend the first weeks collecting examples of stories they can categorically label good and bad. I make them spend those weeks researching and arguing, exchanging favorite stories, and talking about what they have actually read, not pretend to have read. I want them to be excited and inspired by sharing stories they love, and to learn to read critically at the same time, to begin to see the qualities that make a story good and determine for themselves what makes a story bad. Near the end of the class they are asked to bring in what they think is the best and worst story they have ever read, along with a list of what constitutes a good story, and what a bad one, and to support their ideas from their examples. I tell my students to keep in mind that all such judgments, including those about craft and technique, are both passionately subjective and slyly political.

The difficult thing about this exercise is that young writers love to talk about bad writing, to make catty jokes about this writer or that, but only so long as none of that nastiness is turned on them. It is always a struggle to get students to confront what is flawed in their stories without losing heart for the struggles of writing, to help them develop a critical standard without destroying their confidence in their own work, or what their work can become. I encourage young writers to find truly remarkable work by people like them, writers who share something of their background or core identity, because I have discovered that every young writer fears that they and their community are the ones who are not as good as the more successful mainstream writing community. I prod young lesbians and gay men to find work by other queers from the small and experimental presses. Then I try to make them think about what they could be writing that they haven’t even thought about before. They become depressed and scared when it is difficult for them to locate queer stories they believe are really good, but I am ruthless about making them see what hides behind some of their easy assumptions about the nature of good literature. Sometimes I feel like a literary evangelist, preaching the gospel of truth and craft. I tell them they are the generation that might be able to do something truly different, write the stories that future readers will call unqualifiedly good, but only if they understand what can make that possible, and always, that part of the struggle is a necessity to learn their own history.

In one of my most extraordinary classes the exercise worked better than I had hoped when one of the women brought in a “best” selection that was another woman’s choice for “worst.” The situation was made more difficult for me because her bad story was one I loved, a painful but beautifully written account of female survival after rape in a wilderness setting. It was bad, said my student, because of how well-written and carefully done it was. It stayed in her mind, disturbed her, made her nervous and unhappy every time she went into the woods. She didn’t want those ideas in her head, had enough violence and struggle in her life, enough bad thoughts to confront all the time. I understood exactly what she was saying. She was, after all, a lesbian-feminist activist of my generation, and both of us were familiar with the kind of feminist literary criticism that supported her response to the story. But many of the students were younger and frankly confused.

Subjective, I reminded myself then. We had agreed that essentially judgments about fiction are subjective—mine as well as my students’. But the storyteller seized up inside me. I thought of my stories, my characters, the albino child I murdered in “Gospel Song,” the gay man who kills his lover in “Interesting Death,” the little girl who tries to seduce her uncle in “Private Rituals.” Bad characters, bad acts, bad thoughts—as well-written as I can make them because I want my people to be believable, my stories to haunt and obsess my readers. I want, in fact, to startle my readers, shock and terrify sometimes, to fascinate and surprise. To show them something they have not imagined, people and tales they will feel strongly about in spite of themselves, or what they would prefer to feel, or not feel. I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable, to make my ideas live, my memories sing, and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer’s lust, and I know that the author of that “bad” story felt it too. We all do, and if we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments.

Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter—my own nakedness or the grief of the reader?

My students are invariably determined that their stories will be powerful, effective, crafted, and unforgettable, not the crap that so embarrasses them. “Uh-huh,” I nod at them, not wanting to be patronizing but remembering when I was twenty-four and determined to start my own magazine, to change how people thought about women, poor people, lesbians, and literature itself. Maybe it will be different in their lifetimes, I think, though part of me does believe it is different already. But more is possible than has yet been accomplished, and what I have done with my students is plant a seed that I expect to blossom in a new generation.

Once in a while one of my students will ask me, “Why have there been no great lesbian novels?” I do not pretend that they are wrong, do not tell them how many of the great writers of history were lesbians. They and I know that a lesbian author does not necessarily write a lesbian novel. Most often I simply disagree and offer a list of what I believe to be good lesbian writing. It is remarkable to me that as soon as I describe some wonderful story as being by a lesbian, there is always someone who wants to argue whether the individual involved really deserves that label. I no longer participate in this pointless argument. I feel that as a lesbian I have a perfect right to identify some writing as lesbian regardless of whether the academy or contemporary political theorists would agree with me.

What I find much more interesting is that so many of my gay and lesbian and feminist students are unaware of their own community’s history. They may have read Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, On Our Backs, or various ’zines, and joke about any magazine that could publish such trivial fiction, believing the magazines contemptible because they do not edit badly written polemics and true confessions. But few of them know anything about the ideology that made many of us in the 1970s abandon the existing literary criterion to create our own.

We believed that editing itself was a political act, and we questioned what was silenced when raw and rough work by women outside the accepted literary canon was rewritten or edited in such a way that the authentic voices were erased. My students have no sense of how important it was to let real women tell their stories in their own words. I try to explain, drawing their attention to ethnographies and oral histories, techniques that reveal what is so rarely shown in traditionally edited fiction—powerful, unusual voices not recognized by the mainstream. I tell them how much could not be published or even written before the creation of the queer and lesbian presses which honored that politic. I bring in old copies of Daughters books, not Rubyfruit Jungle, which they know, but The True Story of a Drunken Mother by Nancy Hall, which mostly they haven’t seen. I make it personal and tell them bluntly that I would never have begun to write anything of worth without the example of those presses and magazines reassuring me that my life, and my family’s life, was a fit subject for literature.

As I drag my poor students through my own version of the history of lesbian and gay publishing, I am painfully aware that the arguments I make—that I pretend are so clear and obvious—are still completely unresolved. I pretend to my students that there is no question about the value of writing, even though I know I have gone back and forth from believing totally in it to being convinced that books never really change anything and are only published if they don’t offend people’s dearly held prejudices too much. So affecting confidence, I still worry about what I truly believe about literature and my writing.

Throughout my work with the lesbian and gay, feminist, and small press movements, I went on reading the enemy—mainstream literature—with a sense of guilt and uncertainty that I might be in some way poisoning my mind, and wondering, worrying, trying to develop some sense of worth outside purely political judgments. I felt like an apostate who still mumbles prayers in moments of crisis. I wanted to hear again the equivalent of the still, small voice of God telling me: Yes, Dorothy, books are important. Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning. Even outcasts can write great books. I wanted to be told that it is only the form that has failed, that the content was still there—like a Catholic who returns to God but never the church.

The result has been that after years of apostasy, I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of the church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth. The academy is the market-university courses in contemporary literature that never get past Faulkner, reviewers who pepper their opinions with the ideas of the great men, and editors who think something is good because it says the same thing everyone has always said. Literature is the lie that tells the truth, that shows us human beings in pain and makes us love them, and does so in a spirit of honest revelation. That’s radical enough, and more effective than only publishing unedited oral history. It is the stance I assumed when I decided I could not live without writing fiction and trying to publish it for the widest possible audience. It is the stance I maintain as I try to make a living by writing, supplemented with teaching, and to publish with both a mainstream publishing house and a small lesbian press. What has been extraordinarily educational and difficult to accept these past few years of doing both has been the recognition that the distinction between the two processes is nowhere near as simple or as easily categorized as I had once thought.

In 1989, when I made the decision to take my novel Bastard Out of Carolina to a mainstream press, I did so in part because I did not believe I could finish it without financial help. I was broke, sick, and exhausted. My vision had become so bad I could no longer assume I could go back at any time to doing computer work or part-time clerical jobs. I had to either find a completely new way to make a living and devote myself to that enterprise, or accept the fact that I was going to have to try to get an advance that would buy me at least two years to finish the book. Finally, I also knew that this book had become so important to me that I had to finish it, even if it meant doing something I had never assumed I would do. Reluctantly, I told Nancy Bereano what I was doing with Bastard, and then approached a friend to ask him to act as my agent. I had never worked with an agent before, but all my political convictions convinced me I could not trust mainstream presses and did not know enough to be able to deal with them. In fact, I learned while doing journalism in New York in the 1980s that I was terrible at the business end of writing, rotten at understanding the arcane language of contracts. In some ways my worst fears were realized. Selling a manuscript to strangers is scary.

What most surprised me, however, was learning that mainstream publishing was not a monolith, and finding there not only people who believed in literature the way I did, but lesbians and gay men who worked within mainstream publishing because of their belief in the importance of good writing and how it can change the world. Mostly younger, and without my experience of the lesbian and gay small presses, they talked in much the same way as I did about their own convictions, the jobs they took that demanded long hours and paid very poorly but let them work, at least in part, with writing and writers they felt vindicated their sacrifices. Talking to those men and women shook up a lot of my assumptions, particularly when I began to work with heterosexuals who did not seem uniformly homophobic or deluded or crassly obsessed with getting rich as quickly as possible. I found within mainstream publishing a great many sincere and hopeful people of conviction and high standards who forced me to reexamine some of my most ingrained prejudices. If I was going to continue to reject the ideology and standards of mainstream literature, I had to become a lot more clear and specific about the distinction between the patriarchal literature I had been trying to challenge all my life and the good-hearted individuals I encountered within those institutions.

As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying: her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. That telling the truth—your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own—was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts. Like Kate Millett, I knew that what I wanted to do as a lesbian and a feminist writer was to remake the world into a place where the truth would be hallowed, not held in contempt, where silence would be impossible.

Sometimes it seems that all I want to add to her philosophy is the significance of craft, a restatement of the importance of deeply felt, powerful writing versus a concentration on ethnography, or even a political concentration on adding certain information to the canon—information about our real lives that would make it possible for lesbians, working-class runaways, incest survivors, and stigmatized and vilified social outlaws to recognize themselves and their experiences. If I throw everything out and start over without rhetoric or a body of theory behind my words, I am left with the simple fact that what I want as a writer is to be able to tell the truth so well and so powerfully that it will have to be heard, understood, and acted on. It’s why I have worked for years on lesbian, feminist, and gay publishing, for no money and without much hope, and why my greatest sorrow has been watching young writers do less than their best because they have no concept of what good writing can be and what it can accomplish.

I started this whole process—forcing my students’ discussion of the good and the bad—in order to work on my own judgment, to hold it up to outside view. I can take nothing for granted with these twenty-year-olds, and there is always at least one old-line feminist there to keep me honest, to ask why and make me say out loud all the things I have questioned and tried to understand. Sometimes it helps a lot. Sometimes it drives me back down inside myself, convincing me all over again that Literature belongs to the Other—either the recognized institutions or my innocent students who have never known my self-conscious sense of sin, my old loss of faith. They question so little, don’t even know they have a faith to lose. There are times I look at my writing and despair. I cannot always make it the story I think should be told, cannot make it an affirmation or anything predictable or easy or sometimes even explainable. The story tells itself, banal or not. What, then, is the point of literary criticism that tells writers what they should be writing rather than addressing what is on the page?

The novel I am working on now seems to be driving me more crazy in the actual writing of it than it ever did when I was trying to get around to the writing of it. I don’t understand if it is just me or the process itself, since many other writers I have talked to are noncommunicative about the work of writing itself. Everyone discusses day jobs, teaching, what they read, music, being interviewed, groups they work with, things they want to do when this project is finished.

But over here, I am halfway done with the thing and feel like I have nothing, know nothing, am nothing. Can’t sleep, and part of the time I can’t even work, staying up till 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. Thinking. About what, people ask, the book? I stare blankly, sometimes unable to explain and other times too embarrassed. I think about the book, yes, but also about my childhood, my family, and about sex, violence, what people will ask me when they read this book, about my ex-girlfriends and what they will say, about my hips and how wide they have become, my eyesight that is steadily growing worse, the friends who have somehow become strangers, even enemies, the friends who have died without ever managing to do the things they wanted to do, how old I have gotten not recognizing that time was actually passing, about why I am a lesbian and not heterosexual, about children and whether the kind of writing I do will endanger my relationship to my son—allow someone to take him away from me or accuse me of being a bad mother—and about all the things I was not told as a child that I had to make up for myself. When I am writing I sink down into myself, my memory, dreams, shames, and terrors. I answer questions no one has asked but me, avoid issues no one else has raised, and puzzle out just where my responsibility to the real begins and ends. Morality and ethics are the heart of what I fear, that I might fail in one or the other, that people like me cannot help but fail to show true ethical insight or moral concern. Then I turn my head and fall into the story, and all that thinking becomes background to the novel writing itself, the voices that are only partly my own. What I can tell my students is that the theory and philosophy they take so seriously and pick apart with such angst and determination is still only accompaniment to the work of writing, and that process, thankfully, no matter what they may imagine, is still not subject to rational determined construction.

A few years ago I gave a copy of a piece of “fiction” I had written about incest and adult sexual desire to a friend of mine, a respected feminist editor and activist. “What,” she asked me, “do you want from me about this? An editorial response, a personal one, literary or political?” I did not know what to say to her, never having thought about sorting out reading in that way. Certainly, I wanted my story to move her, to show her something about incest survivors, something previously unimaginable and astounding—and not actually just one thing either, as I did not want one thing from her. The piece had not been easy for me, not simple to write or think about afterward. It had walked so close to my own personal history, my nightsweats, shame, and stubborn endurance. What did I want? I wanted the thing all writers want—for the world to break open in response to my story. I wanted to be understood finally for who I believe myself to be, for the difficulty and grief of using my own pain to be justified. I wanted my story to be unique and yet part of something greater than myself. I wanted to be seen for who I am and still appreciated—not denied, not simplified, not lied about or refused or minimized. The same thing I have always wanted.

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations. Absurd, arrogant, and presumptuous to imagine that fiction could manage that—even the fiction I write which is never wholly fictive. I change things. I lie. I embroider, make over, and reuse the truth of my life, my family, lovers, and friends. Acknowledging this, I make no apologies, knowing that what I create is as crafted and deliberate as the work of any other poet, novelist, or short story writer. I choose what to tell and what to conceal. I design and calculate the impact I want to have. When I sit down to make my stories I know very well that I want to take the reader by the throat, break her heart, and heal it again. With that intention I cannot sort out myself, say this part is for the theorist, this for the poet, this for the editor, and this for the wayward ethnographer who only wants to document my experience.

“Tell me what you really think,” I told my friend. “Be personal. Be honest.” Part of me wanted to whisper, Take it seriously, but be kind. I did not say that out loud, however. I could not admit to my friend how truly terrified I was that my story did none of what I had wanted—not and be true to the standard I have set for myself. Writing terrible stories has meaning only if we hold ourselves to the same standard we set for our readers. Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate. It is the whisper of death and denial. Writing is an act that claims courage and meaning, and turns back denial, breaks open fear, and heals me as it makes possible some measure of healing for all those like me.

Some things never change. There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.