Walter E. Washington Convention Center | February 10, 2017

Episode 143: Double Bind: Women Writers on Ambition

(Pam Houston, Erika Sanchez, Claire Vaye Watkins, Hawa Allen) A woman must be ambitious in order to have a meaningful career in the arts. But ambition in women is often seen as un-feminine, egoistic, and aggressive rather than crucial to great work and identity. Until recently, no conversation has taken place to help women navigate this pervasive but unspoken double bind. On this panel, women across diverse backgrounds genres provide both stories from the trenches and practical strategies for progressing in the arts, academia, and beyond.

Published Date: May 17, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:05):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2017 A W P conference in Washington dc. The recording features Beth and Patrick, Pam Houston, how Allen and Clavey Watkins. You will now hear Beth and Patrick provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:30):

Thank you all so much for being here this afternoon. We have some pretty tough competition and I really am glad you came here to be with us because it's a very important topic. But just to speak about height for a moment, the true story about, I saw Claire with her child on her hip and said to someone next to me who was very tall, didn't understand what it's like to be a short person. Who is that darling little person thinking I was going to learn the name of Claire's child and she said, oh, that's Claire Van Watkins writers. So I just wanted to say hello. You might've been expecting Robin Rom, the editor of Double Bind Women Writers on Ambition, which is coming out from Live right in April. And I just wanted to tell you all before I introduce myself and our panelists, that the Norton Booth does have some res of this.

Speaker 2 (00:01:23):

So after this panel, if you're interested and you are very, very good and very kind to them, they may give you one and I highly recommend going for that opportunity. And so you can get caught up on all of this. My name is Beth Ann Patrick. I'm subbing in for Robin, the editor and also an esteemed colleague. I'm based here in dc. I'm a writer and author and a critic. I'm on the National book Critic Circle board. I have my latest book app was called The Books That Changed Our Lives. It's an anthology of interviews I did with people about books that changed their lives. What a surprise. But here I am today with these four women authors and women writers to talk about this very naughty problem of ambition. I thought when I was coming over, ambition takes so many forms. Does the scarf make my ambition look fat? Another true story, when I was doing some book events last year for this new book, I tweeted one day, I think I'm turning into Fran Liebowitz. I just bought cowboy boots in a really nice tuxedo jacket and someone responded, or maybe you're turning into Pan Houston.

Speaker 2 (00:02:33):

And so there are so many layers that go into what makes up ambition. And what I want to do is introduce our four panelists and then have each of them talk to you a little bit about what their essay in this collection was like. And I'm going to start also by telling you about Robin and then telling you a little bit about this collection. Robin Rom's short story collection. The Mother Garden was a finalist for the Penn U Ss A prize. Her memoir, the Mercy Papers won a New York Times notable book of the year. She's writing and curating an essay collection Double Bind, she's done and she's on the faculty of Warren Wilson's Low residency program. And Double Bind is a collection of pieces by women, mostly just writers and authors. There is a butcher story in here as well. That's very cool. And what struck me when I got the book and read it is how different all of these stories are.

Speaker 2 (00:03:31):

That's one of the things we're going to talk about. These are not how to guides to becoming a famous author or how to become a teacher or anything like that. These are very personal stories about definitions of ambition, how ambition plays out across a career, across the life, personal ambition versus professional ambition. It's a really great collection at a very important time for us to talk about female power and what ambition means to women across the board, women and gender non-conforming people. So with me, I have some terrific people. To my immediate left, my left is Pam Houston, the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction, including We All Love It. Cowboys are My Weakness and Contents may have Shifted. Pam teaches in the creative writing programs at the Institute for American Indian Arts, which I was just talking with someone about and at the University of California Davis and directs the literary nonprofit writing by writers.

Speaker 2 (00:04:34):

Next to Pam is Haa Allen, who writes cultural criticism, fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of books and transition among other places. She's essay's editor at the authoring, which is a very cool place if you don't know about it. And a graduate of Columbia Law School where she was a fellow of the center for the Study of Law and Culture. Over here we have Erica Sanchez and she's a poet, novelist and essayist her poetry collection, lessons on Expulsion and her young novel Brown Girl Problems are forthcoming. She has received a Discovery Boston Review, poetry Prize and a Ruth Lily, Dorothy Sergeant Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. That is a lot of names. And finally, Clavey Watkins short person, but by no means tiny. She's the author of Gold Fame, citrus and Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Dill Thomas Prize, and the Young Lions Fiction Award. Among others, a Guggenheim Fellow. She's an assistant professor in the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. And welcome. Thank you all so much for being here and joining us. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (00:05:48):

So as I said, I would like each of you to tell us a little bit about your piece in Double Bind. I asked the panelists, I said, you can talk about it, you can read a bit or any combination thereof. So that is totally up to them. And I will go alphabetically beginning with Hala if you will. Hello? Can you hear me? Okay, so my essay is basically a recap of my former incarnation as a corporate attorney at a big white shoe law firm. It starts off with my discussion of law school, et cetera, and it sort of meanders through discussions of Condoleezza Rice, Madonna, yoga, and Eric from the Frankfurt School psycho analyst. So I don't have time to get into all of that, but I will read the beginning of the piece.

Speaker 2 (00:06:48):

I have been to a few Madonna concerts in my day, so I may or may not have been straining to get a view around the pillar planted in front of my discount seat when I beheld the superstar KickUp into a forearm stand in the middle of the stage for non initiates. A forearm stand is a yoga pose wherein you balance your entire body on your forearms laying parallel to one another on the ground and perpendicular to your upper arms, torso and legs, all of which are inverted skyward. Imagine turning your entire body into an L and then imagine Madonna doing the same except spotlight before thousands of gaping fans in a large arena. I hadn't done any yoga at that point, so the irony of Madonna flaunting her ability and in discipline meant to induce inner awareness was totally lost on me. I just thought it was cool.

Speaker 2 (00:07:32):

Precisely. I interpreted Madonna's Ho stand as a demonstration of power. Power that was quiet, yet fierce, an expression of power that I immediately decided I wanted to embody. So not too long thereafter, I went ahead and enrolled in a series of free introductory lessons at yoga studios across Manhattan and Brooklyn. My modus operandi take advantage of the introductory classes and skip to another studio once I no longer had a discounted pass. I was doing this. I told myself at the time to test out different teachers to find the right fit in height. In hindsight, I can see that it was just an excuse for being itinerant and cheap. In any case, I had a fair amount of time to shuttle between boroughs. My schedule was relatively flexible because I was in my second year of law school. Of course, with law school being law school, my schedule was not absolutely flexible, just relatively relative.

Speaker 2 (00:08:19):

That is the circulation, cutting constraints of my first year, which is both notoriously and actually all consuming. I hadn't seen any of the films you're supposed to watch before your first day of law school, the ones in which some curmudgeon badgers you with cryptic questions and cleverly insults you as you strain to answer them amid the muffled chuckles of your peers. In my experience, all institutional education was rife with illegitimate authority and bullying. So I didn't see why law school should be especially different. If anything, I was up for the challenge. I was quietly determined, my quiet determination mind you had very little to do with the subject at hand. Of course, I cared deeply about injustice, which unlike the lofty concept of justice, was down to earth and concrete evident in the myriad of detrimental effects that structural inequality was having on actual human beings who lived in the real world.

Speaker 2 (00:09:05):

And moreover, I thought law school would provide me with the practical tools to upend injustice. However, as it turned out, I just didn't care very much about the law, a tort as far as I'd ever known before that first year referred to a kind of cake. And subjects like constitutional law, which were to me less esoteric and less esoteric and more pertinent to eradicating injustice were systematically dreamed of all entry by the sheer volume of material we were expected to retain my charge. That first year was not to think and to critique, but to memorize and regurgitate. There was no time to consider what the loss should or might be only to apprehend what it was and then dutifully apply it to a hypothetical fact pattern while ignoring my moral compass. Throughout this experience, I fully grasp the meaning of that saying about the unpleasantness of sausage factories.

Speaker 2 (00:09:51):

Justice was no longer an abstract concept. Justice was sausage justice. Sausage moreover was often composed of the dismembered carcasses of injustice. But once we students arduously cranked it through this elaborate machine, we were too exhausted by the process to question the fairness of the outcome. Burning crosses, for example, was totally constitutional, a protected form of free speech as long as you burn them on your own long. And so for many, the legal process in and of itself came to justify the result. Whatever it happened to be. I watched many a fellow law student transform from as sentient being into an Android that spouted legal precedent on demand, my growing distaste for the law. Notwithstanding, I still wanted to do very well, so I suspended disbelief and went with the program. I tagged textbook pages with fine point pens. I dropped the holdings of cases into classroom mics, like a dutiful subject of colonial education. I envied and gorged. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So much more questions to come, but first, Pam, Maya, say, Maya said Hi. Hi. My essay is called Ebenezer Laughs Back. It is a braided essay and it has a lot of different threads, but one thread is about my mother and I just pulled out little sections of that thread to read you and it also in this thread, I talk about the actual writing of the essay. So I thought I would read you this little thread.

Speaker 2 (00:11:29):

My beautiful mother ran away from Spiceland, Indiana. At the end of the eighth grade. Her Aunt Erie, who had raised her to that point had bet my mother $50 that she could not get straight Cs on her final report card, but she did get straight Cs, took the cash and got on a bus bound for Broadway. There she got plucked off the streets by two young actors who became years later, my uncle Tommy and my uncle Don for the next several decades. She danced and sang and told jokes and did handsprings and cartwheels across stages in countless theaters, nightclubs and cabarets in New York and elsewhere. During World War ii, she went overseas with Bob Hope's U S O touring show. After that, she became Frank Sinatra's opening act in Vegas, and after that she returned to New York and acted in supporting roles both on and off Broadway with some of the best of that time.

Speaker 2 (00:12:23):

Jackie Gleason, Walter Pigeon, Nancy Walker. She never made it big, but she always had work and she was proud of that and though she never said it to me precisely this way, I believe she loved her life in those years with a ferocity approximating the love I have for my own life as a writer and traveler and teacher of writing. Then somewhere in the neighborhood of 42, she always lied about her age and my father lied on her obituary. So now we will never know for sure for reasons that are utterly inexplicable to me. She married my father and got pregnant in that order. I have checked the dates a hundred times. He came backstage one night, so the story goes after her performance at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, New Jersey with a dozen roses and an invitation for the pretty actress to take a spin in his cream colored Buick convertible.

Speaker 2 (00:13:15):

She got so drunk on their first date, she threw up all over his milky leather seats and he is said to have said, you better get your act together because we are going to get married. Six weeks later they were and so began the miserable conventional ambitionless rest of her life. I gave up everything I loved for you. My mother would say to me almost daily to get me to clean my room or part my hair or on the side or wear my retainer and I would want only to find a way to give it all back to restore her to her satisfying working life before being saddled with the burden of me. But why did you do that? I wish I had had the wherewithal to ask her alcohol addiction. Not withstanding, my mother had the strongest will of anyone I have ever known.

Speaker 2 (00:14:02):

She barely ate and she never perspired and she did not grow body hair. I'm fairly certain if her biological clock had ticked one time, she could have wielded it silent with her mind or smashed it with her fist. My father was charming, but she had had 42 years plus or minus to learn to see through his kind of charm. Had 30 years in the ups and downs of show business simply warn her out. Did she marry my father Because she saw a future rushing toward her where the fact of her age would make it harder and harder to land rolls or did some indianan idea of conventionality sneak up out of the cornfield and grab her from behind? If it did, it lied to her about how it would feel once she got there. Her mother had died in childbirth with her, so it stands to reason that my birth would've killed her at least a little she on until my 30th birthday. An honorable life that included fundraisers for the United Way worked with the developmentally disabled devotion to the altar, gull, good friends and lots of tennis, but it seemed to be only a half-life, a shadow of the 30 years that had preceded it and when a combination of vodka and Vioxx took her out at 70, give or take, I was alongside my sadness. Glad she didn't have to witness herself losing any more than she already had.

Speaker 2 (00:15:21):

It is not precisely true to say that my mother stopped working after she married my father for a while. She kept doing summer theater when she gave that up. She landed roles in TV commercials and bit parts on soap operas, the long lost cousin, the visiting aunt. Yet for every day she went off to New York for an audition or shoot and came home glowing and singing. There were 10 other days when her task list read laundry, dinner, dry cleaning Pam to dentist, cat to vet, and there is this, even in the Betty's breakfast years when her residual checks added up to more than his income, my mother handed her checks directly over to my father. He gave my mother $200 household money every two weeks to buy groceries, clothes and every single other thing the family needed from the time I was born until the time I left for college with no adjustment for inflation, my father carried more than $200 in his wallet at all times, bought used Cadillac convertibles and hand tailored suits while my mother made our clothes on the sewing machine and scoured magazines to find interesting things to do with leftovers.

Speaker 2 (00:16:23):

The song that was on continuous repeat in my childhood kitchen was my mother reasoning or flirting or begging for an advance on next week's money and him shaming her no matter what the circumstances for spending it too fast. My mother did not appear in the first draft of this essay. In fact, this essay has been in so many drafts that it has taken me 20,000 wrong words to get to the 4,000 right ones because my mother mostly stayed at home and my father mostly went to work. I began writing with the hypothesis that I had gotten my ambition primarily from him, but then I realized my father's feelings about work were tepid really compared to the arias my mother sang daily to her bygone showbiz days. If your mother runs away from Spiceland, Indiana to Broadway at 13 and she spends the last 30 years of her life asking, begging really for the money she earned back from her husband so that she can use it to pay for his freshly starch shirts.

Speaker 2 (00:17:20):

If the single most powerful and omnipresent emotion in your family's home is your mother's soul shattering grief over the absence of meaningful work in her life, that is likely to inform your relationship with ambition. And if most of my striving has therefore been away and not toward, does that mean I am not in essence as different from the ambitionless woman as I thought I was? Does this mean that in some Condoleezza rice like way that I have drunk the Kool-Aid to did my mother drink the Kool-Aid? Who made the Kool-Aid? Who sold it to my mother for 5 cents a glass for perhaps on mothers?

Speaker 2 (00:18:09):

Okay, thank you. So yes, my essay is about a job when I turned 30 that shattered me and it brought up a whole host of childhood issues that I had been repressing for many years, and so here it goes. It's called Crying in the Bathroom, which I did a lot at that time. None of us can relate to. Everyone in my family was incredibly hardworking and I admire them for their resilience and generosity, but nobody had the kind of life I wanted, particularly the women. My aunt who worked at a candy factory looked at my hands when I was a kid and told me I had manos dica. It was true. They were smooth and soft, rich lady hands. My mom, most of my aunts and many of my cousins married young and had children soon after. In addition to all the cooking and cleaning their jobs involved intense physical labor every day.

Speaker 2 (00:19:13):

My mother came home to never ending cooking and chores who could blame her for being perpetually tired and cranky. Her life seemed like a crushing burden. Her world revolved around us and the factory and there was little room for anything else. She never did anything for herself, never had the luxury of time or money, didn't even have hobbies or good friends to unwind with after work. When I was eight or so, I used her face cream thinking it was body lotion and she was so angry and disappointed why? She wanted to know why would you do such a thing? At that time, I had no idea why she was yelling at me over moisturizer, but now I understand that it was probably one of the few things she ever indulged in and I had taken it away from her. What did I want out of my life?

Speaker 2 (00:20:02):

I sure as hell didn't want to work in a factory that was my parents' worst nightmare. They didn't cross the deadly Tijuana border for their kids to work like donkeys in this country. I know they would've been happy if we simply had white collar jobs. It didn't even matter what kind, but I always knew that I wanted so much more than that. Ridiculous, impossible things. I certainly didn't want to get married or have kids. Judging from what I saw in my family, children sucked all the fun out of everything. Most of the women I knew seemed unhappy, so I fashioned together my dream life from various books and movies. If other women were financially independent, traveled alone and went to college, why couldn't I got myself through college and graduate school on my own? One fall, I couldn't even afford to buy myself a coat.

Speaker 2 (00:20:53):

It was a shameful existence at times, but I had pulled through alone and I was proud of that. After I received my master's degree, I was stuck in corporate America for two grueling years until I was able to cobble together a living by tutoring at a local university in freelance writing for major publications like Cosmopolitan for Latinas, N B c, Latino, Al Jazeera, and The Guardian. I was hustling and barely surviving. My income was downright embarrassing for an adult, though I was successful in many ways, I was financially disempowered. I was too old to be struggling like a college student. I'd been poor for most of my life and I was tired. Accolades were nice, but I wanted my success to translate into cold hard cash in my little brown hands. I wanted the luxury of buying a pair of shoes without falling into a spiral of worry and guilt.

Speaker 2 (00:21:44):

I got married the summer I turned 30. During that time, my writing garnered the attention of a public relations firm and they offered me a full-time salaried position as senior strategist. Most of my writing was focused on reproductive rights, which I had been passionate about for many years, and it was more money than I had ever seen in my life. It was not my dream job by any means. I imagined I'd be a professor or famous writer at this age, but I was excited to write about issues I cared about and I was eager to be compensated for my knowledge and talents. No, I could still live in Chicago. The job would require me to travel to New York frequently. I had always been scrappy, however and had traveled to many places on my own. I felt like I could do anything. Nothing could have prepared me for my monumental unraveling.

Speaker 2 (00:22:45):

Thank you. It's difficult to follow that stuff. Thanks everyone and thanks Beth for moderating. Thank you all for being here. The essay that I have in this anthology, which is really, really great, I hope you'll be able to read it in some way, shape or form. It's about leaving my hometown and it was originally, I wrote it this American Life. The podcast asked me if I would pitch them a story for a show that was themed how I got to college, and I think they asked me that because I'd written an essay for the New York Times about how I got to college. So I pitched them this and eventually it got rejected, but that's okay. I liked it. What I wrote anyway, so I published it in this anthology. Anyway, I'll just read you this excerpt just a little bit about the town where I grew up. It's called Pahrump, the name of the town, not the essay. I would never call an essay that.

Speaker 2 (00:23:55):

Anyway, the town of Pahrump is about 35,000 people sprayed along, sprayed along, sprayed across a long hot valley with purple black mountains all around it. The bottom most point of the valley is a crusty white dry lake bed. The scene of many car commercials and music videos wishing to convey freedom and or desolation over the mountains to the east is Las Vegas 60 miles away. On a clear night, you can see the city lights over the range are neon. Aurora Borealis to the west over another mountain range is Death Valley. I'm not kidding. Death Valley Pahrump is hot and dry as hell over a hundred degrees the whole week. We're here for the Mojave School at one point. A guy at the laundromat says, I like this place. It reminds me of the Persian Gulf. It's a place where the boys become construction workers and the girls become cocktail waitresses and the sunsets are sublime.

Speaker 2 (00:25:02):

A population of 35,000 sounds like a lot, but those 35,000 people are scattered over more than 350 square miles. So Pahrump still feels pretty small. Plenty of residents would disagree with that. Remembering 1980 when only 2000 people lived here. Now there are two stoplights, one public high school, and a lot of the roads are still dirt or gravel. Most of the houses are prefab mobile homes or straight up trailers in this town. There is a difference if you're interested, the distinction between a mobile home and a trailer has to do with whether the home is on wheels and an apron of cinder blocks or just wheels. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one when you grow up here, like the difference between free and reduced lunch. Free lunch means you're a scrounge and reduced lunch means you're regular. No one here says poor, and they certainly did not say working class, underserved, economic inequality or any of the other names for this place.

Speaker 2 (00:26:00):

I learned in college, there's a third type of house here too, which we call stick-built. Even though they're mostly stucco, most homes are set on big on landscaped patches of desert. The house I grew up in 1600, Lola Lane was a mobile home on three and a half acres shaped actually like the state of Nevada. I'm not being heavy handed here. It really was with a big beautiful cottonwood tree shuttering at its tip. I was on reduced lunch. The lots seem empty, but they rarely are. Most yards are clustered with cars both running and not, or horse corrals or a cache of building materials or mounds of unspread, gravel or other trailers or a pen of peacocks or ostriches or wolf dogs. Pahrump has no mare, no sewer system, no alleys hardly any sidewalks. Until the sixties. There were no telephones. The main drag is strewn with billboards featuring blos, beckoning men to strip clubs and brothels.

Speaker 2 (00:27:04):

After we moved from Lola Lane, my family lived in a stick-built house on the south side near the town's two brothels, the Chicken ranch and Sherry's ranch. I learned to parallel park at Sherry's, but before I could drive my school bus past the brothels every morning, it was a moment. I waited for a moment I loved because of the chicken ranch. The chicken ranch is stick-built and painted pink and baby blue with dormer windows and a white picket fence. As a girl, I'd never seen a house. So beautiful and I just wanted to live there so much.

Speaker 2 (00:27:47):

Thank you Chair. There are so many. Oh, no idea. Thank you. I'll just lean over. Here we go. Very close. Thank you, HAA. There's so many ways to start, but one thing I want to say about the thank you, the things that each panelist has just read is it shows ambition and thoughts about ambition and notions about ambition start very early and they start with our places of origin and our families of origin and in our need to get away from places and families. Yeah, oh boy, can I talk about that? We all could. But when I was thinking about that, I realized, I said to a colleague, well, I wonder, what do men learn about ambition? And we both looked at each other and we thought men are born with that being something that they're supposed to do. No, there aren't books called Men on Ambition are there?

Speaker 2 (00:28:55):

No one's writing these essays. So let me first ask each of you and feel free to discuss and talk over me and whatever. How do we define ambition? What is ambition? That was something Robin and I spoke about for a long time. It's not simply an exercise plan. It's not simply wanting to get a good job. There's a lot more to it than that anyone. For me, ambition. I didn't think of it as ambition. I was a little girl and I just wanted to see the world and I wanted to write and that's all I ever wanted. And that's how I lived my life with that goal in mind. And so like I said in the essay for my parents, it would've been great if I just worked in an office because they worked at factories and that for them was a sign of success just to have air conditioning, just to be able to sit down during work.

Speaker 2 (00:29:53):

My mother worked at a paper factory and it was grueling, grueling work. And so for me, I wanted more than what they expected. And some of those things seemed really impossible. I came from a working class family, and I remember once I told my brother, I'm like, I want to see the whole world. I just want to travel. I think I was maybe 12 or 13 at the time. And he's like, well, where are you going to get the money for that? And so I felt really crushed by that because that was my dream. That's what I wanted to do in my life.

Speaker 2 (00:30:30):

And to come from a family in which you don't receive any financial help, that is a real struggle for me. I think ambition and success means being free and living the life that you want. And that's why that job was so terrible for me because I was in a very controlled environment and that's not how I ever imagined my life. I wanted to write and I wanted to move around in the world and make a difference. I'd like to add that thanks for that, because it really resonated with me. I mean, the idea of ambition has got to me more than just cashing checks to me. I don't know. I'm not really interested in that. It's just a version of freedom to be able to move where and through the world the way I want to move through it to be able to say what happens to my body when it happens to be able to be heard, Pam? Yeah, I was just going to say for me, and this is also in a different part of the essay, but my father said to me, Pam, one of these days you're going to wake up and realize that you spend your whole life lying in the gutter with somebody else's foot on your neck.

Speaker 2 (00:31:58):

That's true. That was his worldview. And he said it repeatedly and he believed it even though by any objective standard, he had a reasonable life and made a reasonable amount of we weren't rich, we weren't poor, but he came out of nothing and he made a life for himself. But he really believed that that was his worldview and he said it repeatedly. And so my ambition was simply to make that not true. So much of the driving force of my life was to make that not true. And that involved a lot of things that involved travel and it involved doing what I love for a living and it a lot of things. But even to this day, I'm trying to prove, even under the Trump administration, I'm trying to prove that that's not true. You weren't supposed to say that five letter word, I'm sorry, 45 I guess is what we're calling it now, but just try to prove that it's not true.

Speaker 2 (00:33:00):

And then I think this might lead us somewhere else, but I just want to say I think the word ambition gets complicated at a certain point because ambition, too much ambition can be unattractive on anyone, male or female. But that may be not where we're going right now. And I don't want to, because I definitely wanted to ask you also in terms of, and also Erica, you touched on this, but how ambition is filtered through a family who has immigrated? Well, I mean there's always that issue of having immigrant parents who themselves have basically crossed into another completely other world. Any immigrant I think is ambitious because to reimagine your life in a completely different context where you don't have any family, you don't have any roots, you don't have any support. And to believe that you can do it as an ambitious thing in and of itself.

Speaker 2 (00:33:59):

And I think they, in my case, certainly my parents expected me to be very achievement oriented. So I absorbed that throughout osmosis. My issue came when I was sort of trying to achieve in these contexts that I realized I didn't determine for myself. I was just sort of moving about to place, to place achieving and trying to prove myself. And then I realized that I was miserable. I didn't know why I was doing these things. But ultimately in my essay, I end up thinking about ambition as something that is not, well, I was thinking about it in two ways. One, a way in which you look at achievement, which is really, it's supposed to be a process to achieve it. It's sort of a verb, but we about it, we tend to think about it as terms of a gold star, something that you get something out of something that's sort of inquisitive when it's really more of a process and it's supposed to be more self-reflective and it's ongoing. And I know we sort of know that in quotes, but it's different when you sort of experience that in your day-to-day life, and especially when there's a mismatch between what you're supposed to be trying to achieve and how that's actually making you feel on a day-to-day basis.

Speaker 2 (00:35:22):

Each of you, are you now at this point comfortable saying, I'm ambitious, I'm an ambitious person, I'm an ambitious woman, I'm an ambitious writer. Is that something you even think, yeah, I'm a workaholic freak, which is what I mean too much ambition crosses over. Where does ambition end and workaholism begin? But I'm certainly comfortable saying, you play hard too. I play hard work, hard play hard. But you said, I do know enough to ask where ambition ends and where holism begins. And that I think is a crucial point. And as you were saying, Erica, it's very hard to get there. Erica talks about being in this job that she thought would be very good. It had good benefits, good salary, but they used this awful thing called time task. Other people, I'm sure other companies have a similar thing where you have to account for every minute of your day.

Speaker 2 (00:36:25):

And when you get to that point, it feels like, let me see if I can find the correct sticky note for this, because it really, I loved what you said about this, Erica. It was like a sweatshop of the mind. And so we do need to know as writers, clearly when we are just spinning our wheels and when we're being a workaholic, and it's okay to be a workaholic, but is that something that feeds your real work? So that's something I think we all grapple with as well. So when you get comfortable with being someone who's ambitious, is it fraught? I mean, I think we've touched on this, but let's talk a little bit more about how it's fraught for us because of gender. Please.

Speaker 2 (00:37:16):

Like you mentioned for men, it's not even a question. We don't talk about ambitious men. And I think for women, the way we're often portrayed is that if we're ambitious, we're cutthroat and we're immoral and we'll stab other women in the back. And that is not true at all. In my experience. I think it's easy to succeed without hurting other people. That's how I live my life. I don't believe in competing with other women personally. I feel like we're all in this together, and I feel that we need to lift each other up because who else is going to do it? And so yeah, that idea of ambition as being unattractive, I think we need to flip the script and make it so, I mean, it's already not true, but I think we need to just keep challenging that notion because it's false. Are there times when being a woman is an asset in terms of ambition, the room goes silent. I love that.

Speaker 2 (00:38:27):

But I really like what you just said about, that was one of my questions for you all. Elisa Albert has an essay in here, and I don't expect anyone to have read it, but it's a very long piece. And she tells the story of after, I believe After Birth came out, which was her third novel, going to a party at something like a w p and having friend with her. And the friend said to this other writer who had just gotten some great fantastic deal. Look, this is my friend Elisa, and she blah, blah, blah as a writer. And mom was like, yes. Well, I don't have much time to read contemporary things right now. I'm working on my own stuff. And then Elisa said, oh, well, I just wrote and published after Birth. Oh my God, I love that book. And I think that's part of the competition we face as women sometimes.

Speaker 2 (00:39:15):

And sometimes I guess what I'm trying to say is it's cloaked. It's cloaked behind. I am a more important writer than you are. I'm more beautiful than you are. I'm more this. I have better life balance. I know how to get my children together, all of that kind of thing. So talk to me about that, if you will. You're nodding, Claire. I am nodding because on the one hand, like ambition and between women and the way women are encouraged to be pitted against each other, something I struggle with and I have been guilty of it myself too, of comparing or competing with other women and it just frustrating. That's all. I guess I just wanted a barbaric yacht. I dunno.

Speaker 2 (00:40:07):

It's really hard. It really is very hard. And there are a couple of essays in here that are about Robin's essay about deciding after a really terrific career that she really did want to baby and it was going to take a lot of time and effort and money and take something away from her professional ambition. There's also a piece about a woman who's just had a child and trying to balance all of that sort of thing. So who talked about Lisa Simpson? Was that you? I love Erica said that Lisa Simpson was a role model for her in this world in which women were working really hard at paper factories, then coming home, cooking the meals, taking care of the kids. And I liked that because Lisa I think is such an interesting role model for all of us. She's so very Lisa. So let's talk about role models and some of the ones you found for yourselves. And Pam, I'd love to hear about this from you as well. Role models. Role models. I'm going to embarrass myself hugely and say I don't know who Lisa Simpson is. Is she like Homer's? What? No, she's the daughter and she's the saxophone playing book reading daughter. I am so sorry. That's okay. No, it would only be me. It would only be me.

Speaker 2 (00:41:23):

Role models. That's interesting. Gosh. I mean, as you saw from what I read, I mean in a weird way, my mother was a role model because she did get the hell out of Spiceland Indiana and ran away to New York. She was kind of a wild child, it turns out. But role models, I guess. I mean, what if I said like Lucille Ball and Willa Kaher sounds good to me just to throw two out there. I watched every single episode of any sort of Lucy show, and if you're around my age, there were about 13 different versions. There was I Love Lucy, and then all the ones that followed. Oh God, yes and yes. And then I think Willa Ka once I started reading her, which I did quite young, just the idea of Westward Ho and Pioneer Woman and all of that. So no, that's excellent. Those are terrific role models to have role models. I do so many author interviews and I'm always asking people, who's your greatest influence and things like that. But I love it when people say, here's someone completely out of the creative realm or they are like Lucy in the creative realm and it's a completely different sort of thing. That's why I think Lisa Simpson is so powerful. People in that generation, like you said, got a lot of TV heroes. How about you?

Speaker 2 (00:42:59):

Well, I guess in my essay I do talk about Madonna, but not necessarily because I mean, I happen to love Madonna full disclosure, but she's not my role model, so to speak. I don't look at her and want to be like Madonna. But that said, I also talk about Condoleezza Rice, and I thought that they embodied a certain kind of ambition in female form that at least we are used to, which is sort of competitive acquisitive. It's persistent. Steadfast. It's unapologetic. And that's very interesting to me because I think that's how we think of, that's one model of ambition, but it can be misguided if it's misplaced. One of my favorite Toni Morrison moments is when she was on a panel with Cornell West and someone asked, what do you think about Conez Rice? This was during the Bush administration, Bush two. And then she paused and then she said, I think she needs another job.

Speaker 2 (00:44:04):

Kim, did you also mention Conza? I do. I was going to say this is very intriguing to me. Two essays and two writers, very different and writing about very different topics, both mentioned Conza Rice and she is difficult role model. And I know one of the things that we want to talk about here is women in politics and ambition. First we have Hillary. We have Hillary on one side. I'm not making this side, the Kellyanne Conway side. I'm sorry, that's not what I meant to do. But Conza is an intriguing character. And the reason I think both of you talked about her is no matter how many mistakes she made and how many new jobs she needed, she was someone who embodied a new kind of female male. I don't know. She was a pianist, she was a face skater, she had a razor shirt mind.

Speaker 2 (00:44:56):

What do you think? What else? Tell me about that and what that means to women politics in politics today. Well, for me, I can just say for me personally, watching Conno Lisa Rice, I didn't necessarily feel some kind of vicarious pride because I thought, again, her ambition was sort of misplaced, but it was just a fascinating spectacle to see her rise to Secretary of State always be composed. Her hair was perfectly flipped. She had that pink or pastel suit, whatever it was. She was just always, she had the right answer for everything. She knew everything. She was completely rehearsed and just unflappable. And especially not only as a woman, but as a black woman. It's just very interesting to see that. And obviously it was problematic, but it was sort of, I guess for me, I'm just going to say it was fascinating. Really, really interesting.

Speaker 2 (00:45:54):

Pam, anything on Connie? Not really. I mean, really my sentence there, I mean, I don't know enough. I mean, I watched her as you watched her as we all watched her, but I don't know enough about her to say. But just to throw one more thing into this mix of what you're asking, I am constantly aware of my own reactions to Kellyanne Conway. Dude, Kellyanne Conway is in the sisterhood too, right? Exactly. So fucking I am complicated. The consequences in the sister. Has she absented herself from the sister? I don't know. This is all I'm saying. We might shake a vote. I knew Claire would jump on this. I mean, debate to me, that's all I'm saying. I am watching my own reaction because do I feel more violently toward her than I do to Mitch McConnell? No, but to some of them, my violent feelings toward her have my attention. That's a really interesting thing, I would say, right?

Speaker 2 (00:46:59):

Kellyann is in the sisterhood in a way. And I mean that broadly, not just in the cis c i s sisterhood, but who knows? I just mean's radical compassion. The radical love look like right now, to me, it looks like being like Kellyann Conway is my sister also. Or taking a good look at white feminism, which I didn't even know about before I accidentally wrote an essay and kind of accidentally displayed it. I was completely educated by women of color and queer women. And we too often don't acknowledge those contributions. Well, we definitely don't often enough acknowledge those contributions. And I think that is actually part and parcel of this double bind, which is that the way women are educated, who we're educated by, who we're brought up by Lucille Ball, can teach you more about freedom than some of these rigid elementary school teachers that we have who are, my husband's family is from Indiana. So I feel I can rank on Spiceland who are back in Indiana and don't want to open their minds to anything. And here's another question for all four of you about ambition. There's so much self-education in each of your essays.

Speaker 2 (00:48:24):

These are not essays about, well, I was born with ambition, I was born with privilege, and it's always been like that for me. There's a lot of coming to terms with things and a lot of self pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, if you will. So anyone want to talk about self-reliance in terms of ambition? Am I asking the wrong questions? No, I like that question. Growing up in the west and then going on and writing about the West, the self-reliance deal was big to me growing up. And some people have suggested to me who maybe you grew up to be kind of ambitious because you grew up in the West and there's this prairie ethos or whatever. But that's also kind of bullshit because my family, I, my family received so much assistance, so I have to get called the exception like, oh, kids from these towns, they don't succeed, but you did.

Speaker 2 (00:49:19):

So you're proof that it can happen. But it's like, no, I proof that it doesn't really work because I got so much more assistance than anyone else that I grew up with. I got public assistance. I lived literally on public lands. The government brought us water, and I got fluoride in our water because of the government, because of the federal government. And I went on to be able to get advanced degrees and chew apples because of the federal government. So it's of course such bs, but it was very much there on the surface level. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps girl kind of thing. One time my mom said, or my sister channeling, my mom came to visit me in my new house, and she said, I said, oh, you know, like the living room? It's like a big house. And she said, well, yeah, did you paint it yourself?

Speaker 2 (00:50:08):

I said, yeah, we painted it. And my husband said, we paid people to paint it. And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. We paid people to paint it. And she goes, huh. And I was like, what? And she goes, we're not paid people, people. It rankles my mother. When we talk about having the paid landscaping, that is a fraught thing. But it's interesting. One of the other things Erica had in her essay, but I noticed, and I don't know if it was in all of yours or in other ones that I read in the book about becoming a nuisance when you hit puberty. And so sex below the belt, gender above the belt, but there's this theme throughout double bind of women realizing about themselves when they reach puberty, whether it's 12 or 16, that suddenly everyone finds them smartass. Everyone is uncomfortable with their physical selves. You're shaving legs and your mother being upset about that, there's a real problem. That's where we hit this problem with ambition. I know so many girls, there are all kinds of statistics about girls suddenly their grades dropping, leaving math and science classes when they hit puberty. So let's talk about that biological component.

Speaker 2 (00:51:29):

I just remember hitting 12, 13, whatever it was when I went to junior high officially and deciding to become a tomboy. Well, I don't know if it was a conscious decision, but essentially I was just wearing baggy clothes and hoodies because I just didn't want to deal with what seemed to be going on, which seemed to be this sort of weird performance of gender. I didn't have the terminology for it yet, but I just didn't want to be involved. I felt like I was being pulled into this sort of world where I would have to act a certain way and not do certain things, and I couldn't walk certain places by myself. And suddenly there were all these pressures on me at home about how I was conducting myself that I hadn't felt before. So I mean, it didn't necessarily have to do with ambition, but more so just about how my body was placed in the world. And that was my small rebellion, I guess, to sort of reclaim a sense of power by just dressing like a boy and being done with it. Interesting.

Speaker 2 (00:52:29):

Yeah. It wasn't quite puberty. It was a little later, but I wanted only to be able to do what the boys could do. And that led me to be not the first by any means, but one of the first female whitewater river guides in southern Utah. And the first licensed, do I say this aloud? At a w p, one of the first licensed doll sheep hunting guides, the first female doll sheep hunting guide in one particular district in the Alaska Range. I know, thank you. Thank you, Claire, for shaming me. I did not shoot any sheep myself. Not that Yes, violence is violence. That's right. She would. And so sisterhood. That's right. Yeah. I fucking get to be in this sisterhood.

Speaker 2 (00:53:36):

But so I led mostly Texan men to the sheep. So it's worse. It's worse than if I had shot the sheep myself. That's really bad. It's really bad. 10 day hunts, me and the guy, me and the Texan, or sometimes Louisiana, no offense to Texans. I know there were good people in Texas, we're reading about them all the time. But these guys not so much. And 10 days. And as you might guess, when they saw me, they couldn't believe their eyes. They had hired for a lot of money, $15,000, something like that, which I got paid a hundred dollars a day to be with this guy 24 7, carry his gun, carry his ies, carry his lunch, and take him to kill a sheep. Only if we got to the sheep. And honestly, I mean, honestly, this is true. It doesn't leave this room. I threw a few huns if the guy was just so offensive, it's not hard at all to make the sheep move.

Speaker 2 (00:54:46):

You'll never tell Donald and Eric Trump. So only the decent ones actually went home with a sheep. But anyway, I did that for four years. So for me, at first, I thought it was just about making them not notice that I was female, that I could be mistaken for one of them. And often I still am. I'll go into a bar and talk sports, and I can tell the moment where they forget that I'm female because I know so much about sports, which is another embarrassment here at a wp, but I do. And so for me, that's how it was. It was just wanting to get to do everything they did by being invisible to them as female. That was my strategy. And I carried that strategy into my thirties, I would say. Well, and I think that, I'm sure both of you have things to say, but that is trying to become invisible is one of the problems with female ambition. And that's where those bad suits and the blouses, with the bows that the net came from in the seventies and eighties, let's be just like the men and anonymous, instead of being our bumptious selves, still in the sisterhood, everybody's in.

Speaker 2 (00:56:08):

I just like to share a quick story. When I was two, I tried peeing standing up. I saw a boy do it. If a boy can do it, can I? And so that's like this joke in the family that has never died. Also, when I was 16 or so, I shaved my head, and that was, again, trying to be invisible in a way or trying to be a boy. So I wasn't noticed, but in fact, it made me even more noticeable. So that was a really interesting experience. But I think a lot of girls do that. They try to hide their bodies and hide who they are because we're perceived as such a burden. I know my mom was terrified that I get pregnant terrified, and I understand that terror because a lot of girls did. So, but it made me feel really ashamed and it confused.

Speaker 2 (00:57:03):

Excellent. Excellent. Go ahead, please. Well, yeah, Pam's point about doing the things that the guys are doing. I sort of had a similar strategy, but it was just basically try to be in places where I'm the only woman in the room, so I spent a lot of time at band practices or at the gym. I like to go in the weight room, or I like to use the men's bathroom, or I want to infiltrate that world and be like, what are you doing in there? What are you doing in those rooms that none of the women are in? What's the locker room talk? I want to hear the locker room talk. I always eavesdrop on men when I leave a room or if I'm at a bar or something and I think I can't hear, because I guess it's a writer thing. I just like language.

Speaker 2 (00:57:48):

I like to hear the language shift. I like to hear them use words they wouldn't use if they thought a woman was around. But it's usually been a strategy that manifests itself with just being promiscuous and giving out a kind of commodity. Having something to offer via sex in the body or writing, being on all the panels where you're the only woman or you're in the west. The writing, the American west panels are usually kind of sausage fests. So I think it's a similar kind of impulse, just wanting to, I don't know, infiltrate. Infiltrate. I like that. I like that word. And I by no means finish. There's so many other things to ask, but it is five 30. I want to leave time for your questions, so I will ju


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