Women of Letters

@womenofletters.org

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📚 conversations on work, writing, & professional success with the women shaping our cultural landscape 🎤 @janajm.com, PhD 👇 SEASON 3 OUT NOW 📝 womenofletters.substack.com 🎵 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/women-of-letters/id1747035747

A screenshot of text that reads: “Did you have any mentors along the way? MJB: Of course, there were teachers—although early on, in high school, I didn’t always know how to make use of their support. For a long time, I felt lost and out of my depth. My college teachers were encouraging and that was helpful, but even then, I don’t think I understood that they expected students to ask for their help. I was working as a research assistant for a sociology professor when I applied to graduate school, but I never told him I was applying. When he found out, quite by accident, he said I should have said something, he would have helped me. Fortunately, I was accepted without his help but it’s an example of my lack of awareness that help was there for the asking, had I known.”
A screenshot of text that reads: “Jana M. Perkins: Was there a particular genre of writing, or kind of writing, that you were especially drawn to early on that helped develop this sense in you that, okay — this is what I want to be doing? NM: Anything with rhythm. My mother remembers me as a very young child - and I obviously have no memory of this — at the age of two, sort of reciting a poem that I had found in a children's magazine or something. I learned to read at sort of two and a half, so this is just about credible, I think. But rhythm I've always been drawn by and obsessed by, and I've always wanted to memorize any piece of writing that I didn't understand or whose rhythm transfixed me. So that started very early on, and then at 14 I discovered poetry in a very concrete way, and that coincided more or less with our having access to the internet: there were poems on the internet, and you could download them and learn them, and that absolutely laid the groundwork for everything that came after, for my writing today. My first book was mostly on poetry. I'm very preoccupied with the sound of a sentence when I write, like so many writers, and that all comes from an early preoccupation with poetry.”
A screenshot of the editor’s note to the interview that reads: "I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Cass over the years. The way that she has repeatedly changed paths and always found what seemed like an even bigger, more exciting adventure at every turn has been a real motivating force. Having written a book, launched several non-profits, been the first employee at Kickstarter, and served as the deputy director of digital outbound during the Obama administration (to name just a few of her accomplishments), she’s had precisely the kind of dynamic career that I know many — myself included — have hoped to build for themselves but rarely saw modelled. As Cass writes in this interview, “I’m a big believer in the idea that whenever you arrive is right on time.” It’s a form of hope I’ll be carrying with me as we collectively navigate the months and years ahead. Jana M. Perkins Founder, Women of Letters"
A screenshot of an editor’s note that reads: “My notes, in preparation for the writing of this introduction, formed a web of densely concentrated insight on the human experience courtesy of Aysegül's latest novel, The Anthropologists. The book follows its main character, Asya - a documentary filmmaker - through the kind of rich chronicling of her everyday life that is often offered within the context of anthropological writings. The small, in this way, is made large, expanding to fill the container of major narrative events in ways that would typically be reserved for moments of high drama. "Daily life," Asya says at one point in the novel, "was a difficult story to tell." Her grandmother responds by urging her to "forget about daily life," because, in her view, "no one cares about that." Yet, as the widely regarded success of this novel makes clear, there are, in fact, a great many people who care about that. If in your reading you enjoy attention to detail, incisively rendered commentary, and vivid jolts of emotion, you'll enjoy not only this interview but also its author's work in general, which you can find everywhere from The Paris Review to The New Yorker to the shelves of your favourite bookstore. Jana M. Perkins Founder, Women of Letters”
A screenshot from our interview with Iris Jamahl Dunkle that reads: “All of us, I think, have had the experience of seeing someone else take credit for something we’ve done. But how many of us can say that our work was used by another person to earn a Nobel Prize? The American novelist, poet, and editor Sanora Babb can, as Iris so brilliantly illuminates in her forthcoming biography, Riding Like the Wind. In Babb’s case, it was John Steinbeck who took credit for her work when — despite lacking her permission — he used her notes to write The Grapes of Wrath. His novel went on to win not only a National Book Award but also a Pulitzer Prize, and in addition to being turned into an Academy Award-winning film it would also eventually play a major role in Steinbeck’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Meanwhile, the novel that Babb had written was shelved, and it would not appear in print for more than 60 years. As Iris’s publisher explains..."
A passage from the linked interview
The cover of Jenna Butler’s book Revery
Book cover for MY BRILLIANT FRIENDS
John Frederick Kensett’s “Newport Rocks” painting
The cover of the book Hanging Out, by Sheila Liming