WBEZ | Books

Society of Midland Authors Awards Banquet

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:43:00 -0500

At it's annual awards banquet, The Society of Midland Authors honors its choices for the best books by Midwest authors published in 2012. The master of ceremonies for this year's benefit was Marc Kelly Smith, the founder of the Uptown Poetry Slam. Award winners also read from their works.

A list of this year's winners can be found here.

The Society, founded in 1915 by a group of authors including Hamlin Garland, Harriet Monroe and Vachel Lindsay, has given out annual awards since 1957. The juried competition is open to authors who live in, were born in, or have strong ties to Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota or Wisconsin.

Notable past winners have included Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Studs Terkel, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mike Royko, Jane Smiley, Dempsey Travis, Leon Forrest, William Maxwell, Louise Erdrich, Scott Turow, Alex Kotlowitz, Aleksandar Hemon, Stuart Dybek and Roger Ebert.

Recorded live Tuesday, May 14, 2013 at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza.

Edward Hirsch: Poems for my father(s)

Sat, 11 May 2013 08:00:00 -0500

The poet Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950, and many of his poems are haunted by little glimpses back into that old city of his youth. In the 2008 poem “Cotton Candy,” for example, Hirsch is again a small boy, walking with his grandfather over one of Chicago’s many bascule bridges:

We walked on the bridge over the Chicago River
for what turned out to be the last time,
and I ate cotton candy, that sugery air,
that sweet blue light spun out of nothingness.
It was just a moment, really, nothing more,
but I remember marveling at the sturdy cables
of the bridge that held us up
and threading my fingers through the long
and slender fingers of my grandfather,
an old man from the Old World
who long ago disappeared into the nether regions.
And I remember that eight-year-old boy
who had tasted the sweetness of air,
which still clings to my mouth
and disappears when I breathe.

There is pain here, but also tenderness, and maybe even a little nostalgia -- a recognizable combination where the subject matter is childhood and family.

As an adult, Hirsch won the Lanvan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the prestigious Rome Prize, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations (the latter of which he now chairs) and the National Endowment for the Arts.

But Hirsch’s future success was not necessarily forecast by his Chicago childhood. Early on Hirsch was burdened by a biological father, his “first father” as he calls him in one poem, with poor boundaries and cruel attachments. In one poem, Hirsch depicts Harold, nicknamed “Ruby,” talking openly to his young children about his sexual preferences and his frustration with their mother’s “frigidity.” Ruby then left the family when Edward was a still a child, an event Hirsch writes about in “My Father’s Back”:

There's an early memory that I carry around
In my mind
like an old photography in my wallet,
little graying and faded, a picture
That I don't much like
but nonetheless keep,
Fingering it now and then like a sore tooth,
Knowing it there,
not needing to see it anymore....
The sun slants down on the shingled roof.
The wind breathes in the needled pines.
And I am lying in the grass on my third birthday,
Red-faced and watchful
but not squalling yet,
Not yet rashed or hived up
from eating the wrong food
Or touching the wrong plant,
my father's leaving.

And yet, Hirsch was also cared for by his “other father” – the man who raised him. He writes about this father with the great longing of a grown-up son who has just lost his parent in “Early Sunday Morning”:

Give me back my father walking the halls
of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company
with sawdust clinging to his shoes.
Give me back his tape measure and his keys,
his drafting pencil and his order forms;
give me his daydreams on lined paper.
I don’t understand this uncontainable grief.
Whatever you had that never fit,
whatever else you needed, believe me,
my father, who wanted your business,
would squat down at your side
and sketch you a container for it.

Of channeling these feelings and memories into his work Hirsch said, “I became, I’d say, addicted to this idea: That you could take the muck and mire of your own life, you could take the messy things in your own life, the difficult experiences you didn’t understand, and try to turn them into something.”

“And the idea that you could turn them into something that you thought was beautiful? That seemed noble to me. I aspired to that,” Hirsch added.

The poet gave a reading in Chicago in April, and read several poems that touched on these two men in his young life. You can hear his reading in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Edward Hirsch spoke at an event presented by the Society of Midland Authors in April of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

The Jon Ronson interview

Fri, 10 May 2013 08:01:00 -0500

Jon Ronson is one of those writers who embodies what creative nonfiction is all about by demonstrating just how strange and wonderful the world can be. A Welsh journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author, his books include Them: Adventures With Extremists, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and most recently Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. His book The Men Who Stare At Goats was turned into a movie starring George Clooney. You can learn a lot more about him here.

I saw that you have a standing reply on your website that you will not investigate people’s claims that they are victims of mind control. Aside from that, what personal information do your readers tend to volunteer to you most frequently?

That they are married to psychopaths. Or that they're worried they may be psychopaths. There is an adage in psychology that if you're worried you may be a psychopath that means you aren't one. Because psychopaths never worry about being psychopaths. They're FINE with it. Which makes me suspect that psychopathy is the most pleasant feeling of all the mental disorders.

Isn't it interesting that so many people share the exact same delusion - that they're being mind controlled by the CIA. When our brains go wrong they go wrong in uncannily similar ways. It shows that we aren't all individual snowflakes. My guess is that some of the people who believe they're mind control victims actually suffer from a rare disorder called Delusional Disorder. The symptoms include 'non-bizarre' delusions. That delusion is non-bizarre because some people over the years HAVE actually been mind controlled by the CIA.

Of the different cultures you’ve written about, what have been some that seemed most tempting to join up with, even if just in theory?

I had a good time writing the story Running Through Cornfields for my first book, Them, about Rachel Weaver, one of the survivors of Ruby Ridge. But that's just because I liked Idaho and Montana. The rivers and mountains. But I guess that's not a great reason to become a white separatist. Anyway, they'd never have me.

How can you tell which media are right for which subjects (what works well for radio, web, books, etc?)

Sometimes it's just whoever is interested in having me work with them at any particular time. I go in and out of favor with different people. For instance, British nonfiction TV has no interest in me at the moment. Sometimes the subject matter dictates it. I once made a documentary about the band The Shaggs that I knew had to be for the radio. There was no way I could do that story without getting to play their music. Here it is:

But the thing I'm always looking for is an adventure that might become a book. Whenever I do a documentary or a feature I'm always wondering if it could be a rabbit hole that takes me to a book.

I remember asking Christiane Kubrick - when I was making my film Stanley Kubrick's Boxes - what her husband was looking for during those ever lengthening gaps between films. She said, "The magical moment of falling in love with a story." I know that feeling well. Whenever I start a story I look for that magical moment of falling in love with it enough that it may become a book.

Who are some of your "favorite" criminals ("favorite" of course meaning compelling, not as in you’d want to move in with them).

I loved my adventures with David Icke and Alex Jones in Them, infiltrating Bohemian Grove with Alex. Not sure he counts as a criminal. Tony in The Psychopath Test. I liked him personally, and also he was mysterious. He claimed to have faked madness to escape a prison sentence and now he was stuck in a hospital for the criminally insane and nobody believed he was sane. I loved trying to work out if he was insane or not. It opened up such an interesting area about how we view and judge other people, how we read between lines, how morally corrosive it can be.

If you had to teach a ten-minute course on interviewing, what advice would you be sure to impart upon your students?

This could be terrible advice, but don't plan any questions in advance. That way you have to listen. You have to be a twig in the tidal wave of the conversation. But not preparing any questions doesn't mean don't do research. Do lots of research, just assimilate it, rather than plan and structure the interview. As I say, that might be the worst advice.

You immerse yourself so fully in the stories you write. What have been some scenarios where you were conducting research or interviews and then found yourself in a potentially unsafe environment?

The most recent time was writing The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones, which is in my new collection, Lost At Sea. He's the real life superhero I was patrolling with in Seattle. He took me to Belltown to break up a gang of armed crack dealers. They were, "What the f*ck are you doing coming here in your costumes? This is not fun and games to us. If you don't get off our block we're going to shoot you." And Phoenix said, "We're staying."

What are you reading right now?

Nothing. I'm watching Freaks and Geeks on Netflix. I think it's just about the best thing I ever saw. It breaks my heart that they only made one series. It makes me feel so helpless that I can't go back in time and fix it so they made more. It's like finding out someone died. Although I did notice one or two jumping the shark moments in the last episode or two - like James Franco liking Dungeons and Dragons. So maybe it was for the best that it died young and left a good looking corpse.

Do you stay in touch with anyone you write about?

I would like to stay in touch with everyone. I consider it a real honor and compliment if people want to stay in touch with me after I've written about them. Even if we massively disagree with each other politically, I always think we've been thought something intimate together when we've had some kind of encounter or adventure. They feel like family members.

What have been some of your most recent obsessions, even if they were only fleeting? (I for instance spent part of today googling Aleister Crowley and his ilk.)

Ha. Last few days I've looked at the disappearance of Maura Murray, workplace bullying and Amanda Palmer.

What’s a potential story topic you figured would be rich for material but turned out to be relatively banal, and then another where you stumbled upon a wormhole in an unexpected place?

The saddest example of a story that went nowhere was the months trying to write a book about the credit card industry. This was before the crash. I realized was that all these people who work in the credit industry – the list brokers, all these people who’ve got these devious tricks to keep us ensnared – are really important. But they are also incredibly boring. They couldn't light up the page for me. So I abandoned the book. And instead I went to Alaska to write my story Santa's Little Conspirators, that ended up in Lost at Sea, my new collection. That was about shenanigans in a Christmas theme town.

The opposite - a story I wasn't into but turned out to be extraordinary - was going to Hawaii to interview a soldier called Glenn Wheaton. He had been part of the US Military's remote viewing program. The psychic spies. I really didn't have any interest in them. The writer Jim Schnabel had already written a very intricate book about them called Remote Viewers. I felt like I was telling a story that was already known. It was really miserable for me. While I was interviewing him we got talking about the 'other stuff' they were doing. He said they were trying to become invisible and kill goats just by staring at them. So the wormhole opened up. And I ended up writing The Men Who Stare At Goats.

Factchecking your work must be thrilling and exhausting. Which stories of yours were the most difficult to clear before publishing?

I don't remember ever having much of a problem. I'm pretty assiduous when I'm gathering the stories. So fact checking is usually fine.

How does it feel to be the 348th person interviewed for Zulkey.com/WBEZ?
It feels good!

Mayor Richard M. Daley: An Appraisal

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:21:00 -0500

Keith Koeneman writes about Chicago history, politics and culture. His recently released book on the retired mayor of Chicago, "First Son: The Biography of Richard M. Daley," was built on unprecedented access to the key players in the long-running Daley administration. The book tells the story of a complicated leader—sensitive and tough, impatient and persistent—who as mayor not only ran but also embodied Chicago.

In First Son: The Biography of Richard M. Daley, Koeneman chronicles the complex and often contradictory life of an American political legend. Through more than 100 interviews, he tells an up-close, insider story of political triumph and personal evolution, highlighting Daley’s achievements and mistakes.

Koeneman also demonstrates how Daley’s influence expanded beyond his beloved city, especially after protégés Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, as well as his confidant and brother Bill Daley, became major players under President Obama.

Recorded live Wednesday, May 8, 2013 at Elmhurst College.

Elizabeth Smart decries abstinence-only sex ed, and her message hits home

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:00:00 -0500

Before Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Berry's young daughter were discovered in the basement of a Cleveland home on Monday, held captive by a neighborhood man for over 10 years, the nation was captivated by another abducted girl-turned miracle story: the case of Elizabeth Smart.

In 2002, 14-year-old Smart was kidnapped from her bedroom in Salt Lake City. She was found nine months later, only 18 miles from her home, and her captors (who also raped her repeatedly and threatened to kill her) were sentenced to life in prison.

Today, Smart is working on behalf of the Elizabeth Smart Foundation for abduction awareness, and in light of recent events in Ohio, speaking out against abstinence-only education and its detrimental effects on victims of rape and human trafficking.

During a panel at John Hopkins last week, Smart (now 25 and finishing up a music degree at Brigham Young University) described how intense guilt and shame kept her from escaping her abusers:

"I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence,” Smart told the panel, “And she said, 'Imagine you’re a stick of gum. When you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum, and who is going to want you after that?’ Well, that’s terrible. No one should ever say that. But for me, I thought, ‘I’m that chewed-up piece of gum.’ Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And that’s how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value."

I received a similar abstinence-only lecture while attending Catholic school in Texas. As I sat in a gymnasium with 200 other girls between the ages of 12 and 14, a speaker put on a pair of velcro garden gloves ("Barbie and Ken," he called them), slapped his hands together and then pulled them apart with a loud, drawn-out ripping noise.

"That's the sound of your virginity being taken away," he said.

On another occasion, my middle school classmates and I were shown pictures of aborted fetuses, then given white cards that we had to spray to reveal our pink stains of STDs from pre-marital sex.

I got chlymadia on the card, but not in real life. Meanwhile, the abortion scare tactics seemed to have little effect on my peers, as many of them went on to have sex behind the bleachers in high school.

Unfortunately, this "virgin purity" absurdity is perpetuated by faiths the world over, and causes religious victims of rape and molestation to feel even more worthless than they would already.

After being raised in a Mormon household, Smart attests that she felt "so dirty and filthy" for being forced into pre-marital sex, and understands why victims don't run for "that alone."

However, she also believes that instead of slut-shaming children with creepy used gum and premarital-sex-is-like-being-a-dirty-glass-of-water analogies, they should be taught that "they have value no matter what."

Smart remains a devout Mormon to this day (married to a young man whom she met on a mission, no less) but her strength and courage in denouncing a key component of the religious right proves that she is a true advocate for more comprehensive sex education as well.

When asked for her thoughts on the Ohio kidnap rescue earlier this week, Smart said that she hopes the three victims will "find their own pathway back to some sense of well-being" and not blame themselves for the abuse that they were forced to endure:

“[Their abductor] has stolen so much from them already, they deserve to be happy," Smart told ABC's Good Morning America, "I would tell them I hope that they realize there is so much ahead of them, that they don’t need to hold on to the past … They don’t need to relive everything that’s happened, because it’s proof, their rescue is proof that there are good people out there."

"It's not their fault," Smart made sure to add, "It's never their fault."

Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Twitter @leahkpickett or join the conversation on Facebook.

What is the ultimate Chicago book?

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:15:00 -0500

Curious Citizen Pavel Gigov asked a question a few months ago that might have been answered in Rachel Shteir's recent New York Times Book Review article. Pavel wants to know which single book could teach him the most about Chicago. In Shteir's infamous review of three recent books about Chicago, she gave short shrift to the city's literary context, instead focusing on myriad problems plaguing "Poor Chicago." Nearly three weeks out and, with our collective ire down to simmering, now is as good a time as any to answer Pavel's question.

To start off, we reached out to someone who’s at least familiar with the theme: Annie Tully, who directs the One Book, One Chicago program at the Chicago Public Library. After huddling with library staff and consulting their master lists, she sent us a list of titles that could potentially fit the bill for Pavel. That list, produced below, includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children's literature and graphic novels. While The Encyclopedia of Chicago contains a lot of facts about the city, Chicago Poems by Carl Sandberg may convey more essential truths. Could Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bronzeville Boys and Girls be more instructive than Mike Royko's early columns?

Of course we can't settle on one book to define Chicago, because there are as many “Chicagos” as there are Chicagoans. Rachel Shteir would certainly have a different choice (possibly Sister Carrie) than Neil Steinberg. But that just means we get to have a conversation about our choices and hopefully understand more about the vast array of different Chicagos.

So please choose a book from this list that best explains Chicago as you understand it. If your choice isn't listed, please add it. Maybe Rick Kogan's Dr. Night Life should be included, who knows? We'll talk about the top five books next Monday on Morning Shift.

Andrew Gill is a WBEZ web producer. Follow him @andrewgill.

'The Great Migration' Conversation with Timuel D. Black Jr., Linda Johnson Rice & Adam Green

Mon, 06 May 2013 13:46:00 -0500

As part of the programming for the 2013-14 One Book, One Chicago selection, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America’s Great Migration, the Chicago Public Library welcomed Timuel D. Black Jr., Linda Johnson Rice and Adam Green for an engaging conversation of how the Great Migration shaped their lives and the city of Chicago.

Timuel D. Black, Jr., a recent Champion of Freedom Award recipient, is a Chicago educator, activist and historian who has written extensively on the Great Migration in his books Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration and Bridges of Memory Volume 2:Chicago’s Second Generation of Black Migration.

Linda Johnson Rice’s parents, John and Eunice Johnson, came to Chicago from the South and built the Johnson Publishing Company, one of the world’s most successful black-owned media companies of which Ms. Rice is President and CEO.

University of Chicago History Professor Adam Green, writes about the Great Migration in his books Selling the Race: The Culture and Community in Black Chicago, 1940-1955 and Time Longer than Rope: Studies in African American Activism, 1850-1950.

Recorded live Monday, May 6, 2013 at the Harold Washington Library Center.

Q&A with Julie Klausner, author of 'Art Girls Are Easy'

Mon, 06 May 2013 08:13:00 -0500

You probably know Julie Klausner from my 2010 interview with her. If not for that, maybe her memoir I Don't Care About Her Band or her personable podcast How Was Your Week. Starting Tuesday, you will also know her for her role as Young Adult author, as her new book Art Girls Are Easy, a funny and romantic summer camp romp with an artsy twist, will be released May 7. I asked Julie what it's like wearing a new YA hat, and below that, check out an excerpt from the book.

How hard or easy was it to switch gears into YA writing? What challenges did it pose?
It's completely tough to write a book, period. But switching gears into fiction was absolutely challenging, if only because I had to make sure I wasn't using my own voice the whole time when I was writing—whether it was in the description or in the dialogue. I don't have a lot of experience writing fiction. Part of that is because I have such a loud nonfiction voice. I am who I am. Another element of the challenge of having to sit down and make sh*t up is imagination. As I grow older, I become more and more fearful that I have little to no imagination. The kind of abilities I had as a little kid to just play and make things up as you went along. So, I had to get past that fear to crack the story, and then to write in the voices of the kids I invented. But as far as it being a challenge from a YA perspective, I honestly have to say that I just tried to be true to the material, and I didn't think of the audience as being below or necessarily less sophisticated than somebody I would usually write for. I didn't dumb down my prose—or, I tried not to.

You don't have to give us details (but feel free to), but how much of the book was inspired by your own young adulthood?
I absolutely relate to the main character in the book. I was a very emotionally intense adolescent, very interior. I was eaten alive by my own passions, which were equal parts artistic drive and sexual madness. That's where I drew the inspiration for Indigo's tumult. Her conflict is more internal than it is a concrete struggle with her best friend. She does have some love affair gone sour stuff with her best friend Lucy, but the main plot exists within Indigo, I think. As far as the setting, I did go to a Fine and Performing Arts sleepaway camp, but it wasn't like Silver Springs at all, insomuch as the counselors were NOT sleazy and I will go on record as saying nobody ever tried to make out with me at the time. Which is still disappointing.

What YA books have inspired you, either when you were a young adult or now in your general adulthood?
The first Gossip Girl novel, by Cecily Von Ziegesar, was a huge inspiration, in terms of when I was first researching the genre and my agent suggested I see what was out there. I was so impressed by its satire and humor and its references, as well as by its structure. It read like a television show in how it was laid out; each scene introduced a couple of characters and they all converged in the middle and at the end. I mean this as a huge compliment. So, that absolutely encouraged me to write one of my own. AS far as growing up, like everybody else I was shaped by Judy Blume's opus, but I also want to give a shout-out to Paula Danziger. She wrote some steamy—for me, at the time—novels about teenage girls making out with dudes and coming of age, and I plowed through every one of her novels. Also, if you Google her, you'll find some pretty incredible photos of her wearing a jaunty headband, which I guess, along with her purple glasses, was a trademark. She's dead now, which is very sad. A fellow redhead, too! Redhead Hall of Fame for her, no doubt.

What are your plans for celebrating your first YA book's release?
None as of yet! But I will probably overeat that night.

Who is currently your favorite animal? (Neither your nor my pets qualify.)
Well, that is unfair to disqualify Briscoe and Jimmy Jazz, but I'll play along. I'll go with most recently adored instead of utmost overall pet. Yesterday I met Marc Spitz's two basset hounds, Jerry and Joni. Jerry dazzled me, with his vocal displays of neediness and alpha-tude, but Joni ultimately won me over with her nuzzles and her plaintive, God-like eyes. I love them both. They are good hounds.

[Editor's note: Both Marc Spitz's and my dogs are named after Jerry Orbach.]

Now please enjoy an excerpt from Art Girls are Easy:

“Wake up!” Eleanor hissed. Sure enough, the bus was pulling up to campus, and the sign welcoming motorists to Silver Springs elicited cheers and general rabble from the peanut gallery of young campers at the front.
Indigo felt disoriented and groggy. She rubbed her eyes carefully so as not to smudge her mascara and looked out the window.They were just pulling up to the front of the camp.Indy could make out the lush lawn and blue buildings with sloping gray roofs in the near distance. Massive shady trees were spaced evenly throughout the campus, and the Silver Springs camp flag, which bore a feminized coat of arms that represented each discipline taught at camp above the Latin phrase ArsGratiaArtis (“Art is the reward of art”), danced lightly in the breeze. The overall effect was quite ethereal. Indigo began to imagine which colors she would mix to achieve the specific shades of the scene if she were to paint a landscape right now. Chartreuse and goldenrod. Maybe some cerulean.
“You were snoring.”Eleanor smirked, her thin lips a line graph of contempt under her Lancôme burgundy matte stick. “It was pretty annoying.”That was rich, coming from her. Indy gathered her things: she couldn’t wait to get off this bus and avoid Eleanor for the rest of the summer.
As the girls lined up like elegant, talented cattle down the bus aisle, the camp director, Lillian Meehan, greeted each camper as she exited with a lei made from organic peonies tied together with red kabbalah string. Lillian was tall and amiable, and thin enough to look great in clothes, though not necessarily pretty. Basically, she was Glenn Close with dark hair and a whistle around her neck.
Lucy looked back at a still-sleepy, rumpled Indigo before getting off the bus. As the two girls made eye contact for the first time since their light dish session about Tyler or Taylor or whoever, Lucy smiled and winked at her friend, and Indy felt the warm rush of camaraderie wash over her. She smiled back and soon enough emerged from the bus into the warm kiss of sunlight on the grassy patch, where Lillian greeted her with a lei. And when she lifted her face to take in the familiar postcard of the sprawling green campus before her, Indigo found something small and sublime in its composition.
There, on the lawn of the main sprawl of Silver Springs, right near the office, stood Nick Estep, holding a blowtorch to a life-size rectangular metal sculpture. Goggles rested over his longish hair, which trickled onto the collar of his Nirvana T-shirt in the Berkshires sunlight.Indigo’s heart rocketed to every point on the surface of her skin. He was here after all.

Follow Claire Zulkey @Zulkey.

Recipes for Domesticity: Cookery, Household Management, and the Notion of Expertise

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:07:00 -0500

How does one roast a fawn or properly set a dinner table for twelve? For centuries, people have been documenting and decoding the vast array of knowledge associated with domestic life, assembling cooking and household guides to assist with the tasks of daily living. Not merely collections of recipes and how-to instructions, these guides also document cultural patterns and give insight into the development of modern-day kitchen and cooking practices.

This exhibition, drawn primarily from the Rare Books Collection, provides a sampling of European and American cookbooks and domestic manuals from court chefs of the 15th century to cooking icons of the 20th century. Take a virtual tour of the collection here.

Julia Gardner is Head of Reader Services at the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. She received a Master’s of Science in Information degree from the University of Michigan School of Information. She earned a B.A. in English literature from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. In addition to providing reference assistance to SCRC’s many visitors, Julia is active in the Center’s exhibitions program and its instruction program, which last year hosted 100 classes.

Recorded live Saturday, May 4, 2013 at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library.

Interview with 'Sexy Feminism' co-author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:54:00 -0500

I chat with a homegirl today, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs before moving to New York, where she spent a decade on staff at Entertainment Weekly, cofounded SexyFeminist.com, and now writes for several publications, including Women’s Health, Runner’s World, Writer’s Digest, Fast Company, and New York‘s Vulture. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, is coming out on Tuesday, while her collaboration with Heather Wood Rudulph, Sexy Feminism, was released earlier this year. She has provided pop culture commentary for CNN, VH1, A&E, and ABC and teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop. You can learn a lot more about her here.

I’m guilty of this myself but often, women criticize other women’s definitions of feminism. What were some criticisms you anticipated people lobbing towards Sexy Feminism that you wanted to head off at the pass and address within it?
We knew when we named our website Sexy Feminist (and then our book Sexy Feminism) that we were being a little, you know, provocative. But we knew it would start specific discussions, and we were right. Our thing is that we're definitely NOT delineating ourselves from other feminists somehow—you know, we're sexy feminists, and the others aren't—but we're saying that, despite continued misperception, ALL feminism is sexy. And we'll stop calling our website Sexy Feminist when everyone gets that. The idea is to stop people who have not necessarily identified as feminists but who are feminist-curious to look at the book or the site and want to learn more.

Tell me about the cover of the book: what were some other possibilities (if any) that were considered?
The only other possibility we got from the publisher was a very straightforward cover with no photos or graphics, which we thought was a little ... less than exciting, given the provocative name. This was the alternative we ended up with after sharing that feedback with them, and we felt okay about it. It's attention-grabbing, and that lipgloss is so fantastic that I ended up going out to hunt down anything I could find at Sephora that came close. (Hot tip: Tarte's lip crayon in "Enchanted" is my new favorite toy, and Tarte is one of our feminist-friendly cosmetic companies named in the book. Win win!)

What do you think are examples of pop culture that got feminism right both in terms of definition/idealism but also by demonstrating it in an everyday, practical way?
I feel a professional obligation to say this, but I also believe it: The Mary Tyler Moore Show. They weren't trying to be feminist, but the movement was so much in the air at the time, and they had so many feminist-identified women writing for the show, that it came through. I always say Mary Richards was the original Sexy Feminist. She really came into her empowerment throughout the series, and we saw her argue for equal pay to her male predecessor, we saw her talk about the pressures of being the only woman in the newsroom, and we saw her (mostly in later years) assert herself strongly with men. In one of the last episodes, she even asked Lou Grant out. It didn't work out, but still.

You’ve written books about The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the Mickey Mouse Club. What are some books about shows you’d read if they were written (but don’t want to write yourself?)
I love this question, because I can tell you that when figuring out my next book (which is now officially Seinfeld) I basically just pored over lists of TV shows. The ones I feel like I definitely can't tackle are sci-fi shows: I love some of them but don't have the geek-level knowledge required. So I think about stuff like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Lost. Those are the two that I think could hold up to book treatment, but I'm not necessarily the right author for them.

Tell me about what you do as a career coach/consultant. And what do you do when you feel like you need consulting?
I'm very good at running other people's lives! Actually, I have to admit I think I've had a pretty good run in my own career so far, and I really do like helping other people figure out how to make those key decisions that can make a difference. Most of the time, it's that people are simply frozen into inaction by fear—fear of failing, fear of succeeding. And writing, in particular, is such a baffling career path full of constant decisions. You don't just take the corporate job and then wait 50 years so you can get your gold watch. So I can talk to clients about everything from getting their first few publication credits to moving to the next level of publications to getting an agent or going freelance full-time. It's funny you ask about what I do when I need consulting, because I've just recently started feeling that itch, like, okay, what now? I've started looking for mentors to befriend so I can ask them for a little advice in exchange for a few rounds of drinks; I also went to a great conference last week run by ASJA, and got tons of ideas for ways to advance my career more.

What’s something really unfeminist that you like? (Sometimes I dance to really misogynistic music.)
Oh, man, I do love me some "In da Club" and "Big Pimpin.'" They're just good songs. I also happen to really enjoy watching The Bachelor/Bachelorette. I always say I will allow myself to watch them because I have studied media and feminism enough that I watch them with a (very) critical lens, and because I don't personally have a Nielsen box, so I'm not actually affecting the ratings. If I get a Nielsen box, it must stop immediately.

When you worked at Entertainment Weekly, which fanbases tended to respond most rabidly when you wrote about their favorite show/artist/movie etc?
Well, despite my claims that I couldn't write a whole Lost book, I did do some reporting on Lost in my day, and, you know, you can imagine that fan base. But more surprisingly, people get just as into their Grey's Anatomy, for instance. I used to recap that and couldn't ever read the message board comments. They were very, very passionate, and channeled that passion into being not-always-kind to me.

Who are some of your favorite sexy feminists in pop culture (and you cannot name either Tina Fey or Amy Poehler.)
Ha! Those ladies do rule, but I've been totally enamored of Lena Dunham of late. If you watch or read her interviews, man, that girl is scary smart. And a totally out-and-proud feminist. She takes the loads of criticism of her work quite beautifully, and I think her constant nakedness onscreen really is revolutionary the way she does it. We truly do need to see more body types besides 90 pounds and 5-foot-10 with Olympic-level abs. I also adore Mindy Kaling, and her show does a lot of subtly feminist things: Her character is great at her job and clearly smart, even though she's a little boy crazy and talks like a teenager. But more importantly, she has this insane sexual confidence that I think makes her a strangely wonderful role model to young women. Also, she's unbelievably funny, in her own way.

You’ve worked with Heather Wood for a long time (back when I interviewed you for MBToolBox about Sirens Mag.) Why do you two work so well together and what tips do you have for working with a longtime collaborator?
We definitely just have that mind-meld thing happening. We're each totally comfortable letting the other speak on our behalf as a team. I'm an independent spirit, but it's nice to have a collaborator to fall back on sometimes when your life gets crazy with book deadlines or personal stuff. It's the best when I log onto the site and see that she's posted new content or edited a piece I'd been neglecting. We can talk each other off professional ledges sometimes, too. The main thing is to treat it almost like a romantic relationship. Keep lines of communication open and constantly express appreciation. One of the things I've noticed we automatically do, and I like, is to always thank each other. If she sees that I put up a new post, she thanks me. If she does our taxes, I thank her. I've actually carried this over into my romantic relationship, and it works wonders!

How does it feel to be the 347th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
I feel really good about that number. There's something auspicious about it.

Follow Claire Zulkey @zulkey, check out previous interviews here or see her at Funny Ha-Ha tonight.