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Welcome Back, WRB!January 26, 2006 I knew it was coming but still I'm thrilled: the Women's Review of Books, volume 23, issue 1, is in the bundle I withdrew from my overstuffed p.o. box. It's back, it's back! After noting the new cover design (eye-catching), the use of color (excellent), and the quality of the printing (fine), of course I turn immediately to my review of Octavia Butler's Fledgling and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, the one I was sweating blood, ink, and virtual print over in September (how soon we forget). Hurray, it still seems lucid; it does a particularly good job, I think, at laying out the themes Butler has been working with in her fiction over the last 30 years. Most important: there are no sour notes I wish I hadn't played. Then I start at the beginning, to savor the glorious company my prose gets to keep: reviews of biographies of Billie Holiday, Eudora Welty, and the Peabody sisters; of "Vivian Gornick's exquisite meditation" on Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Dorothy Allison's discussion of Bobbie Ann Mason's new novel, An Atomic Romance, which manages to seamlessly combine a review of the book with an exploration of plot-, language-, idea-, and character-driven fiction and the appeals thereof. (Memo to self: Learn how to do this, do justice to the book while discussing larger literary issues. If the likes of Dorothy Allison and Ursula Le Guin can do it, so can I. Aim high! Aim high!) I linger over an interview with Doha Boraki, Moroccan translator and novelist -- mention of a detached retina leaps off the page and inspires thoughts of an international sisterhood of detached-retina survivors. I relish poems by Alicia Ostriker and Maxine Kumin, then wallow in an essay on lesbian pulp fiction, written by Carol Seajay, one of my long-time heroes and also my editor for the 12 years I reviewed fantasy and science fiction for Feminist Bookstore News. Carol founded, edited, and published FBN -- an indispensable journal for the feminist, gay, and progressive book trade, from 1976 through 2000. Now she's back as the editor-publisher of Books to Watch Out For. (More about that at www.btwof.com -- essential reading if you have any interest in lesbian, gay, and/or women's books.) And more more more -- even the ads are great; I read every word of all the ads because they're all about books, and one major publisher's lead title is a biography I copyedited. (Egoboos are everywhere . . .) In her lively essay on why you don't hear women comedians on late-night TV (well, I know why I don't hear women comedians on late-night TV: I don't have a TV), feminist humorist Kate Clinton notes: "The comic elders mouth the classic line, which I have heard often in my career, 'Look, funny is funny.'" Clinton knows this is crap, you and I know it's crap; and we know it's crap not just about comedy but about literature, politics, and everything else. Literature without women, without feminism, is flat -- like the world before that Columbus dude sailed over the edge and messed everything up. Which is why, in this stellar comeback issue, the most important piece is editor in chief Amy Hoffman's editorial on page 2. Addressed to "Friends of the Women's Review of Books," it begins: "I never thought I'd be writing this letter." Hoffman describes her search for solutions after WRB suspended publication at the end of 2004, her pessimism -- and the connections that led to this wonderful relaunch. She writes: "Feminists often agonize over the split between researchers, scholars, and theorists, on the one hand, and activists, on the other. In Women's Review of Books, the two groups meet. This is happening nowhere else." That says it all, or most of it. If we don't put ourselves first, no one will. (The winter 2006 issue of Ms. noted that between September and December 2005, women writers represented 23% of the contributions to the Atlantic Monthly, 18% for Harper's, 21% for the New Yorker, and a whopping 29% for the New York Times Magazine. Is this because women writers can't produce excellent stories on important topics? Don't believe it. It's because the guys, and occasional gals, editing those rags think that funny is funny, writing is writing -- that gender doesn't matter. Got a secret for y'all: it does.) So please, for your own sake and the sake of all us writers and readers who desperately need more discussion of feminist issues, and not just Feminism 101 -- subscribe. Buy a sub for a friend, or two or three. Put a sub of your own high on your next birthday list. More info at www.wcwonline.org/womensreview.
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