#joannawalsh

[theletterspage]

International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day is on March 8th. Our newest member of the editorial team, Rachael Smart, considers the role writers have played in the feminist movement.

International Women’s Day couldn’t come at a more welcome time. When anti-women agendas have inflamed social climates of disbelief and deep unrest in America, and the UK following Trump’s inauguration, today’s event offers up a necessary and lively forum for women’s debate.

Its theme this year, ‘Women in the Changing World of Work,’ aims to realise a ‘Planet 50-50 by 2030’ in an urgent call for action to accelerate gender parity. Social representations suggest the gender gap is closing but the reality is similar to that maddening playground game, Grandmother’s Footsteps, where once women are caught moving they get sent back to the start.

So what needs to change for women in writing? Debbie Taylor, founder of Mslexia ‘the magazine for women who write’ recently reviewed some 20 years of statistics on gender imbalance in the literary industry. She recommends that anonymous submissions, more women judges, encouraging women’s submissions and challenging how masculine aesthetics bias standards of excellence would make a pretty good start.

The formerly singular, ‘Woman’s Day’ began in radical ways with Charlotte Perkins Gilman addressing women’s domestic disadvantages at a New York conference of socialists in 1909. Whilst today’s event will chart measurable ways forward in women’s industry, it’s much less about starting revolutions now with its ‘change starts small’ philosophy and the lens is on empowerment, and dare we say it, fun.

All this talk of women got us thinking, and in keeping with the celebratory spirit we’ve been reflecting on former contributors to The Letters Page, women who are #bold for change.

In celebration of women’s art and performance at London’s Southbank Centre from 7-12th March WOW – Women of the World Festival will champion gender equality. Karen McLeod, former contributor to The Letters Page (Issue 5, Spring 2015) will be performing with award-winning literary salon Polari in a collaborative event which celebrates writing by LGBT women.

McLeod is probably best known for her debut novel In Search of the Missing Eyelash, a startling narrative about a lonely woman who stalks her former lover. She is also a talented performance artist who created the tragicomic alter-ego Barbara Brownskirt, a poet McLeod defines as a ‘manifestation of bitterness, anger, lesbian cliché, railing against her lot through poetry. She might be rubbish, but she doesn't know it.’ Obsessed with Dame Judi Dench, Brownskirt wears a brown skirt, sensible shoes and bungee-cord hooded cagoule for her self-appointed post as Writer in Residence at the 197 bus stop, Croydon Road, Penge where she reads godawful poetry to passersby.

Joanna Walsh (The Letters Page, Vol 1) founded the phenomenally successful Twitter hashtag #readwomen, an initiative signposting readers to women’s lesser known works. To mark the event last year, she recommended a compelling list of female writers in translation including Lina Wolff’s bizarrely witty yet rarely heard of ‘Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs.’

Walsh’s approach to feminism is invigorating. In a piece for the Guardian she argued for the much neglected political importance of having fun and found amongst the handmade witty placards, the diverse groups merging in a bid for political solidarity at the London women’s march in January that enjoyment was there to be had. Fun, she says, whilst temporary and the sort of gratification that gets interpreted as uncouth and cheap, can also be a fiery act of defiance. In times of austerity, Walsh argues, the conditions for happiness are stripped and laughter is sometimes all the poor are left with and therefore fun, ‘is ripe for our use.’ Whatever you’re doing for International Women’s Day, whether it be making a dent in that woman’s novel gathering dust or making a much bigger statement, Walsh reminds us that ‘having a laugh can smash down walls’, so in the same spirit, make sure you have fun. Previous issues of The Letters Page can be downloaded here.  Our handsome print edition, The Letters Page, Vol 1, can be purchased from Book Ex Machina.

[theletterspage]

An interview with Joanna Walsh - Volume 1 contributor

Joanna Walsh’s work has been published by Granta, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Best British Short Stories, and others. She is a critic for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the National. Lu Feng, an MA student of Creative Writing here at the University of Nottingham, spoke to her recently on behalf of The Letters Page.

On Christmas Day, the English writer Joanna Walsh is on the road again. She posts a tweet from Spain: ‘Happy unxmas from my balcony in Granada,’ along with a photo of the sun shining over trees and white buildings on a hill. Journeys and hotels feature frequently in Walsh’s published works; themes which seem to reflect her sense of adventure and wanderlust.

As a writer Joanna Walsh is increasingly concerned with what happens before new female writers get published. ‘I didn't become a writer for years because I didn't think what I had to say had any 'value'. And I thought that was because my writing was about women's everyday experiences,’ Walsh recalls. Her collection of stories Fractals was published by Blue Pavillion in 2013. She is also the Contributing Editor at 3:am Magazine where she has published female writers before they get book deals, such as Eley Williams.

To some extent, Walsh’s highly successful Twitter campaign #readwomen can be seen as a gentle feminist intervention. When Joanna Walsh was invited to talk on the book blog, The Literary Sofa, she said she hoped to put women writers on a slightly wider radar. ‘It’s little more than whispering their names in a crowded room, but if enough people whisper them, people will hear.’ With #readwomen approaching 20,000 followers and continuing to grow, it seems the world did hear her voice, and clearly.

In her memoir, Hotel, Joanna tackles the concept of home, an issue she decided to address systematically because she had spent so much time thinking about it before and during the breakdown of her marriage.It was once she took a job as a hotel reviewer that Walsh started writing seriously and went on to publish three books in one year. ‘I have felt for a long while, maybe forever, that there is something not quite right about my life. The plot could be better, or maybe the scenery. This is, perhaps, why I am writing.’ Joanna Walsh explains in Hotel on the compulsion to write.

This concept of displacement also runs through Joanna Walsh's short story collection, Vertigo. The New York Times describes Vertigo as ‘a psychological landscape lightly spooked by loneliness, jealousy and alienation.’ The collection articulates a sense of the dislocation that travel can bring, a sensation that Joanna knows all too well, where ‘the first effect of being abroad is strangeness.’

In addition to verbal expression, Joanna Walsh also excels at visual expression. Her first occupation after studying English at Oxford University was as an illustrator. Her illustrations have appeared worldwide in publications ranging from The Economist to The New York Times, Die Woche to Penguin Books. In 2011, her visual diary, London Walks! was published by Tate.

For Walsh, both writing and illustrating are all-absorbing occupations. “I used to wake up in the night and think, ‘If I changed that colour to orange, everything will work out.’ Now I wake up thinking, ‘If I replace all the “thes” with “as”...’ Even so, a sensitivity to material objects greatly benefits her writing. When readers open her books, vivid descriptions of sound and image always evoke the physical impressively.

In Walsh’s contribution to The Letters Page, Your Return Shipment, she shares an awkward journey with troublesome baggage. In fact, Walsh did this very same journey in reverse but carrying only emotional baggage. ‘It's possible to claim that the emotional realm is a female writer's take,’ Joanna Walsh said, when I asked about the letter’s perspective, ‘I'd say it's more of a sneaky Beckett reference. I didn't think of it as gendered. In fact, if you read the story, there's no reference to the narrator's gender. That story could as well be narrated by a man.’

You can read Joanna Walsh’s letter, Your Return Shipment, in The Letters Page Vol 1, available from http://www.bookexmachina.com/theletterspage.html