When I heard about Alex Schnee, an author and student at Sarah Lawrence college, and her recently published novel, Shakespeare’s Lady, I knew that I had to talk with her. We decided to Skype about both publishing books around the same time, what our experiences were like and why some view young women our age as complacent.

Julie Zeilinger: Ok, so can you just start by explaining briefly what your book is about?

Alex Schnee: Sure. It’s about the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Nobody really knows who she is, but I found a woman living at that time who has been propositioned as the dark lady by several scholars. I tried to weave together a fictional romance between William Shakespeare and this woman, Emilia Bassano Lanier.

Julie: How did you decide to write about that topic in particular? Was it born from a literature-based love of Shakespeare, a historical perspective, both?

Alex: It was definitely both. I was writing a report on Shakespeare and his sonnets and I thought it was kind of strange how very few people actually knew about the dark lady or who she was. I’ve loved Shakespeare and that time period ever since I was a kid so it was a very fun project for me.

Julie: Can you explain how you came to be published at such a young age? What was the experience like for you?

Alex: I had been taking a writing class with author Tricia Goyer. I showed her some of the manuscript and she encouraged me to attend the Mount Hermon Writers’ Conference in Santa Cruz, California. She thought I should pitch the novel to some editors and agents–which was kind of intimidating when I was seventeen! But everyone was really nice and interested in the story.

Julie: Had it always been a goal of yours to get published? Or was it something that just happened based on the experience of going to the conference?

Alex: I’ve always wanted to be a writer, so it was a dream I kind of always had. I hadn’t ever expected it to happen when I was so young, though. I was really lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

Julie: Yeah, that’s how I felt about my book, A Little F’d Up– I just felt a lot of self-doubt because of my age.

Alex: Has it been difficult to balance school work and having a book published at the same time?

Julie: It’s been difficult, especially since I got to college and everything stepped up academically. People asked me that a lot in high school, and the thing was it was never difficult for me to balance the actual work in high school with writing the book, the issue was always more this weird dynamic that existed between me and other people because I was writing the book. There wasn’t animosity, but it was just sort of like I was the girl writing a book and I think it made people look at me differently. How was handling that balance for you? Did you write the book in high school?

Alex: I wrote it in high school, too. It was a lot of the same thing you were describing. There were a lot of people who were really supportive and there were some who weren’t so much. I guess you have to learn to separate the opinions of the people who are important to you and the ones of those who aren’t.

Julie: True. It’s something I think a lot about because I’m always asked if teen girls today are complacent and while I think that teen girls are capable of so much, I also think they’re afraid of the backlash that often comes with “overachieving” (even if “overachieving” really might just mean living up to your potential).

Alex: That’s a great point. I feel like sometimes it’s hard for girls to feel comfortable pursuing their dreams. And teen girls can accomplish so much if they put their minds to it.

Julie: So do you consider yourself a feminist? It seems like there’s a feminist thread to the topic of your novel.

Alex: I do consider myself a feminist, though it wasn’t something I was particularly passionate about as a teen. I’ve always believed in equal rights and equal pay for women, but it wasn’t really a topic that was apparent to me as I wrote the book. Only after I started attending Sarah Lawrence did I really realize that these were important societal issues to me–and that as women we’ve struggled with our rights even as far back as Shakespeare’s time.

Julie: Yeah, it’s interesting I just finished my first year of college and there was this clear difference I noticed just in the course of the year where girls who at the beginning didn’t really seem interested that much in feminism were starting to pick up on it more and becoming more interested in it by the end of the year. Was there something specific that happened during your time at college that made you more interested or was it more of a gradual thing?

Alex: I took a class in ancient Greek art, and it was amazing to me how there was constant allusion to the idea of matriarchy in Greek art. Greek mythology is the basis for my second book, and I was fascinated by the idea that women were once such an important part of religious ideology in the ancient world. I ended up writing a conference project, which is kind of like a mini-thesis at Sarah Lawrence, about how women were perceived in ancient Greece. I think that was what really got me thinking about our place as women in the world–historically and today.

Julie: That’s fascinating. Well, thank you for taking the time to talk with me and I look forward to reading Shakespeare’s Lady!

Alex: Thanks!

I hope that my conversation with Alex can be a starting point for a greater conversation in the FBomb community. To all the aspiring writers out there — I want to hear about your writing processes and experiences as well. Have you guys written essays, short stories, novels (etc) and are interested in publishing? What motivates and inspires you and what do you feel holds you back? And if you have published your work, please feel free to tell us about it here — God knows I plug my book on here, now it’s your turn.

Speaking of which, Shakespeare’s Lady is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and A Little F’d Up is also sold at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

El Perro Del Mar

El Perro del Mar is the musical work of Swedish songstress Sarah Assbring. Drawing influence from ’60s girl-group music, church hymns, buddhist mantras, and twee pop, Assbring makes slow, sad, achingly beautiful pop-songs that favor simple repetition over overblown ostentation.

Assbring (born in 1977) was raised in Gothenburg, and was exposed to music at an early age via the record collection of her jazz-loving father. From her childhood, Assbring wanted to “first and foremost” be a singer. “I remember being amazed by Annie Lennox and Kate Bush as a kid,” Assbring has recalled, to Identity Theory. “I was totally into their way of going in and out of different personalities, almost as a form of acting when singing.”

Assbring abandoned early piano lessons because of their “restrictive” nature, and took to singing in a church choir throughout her adolescence and into early adulthood.

In 2003, mired in depression and feeling like a victim of her own “destructive and negative” attitude, Assbring escaped on a holiday to Spain. On an isolated beach, she came across a dog, and via a strange process of self-identification —”I had had this feeling of feeling like a dog, all hopeless and tired,” she told Pitchfork— she came to two conclusions: she had to start making music, and her name had to be El Perro del Mar (Spanish for “the Dog from the Sea”).

via Altmusic.about.com

Change of Heart

From The Valley To The Stars

El Perro del Mar on iTunes:

Over the past several months, I’ve begun to watch competitive cooking shows obsessively. I mean, I don’t really know how to turn on my own oven and have never cooked anything in my life, but watching food shows has given me a desire to learn how to cook something simple…someday in the far future. But while these competitive food shows are certainly good for cooking tips, I couldn’t help but notice that women are largely underrepresented.

One of my favorite shows is Chopped, where four professional chefs are given a very short amount of time to make a dish composed of three or four random ingredients. There is usually only one female competitor on each episode. Every once in a while, you’ll see two women, but it’s unusual. There was only one episode I can remember where all four competitors were female, and the rarity of such an occurrence was pointed out by one of the judges.

Iron Chef, which is probably one of the biggest competitive cooking shows out there, has noticeably few women. In the show, a chef challenges one of the Iron Chefs to a cook-off. There were no female Iron Chefs on the original Japanese version. I don’t watch the show that often, but I’ve never seen an episode with a female competitor. I don’t think my perception of the show as a boys’ club is too far off, since Wikipedia’s section on notable challengers lists twenty men’s names.

To the Food Network’s credit, teams of judges on these shows tend to be closer to equal in terms of gender representation (although not quite). Of the 18 professional chefs and restaurateurs that have served as judges on Chopped, seven are female, and two out of five judges that have served on every season are female. There’s almost always at least one or two women on the judging panels of Iron Chef, Iron Chef America, and Next Iron Chef. On every season of The Next Food Network Star, two out of four judges were female.

Also, interestingly enough, the pastry and dessert shows feature more women than men. Cupcake Wars, where competitors have to bake themed cupcakes for an event, is Chopped’s opposite: usually there are three female competitors and one male, and every once in a while there are two men. Sweet Genius, pastry chef Ron Ben-Israel’s way to find up-and-coming dessert artists, usually features two women and two men. Challenge, an extreme cake competition, also averages out at two men and two women. Perhaps this is because desserts are seen as less intense or less difficult to prepare than “serious” gourmet cooking, and therefore women are allowed to participate in equal numbers (even though that’s bullshit).

If these shows are supposed to represent reality, it surprises me that there aren’t more women in the professional cooking field. The Food Network seriously needs to work on equal representation of men and women chefs in their shows.

On May 15th, my first book will be published. This fact is not a result of some pretentious belief that at 19, my writing skills have been so carefully honed to the point that my work must be shared with the world. It was not some ploy to get into college. Contrarily, writing this book was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, and something I almost didn’t do. But it was also an experience that completely transformed me, and for which I will forever be thankful.

After a year of running the FBomb, I was approached to write a book about the next generation of feminism. I tried to explain that the FBomb was always meant to be a community – a place I may have started, but a place accessible to everybody, and composed of a diverse array of voices, not just my own. I didn’t view myself as a leader so much as an organizer and perhaps a creator. Who the hell was I to impose my beliefs on the world?

But then I realized I had to ask myself: is this reluctance to write a book based on my belief that feminism should be a collective effort rather than driven by singled-out leaders, or is it based on fear? Am I so scared of doing something I know virtually nothing about, of putting my voice out into the world in one of the most definitive ways possible and of the criticism that will inevitably follow that I’m going to turn down an opportunity that is not only personally valuable, but from which others very well might gain something?

The answer, I found, was both, and while I respected and still do respect the former, the latter was simply unacceptable. I had always considered myself to be a strong, independent woman – I identified as a feminist in high school in Ohio for God’s sake: I clearly wasn’t afraid of at least some criticism thrown my way — and yet here I was, frankly terrified of positioning myself as a leader. My feelings had clearly surpassed modesty and had entered the clear terrain of self-doubt and lack of confidence. It was then that I knew that writing this book was something I had to do in order to be the woman that I wanted to be and knew I could be. So I agreed to write the book. Specifically, I agreed to write it my way, and figuring out what that actually meant turned out to be the most transformative experience of my life.

From the first second I agreed to write the book, I constantly had to make Big Decisions. Previously, the biggest decisions I’d had to make was whether or not it was appropriate to still go trick or treating in high school (and that didn’t even turn out to be a hard decision – free candy is free candy whether its given to you with a smile or a disgusted scowl). Since I had no plans to delay school to write the book, I first had to decide whether or not to write it with a ghostwriter. I immediately shut down that idea. I knew if I was going to write a book, I was going to write every single damn word.

I also had to make the decision of whether or not to express the feminist beliefs that I knew were technically “correct” – the ones that were mainstream, the ones the fewest number of people would disagree with – or whether to express the feminist movement in which I believe. I believe that feminism for my generation is different than any other previous generation’s feminism. Our activism is online, the issues we deal with are subtler and require more dialogue and support to tackle. I strongly believe that while we must take feminist issues like violence against women and double standards (just to name a couple) seriously, we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously – that there’s more than enough room for love and laughter in this movement and that, in fact, feminism thrives on humor and support. I decided to write what I believe and what I know to be true, and to write it in my own voice (not some scholarly, posturing voice of what I thought a “writer” should sound like). I know full well that there will inevitably be feminists who disagree with me. But then again, I’ve found that there will always be people, feminist or not, who disagree with everything/anything I say and/or believe, and that pandering to them is pointless.

I had to make decisions after the book itself was written. During the editorial process I had to fight the urge to simply agree with every change my editors made – which I’d always done before, ever the good student – and fight for my words and beliefs to make the cut. I had to decide on a cover, opting away from images that ranged from weirdly sexual to bubble-gum girly, ultimately deciding on one that felt right to me.

All of these decisions seemed so daunting, so life-threateningly serious while I was making them. But ultimately, they ended up being simple. Whereas I started the process in a place of self-doubt, I ended it knowing exactly what I wanted to say, exactly what I had to do. As it turns out, I always had a strong sense of self, a definitive sense of my personal limitations and definitions of what’s right and wrong for me. I just had to learn how to listen to myself and how to express it. I don’t know how long it would’ve taken me to figure that out had I not written this book, which is why, even if this book only sells 15 copies to my family and high school frenemies (who are really only interested in hate-reading it to more effectively hone their animosity towards me), I will always be proud of this book and will always be thankful for the experience it gave me.

This week, weighing in at about 8 ounces, and after years of labor (seriously, I feel like the age at which I will have an actual child just got pushed back 5 years after this experience), I am proud to (officially) welcome A Little F’d Up: Why Feminism Is Not A Dirty Word into the world. I am in love with it. I hope you will be, too.

A Little F’d Up is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other independent book sellers on May 15th.

April Smith

“I was the surprise,” says April Smith, the bonus baby her parents won late and whose moxie and dash astounded everyone she met. Today, she remains a welcome bolt: a loose-lipped, cocked-hip gal whose music and mien could buoy the Titanic.

As she took her place in the family, April developed a muscular, mellifluous voice and high-flying showmanship. Her mom adored Queen (”If you didn’t know a Brian May solo in the first few notes, you weren’t her child”) and her dad gave her his old 8-track tape player, letting her buy Elvis and Led Zeppelin tapes at yard sales. During summer vacations with Aunt Cricket and Uncle Fred, April discovered songwriters like Tom Waits and Kinky Friedman, stealing Fred’s cassettes and absorbing observational story-songs in a backyard tent. Waits so impressed April that she felt compelled to dress up – using Fred’s hat, pipe and Junior Mints (she placed them on her teeth) each time she played his music.

When she began to write songs, she incorporated elements musical and otherwise, some contradictory in theme or vibe – to anyone but April. Because she’d been so diversely inspired, it was a cinch to stitch together Queen’s majesty, big band’s sunny optimism, the terror and despair of horror flicks and Edgar Allan Poe writings, and the cottonmouthed wit and poignancy of Wes Anderson films. From this influential primordial stew came April’s new album Songs for a Sinking Ship.

The album’s sound was informed by the ’30s and ’40s, juke joints and cabaret, the Andrews Sisters and, of course, Waits. Smith covers a wide range as a singer and songwriter, from the heartbroken ballad “Beloved” to the cheeky tell-off “Stop Wondering” and the sexy swagger of “Wow and Flutter.” Her voice swoons and seduces, and then escalates to breathtaking peaks, backed by piano, upright bass, drums, guitar, horns, ukulele, accordion and even, when the occasion warrants, a suitcase used as a bass drum.

Her songs and her playful, confident performances – in which she’ll wear a tutu and impishly tease her band, The Great Picture Show – now win her fans everywhere. 

via April Smith Music

Colors

Movie Loves A Screen

April Smith and the Great Picture Show on iTunes

a still from the video

I would be lying if I said that while watching the recent viral video “Hot Problems” (or, to be accurate, about 45 seconds of “Hot Problems” before I gave up), I didn’t blankly stare in disbelief, then roll my eyes and feel more than a little bit disheartened. And yet, despite comments made by YouTube viewers as well as the mainstream media, the depression I felt after watching the musical attempts of 17-year-olds Drew Garrett and Lauren Willey was not based on the concept of this video representing a generation of conceited, vapid young women. As a teen myself, it’s blatantly apparent that there’s a much more concerning problem at the heart of this video, and, more specifically, the vitriolic response to it.

We live in a society that relentlessly targets young women and indoctrinates them into believing that, above all, their appearance should be their priority, the defining element of their identity. Young women are bombarded with images that glorify unattainable standards of beauty—in fact, by the age of 17 the average woman has received more than 250,000 commercial messages through the media, many featuring photoshopped, idealized and otherwise manipulated images of female beauty. Our televisions stream a version of “reality” in which young women are more preoccupied with their appearance and attracting men than with actually making any kind of substantive contribution to the world. In fact, thanks to this reality TV culture, one in four teen girls now expects to become famous; not famous for doing something, mind you, but famous for being. Being what? I’d bet all my money that such young women expect to be famous for being “hot”—for being a face on the cover of magazines, a body club promoters pay to show up at their clubs.

This is the standard we have set for young women. And yet when young women, like the stars of “Hot Problems,” consume this message and dare to throw it back to us, dare to call themselves hot, we destroy them. The media gleefully snatched the opportunity to tear these two apart. Comments on the YouTube video itself almost unanimously declare that the pair is ugly. Even supposedly reputable media sources like the Huffington Post more subtly questioned the girls’ attractiveness; the article’s title declared that the girls couldn’t get dates to prom, and the first line snidely stated, “These ‘hot’ girls’ problems are now everyone’s problems.” In an appearance on “Good Morning America,” the girls were asked to evaluate their own looks on national television, coaxed to clarify to the world that “we don’t think we’re that hot.”

Yes, I certainly find a video of two of my peers singing about how “hot” they are to be incredibly problematic for many reasons. I may have had a strong urge to futilely yell, “READ A BOOK” at my computer screen after being subjected to their admittedly painfully constructed lyrics. But what I find most problematic about this video is not what many sources seem to have identified as a conceited, over-confident representation of my generation; what I find most problematic is the response. I find it horrifying that we live in a society that can gleefully tear them down, not just effectively enforcing the idea that “hotness” is unattainable—that we’re doomed forever to a cycle of hating ourselves because our desired outcome is impossible—but more broadly that there doesn’t seem to be a way in which young women can win within this societal structure.

Now, before launching into this, let me make one thing clear: I love the TV show Bones and have for a long time. I also kind of like Rizzoli & Isles, but there’s one thing that’s been irking me about these two series, even though they feature women in the leading roles and (especially in the case of Bones) have diverse casts. My problem is the fact that while both Temperance Brennan of Bones and Maura Isles of Rizzoli & Isles are portrayed as unusually smart and gifted females, they are also portrayed as socially awkward to a point that borders on a psychological disorder.

As anyone who has read The Yellow Wallpaper might know, there’s been a long standing tradition of portraying women as crazy and in need of psychiatric assistance in order to undermine their intelligence (or, as the folks at Jezebel recently pointed out, just to undermine them in general).By portraying both Temperance and Maura as gifted-but-mentally-challenged individuals this old stereotype is reinforced.

But there’s more to it. Think about all the police procedural dramas out there that have especially smart male characters (Gill Grissom of CSI is one example that comes to mind). While these male characters are sometimes portrayed as a bit goofy, there’s never the same social inhibition or hints at disorders as with Temperance and Miranda. In male characters, being smart is astonishing and awe-inspiring, but is rarely seen as being “crazy.” The only reason I can see for this is gender. I mean, wouldn’t Temperance’s social blunders be just as fun if she was a man? Or in the case of Miranda: would it detract from the show if she was socially well-adjusted? I really don’t thinks. After all, is it so much to ask of the writers of these shows to create opportunities for tension and/or humor without making a smart woman look like she should see a shrink?

Of course, there are smart female characters that are able to be smart without being portrayed as “crazy”: Catherine Willows in CSI, Stella Bonasera in CSI:NY or Angela Montenegro in Bones are all good examples. But it’s still revealing to see that women that are not only smart, but specifically exceptionally talented in male-dominated fields (forensic anthropology in Bones and medical examiner in Rizzoli & Isles) are portrayed as slightly crazy. The idea that too much knowledge is just not good for women, and that women can’t actually be as good (let alone better than) men in traditionally male-dominated fields still seems to linger in some people’s minds, which in turn leads to the perpetuation of this harmful stereotype. And here we are, still wondering why there aren’t more women in the so-called hard-sciences. When women who are in those fields on TV are portrayed as “crazy” is it such a stretch to understand why female viewers might shy away from those fields?

Polly Scattergood

Polly Scattergood (born 1987, Colchester, Essex, England), is a British singer-songwriter. She has been described as ethereal, dark, intense and quirky, while her musical style has been described as “early 21st century electro-dance-pop of London proper”. Scattergood’s debut album, self-titled, was released in spring 2009 in the United Kingdom and United States. Scattergood attended the Brit School where she wrote 800 songs. After graduation she caught the attention of music industry executive Neil Ferris who took on her management. Ferris then introduced Scattergood to Daniel Miller head of Mute Records. He led her to her current producer Simon Fisher Turner. Scattergood describes herself as a storyteller. “I write about emotions and moments, not all are biographical.”

via Wikipedia

Please Don’t Touch

I Hate The Way

Polly Scattergood on iTunes: