02.21.07
Look! Look what I have!
You can get one too… they ship in just a week or so. Ask your favorite bookstore to order you a copy!
01.09.07
The Book Breakup
Ever since I started writing books I have been irritated, sometimes beyond all reasonable proportion, by the tendency to refer to the slump many writers go through after they finish a large project, for example a book, as “post-partum depression.”
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the connection is drawn. Both pregnancy and book-writing are largely solitary processes that take a fairly sizeable length of time (though many books need to be baked for considerably longer than the average baby). Both pregnancy and book-writing are fated to end in the act of delivery that takes the more or less internal creation and brings it outward to the world, or at least to the editor, and hopefully thence to the world.
But in addition to the obvious issue of hormonal swing — and we should probably all be thankful, all things considered, that writers don’t also have to contend with the enormous hormone shifts that post-partum mothers do — there are a number of other reasons that I think characterizing post-writing-project slumps to post-partum depression is inaccurate, unhelpful, and frankly misapprehends what’s going on.
Consider this: there is an immediate, necessary, and consuming relationship between a mother and an infant that begins as soon as the baby is born. It is social, emotional, and physical, and it is, by comparison to the relatively passive and unilateral process of gestating a pregnancy, an enormously complicated series of interactions with another (somewhat inchoate but less so all the time) human being with its own opinions, needs, and desires. A new mother, unless she puts her infant up for adoption, lives with the end result of her pregnancy as not just some artifact of a lengthy process of creation, but as its own kicking, screaming, eating, pooping, needing independent self.
A book, in many ways, reverses both the sequence and the dynamic. A writer engages in an extremely active process of building a book, consciously creating it, shaping it, figuring it out, researching it, wrestling with its difficulties, coaxing it to do what the writer wants. It takes on a life of its own, existing as an entity in the writer’s mind and his or her life, a thing to which the writer devotes a great deal of time and energy on a daily basis, time and energy which can’t be used for other things. Just as rearing a small infant is not easily compatible with, say, the demands of any job that requires that one’s attention and physical presence be primarily focused on job tasks for lengthy periods of time, writing is also not compatible with those kinds of jobs. It is possible to think about writing here and there while one gets through one’s daily round of being, say, a nurse or a line cook or a telephone receptionist, and maybe it is even possible to do a little writing in the interstices of those jobs.
But it is not possible to write throughout the time that one does those kinds of work. The tasks are incompatible. The writing demands its own share of your time, your focus, your brain, your hands, during which you may also be, perhaps, cooking (in the oven or crockpot), doing laundry (in the machine), or some other automated task, but nothing to which you have to be paying attention. In point of fact, writing is also not very compatible with caring for small infants. Unless, of course, the infant in question happens to be asleep, in which case write like the wind, my darlings — I do know women who’ve written entire books or dissertations during the intervals that their infants were napping, so it is clear that writing and infant care can be combined, but sequentially, not simultaneously.
By contrast, it is quite possible to be pregnant whilst being a nurse or a line cook or a telephone receptionist, or a writer for that matter, because pregnancy doesn’t require too much of one’s conscious involvement for creation to happen. Pregnancies are rather inexorably biological, and in some ways they are something that happens to people, not something that people do. A pregnancy will, if all goes well, simply do its thing without the mother-to-be having to lift a finger to steer — indeed she cannot lift a finger to steer, the rudder that steers the process is not available to her, and if all does not go well she still can’t really do anything about it of her own self, and certainly not through mental effort alone. I mean, if you want to, you may stop writing a book one afternoon and simply quit in mid-sentence of your own volition and without having to involve anybody else at all, the thought and the deed perhaps even instantaneous. Just you try that with a pregnancy.
So no, books are not pregnancies and pregnancies are not books. Books are much more like intensely high-maintenance love affairs, or perhaps even dysfunctional marriages, than they are like pregnancies. Books exist, necessarily, on your level: they must, since they are the products of your intellect. They are highly (!) verbal, and cannot exist without communication. They in fact consist entirely of communication, and thus of choices of how to communicate and what to communicate and why. They have the extraordinary ability to poke you right in your most sensitive and least well-calibrated buttons, and to make you all but turn yourself inside out doing whatever you can possibly think of to do to get them to work with you and say or do the right thing. They sometimes stalk you and pester you, but more often you have to be the one in pursuit with coaxing and pleading and confrontations and dinner reservations and flowers and simple bullheaded consistent showing up on the doorstep hat in hand and willing to talk it all out, if you want the relationship to continue to exist at all.
If you’re lucky, this relationship will flourish to the extent that the book will get written, and then revised. Some people have a really difficult time letting go of books when they’ve finally managed to suss out the requirements of the relationship enough to get to that point. Some people revise for as long as humanly possible, smoothing the rough edges where the difficulty of the relationship shows, until they’ve rubbed all the nap from the velvet as it were. But most of us, and particularly those of us who are obliged to turn over our books to agents and editors in order to earn what passes for a living, do all this courting and seducing and explaining and pursuing and explaining and explaining and explaining only to get the book to the point where it is not perhaps Completely and Definitively Done but sufficiently done… and then it’s over.
It’s over. Printed out, shoved in a box, sent off to New York City with a few drops of bourbon sprinkled over it and a whispered “write if you get work, little book!” or whatever ritual of parting one prefers. Perhaps just e-mailed, these days. If one is fortunate, one gets notified when it shows up.
And then there’s silence. The space where there has for months, maybe even years, been this constant flow of verbiage, this incessant back-and-forth of ideas, this continual emotional and intellectual exchange has not merely gone empty, the space itself has ceased to be. It’s in a box in New York City. You can’t dip your foot in the same river twice and you can’t write the same book twice either. Even if you try.
It’s gone, daddy, gone.
That’s the nature of the post-book slump, or depression, or ennui, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not birth, it’s a breakup, the kind where the bed’s too damn big and the afternoon is too quiet and you go out for a walk and something scary or funny or just plain strange happens and before you know it you’ve gotten out your cellphone and started to dial and then taken a deep breath and hit the little red “hang up” button instead because that’s not the person you call to tell about that stuff, any more.
And you know you’ll see them later. You’ll have to make arrangements to have brunch sometime, so you can trade plastic grocery bags of borrowed books and forgotten sweaters and say embarrassing things like “I, um, threw out your toothbrush” and “I got mocha latte all over your David Bowie CD but I washed it off and it still plays okay” and “I’m sorry I said that thing about your brother.”
Eventually you’ll see them out somewhere, all dressed up and looking sharp and sexy in some bookstore-cafe, and you’ll say hi and you’ll hug and you’ll feel their familiar shape in your hands but there’s all that distance now and don’t you see? It can never be the same again. Never the way it was when they were yours. And sometimes that means you’ll see them more clearly, and be embarrassed by the way they talk or the fact that they never seem to realize when their panty lines are showing, stuff that never bothered you before but now you wonder how you could ever have missed it. But you’ll still miss them, and the way it was then, before things changed.
Unless. Unless they’re the Evil Ex and you couldn’t get rid of them fast enough because they were, quite simply, that evil. But these are thankfully rare.
Still very unlike babies, though.
12.04.06
Call for Submissions — Essays on Menstruation
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Breakthrough Bleeding:
Essays on The Thing Women Spend A Quarter Of Their Time Doing, But No One’s Supposed To Talk About
Essays on The Thing Women Spend A Quarter Of Their Time Doing, But No One’s Supposed To Talk About
Edited by Hanne Blank and Moira Russell
Forthcoming from She Devil Press, an imprint of Suspect Thoughts Press (www.suspectthoughts.com); scheduled publication date Fall 2008.
FINALLY, a book that isn’t afraid of a little blood!
Between puberty and menopause, most women spend close to a quarter of their lives dealing with menstruation. But except for coming-of-age stories and the occasional Stephen King novel, all this spilled blood hardly creates a blip on the cultural radar. It’s as if someone has removed it all with a super-duper magic cleanser… ironic, considering what the rest of us go through to get the stains out.
Breakthrough Bleeding is here to change all that. Thoughtful, challenging, political, and maybe even sexy, this collection of essays looks at menstruation from the inside and the outside, a super-maxi size dose of heavy-thinkin’ menstrual mojo.
We are looking for essays and creative nonfiction that analyze, question, and explore all aspects of menstruation and menstruation culture. Potential topics include:
- menstruation and gender – how does menstruation fit into (or conflict with) experiences of gender?
- menstrual products advertising & the “sanitary products” industry
- menstruation, personal relationships, and sex – from phobias to fetishes
- menstrual education – what do we learn and how do we learn it, what do we teach and how to we teach it?
- menstruation as a human rights issue – how are women’s periods dealt with in prisons, shelters, mental institutions, long-term care facilities, and other institutions?
- women who voluntarily/intentionally stop menstruating
- men’s experiences with / attitudes regarding menstruation
- menstruation humor
- menstruation and ridicule/shame
- transmenstruation – what kinds of issues come up around menstruation for intersex, transsexual and transgendered people?
- premature menopause (organic or induced)
- enjoying/appreciating menstruation
- menstruation and/in the workplace
- menstruation through the eyes of Western medicine
- the “menstrual alternatives” movement (e.g. reusable pads/cups/sponges) and its culture
- menstruation in straight vs. queer spheres
- feminist culture and menstruation
GENERAL GUIDELINES:
- NONFICTION only.
- NO fiction, poetry, or memoir. (This means that unless there is a specific reason for it to be in your piece, we do not want to hear about when you got your first period or how bad your PMS is. This is not a collection of first-person narratives.)
- Submissions should be between 1500 and 5000 words in length.
- TWO (2) copies of your submission will be required.
- Hard copy (paper copy) submissions ONLY. No electronic or emailed submissions will be considered.
- Typed or computer printed ONLY.
- Formatting: 12-point type in some generic traditional font (Times, Georgia, Geneva, Courier, etc.), one-inch margins, double spaced. Please include all italics, boldface, blockquotes, section breaks, etc.
- References, if any, may be either footnote or endnote according to author preference and should use Chicago Manual of Style format. No inline references please.
- Please number your pages
- Each submission should be accompanied by a cover sheet that contains ONLY the following data: Author Name, Pseudonym (if used), Title of Submission, Author mailing address, Author e-mail address, and Author telephone number.
- The author’s name or pseudonym should NOT appear anywhere on the submission itself.
- Each submission should be accompanied by a single business-sized self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE, with first class letter postage already affixed). Submissions from outside the USA do not require the SASE.
- Please DO NOT send additional cover letters with your submission,, only the cover sheet as indicated above.
- Please DO NOT send your only copy/copies of your work.
- NOTE: Manuscripts will not be returned. Manuscripts not chosen for the book will simply be recycled.
SUBMISSIONS ADDRESS:
Send all submissions to the following address
Breakthrough Bleeding – SUBMISSIONS
C/o Hanne Blank, Editor
44 E. 26th Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218 USA
COMPENSATION:
Writers whose work is included in the book will receive a cash honorarium (amount TBD) and two copies of the book.
DEADLINE:
Deadline for all submissions is March 20, 2007.
Writers will be informed of editorial decisions no later than June 1, 2007.
11.29.06
State of the Hanne Address
It would seem that I am well overdue for a State of the Hanne Address. I’ve alluded several times here to having been under the weather a lot lately, and a handful of folks, concerned, have written to ask me if I’m okay.
Short answer? Yes.
Slightly longer answer? Yes, for certain values of “okay,” and am getting okayer.
Longer still, but more informative answer: The best I can figure it, my system waited until I had finally gotten done with the last stages of getting Virgin into production, until the page proofs were out the door, and promptly collapsed like a souffle in the front row of a road production of Riverdance. Almost four years of mostly solitary work on very difficult, often emotionally and conceptually toxic, intellectually tricky material that mired me in the misogyny mines pretty much from Day 1 took their toll… along with various other things, familial and professional, that’ve gone on in my life during that time that I didn’t really have a chance to deal with, grieve, recuperate from, etc. because I was already over deadline with the book.
So in the time-honored manner of college students finishing finals only to catch the most revolting flu available, I crashed. Hard. Not “post-book depression” particularly. I know from depression and this wasn’t the same thing. Exhaustion. Awful flareups of all the repetitive stress injuries I’ve ever dealt with, plus some new ones just for fun. Exciting new stress-related health issues I’d never experienced before in my life, like temporomandibular joint pain, frequent nausea and other GI misbehavior, cluster headaches… huh? Who, me? I’d never had these things happen to me. And then the array of symptoms that came along for the ride with the exhaustion, like the inability to focus, the shakes, the muscle and joint aches, the incapacity to think well. Writing was laborious and unpleasant, which it generally is nowhere near. Reading anything too complex was right out, because I couldn’t follow what was going on. I could just make it through Terry Pratchett’s new YA, Wintersmith, but I think that was mostly because I already knew the characters.
I’m not about to get into some tedious recital of all the ways in which this was a gargantuan pain in the ass, let alone how un-fun it was to endure. I’m sure you can do the math. Point is, I had never before understood those bits, typically in Victorian novels, where someone undertakes some massive task and does it and it “ruins [his/her] health.” I never imagined that was literal. I always figured that was code for “after doing such-and-so, s/he was feeling a bit run down and tired and in need of a vacation.” It wasn’t. At least not necessarily.
Fortunately, having something ruin your health can be a temporary condition. For the past six weeks or so, my day job has been getting better. Figuring out what I can and can’t do. Figuring out how to get the stuff I can’t do done anyway. Lots and lots of acupuncture, which has been helping me enormously… truly amazing, and my acupuncturist is worth her weight in something really really good. (Like maybe Michael Recchiuti fleur de sel caramels, or something equally outrageous.) Sleeping a lot. Eating plenty of fruits and veggies. Trying to get a judicious quantity of gentle exercise. Trying not to beat myself up too much about all the stuff I couldn’t do, or the stuff I still can’t. Waiting. Praying. Trying to be patient, because this kind of incapacity is tooth-grindingly frustrating.
The good news is that I’m doing a lot better. It’s a perplexing thing, this recovery process. There are some things I still can’t really do a whole lot of — driving the car remains inordinately taxing for some reason, for instance, so there’s a really firm limit as to how much of it I can do in a day — and other things that are getting more or less back to normal. But the ability to get through a whole day without needing to sleep for a couple of hours was a milestone. Getting to the point where I could go swimming was another, but first I had to get to the point where I wasn’t likely go shaky and dizzy and disoriented in the pool, or at least if I did, that I was well enough that I could depend on a few minutes’ rest being able to set me back to rights.
That was two days ago. And after two days where I was well enough to trust myself to be able to go swimming for a little while, I’m now having a day where I can tell it wouldn’t be such a hot idea. I’ll probably feel up to it again tomorrow, but today I’m apparently running on fumes. So, ya know, still a work in progress.
I’m hopeful that I’ll be back to normal by my birthday, which is at the end of February. Virgin comes out in March, so it’d be awfully nice not to feel like I had to husband my energies quite so carefully by the time that happens.
And speaking of Virgin, I’m happy to say that the Japanese rights have just sold, to Sakuhinsha. Other foreign sales are in the works, but nothing to announce yet. This will be my second book to be released in Japanese, which is very exciting for me. Not that I can read them. I always have a secret fear that they’ve taken my name and put it on the cover of a book about, oh, I don’t know, growing enokitake or something.
Also, blurbs have been coming in from various people, and I’m truly thrilled by some of them — validation is paradise, as a certain very wise and wily friend of mine notes, but validation from people whom you admire personally as well as professionally is a special sort of joy.
Oh, and y’all do know that the Virgin book has its own blog, right? I update it pretty frequently with discussions of virginity-related news items, and will be adding book events/book tour information, speaking gigs, and so on when the information becomes available.
Anyhow, that’s all the news from the little purple house in Baltimore. Over ‘n’ out.
11.27.06
Looking for a Few Good… Interns
I’m in the teeny baby-steps early stages of work on the next nonfiction book, whose working title is Straight: A History of Men, Women, and ‘Sex’. Having been through this before with Virgin, I have a bit better idea of what this first stage should look like now than I did a few years ago, and am attempting, therefore, to correct for the errors of the past by not making the same mistakes twice.
Hence I am looking for a couple of good research interns, one for spring and one for summer 2007. If this interests you, let me know! If you know someone who might be interested, please feel free to pass this along.
Independent Scholar/Writer Seeking Research Interns
Writer and historian Hanne Blank, author of several books including the unprecedented new history Virgin: The Untouched History (Bloomsbury, March 2007), is looking for two research interns, one for Spring 2007 and one for Summer 2007. Interns will be working with Blank on research for her next nonfiction book, a history of heterosexuality and heteronormativity in the West. Past research interns have worked an average of 5-10 hours per week. Hours are generally flexible.
Applicants should have: excellent research skills (library and Internet), understanding of bibliographic form, regular (at least daily) computer/Internet access, available access to at least one research library, and excellent written and verbal skills. Candidates also should be good at working unsupervised, making judgment calls about information quality, comfortable working on issues of human sexuality, and reliable communicators. Foreign language skills are a big plus, particularly German, French, and Latin.
These internships are unpaid, but I happily extend ongoing support (including letters of recommendation) to my interns and former interns. Some former research interns who have worked for me are now employed by Elsevier, NYU Press, National Public Radio, and other prestigious businesses in the information and publishing sector; others are excelling in graduate school.
Applicants may be either local (Baltimore, MD) or long-distance, with a slight preference for local applicants.
To apply, please send a letter indicating your interest to hanne at-sign hanneblank dot com. Please describe your skills and background, the reasons you are interested in this internship, and be sure to indicate whether you are applying for the Spring or Summer internships.
I promise there’ll be substantive and entertaining content in this blog again someday soon. Between trying to recover from the health stuff I’ve been dealing with, and trying to get going with this new project, I fear I haven’t had a whole lot of entertaining stuff to relate, nor have I been feeling terribly chatty.
A handful of recommendations, though: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory read by Eric Idle, available unabridged on CD from Harper Children’s Audio; Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts; the album Guest Host by Stew; and the ultra-sexxay new open-source research tool Zotero (Firefox 2.0 and up only, sorry, IE-heads…).