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On Labels
"I came out as a lesbian long before I came out as a writer.";
-Jane Rule
From the time we are very young children we are taught to label ourselves and other people in a variety of ways. But what begins as simple information soon becomes more complicated, colored by value judgments which are not always fixed or easy to understand. I was five before I learned that being a girl had serious drawbacks, six before I discovered that being left-handed was unacceptable, nineteen and traveling in Europe for the first time before I had to apologize for being an American. Some labels we can choose like a favorite hat; some we are simply stuck with like a necessary cane. Those we outgrow like "child" are replaced by "old woman". Others we are comfortable with only after they really apply, as I am now with the label, "writer".
By the time I was fifteen, I was sure I wanted to be a writer, and I wasn't shy of saying so. What kind of a writer I wasn't yet sure. I was writing a lot of bad poetry, strongly metered and rhymed in imitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eleanor Wylie, inspired for subject matter even by such heavy worthies as Milton. When my mother read my tragically touching, thumpingly rhymed poem on my own blindness, she laughed and saved the world from the bad poet I might have grown up to be. I retreated for a time to personal essays intended to amuse, and my mother, for whom laughter was the highest goal, approved. By the time I reached college at sixteen, away from my mother's comic influence, I began to write bad short stories in imitation of Katerine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, heavy in symbolism and grotesque characters. One featured a black man with yellow hair and green eyes, named Cain, who raped sheep. That story inspired
my classmates to burst into the Wiffenpoof song-"We are little black sheep who have gone astray, bah, bah, bah"-every time they saw me.
Tough critics like my mother and my classmates daunted me a little. Then I learned that in academic circles a real writer was by definition dead. Those foolish enough to be alive were not real writers at all, but "creative" writers, a swell-headed, deluded lot with nothing important to say. That attitude taught me if not real modesty some caution about exposing my ambitions. I gradually learned not to call myself a writer at all. As a young university teacher, I did not admit that what I did in my spare time was write short stories and novels. During the ten years I wrote before I had any publishing success, writing was a secret vice to be confessed only to intimate friends.
A few years ago the Canadian Writers' Union was concerned about how few young writers were applying for membership and tried to think of ways to make them more welcome. I pointed out that it was, in fact, very difficult to admit to being a writer. Only years of experience which tended to thicken the skin made such a confession possible.
In my personal world I came out as a lesbian long before I came out as a writer. The Union should be resigned to being an organization for the middle-aged and the old.
I finished my third novel which would be my first to be published a few days before my thirtieth birthday. It took three years to find publishers. I don't know what I expected beyond finally feeling I might have a legitimate claim to call myself a writer, or, if not anything as grand on the slim proof of one published book (anyone can write one book), at least permitted to say that I wrote. Instead in 1964, before homosexual relationships were removed from the criminal code, I became Canada's only visible lesbian and almost lost my job at UBC. I was defended by my colleagues with the old saw, "Writers of murder mysteries are not necessarily murderers." To my interviewers I was not a writer but a sexual deviant.
Years later my good friend, Don Bailey, told me that in all his years of publishing poems and stories and novels, no interviewer ever wanted him to talk about his writing, which he began in jail serving a term as a bank robber. They wanted him to talk about robbing banks. Over a bottle of scotch, we decided we should have a TV program called "The Lesbian and the Bank Robber" and give the public what they apparently want.
Jose Saramago, in his novel Blindness, says that if we first contemplated all the possible ramifications of our words or actions, we would be struck dumb and freeze. We can't possibly know and therefore take responsibility for the effect our words may have on others. As Auden says in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" poetry is "modified in the guts of the living." Certainly Goethe, when he wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther didn't intend or expect to inspire a rash of suicides all across Europe. Yet we are often expected, like parents, to take responsibility for what our work, however distorted and misrepresented, does out in the world.
I am also labeled a pornographer because my books, coming from the States where some stay longer in print than they have in Canada, are routinely seized at the border by Customs, but none has finally ever been refused entry. Still the label sticks, and readers who buy my books are therefore often disappointed, and others who might otherwise buy and enjoy them don't.
I have done relatively little to publicize my work, weary of the roles I've been forced to play, but, when I agree to be interviewed, I give up any notion of speaking as a writer and become instead a teacher about gay issues, about censorship, about civil liberties, a responsibility I take seriously, not so much as a writer but as a citizen.
My first published novel came out just before I became a Canadian citizen. It is a book set in the States, probably accurately called an American novel. I have since been challenged about what right I have to call myself a Canadian writer though the majority of my fiction has been set in Canada. My Dutch publisher, arranging a publication party for one of my novels, approached the Canadian Embassy for a small contribution, only to be told that I was really an American. "Odd,"; replied my publisher, "since another branch of your government contributed funds for translating the book."; I have been told that
some Canadian writers traveling abroad are pleased to be mistaken for American and therefore part of a larger and more established and respected tradition. Only strong nationalists like Margaret Atwood insist on being identified as Canadian and become ambassadors for Canadian literature. For immigrants (another possible label) it is
often difficult to know what use there is or what right we have to claim our citizenship as part of our identity. I felt guilty the first time I traveled in Europe with a Canadian passport and enjoyed the courtesy and kindness so often withheld from Americans, for underneath that bland label lurked surely still an ugly American. I should probably have been called an ex-American writer. Even now, after fifty years in this country and very proud and relieved to be a Canadian, I am shy to claim the label and never surprised if others are reluctant to grant it.
Because only a very few fiction writers or poets make even a modest living from those activities, many turn to other forms of writing to pay the rent. Betty Jane Wylie, a playwright and poet, as well as a wife and mother of four children, was widowed suddenly in her forties and faced the task of not only raising four children alone but supporting them as well. She was amazingly successful, writing books of advice for widows, cook books, writers' guide books, travel books while she also occasionally took time to write a poem or play. Recently she was awarded the Order of Canada. An interviewer, seeing listed among her many accomplishments a book on using leftovers,
wanted her advice on how to use up what was in his refrigerator. She snapped back, "I don't suppose I was given the Order of Canada because I know how to clean out your fridge." Genre labels make most writers uncomfortable in a culture that rates writing narrowly and strictly to exclude or at least place below the salt how-to books or children's books or mysteries or science fiction as not really literature. Even best sellers and women's fiction are suspect. A poet isn't a real poet if he or she is funny or sings poems to a guitar accompaniment. Genre labels are not meant to be descriptive so much as judgmental. Real writers don't write cook books or jokes or murder mysteries. Real writers die of starvation years before they can reap the rewards of their immortal words. And their names are often "anon."
Though some claim that "anon" was a woman, gender labeling of writers has been a long debate. Many women writers in the past chose to avoid the label with masculine pen names, and that still is the habit of many mystery and science fiction writers who fear otherwise putting off their male readers. One bookseller I know makes a habit of misleading men into buying women's writing so disguised. Until the present women's movement made many women rethink their attitudes toward themselves as women, even writers who didn't disguise their gender often refused to be included in women's anthologies or published in women's magazines, not wanting to be ghettoized.
Certainly some gay writers resist the label, not now so much in fear of criminal charges or job loss or alienation from family but of being placed in an even smaller ghetto, cut off from the main stream of literature, from larger audiences of readers.
Disguised or denied sexual identity rarely works. The first novel of James Baldwin's I read was Giovani's Room, a story of two white male homosexuals in France. I didn't know he was black until I read others of his books, less self-conscious and much more powerful when he wasn't hiding his race or his sexuality in white characters. Who we really are nourishes what we write, and energy is better spent transcending than denying limiting labels. That choice also has the virtue of inspiring great loyalty in core audiences, ethnic, racial, sexual, who will be there for us even if the cross-over audiences publishers are always wooing don't happen to cross.
If we could be identified as many labeled, which all of us are, we might move more comfortably in the world. Even if we could wear only those labels appropriate for the occasion, much as we select among our shirts or rings, we would be less apt to be embarrassed and irritable.
Auden said, "I am a poet only when I'm writing a poem." Because writers so often feel they may possibly never write another worthwhile word, putting down the label except while involved in the activity can be an enormous relief. For a long time I wanted to be even freer than that. I didn't want to be a writer at all. I simply wanted to write, and being a writer got in the way of that because what the world wants of a writer is not writing but public performing, lectures, readings, seminars, for which we are often paid more than we are for the writing we do. Now that I am retired, write only very occasionally as I have this small essay, which seems like a grandchild come to visit for a few days, I don't find it as difficult to "be a writer". But the old are forgetful of nouns. Proper nouns go first, then common nouns. They are, after all, the only words we have to teach children who learn other parts of speech, even verbs and their tenses, by themselves. We are not finally labelers. The real business of our lives is to live, to love, to write, and to remember, leaving the calling of names to others, names we may answer to or not.
-September 13, 2004
Speech delivered by Jane Rule on Galiano Island (Bodega Resort) to a meeting of the Periodical Writers of Canada, and edited afterward for publication in B.C. BookWorld, Spring, 2005, by Alan Twigg
-Jane Rule
From the time we are very young children we are taught to label ourselves and other people in a variety of ways. But what begins as simple information soon becomes more complicated, colored by value judgments which are not always fixed or easy to understand. I was five before I learned that being a girl had serious drawbacks, six before I discovered that being left-handed was unacceptable, nineteen and traveling in Europe for the first time before I had to apologize for being an American. Some labels we can choose like a favorite hat; some we are simply stuck with like a necessary cane. Those we outgrow like "child" are replaced by "old woman". Others we are comfortable with only after they really apply, as I am now with the label, "writer".
By the time I was fifteen, I was sure I wanted to be a writer, and I wasn't shy of saying so. What kind of a writer I wasn't yet sure. I was writing a lot of bad poetry, strongly metered and rhymed in imitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eleanor Wylie, inspired for subject matter even by such heavy worthies as Milton. When my mother read my tragically touching, thumpingly rhymed poem on my own blindness, she laughed and saved the world from the bad poet I might have grown up to be. I retreated for a time to personal essays intended to amuse, and my mother, for whom laughter was the highest goal, approved. By the time I reached college at sixteen, away from my mother's comic influence, I began to write bad short stories in imitation of Katerine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, heavy in symbolism and grotesque characters. One featured a black man with yellow hair and green eyes, named Cain, who raped sheep. That story inspired
my classmates to burst into the Wiffenpoof song-"We are little black sheep who have gone astray, bah, bah, bah"-every time they saw me.
Tough critics like my mother and my classmates daunted me a little. Then I learned that in academic circles a real writer was by definition dead. Those foolish enough to be alive were not real writers at all, but "creative" writers, a swell-headed, deluded lot with nothing important to say. That attitude taught me if not real modesty some caution about exposing my ambitions. I gradually learned not to call myself a writer at all. As a young university teacher, I did not admit that what I did in my spare time was write short stories and novels. During the ten years I wrote before I had any publishing success, writing was a secret vice to be confessed only to intimate friends.
A few years ago the Canadian Writers' Union was concerned about how few young writers were applying for membership and tried to think of ways to make them more welcome. I pointed out that it was, in fact, very difficult to admit to being a writer. Only years of experience which tended to thicken the skin made such a confession possible.
In my personal world I came out as a lesbian long before I came out as a writer. The Union should be resigned to being an organization for the middle-aged and the old.
I finished my third novel which would be my first to be published a few days before my thirtieth birthday. It took three years to find publishers. I don't know what I expected beyond finally feeling I might have a legitimate claim to call myself a writer, or, if not anything as grand on the slim proof of one published book (anyone can write one book), at least permitted to say that I wrote. Instead in 1964, before homosexual relationships were removed from the criminal code, I became Canada's only visible lesbian and almost lost my job at UBC. I was defended by my colleagues with the old saw, "Writers of murder mysteries are not necessarily murderers." To my interviewers I was not a writer but a sexual deviant.
Years later my good friend, Don Bailey, told me that in all his years of publishing poems and stories and novels, no interviewer ever wanted him to talk about his writing, which he began in jail serving a term as a bank robber. They wanted him to talk about robbing banks. Over a bottle of scotch, we decided we should have a TV program called "The Lesbian and the Bank Robber" and give the public what they apparently want.
Jose Saramago, in his novel Blindness, says that if we first contemplated all the possible ramifications of our words or actions, we would be struck dumb and freeze. We can't possibly know and therefore take responsibility for the effect our words may have on others. As Auden says in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" poetry is "modified in the guts of the living." Certainly Goethe, when he wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther didn't intend or expect to inspire a rash of suicides all across Europe. Yet we are often expected, like parents, to take responsibility for what our work, however distorted and misrepresented, does out in the world.
I am also labeled a pornographer because my books, coming from the States where some stay longer in print than they have in Canada, are routinely seized at the border by Customs, but none has finally ever been refused entry. Still the label sticks, and readers who buy my books are therefore often disappointed, and others who might otherwise buy and enjoy them don't.
I have done relatively little to publicize my work, weary of the roles I've been forced to play, but, when I agree to be interviewed, I give up any notion of speaking as a writer and become instead a teacher about gay issues, about censorship, about civil liberties, a responsibility I take seriously, not so much as a writer but as a citizen.
My first published novel came out just before I became a Canadian citizen. It is a book set in the States, probably accurately called an American novel. I have since been challenged about what right I have to call myself a Canadian writer though the majority of my fiction has been set in Canada. My Dutch publisher, arranging a publication party for one of my novels, approached the Canadian Embassy for a small contribution, only to be told that I was really an American. "Odd,"; replied my publisher, "since another branch of your government contributed funds for translating the book."; I have been told that
some Canadian writers traveling abroad are pleased to be mistaken for American and therefore part of a larger and more established and respected tradition. Only strong nationalists like Margaret Atwood insist on being identified as Canadian and become ambassadors for Canadian literature. For immigrants (another possible label) it is
often difficult to know what use there is or what right we have to claim our citizenship as part of our identity. I felt guilty the first time I traveled in Europe with a Canadian passport and enjoyed the courtesy and kindness so often withheld from Americans, for underneath that bland label lurked surely still an ugly American. I should probably have been called an ex-American writer. Even now, after fifty years in this country and very proud and relieved to be a Canadian, I am shy to claim the label and never surprised if others are reluctant to grant it.
Because only a very few fiction writers or poets make even a modest living from those activities, many turn to other forms of writing to pay the rent. Betty Jane Wylie, a playwright and poet, as well as a wife and mother of four children, was widowed suddenly in her forties and faced the task of not only raising four children alone but supporting them as well. She was amazingly successful, writing books of advice for widows, cook books, writers' guide books, travel books while she also occasionally took time to write a poem or play. Recently she was awarded the Order of Canada. An interviewer, seeing listed among her many accomplishments a book on using leftovers,
wanted her advice on how to use up what was in his refrigerator. She snapped back, "I don't suppose I was given the Order of Canada because I know how to clean out your fridge." Genre labels make most writers uncomfortable in a culture that rates writing narrowly and strictly to exclude or at least place below the salt how-to books or children's books or mysteries or science fiction as not really literature. Even best sellers and women's fiction are suspect. A poet isn't a real poet if he or she is funny or sings poems to a guitar accompaniment. Genre labels are not meant to be descriptive so much as judgmental. Real writers don't write cook books or jokes or murder mysteries. Real writers die of starvation years before they can reap the rewards of their immortal words. And their names are often "anon."
Though some claim that "anon" was a woman, gender labeling of writers has been a long debate. Many women writers in the past chose to avoid the label with masculine pen names, and that still is the habit of many mystery and science fiction writers who fear otherwise putting off their male readers. One bookseller I know makes a habit of misleading men into buying women's writing so disguised. Until the present women's movement made many women rethink their attitudes toward themselves as women, even writers who didn't disguise their gender often refused to be included in women's anthologies or published in women's magazines, not wanting to be ghettoized.
Certainly some gay writers resist the label, not now so much in fear of criminal charges or job loss or alienation from family but of being placed in an even smaller ghetto, cut off from the main stream of literature, from larger audiences of readers.
Disguised or denied sexual identity rarely works. The first novel of James Baldwin's I read was Giovani's Room, a story of two white male homosexuals in France. I didn't know he was black until I read others of his books, less self-conscious and much more powerful when he wasn't hiding his race or his sexuality in white characters. Who we really are nourishes what we write, and energy is better spent transcending than denying limiting labels. That choice also has the virtue of inspiring great loyalty in core audiences, ethnic, racial, sexual, who will be there for us even if the cross-over audiences publishers are always wooing don't happen to cross.
If we could be identified as many labeled, which all of us are, we might move more comfortably in the world. Even if we could wear only those labels appropriate for the occasion, much as we select among our shirts or rings, we would be less apt to be embarrassed and irritable.
Auden said, "I am a poet only when I'm writing a poem." Because writers so often feel they may possibly never write another worthwhile word, putting down the label except while involved in the activity can be an enormous relief. For a long time I wanted to be even freer than that. I didn't want to be a writer at all. I simply wanted to write, and being a writer got in the way of that because what the world wants of a writer is not writing but public performing, lectures, readings, seminars, for which we are often paid more than we are for the writing we do. Now that I am retired, write only very occasionally as I have this small essay, which seems like a grandchild come to visit for a few days, I don't find it as difficult to "be a writer". But the old are forgetful of nouns. Proper nouns go first, then common nouns. They are, after all, the only words we have to teach children who learn other parts of speech, even verbs and their tenses, by themselves. We are not finally labelers. The real business of our lives is to live, to love, to write, and to remember, leaving the calling of names to others, names we may answer to or not.
-September 13, 2004
Speech delivered by Jane Rule on Galiano Island (Bodega Resort) to a meeting of the Periodical Writers of Canada, and edited afterward for publication in B.C. BookWorld, Spring, 2005, by Alan Twigg
Submitted on December 8, 2004 in By David.
