Long ago, during my mid-twenties, I worked for a furniture manufacturer. I was their graphic artist and the guy responsible for generating their marketing materials, from catalog sheets and price lists to the ad slicks, i.e. line illustrations of the product accompanied by descriptive copy that retailers could use for their newspaper advertising. I also created the assembly instructions (everything was sold as kits for customers to assemble, a style known in the industry as “knock down” or “K-D” furniture). And I set up the tradeshow displays.
My job rarely called for me to make an appearance on the factory floor. Instead I and my drawing table were tucked into an out-of-the-way nook in the second-floor suite of offices that served the executives, the accounting-department personnel, and the order-desk staff. One side-effect of this arrangement was that my sitting place was only a foot or two away from the conference room, separated from said room by a wall that contained no soundproofing to speak of. I could hear every word uttered when the board of directors had their quarterly meetings.
One day I found myself inadvertently eavesdropping as the board discussed the serious matter of whether a liquidation bankruptcy could be avoided, the company having already entered into Chapter 11 bankruptcy (the “negotiate with the creditors” type of bankruptcy) several months earlier. It was the early 1980s and all across the United States, traditional manufacturing was being undercut by the relocation of factories to foreign locales where the labor force could be paid a small fraction of what American workers received. The fact is, the outfit I was working for was doomed, but the downfall was occurring slowly enough that the owners on the other side of the wall began their discussion by bandying phrases like “further downsizing” or “increased efficiency” or “capital infusion” as if any of those things might be a solution that could somehow preserve the worth of their shares.
One, and only one, of the owners was a female. She remained silent until a lull in the conversation developed, whereupon she laid out a well-thought-out strategy that, if executed, would stabilize the current crisis and grant the company at least a couple of years grace where nothing drastic needed to be resorted to (the Chapter 11 filing having already been drastic enough for all their tastes), and leaving the board able to revisit their dilemma in the next fiscal year, after they’d had more time to develop options.
I thought her plan was genius. I fully expected the group would think so, and would thank the speaker for her cogent analysis and problem-solving. Instead, the others acted as if she hadn’t said anything at all, and went back to their vague woe-is-us, grasping-at-straws brainstorming. Except that after about five minutes, one of the men reiterated what his female colleague had said, only in a less articulate fashion and tossing in a couple of inconsequential embellishments.
Suddenly the conference room buzzed. Cheers didn’t literally break out, but that was the shift in the mood, particularly after the chairman firmly endorsed the idea, giving the man credit for having come up with it.
Never mind that it was in every meaningful respect the idea the woman had come up with.
The meeting broke up. The men went down to the factory floor to get a look at a newly-arrived piece of major equipment. The woman lingered in the upstairs office suite in order to say hi to the accounts-receivable secretary. She also said hi to me. We had met three months earlier, and had spoken about tradeshow set-up, a responsibility I now had but which she had overseen in former times.
I told her how flabbergasted I was that she hadn’t been given credit for the idea the board had endorsed.
“I’m a woman,” she said. “Happens all the time.”
I realized she wasn’t just being cynical. It was a fact. It was her lived experience, and I had no doubt by the way she spoke of it that the phenomenon was common, not just in her case but as something shared by most women. I have repeated this story a number of times over the past forty-five years to women friends and they have always nodded their heads and said things like “of course” and “typical” and “been there more times than I can count.” But to me, it was a revelation. Because, you see, it wasn’t how things played out in the other contexts in which I’d lived and worked. The factory job was the first gig I’d had outside of the university environment or back home participating in the family businesses (farming and operating a fruit-packing shed).
Dismissing what a woman says? Not when the topic was consequential and needed a serious solution. Forgetting they’d even said it? Transferring the credit to a male contributor? What the fuck? That wasn’t how I was raised.
As you might expect, that upbringing shaped the way I approached the portrayals of female characters in my fiction. They don’t just adorn the setting; they affect their worlds. Sometimes they face opposition to their efforts — conflict after all being central to the majority of stories and novels — but what they do matters, how they speak their minds, matters. That’s been true from the early days of my career. The propensity to treat female characters that way has been a boon, careerwise. Tales of women’s empowerment has fit the zeitgeist. However, I came to it naturally, not because editorial market forces drove me there. It was my mode all along.
The new collection, Swords, Magic, and Heart, reflects that. The central characters of nine of the dozen stories are female, and female characters play critical roles in the remainder. The cover image captures that. Do you see a male character there? You do not. It’s the kind of book meant to have a woman on the cover.
But I want to be clear. The men matter, too.
Readers and colleagues, having experienced or at least been told how I tend to focus on female characters, have sometimes wondered aloud that I must have had a strong mother to inspire me to write stories about women who possess agency. But “having a strong mother” is not how I would describe my circumstances. I had a mother who was wonderful in many ways, and she had strengths, but she was not the influence that caused me to notice women, to listen to women, or to try to echo their perspectives in my fiction. I got that from my father and my maternal grandfather. They were my models. They listened to their wives and to their other female relatives. My father was born in 1914 and my grandfather in 1884, so they belonged to generations that bestowed a considerable degree of authority and privilege upon men. They had social permission to “have the final word.” Still, they listened. All I had to do was copy that.
I know now from my deep dive into genealogy that the practice of attending to what one’s female relatives said goes way back, and includes my other grandfather, whom I sadly did not get to know as anything other than a presence fading into senility, half my great-grandfathers, and the majority of their dads, too. I bless them for it.
Males as role models. That, I would argue, is a reason I have been able to largely avoid the trap that was lying there for me as I became a regular contributor to magazines and anthologies. I saw many examples of other people’s tales in which, yes, the female empowerment was there, but it was expressed as rage, and acted out as violence against a misbehaving male villain. And not a lot more than that.
Don’t get me wrong. Scenes of violence can be effective drivers of fiction, and I’ve been known to include them from time to time. Brutal villains is another useful trope, and hello, been there done that, too, sometimes. But oh, how fine it is when characters can just be, y’know, people. There is plenty of room in the literary landscape for stories in which the impetus of the tales revolve not around the simple plotline of oppression and reaction, but trod down a nuanced path in which compassion, or nurturance, or questions of justice, or loyalty or moral principles or loving desire, are what matter. And goodness knows, there is room for stories in which both the female characters and the male ones have agency, even within the same scenes and the same exchanges of dialog. They can provide each other with agency. Please, enjoy the stories. And when you are done, let me know what you think. I will listen.
