By Emily Schultz
I don’t like talking about my time spent as a sex slave for Canadian literature. But it does still come up at parties. Believe me, it does.
Where did it all go wrong? How did I wind up in fashion photographer Chris Nicholls’ Carlaw Street studio in Toronto, wearing lipstick and a strappy dress, my shoulders bared to the world, all in the name of literature? How did I go from being the director of my university Womyn’s Centre to the hetero-nightmare that I am today?
I remember so little from before that fateful day. The day that the infamous Gutter Press publisher on the run, Sam Hiyate, asked me to pose for what would be a defining (though short-lived) moment in Canadian literature. Hiyate had an idea, a plan to topple the literary establishment and shock the press. It was just a little joke, really. As we gathered , it all seemed so innocent: 14 women writers–smiling, chatting, and reapplying makeup for the cover shoot. Yes, I am speaking about the now-notorious original b+a”Literary Babes” issue. It was the summer of 1999–almost six years ago. A lifetime. If only I could turn back the clock, but I’m doomed to walk this side of the canon, forever a scarlet woman. How did I get here?
I had only come to Toronto a year before. Those were days of homebrew coffee and $20 shoes. I was 24, young and full of dreams. More than anything I wanted to be published. Oh sure, I’d seen a poem or two in print already, but nothing substantial. In those days, my poems were as thin as dimes. I don’t know what made me think I could even get a story published. I only had a few scraps, a few lines and paragraphs. During the day, I was a student of publishing at the college known as Centennial–one of those open-armed collegiate campuses too small to possess a bank machine, the kind that advertises on buses. At night, I rendezvoused with Hiyate, as a kind of intern/assistant though he generously bestowed me the title of “managing editor.” For four or five brief months, I lugged the mail and took the messages. I wrote the reject letters. I broke the hearts. He charmed the ladies. He wore pinky rings and sharkskin suits, appeared in the fashion section of the Globe and Mail on a regular basis, was either the bane or the glamour boy of everyone he met. He was just as likely to publish the brilliant writings of Derek McCormack as he was to publish something by the stripper he’d met the night before or a student he’d pulled from the slush pile. He avoided making call-backs, particularly to those he owed money, and he sucked up to the star machine in a way that could make small press hippies tremble. He didn’t always pay me, but then I would cry, and he would get me the cash, and I couldn’t stay mad. This was my first exposure to the world of publishing and believe it or not, in the beginning I assumed all of this was normal. And then one day, Hiyate told me his idea….
He would adorn the cover of his fiction magazine b+a (short for blood + aphorisms) with as many women writers as possible, gorgeous babes, he said. Literary magazines needed more women on their covers. Lit. mags needed to be sexier. And everyone would be so offended by this smallest of gestures. I agreed. It was brilliant. Any lit. journal based in academia would be likely to assemble a silver-hued cast and call it simply: 14 Women Writers. What set the infamous “babes” issue apart was exactly that: the use of the word “babes” floating in the black centre of our coy and grinning core. That, and our youth. We ranged from approximately 22 to 32, which in terms of the literary world meant that we were literally babes in the woods. At that point in time where else in Can.Lit. had a full volume been entirely dedicated not only to women, but to young women? However, the flippant heading was obviously plastered onto us by a man–with a reputation of more a lothario than a thinker.
Regarding the actual writing within the issue, Christopher Michael of the National Post reported, “Sharp insights are undermined by some of the frankly erotic writing, which ends up seeming graphic for its own sake, more exemplary of a preoccupation with sex than a definitive literary statement on behalf of babes everywhere.” I’m not certain what Mr. Michael meant, but in a year when the rough zine aesthetic had undoubtedly tramped its way into the mainstream and Maxim and Lilith Fair were competing for control of the female form, to shy away from discussions of either graphic writing or gendered writing seems…suspect. Alexandra Gill of the Globe and Mail chose to quote me as saying, “What’s sexist? …All these women are fabulous,” though I might have said much more on the topic than these seven fluffy words. Hiyate himself did what he’d set out to do, he offended people left, right, and centre, admitting that he wanted to mimic the new flood of men’s magazines and that not all of the writing was chosen for its quality–something that, as his then-assistant, I can attest was not strictly true: edits were made and rewrites requested.
Despite the hubbub the theme issue caused, the cover could have more easily been a Tampon ad than a status quo shattering image. Yet, we remained to most peoples’ eyes, the whores of literature.
Why? you ask. We weren’t writing about the traditional themes that still dominate book lists for the middle-class, middle-aged, and middle-cultured. Canada’s superstores Chapters and Indigo were still separate outlets then, and they were hungry for us. “Bring in the whores!” their purchasers hollered. “We’ll take anything. Two copies of every small press book in Canada.” At the same time, women writing about sex were not going to make book club lists or aisle displays. Not only were we writing about sex, we were writing about the differences between kissing styles, the consistency of ejaculate. Many of the stories ended abruptly, dissatisfying endings for dissatisfied characters, disqualifying us from fitting into the ever-swelling erotica aisles. In the final scene of Simona Choise’s story, “Looking for Mr. Hand Guy” she writes of a man’s hand that occasionally reaches in from off-camera during porn scenes to rub or fondle the woman onscreen–a hand that is ultimately anonymous, leaving the viewer to question who is being served and who fulfilled. In retrospect, the image seems apropos to the whole issue. We were the subjects but who was the hand?
Most of us hadn’t agreed to be photographed as a means to fulfilling Hiyate’s male fantasy, even though he was upfront about his motives. We wanted to publish, even if we were simply the filler that would be glanced over in the glossy abyss before the general consumer ascended to the floor that contained what she or he had really come for: candles, fancy notebooks, and Best of Sting CDs. As Tim Conley pointed out in a critical article in a 2002 edition of Open Letter, a small Canadian journal of writing and theory, the babes were given faces but no biographical notes. We ourselves then, were largely anonymous; eleven of us had never published fiction before. As Mr. Conley suggested, we were not necessarily producing great literature… but we were just starting out. We took what was available to us at the time because it was all that was available to us, and we hoped it would lead us someplace greater.
So, who were the babes and where are we now? “Babes” Golda Fried and Barbra Leslie had already published during the mid-to-late ’90s golden era of Gutter. Even then, Fried was a Montreal zine favourite and her recent fiction can be read in issue #26 of Broken Pencil or online. Leah McLaren had just begun as a regular lifestyle columnist at the Globe and Mail. The same year that Literary Babes took the stands, Roxane Ward released her novel Fits Like a Rubber Dress. Sam Haywood would make a name for herself as a literary agent. In addition to working at BookTV, Choise would release a nonfiction book exploring women’s sexuality, Good Girls Do. Lydia Eugene would stand by Hiyate’s Gutter Press for a book called Burnt Orange Lipstick even though it would take longer to release than finding the perfect shade. Youngest “babe” Sheila Heti would step up to publish with McSweeney’s, This Magazine, and Toronto Life before her Anansi-released Middle Stories took her to skyrocket success as a respected writer in Canada, the U.S., and abroad. Priscila Uppal had previously published two volumes of her poetry through Exile Editions and would become known for her fiction, most recently The Divine Economy of Salvation . I do not know where the other four are. I did not know them on that day and I do not know them now. Perhaps our hair touched as we gathered in the circle that Hiyate had mentally drawn for us. That would be the extent of our camaraderie but not the extent of what we had in common.
Plain and simple, we on that cover were (and are) commodity. To believe we are not would be foolish. If we had not appeared within the constraints of the Literary Babes issue, we would have been forced to appear within some other clichéd constraint. The Babes issue was merely upfront about such constraints , and dammit if we didn’t have fun doing it. In a deluge of chick lit and mom lit, there is little place for the wanton writerly woman–for the woman who writes “like a man,” or the woman who writes ala French filmmaker Catherine Breillat: simultaneously of cocks and menstrual blood. The woman who is without children or aging parents to fill her literary scribblings will have a hard time proving herself en par with her contemporary male writers–and it should be argued even those who belong to that family brand of literature where women dominate will never be compared with their male contemporaries, but only with one another.
We still have an outdated notion that men read men and women read women. We also have a publishing industry where the majority of workers are female, yet the majority of what is being published is male-authored. Curiosity led me to tally the male-versus-female percentage of fiction books released by small presses in Canada. Excluding the presses that publish women-only, I based my count on the “New Titles” sections of ten small press Web sites from Halifax to Vancouver. The number is staggering and embarrassing. Male fiction writers lead the presses by almost two-thirds. Without taking into account poetry and memoir titles, women hold only 33.7% of small press’ heart. So why have I, as a female fiction writer and part of that slim 33%, spent two years slogging it out in defence of the small press? Hope, I guess. Unless I want to begin writing “like a woman,” meaning inoffensive literature, I will have to be content with writing “like a babe”…with the short-lived space the other “babes” and I were given in Can.Lit.
Is it true? Are the men, the “boys” if you will, really a full two times better? I think we can take ’em. Just pass me my lipstick, darling. It and my pen–they’re the only phalli I’ve got.
Since the b+a Literary Babes issue, Emily Schultz has published two small press fiction books–Outskirts: Women Writing from Small Places and her own collection of stories Black Coffee Night. She has edited Broken Pencil for just over two years and hangs up her editor’s hat now with this issue that takes the piss out of boy culture–all that from which women are excluded.