In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • A Woman’s Work: Editing and Narrating Memoirs at the Feminist Press by Florence Howe
  • Florence Howe (bio) and Shirley Geok-lin Lim (bio)
A Woman’s Work: Editing and Narrating Memoirs at the Feminist Press Interview with Florence Howe, New York, June 2011

I had been calling on Florence Howe at least once a year each time I was in New York visiting my son and our friends. We met often at her West End condo, lunched in her favorite restaurant a few streets away, and talked about books. Still, I was astonished when she asked me to blurb her forthcoming memoir, A Life in Motion;1 she was a star in the publishing firmament, and I felt inadequate. Of course, I said yes, and I read the preprint copy closely with fascination, gulping down huge histories of U.S. and international feminist activism in which Florence was a preeminent actor and also held a stage-front seat to the broad spectrum of civil rights movements from the early 1960s to the early twenty-first century, when due to increasing health problems she retired from her executive position at the Feminist Press and as professor at the City University of New York.2

In June 2011, I spent several hours recording an interview with her, focusing on how she positioned herself as a memoirist, in distinction from her work as acquisition editor, for a series of memoirs she had imagined, established, nurtured, and successfully shaped as “cross-cultural.”3 Florence’s interview was one of four I had completed that I intended to include in a collection of interviews with women writers and scholars, titled “Women of a Certain Age.”

Unfortunately, I retired from the University of California, Santa Barbara, shortly after and spent much of the next six years or so abroad, in conferences, lecturing, and on short- and long-term teaching residencies as visiting professor in various international universities (e.g., National University of Singapore and City University of Hong Kong). The projected collection was abandoned, and Florence’s interview has remained unpublished.

More than a decade later, I offer this exchange, in which her voice carries [End Page 31] insights into her complex psychology as the indefatigable feminist activist who believed in recovering the writings of women, making visible and substantial the writings of new feminists and younger women, and pushing the circle of the center to include the writings of marginalized women, be they subordinated by class, race, language, region, or sexual identities. The major irony of the exchange clarifies that the brilliant editor and feminist visionary did not arrive at her confidence in her own position as a woman writer till she was in her eighties, and even then, that confident writerly identity was still in formation. Hers is indeed the voice of a woman of a certain age.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim:

What are some major differences between the work of editing that you have done for so many decades and writing your own memoir?

Florence Howe:

There is no simple difference. They are like day and night. Probably the greatest difference for me lay in writing my memoir. It turns out, even though I had not written my own book, I was pretty smart about people who were going to write their own memoirs. I knew poetry meant the opposite of prose, but I knew every poet could be a prose writer. I told Meena Alexander that she could actually do it.4 In my view being a good editor depends on how much reading of good literature the editor has done. My main training was in the magnificent works I had studied in British literature, from Beowulf on, and the fact that I was such an avid reader when I was a child certainly helped. There is no substitute for reading, when you hear the sounds of good sentences in varied styles like Emerson, Jane Austen, and Virginia Wolfe, all quite different kinds of writers. The English sentence is an infinitely malleable instrument and very complex, and potentially capable of extra length and extra brevity.

SL:

Can you develop on this thought?

FH:

When you talk about editing, you...

pdf

Share