Forever Feminists: A Conversation with FP Authors
This week, we spoke to two authors whose work is foundational to Feminist Press. Shirley Geok-lin Lim is author of the memoir Among the White Moon Faces, published by Feminist Press in 1996 and winner of the American Book Award, as well as the novel Joss and Gold and the collection Two Dreams. Annell López was the 2023 winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize with her debut short story collection I'll Give You a Reason, which follows working-class and immigrant women in New Jersey.
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Annell López
How did you first learn about Feminist Press?
My introduction to Feminist Press was Ivelisse Rodriguez’s collection Love War Stories. I found and read the book, which I now teach all the time. I read the first story and was blown away by the writing. After I finished her collection, I looked into who published it and found Feminist Press.
What does it mean to you to be published by FP?
It’s an honor to be published by FP, joining a legacy and lineage of people whose work is really important to me and impactful. Not only because FP’s books are beautiful and well written. Feminist Press publishes literature that should be read by everyone—literature that is meaningful at large to the world, that says something to the world. It’s important that a book like I’ll Give You a Reason was published by FP.
Why do you think Feminist Press is important?
Feminist Press is important because of the work that it publishes. Books like my own or Training School for Negro Girls or Louise Meriwether’s book or We Are Bridges—these are books that have a lot to say about the world and can sometimes be overlooked or can have a difficult time finding their place in traditional publishing because of the themes that they treat or the message that they convey. Some of this literature is risky and political. FP is a place for literature that takes those risks, that confronts our society and what is happening at this current moment, both good and bad. It’s important to have a press that highlights those authors and backs their work, and brings it into the world.
What does feminism mean to you? Has your relationship to feminism changed over your lifetime?
Feminism, to me, is the root of all great things that have happened in the world. For me, as a person who lives at the intersection of multiple identities, I wouldn't have a place in the world without it. As an immigrant, as a woman, as a Black Latina, my place in society would be zero, would be nothing without it—my autonomy and personhood and ability to just exist.
My understanding of feminism has changed and become more intersectional—I learned as I got older; a teenage version of me didn’t know what that was. My attitude has changed. I feel more compelled to protect it because it feels under threat as we speak. We can’t take anything for granted. We have to assert our presence and keep protecting what has allowed people like me to exist.
What did you learn from the feminists who came before you? What would you like younger and/or older generations of feminists to know about the movement and its history?
I’ve learned from feminists who came before me to sit with discomfort. To embrace the notion that we might not always be liked, we might not always be loved in a mainstream understanding of what love is. That it’s ok to redefine what those values mean to you—love, connection—and what it means to you. Rejection is not the end of the world.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
What brought you to Feminist Press? How did you first learn about the Press?
It’s not “what” but “who.” Florence Howe, well-known as founder of Feminist Press in 1970, came up to me at the Modern Language Association Conference in 1988 to say she had read my autoethnography essays and wished me to write for the Press’s Cross-Cultural Memoir Series, which by then had published Toni McNaron’s I Dwell in Possibility, Arlene Voski Avakian’s Lion Woman’s Legacy: An Armenian-American Memoir, and Jo Sinclair’s The Seasons: Death and Transfiguration. I told Florence that I had received an advance from Columbia University Press to publish a critical study of Asian American literature, the kind of publication that my research-oriented department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, valued. Feminist Press and its memoir series were not ranked highly in top-tier research universities, and as a woman and immigrant from Asia (viewed by some as an affirmative action recruit to the university), I could not afford to ignore this reputational ranking. Rather than take offense by my frankness, Florence introduced me to Tillie Olsen, whose short stories in Tell Me A Riddle and more life-altering text, Silences, made her (and still does) a towering figure in my imagination. “Tillie,” Florence declared, “I want you to meet Shirley, who is writing her memoir for us.” Florence gave me an assignment, pledging me with Olsen as witness, to write the memoir no matter what. Some may recall, like me, that Florence was an imperious publisher and as imperious an editor. I finally returned the advance to Columbia University Press. Publishing Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands took me down a road that was not the road taken by research faculty, and for that Florence was my far-sighted Tiresias.
Why do you think Feminist Press is important?
Feminist Press continues to do what Florence created, generating new writing by women of all diversities. Its importance is precisely in its risk-taking vision of how society is gendered, in its discovery of stories on the edges, emergent, necessary for a future in which these new voices are not merely novel but transformative of a present in which social justice is still wanting. Feminist Press encourages courage in women, many struggling for meaning and purpose in a nation and planet where their core selves are denied recognition. Some of the books Feminist Press brings out each year may receive scant attention, but they circulate; and like our blood stream, circulation is crucial for the authors to live.
What does feminism mean to you?
For me, it means simply R.E.S.P.E.C.T. For millennia, monarchs, pharaohs, chieftains, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, have been male. Patriarchy is a buzzword cliché, but it is reality recorded in annals, parchments, runestones. Like water, it is what fish-humans swim in. Like air, it is what bird-humans fly in. Yet, females were also always there in the water, air, and socio-political world. They were married off young, bore children, died young, wife giving way to wife, or wife living with second and third wives, or mistresses. Their names were changed with their marriage oaths. They could not own property; could not keep their children if fathers claimed them. What we view today as human rights came out of women’s marches, demonstrations, fights, two steps forward, one and a half step back, one man, one court, one country at a time. That is what feminism means to me: our hypervigilance against the one and a half step backwards that continues wherever toxic patriarchy is still rooted.
Has your relationship to feminism changed over your lifetime? If so, how?
Yes and no. I am now eighty years old, and have lived in the US for fifty-six years. I am more comfortable as a womanist, enjoying immensely my relationships with women neighbors, interacting with women all over the US and world through the internet, my micro-sociability with women in stores, across takeout countertops. I am a womanist in that I also acknowledge the support of men, my husband’s daily help, male friends in the professions, male doctors, and more. But I continue to rage openly against the machine of a regime that is toxic patriarchy even now pushing all of humankind back to the stone age when women were property, transactional pawns, when violence against the female body was common, when feminism is what we call the fight for women’s dignity and human rights.
What did you learn from the feminists who came before you? What would you like younger generations of feminists to know about the movement and its history?
I learned from feminist foremothers that our silence will not save us. That is why Feminist Press books, in breaking the silences, are so important. And I would like younger women and men to read about the millennia of movements for women’s just rights. History has also a woman’s voice, often banned from speaking, from writing her own narratives. I would stretch the breadth of what you call the feminist movement to incorporate the movement for human rights wherever the struggle is ongoing, in refugee camps, among the poor denied food and housing, against erasing difference and homogenizing a supremacist society whatever that ruling ethos is—a color line, a gender line, an ability line, a belief system line, etc.
Inspired by Annell and Shirley's perspectives? Make a donation to Feminist Press today, and read the rest of their interviews on the Feminist Press website.
