mcnally

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/working-rejection-john-mcnallys-promise-failure/"></div>This past New Year, I noticed a lot of writers making resolutions about their writing life. One common resolution was to net a specific number of rejections in a year: 80, 100, 150 — whatever seems manageable. Writers who have done this note that the more they submit, the more likely they are to get published, which makes sense. A rejected piece also brings their names to the attention of editors and may result in useful feedback on how to improve. Most importantly perhaps, writers argue that aiming for so many rejections helps to build a thicker skin; they learn to not take rejections as personal failures, to just move on to the next piece.
John McNally, author of <a href="https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609385750/the-promise-of-failure">The Promise of Failure</a>, is no stranger to failing, but he’s a huge proponent of rethinking it. He starts his book by sharing a Facebook status he posted, in which he listed all the books he’d written, how long it took him to write each one, whether or not they were published, and how long it took to revise them for publication. The response was phenomenal. Writers were thrilled to finally see the truth about writing failures, rather than a carefully curated litany of authorial successes. His list also showed that one success does not guarantee future successes.
This post was the impetus for McNally’s book, which uses the same conversational style you’d expect when interacting with someone on Facebook. It’s a slim, small volume, and though it’s somewhat meandering, McNally repeatedly turns the idea of failure on its head, providing a welcome new perspective on success for writers at all stages.
Everyone fails or is rejected at some point in their lives. But McNally insists that it’s how you perceive and deal with that failure that matters. It also depends on <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/">how you think about your abilities</a>. Do you have what psychologist Carol Dweck has termed “a fixed mindset,” in which you think that your “character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way?” Or do you have a growth mindset, which “thrives on challenge and sees failure…as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities?” To make the most of failure, he argues, we need to cultivate the growth mind set.
While McNally addresses his book to all writers, accepting failure is particularly important for women, who are conditioned by society to think that failing at work means we are failures in life. Instead, women need to sever the link between failure and self, and see it for what it is: an opportunity to learn. As Andi Zeisler writes in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30842580-we-were-feminists-once">We Were Feminists Once</a>, “Equality is not simply elevating women, but also allowing them to fail as spectacularly and often as anyone else.”
So what constitutes failure in writing? McNally’s book suggests two ways of embracing failure: (1) embracing specific failures as a means to future success, and (2) embracing failure as a state of being, regardless of future outcomes.
Those who advocate the first approach (let&#8217;s call it failure-as-success) insist that rejection can often lead to later acclaim: maybe your essay gets rejected today but it results in constructive feedback, networking with editors, and publication tomorrow. But with the second approach (­we could just call it failure, I suppose) you need to ignore external factors that are out of your control: including getting published, receiving awards or job offers, getting good reviews and high book sales. Instead of relying on these external motivators, you have to focus on the one thing you can control: the writing itself. Instead of writing because you hope to receive praise in the future, you write because it&#8217;s a vocation, because you are compelled to, because you can.
Thus McNally cautions writers, “don’t seek rewards. Let the act of writing be its own reward.” But this is a difficult choice to make: many of us are primed to aim for ­failure-as-success but don&#8217;t really know how to accept failure as such. We know intuitively that the writing life is more sustainable if we focus on the process, and if we see it as a craft we must practice regularly. We know that we need to be humble and open about our failures instead of publicly curating a perfect life that suggests writing is a competition. But we often require some motivation to move beyond that – and that motivation ultimately takes the form of publication, putting us squarely in failure-as-success territory.
If we’re not able to fully embrace failure itself, we may begin to ask ourselves: why write if I’m just going to be rejected? Given my mental health-related disability, I often ask myself why I write. Why do I spend my limited time on something at which I may not succeed? Sometimes I feel I neglect my family by writing instead of spending that limited time with them. But I can’t not write. It’s something that’s good for my soul, and it makes my dark periods more bearable. I write because I can. I write because it’s my way to contribute to society given my illness. I write, as Joan Didion said, to find out what I’m thinking.
Indeed, McNally makes clear that writing is built on sacrifice of some sort: “each story you write is probably something you already have sacrificed something important for — time with your children or spouse or partner or friends or pet…” Having made this initial sacrifice, McNally suggests that writers make the most of their writing time and take a personal risk: move beyond your fear of failure to be emotionally honest, to let your life and worldview seep into a book. Consider becoming a genuine “failure,” who writes only for the joy of it. It will make your writing more compelling, and more of an experience for the reader. As he quotes Ray Bradbury: “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/working-rejection-john-mcnallys-promise-failure/"></div>

Working with Rejection: John McNally&#8217;s The Promise of Failure

Working with Rejection: John McNally&#8217;s The Promise of Failure

valian

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/building-inclusive-academy-one-generation-time/"></div>I first read Virginia Valian’s <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/why-so-slow">Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women</a> when I was starting my PhD in the early 2000s. I found it fairly depressing. She showed that it could take generations to achieve equity in overall career advancement between the sexes, and that men benefitted professionally from negative schemas (a.k.a. stereotypes) against women. While she succeeded in exposing the previously unexamined differences in career advancement between men and women, Valian concluded that, ultimately, “men tend to be overrated and women underrated” in professional life. It made me wonder whether there was any hope for gender equality during my lifetime, and didn’t make me feel particularly optimistic about my own career in science.
Fast forward eighteen years to the release of Valian’s latest book, <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inclusive-academy">The Inclusive Academy</a>, co-authored with Dr. Abigail J. Stewart, which returns to those differences in the careers of men and women in academia. They unpack the structural issues in academia that prevent women and minorities from being evaluated on merit alone and, by consequence, make the academy anything but a meritocracy. They also note that schemas held by university faculty often keep them from identifying these structural issues. But far from merely an indictment of the treatment of women and minorities in academia, this book provides real solutions and concrete actions that can be taken to make academia more welcoming. I found The Inclusive Academy much less disheartening than Valian’s first book: although there remain obstacles to achieving diversity in the academy that can often feel insurmountable, the results of a 17-year pilot study across nine American universities show that diversity and inclusion can be achieved if an institution makes a strong commitment and implements certain key strategies. And <a href="https://snowhydro1.wordpress.com/freelance-work/#interviews">my own interviews with over 20 women scientists</a> suggest that the younger, new generation of faculty is more likely to embrace diversity initiatives than those that are more entrenched.
Stewart and Valian draw on an expansive breadth of research from psychology, corporate culture, and government to make their case. They state that if universities are serious about improving knowledge outcomes by increasing diversity, they must invest in more objective and replicable approaches for identifying a candidate pool for faculty positions, hiring and retention processes, and evaluations. At the hiring stage, for example, this requires writing job descriptions that are both broad and accurate, in a manner that makes women and minorities feel that they are qualified for the job. For faculty retention, Stewart and Valian suggest that every new hire “should be provided with conditions that offer a realistic chance of promotion and tenure … [and] should operate within institutional conditions that permit them to be productive and satisfied with their work lives.”
Stewart and Valian’s approach, which includes suggestions for increasing diversity at all career stages, is necessary if we want to maintain and improve universities that are at the cutting edge of knowledge: diversity has been shown to improve research outcomes and foster creativity and innovation — things that universities (at least nominally) prize.
Stewart and Valian have an uphill battle in pursuit of a diverse academy: universities are often heavily socially stratified, and notoriously difficult to change. As a graduate student at an R1 university in 2018 <a href="https://tenureshewrote.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/picking-the-wrong-place/">wrote</a>: “both professors and other graduate students tell me they’re afraid of professional judgement by their peers over their personal leanings, and … people openly admit that relationships between faculty, staff, and students are inherently inauthentic.” As <a href="https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1572-cruelty-and-kindness-in-academia">Kelly J. Baker writes</a>, unkindness is common in this milieu, and often “viewed as a signifier of intelligence and kindness as a signal of intellectual weakness. Academia rewards those who represent the clever and cruel version of intelligence … nasty behavior gets reinforced. Jerks admire other jerks, and departments and institutions can become havens for assholes.”
Historically white men have benefitted tremendously from the academy as it is. There’s been little incentive for those in power to push for change, which has left many biases (both institutional and personal) intact. The problem is rampant: recently, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45709205">a senior male researcher at CERN</a> gave a talk saying that &#8220;physics was invented and built by men,” and that, these days, &#8220;physics is not sexist against women, but against men.”
Women often have to work twice as hard to receive the same recognition as the archetypal white man, their ideas are talked over or appropriated by white men during meetings, and, as Kelly J. Baker writes in <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/time-take-sexism-post-secondary-education-seriously/">Sexism Ed</a>, they’re often expected to do a lot of the “care work” that happens in a university department (birthday cards for the administrative assistant, flowers for the woman who just had a baby, etc.). And heaven help a woman if she displays any competence or ambition — she’ll be seen as unlikeable or a bitch (been there, done that).
In “<a href="https://tinhouse.com/on-pandering/">On Pandering</a>,” Claire Vaye Watkins’s viral 2015 essay in Tin House, she notes that minorities are also targets in academia. “My husband, half Cuban but made much more so on a job interview, is told by a white male scholar specializing in African American literature that his inventing and imagining aspects of Cuba in his novel was ‘problematic’ and that according to this white professor, he got things about Cuba ‘wrong.’”
Rather than seeing Watkins’s husband as a possible collaborator on African American literature, the white male scholar immediately sees him as a threat, someone who must be “put in his place,” a Cuban who needs to be told what he’s gotten wrong about Cuba.
These are some of the many issues that Stewart and Valian aspire to solve. They argue that, while most universities have no idea where to start, they — and the eight other universities who received NSF funding to study this issue — have developed a series of approaches that can be universally applied.
Having worked in a regressive department run by an old boy’s network, with little faculty autonomy over even small things like teaching schedules, I know the type of people who may oppose the institutional changes that Stewart and Valian suggest. Certain faculty are often convinced that, given their education, they know how to accurately assess people, though, as Stewart and Valian note, their approaches are actually largely error-prone. These faculty also often feel that achieving diversity outcomes automatically negates hiring for excellence (i.e., the dreaded “diversity hire”).
At some universities, the status quo may be too entrenched and institutional inertia too strong for things to change. It would be like turning the Titanic: require a lot of advance notice and happen only incrementally over a long time period. Fortunately, at other universities, these problematic faculty represent an increasingly small and isolated number, as they are replaced by new faculty with progressive perspectives on diversity.
Stewart and Valian, for their part, are optimistic that universities will take up the diversity torch and use the resources and guiding principles they’ve outlined in their book. I can see why. During my 18 years in and around academia, discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion have become more mainstream. And in a climate where we can talk openly about diversity, universities are more likely to implement the concrete strategies outlined by Stewart and Valian, changing the minds of intransigent faculty as they go.
Recently, international communities of scientists have come together to affirm a commitment to diversity, representing a major step forward for science in general. For example, physicists worldwide countered the CERN researcher’s claims (mentioned above) with <a href="https://www.particlesforjustice.org/">an open letter</a> that supports the diversity goals outlined by Stewart and Valian, stating that “the humanity of any person, regardless of ascribed identities such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, disability, gender presentation, or sexual identity is not up for debate.” The American Geophysical Union, which represents over 60,000 scientists, created a <a href="https://sites.agu.org/leadership/committees/shared-committees/diversity-inclusion-task-force/">Diversity and Inclusion Task Force</a> in 2017, and even the Canadian government has published a document on <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/corporate/reports/building-diverse-inclusive-public-service-final-report-joint-union-management-task-force-diversity-inclusion.html">Building a Diverse and Inclusive Public Service</a>. These are hopeful signs.
At individual universities, the impetus for change must come from key champions in upper administration, and they must make clear that they’re invested in diversity as something more than just hiring token women and minorities. They also need to show their commitment to diversity by providing course relief or additional pay for faculty working on tricky diversity issues.
In Valian’s first book, Why So Slow?, she concluded that sociopolitical and socioeconomic changes in the status of women in the workplace would change with successive generations. I suspect the same is true of increasing diversity in universities, particularly those with fewer entrenched faculty members. The new generation sees diversity and inclusion as standard practice; offer that new generation incentives to work towards implementing Stewart and Valian’s recommendations, and I think we may see the change they’re promoting.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/building-inclusive-academy-one-generation-time/"></div>

Building an Inclusive Academy – One Generation at a Time

8716270958_f636dfeb5b_k

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/breaking-silence-anger/"></div>Society is not designed to hear women’s voices. As Mary Beard writes in Women &amp; Power, when women speak out “it doesn’t much matter what line you take…if you venture into traditional male territory the abuse comes anyway…A significant subsection [of threats] is directed at silencing the woman.”
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford broke that silence and spoke out against Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanagh, about his assault of her 35 years ago. She had everything to lose, and nothing to gain. The price for breaking that silence was <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/21/politics/christine-blasey-ford-kavanaugh-fbi-threats/index.html">death threats</a>, email hacking, and being impersonated online. She’s had to relocate her family to avoid unwanted public attention.
Women watching the Ford-Kavanaugh spectacle were in tears, as were their male allies. But those tears were also a sign of anger. The #MeToo movement has set a precedent for removing male predators from positions of power, but it seems to have come to a screaming halt once it hit the brick wall that is the Republican Party. Indeed, the public treatment of women by members of the Republican administration fits Kate Manne’s discussion of misogyny as “punitive, resentful, and personal, but not particular.”
Had Ford responded as Kavanaugh did, with partisan political statements about a left-wing conspiracy, she would have been labeled hysterical, angry, and strident, and dismissed outright. As <a href="https://twitter.com/annehelen/status/1045353624598011904">one woman wrote</a>:  &#8220;She is the epitome of a woman academic who has made her way through extreme competence and intelligence and not pissing the men around her off.&#8221;
In We Should All Be Feminists, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie notes that western women are highly invested in being liked, which necessarily requires that we not show anger or be aggressive or disagree too loudly. She writes, “We spend too much time telling girls they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.” As Soraya Chemaly writes in Rage Becomes Her, anger is not considered a valid emotion for a woman — though sadness is, which is why we often cry “tears of rage.”
But Adichie fails to identify the reasoning behind being “likable.” In many cases, it’s purpose is to protect us from men and the results of their anger. If you’re liked, maybe they won’t get angry with you or hurt you. Maybe you won’t get the cold shoulder or be attacked or threatened or have your tone or behavior policed. As Jess Zimmerman <a href="https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/03/28/why-male-anger-so-threatening/">writes at Dame</a>, “This is the world we go armored against: the one where the response to “I’m afraid of your anger” is “well, don’t make me mad and we won’t have a problem.””
The Ford-Kavanaugh spectacle is something that we should all be angry about. It exposes everything vile about the underbelly of US politics and the wholesale failure to see and treat women as equal human beings. Some argue that Ford was <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/28/opinions/worse-than-what-senate-did-to-anita-hill-zelizer/index.html">treated even worse than Anita Hill</a> was 27 years ago, and that it shows women yet again that coming forward about sexual assault is in some cases as terrible an experience as the assault itself.
Women need to get angry and stay angry, and channel that anger into action. In 1981, <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/1981-audre-lorde-uses-anger-women-responding-racism">Audre Lorde wrote</a>, “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against…oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” Soraya Chemaly devotes an entire chapter of Rage Becomes Her to how to effectively channel our anger. Even <a href="http://time.com/5404884/women-anger-politics-2018/">Time magazine</a> notes that women’s anger is rising in everyday society, saying “Boldness, distilled from our anger and laced with a sense of humor, is the only solution. Forward march.”
As Mary Beard writes in Women &amp; Power, “we have to be more reflective about what power is for, and how it is measured…if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?” In July of this year, a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/opinion/women-democratic-party-grassroots-trump.html">New York Times piece</a> discussed how some of that power is being redefined by the large number of women running for political office and winning, “many of them suburban, middle-aged and not particularly radical, who are making political activism the center of their lives.”
The Women’s March, held the day after Trump’s inauguration on January 21, 2017, may have been the largest protest in American history. Approximately five million people in more than 600 cities marched to advocate for the rights of women, workers, and LGBTQ peoples, as well as racial justice, immigration reform, and more. That march was repeated again in January of 2018, drawing large crowds and focusing on the concrete goal of <a href="http://www.powertothepolls.com/">Power to the Polls</a>, which aims to increase voter participation and the number of women running for office.
Our power lies in breaking the silence and using our voices to articulate our anger and purpose. We want the same freedoms that men have: to be free from the male gaze and male harassment, the ability to walk alone at night without fearing for our safety, the ability to make our own choices in relation to our own bodies, the same pay for the same work.
And we are angry enough to fight for it.
&nbsp;
<h6><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/philippeleroyer/">Image via Flickr</a></h6>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/breaking-silence-anger/"></div>

Breaking Our Silence with Anger

Sarah Boon (PhD, FRCGS) writes about nature, literature, and women in science for Catapult, Narratively, The Rumpus, Longreads, Undark, LitHub, Alpinist Magazine, and more. She is currently writing a book about her outdoor adventures as an environmental research scientist.

Sarah Boon

Fact-Checking Help from Readers: A Conversation with Ann Patchett on “The Dutch House”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

On History, Marriage, and Politics: A Q-and-A with Barbara Kingsolver

Sexism Ed

Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously

Education

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith

Gender &amp; Sexuality

Sarah Boon (PhD, FRCGS) writes about nature, literature, and women in science for Catapult, Narratively, The Rumpus, Longreads, Undark, LitHub, Alpinist Magazine, and more. She is currently writing a book about her outdoor adventures as an environmental research scientist.