A Message from Story Circle Founder Susan Wittig Albert
As the founder of Story Circle Network, I am almost inexpressibly proud to say that, for nearly three decades, SCN has created many ways to honor women’s stories: the story-song of women at work and women at play, women loving and living, women birthing, women dying, women losing, women gaining, women writing. It was one of the great pleasures of my life to be on the SCN board in 2010 when we designed the Sarton Women’s Book Awards and to continue to work with the team of forty or so dedicated volunteers who manage the program. Together, we have reviewed thousands of entries and made hundreds of awards to women authors of books that celebrate strong women and girls as they meet the often-overwhelming challenges of their lives with insight, energy, and personal agency.
And then last week, our Sarton team received a query we’d never heard before. A leading Canadian independent publisher emailed us, asking if we accepted entries by nonbinary and transgender authors. It’s such a simple question, really—just a few words. But it gave our team of Sarton coordinators something to think about. Who are we, anyway? Women who honor women’s stories? And whose stories do we honor?
These are not the fairly simple questions that confronted that little group of women who created the Story Circle Network. In 1997, our definition of “woman” was rooted in the cultural landscapes of the twentieth century. There were no out lesbians among us, and none of us had met a transgender woman. While the concept of “nonbinary” or “intersex” has existed in many cultures for many centuries, I doubt that any of us could have told you what the terms meant. And if a Supreme Court candidate had been asked in that year to define “woman,” they (yes, they—that new nonbinary pronoun) wouldn’t have any trouble at all. And they wouldn’t have met with an argument.
But the cultural landscape is beginning to change. Defining the word “woman” is so challenging that, when asked the question, Supreme Court candidate Ketanji Brown Jackson began with “Well, I’m not a biologist”—an answer that was turned by her Congressional questioner into a political statement. The LGBTQ+ movement is established and growing increasingly powerful, requiring us to recognize that biology is no longer the sole definition of gender. In 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary added the adjective “cisgender” to designate a person “whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds to his or her sex at birth.” The United States Department of State is introducing a third gender-marker option, allowing nonbinary, intersex, and gender nonconforming people to say who they are on their passports. And wonderful books are being written by and about individuals exploring gender.
There’s been a backlash, of course. Many of those exploratory books are banned, authors are castigated, protesting librarians are fired, and library funding is withdrawn. LGBTQ+ people are harassed and attacked, and legislatures are passing laws to deny transgender people necessary medical care. The recently won constitutional right to marriage equality is threatened. In the midst of all the other dividing issues in our country, our right to define our gender for ourselves has become extraordinarily divisive.
All this is what went through my mind when I saw the email from that Canadian publisher asking that very simple question: Are nonbinary and transgender authors eligible to submit their books to the Sarton/Gilda? Speaking as SCN’s founder and one of the women who was there when we began work on the Sarton, I feel that we must say yes. What’s more, I believe that May Sarton (the writer for whom the award is named and a very butchy broad herself) would enthusiastically agree. I also believe that a yes is nothing more (or less) than an extension of the diversity statement that SCN has published on its website, renewing “our passion and commitment to lift up the lives of all women through the healing force of story” and pledging ourselves to actively seek “interested women writers to join forces with us as we embark on this transformative journey.” As always, we may not fully understand what that means or what it requires, but we are committed to the exploration.
The year before Story Circle came to life, I wrote this:
Our stories must be told, so that the women who come after us will know how it really was, so that they know that their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers are more than just the characters in men’s tales, that we are dimensional, intentional beings with minds of our own, wills of our own, and dreams of our own. Our stories must be told. My story, your story, women’s stories. And you and I are the only ones who can tell them, because we are the only ones who have lived them. By telling them, by telling our real, true woman’s story, we will challenge and correct all the myths and made-up stories about women’s lives. We will help to show that women’s lives aren’t lived as men have taught us to imagine them. Our stories are more than idle gossip, family chitchat, more than old wives’ tales—although they are these things, too, and isn’t that wonderful?
—Writing From Life, 1996
I still believe this. And as we turn toward another year of the Sarton Awards, I am delighted that we are turning yet another page in its history and growth. On behalf of the Sarton coordinators (Paula Yost, Jo Virgil, Ellen Notbohm, Regina Allen, Liz Beaty, Christina Wells, Teresa Lynn), we invite you to become a part of it. If you’re a woman (cis, trans, nonbinary/intersex) who reads books, we’d love to have you join us! You can apply here to join the Sarton team, or go here to join SCN.
