Editor’s Note: Tracy K. Smith, who was just announced as the 2012 Pulitzer Prize recipient in poetry, will keynote the Loft Poetry Conference (May 18–20, 2012) with National Book Award winner Mark Doty. She will also read at the Loft on Friday, May 18, 2012 (7 p.m.) as part of the Mentor Series.

Chris Jones (CJ): Part of Life on Mars is an elegy for your father. What was his influence on your life as a poet?

Tracy K. Smith (TKS): My father had a great deal of influence in encouraging me to lose myself in books as a child. He was such an avid reader, and so powerfully moved by the worlds he had known in books, that I took it as fact that words were important.

In writing this book, the memory of my father, and the sense of his own avid imagination (he was a huge science-fiction buff) helped lead me toward space as not just a metaphor but also a real place.

My father had difficulty with the ticks and gimmicks that sometimes characterize contemporary poetry—the way that some things can come off as heavily-encoded, and off-putting for a reader more used to prose–and so I wanted these poems to be as clear as possible, for artifice to stay out of the way of the larger mysteries the poems are striving to contemplate.

CJ: The poems in Life on Mars connect many disparate themes – cosmic and mundane, elegiac and political – within and among themselves. Do you have a method for organizing and ordering the themes that come up in your collections? And at what point in your writing process do you think about how poems will fit into a book?

TKS: When I’m organizing a book, I tend to first take a look at all the individual poems and see if they seem to be saying something to one another that might be highlighted by something as simple as order. Then I think about whether or not it would make sense to divide the collection into sections—as a way of highlighting breaks or silences between themes or “movements.” I think that structure is very often what pushes a reader to consider the connections between things, even those that seem, initially, to be quite disparate. Arrangement also calls my attention to gaps, areas that have been under-explored, which can send me writing in a new direction.

But perhaps it’s most true to say that when I’m writing the poems, I’m just writing one poem at a time, with only a minimal consideration of how each one might eventually come to fit into a collection.

CJ: You recently took part in NPR’s Newspoet project. How did you get involved with that? How did you handle the challenge of producing a poem within a very limited timeframe? And what did you think of the experience?

TKS: I was invited to spend the day in Washington and sit in on news meetings for “All Things Considered.” It was a challenge to finish a poem in just a few hours, but the process itself was very similar to what normally happens—much more slowly—in my everyday writing life, where I’m taking in information from various sources, reflecting on it, and trying to write my way further into whatever that world seems to be.

CJ: You’ve mentioned in a previous interview that you’re taking a break from poetry now to write a memoir. How is that coming along? Any challenges you’ve discovered in switching genres?

TKS: I am enjoying the expansive feeling of prose, and loving the way that prose invites me to open up, to explain, to explore on the page, without the same kind of leaps or concern for formal compression we tend to associate with poetry.

It can feel daunting, too, worrying about whether or not my narrative is moving forward, staying taut enough and making sense. I feel like I’m learning a new language, and it’s making me aware that we think and express ourselves differently when we move from one language to another. I feel like another version of myself. The stories I’ve explored already in poems even manage to feel different when I sit down to consider them in prose.

CJ: What’s the best piece of writing advice you ever received and what advice would you share with an aspiring poet?

TKS: A teacher once quoted Yeats in reminding me that the process of writing should be a joyful one: “And wisdom is a butterfly / And not a gloomy bird of prey.” Even when we are exploring difficult material, there is a buoyancy that I try to remind myself to tap into—something hopeful and alive, and unflagging that can help carry me further into whatever it is that I’m pursuing.

Tracy K. Smith is the author of three poetry collections: Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award, The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Life On Mars. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Smith is currently a protégé in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, and a member of the Creative Writing Faculty at Princeton University. She was just announced as the 2012 Pulitzer Prize recipient in poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Chris Jones is the Loft’s marketing and communications director.

Editor’s Note: Leslie Adrienne Miller reads as part of the Loft Mentor Series on Friday, April 20, 2012 at 7 p.m.

Chris Jones (CJ): When I read your new work, The Resurrection Trade, one line from a poem really stood out to me as a frame for the entire collection. The poem ends with the line, “the changed landscape of her womanhood.” I’m wondering if you can talk about how your research into historical anatomical studies of women revealed that changing landscape?

Leslie Adrienne Miller (LAM):   It’s interesting that you quote that line, when I wrote The Resurrection Trade I started by being interested in feminist geography, which is a fascinating and burgeoning field of study. I read a few books on it, and I thought it would be interesting to try to map out space in poems as women experience it– which is, of course different from the way men experience space neurologically and physically. For example, women have different notions about public space versus private space, and I wanted to explore how the mapping might be done in language. I was developing poems in that vein when I ran across Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography, a study of the history of the female body which includes a history and science of each body part and how people have thought about it over time. In the course of that book (which I highly recommend) she mentioned several of these images from the history of medical illustration that captured my imagination.  I went looking for those she mentioned, and I found one, and then another and another, and I discovered a treasure trove of these images existed in old medical books and archives. At first, my search was just a sort of weird obsession/fascination, and I wrote a few poems about the images that most captured my imagination and then followed my curiosity to other books that could help me answer questions about these images.  Who were these women?  How did they end up on dissection tables and eventually in these odd medical books and collections?  What did people know/not know about the female body in the past?  By the time I’d written three poems, I knew I had the backbone of the collection and I would have to keep going.

Then I started doing more specialized research for the book and discovered history of medicine archives. It was new territory for me. I have no training in this area, but I found friendly and generous archivists at  medical libraries were eager to help me. The archivists at the History of Medicine library in Kansas City were just great.  They sent me facsimiles of anatomical collections and they talked to me on the phone, suggesting that I look at this or that new item. They knew the material very well and were elated someone was interested in it. The people at the National Institute of Health were generous too. In fact, the cover image comes from the NIH’s “Dream Anatomy Exhibition, an online show of a few of their holdings that I found early on in the process. That cover image is by the medical artist Gautier D’Agoty, whose anatomical atlas of the pregnant female body eventually inspired the long central poem in The Resurrection Trade.  Once the book came out, the NIH invited me to come and give a reading at the History of Medicine Library, and they, like the archivists I encountered elsewhere were pleased and excited to find that interest in their collection had gone beyond the medical profession.   

CJ: You mentioned finding that backbone for a collection of poetry. There tend to be two schools of thought when it comes to books of poems. There is either, “these are my newest and best poems” idea or there are books which have more of that thematic backbone. Your work seems to fall more into that latter category. So I’m wondering if you can talk about how you find that backbone, and if that is something you prefer in books of poetry?

LAM: I don’t know if I prefer what some people are now calling the “project book.” I didn’t think about that when I embarked on The Resurrection Trade, but it’s fairly specialized material, so I needed to build a context for it, and I was grateful for material that was both linked to my emotional life and yet very remote from it.  More generally, I think having a project gives more shape to a book. The book itself becomes another poem, a book that’s more complex in many ways than a book of best hits because the poems interact more with each other. For most people, however, a first book is always a best hits. Certainly my first book was, but it also represented a much longer period of work. There were 15 years in my first book because it takes a long time to build an audience through literary magazine publications, and for first books, that’s necessary to get across the publisher’s desk. They want to know you already have readers waiting for the collection.

But, as you write more books and you write them more rapidly, you have more sense of how a book works as book; you feel the structure of a book more completely as you’re finding your way to it. It’s a pleasure that comes with writing multiple books, and it’s a pleasure that I’m now unwilling to give up. I can’t imagine now writing another best hits sort of book, unless at some future point I get to do a “collected” or “selected” volume.

CJ: In one of the Mentor Series sessions, you talked about the rise of memoir. You said memoir has had a huge impact on poetry, especially confessional poetry. And I also read somewhere that you said that if you play with a reader’s sense of truth, you piss them off. So I’m wondering if you can talk about the role of a speaker in a poem, and whether poets can get away with a fictional self or not?

LAM: I think poets still can get away with a fictional self. I hope they can, but it really depends on what readers expect and assume.  I don’t think there’s any such thing as a real self, especially in the written form. We like to think there is (or more precisely, readers like to think there is), but…I’m a huge fan of literary biographies, and if you read more than one biography about a particular writer, you will find, very often, that the subject feels like two different people even as the biographers may be working with roughly the same set of biographical facts. And that to me is a demonstration of the fact that there are multiple selves that depend as much on who is reading as on who is writing the self. Not to mention the fact that when you write a book, you’re presenting a very deliberately selected, even a constructed self. And the whole process that goes into writing that self is a process of winnowing away a lot of what might be closer to the self that your friends and family know, and highlighting a self that you want to present to the public, even while it may still be a self that feels intimate.  Even the most biographical collection of poetry you can imagine, I would still say is in many ways presenting a persona.  

But I think that readers like to feel like they know the poet’s “real” self. They make very intimate contact with that self as they read– it’s one of the pleasures many have come to expect of poetry, and readers become attached to that self because it’s part of them finally! That’s why they get pissed off if you tell them it’s not “real.” It’s always certainly part of you because you wrote it, but once the reader has invested in inhabiting that self, it’s disappointing for the writer to kill it off with glib statements about its being made up.  Critics, I think, sometimes get in trouble when they assume the written persona and the biographical self are one person, but when that does happen, at least you know that you’ve created a convincing persona!

CJ: Who are some of your favorite poets to read?

LAM: Oh, I hate that question. Because it changes all the time!

CJ: Well, who are you reading right now?

LAM: I read different people for different reasons. There are a lot of poets I like to read because they teach me something I want to do right now. There are poets I read because I can’t do what they do and I envy it and want to see what part of them  I can inhabit myself—and I think those are probably my favorite ones to read. I’m thinking poets like Anne Carson. I don’t know where she gets that voice, but I love it! Everybody loves that voice. (I think it’s because I’ve heard her read, too. [Then] you hear the real Anne Carson voice when you read her on the page.) So I love to read Anne Carson, but I don’t write anything like Anne Carson, nor would I want to, exactly.

Mary Ruefle is another one I love because she’s wonderfully odd, and also because she manages intimacy without autobiography. A recent book I enjoyed was Laura Kasischke’s Space in Chains. Laura Kasischke and Mary Ruefle have some things in common in the way they use certain kinds of surrealism, and I’m attracted to it even though it’s something I don’t often do myself.  I should say that I don’t know any of these poets personally, and there’s pleasure in that too because my experience of the work is more pure that way. 

CJ: So would you say that when you’re reading other poets, you’re looking for something outside your own work? That you like to find voices that are different from your own?

LAM: Yes, absolutely. I do. I dislike poems too much like my own. It’s just too familiar. I don’t learn anything from it.  I read because I want to grow as a writer, and I can’t grow if I’m reading work that does things I already know how to do.

Jordan Smith, a friend I went to Iowa with years ago was recently quoted by colleague of mine as saying, “I know that when I read a book that I really hate, that book will be one I completely love in another year or two.” I’ve often had exactly that experience. I think if you read a book that you actively hate, a book that gets under your skin in some way that really irritates you, you’re going to eventually love it, because you’re going to have to figure out how and why it got under your skin, and once you do you’ll have an enlarged sense of what poetry can do.

I asked something like this of the Mentor group too. “What was the last book you read that annoyed you? Or that you hated, that really got under your skin in some way? And why?” We talked about that in the first seminar, and it was fun to hear the variety of writers the group put forward– and to hear how the wheels started to turn as they talked about the work and why it had gotten to them, even in a negative way.  Of course, for people who read a lot, this process is something we go through continually.  It’s a way of  learning who you are as a writer, where you think you fit, where you think you don’t, what you’re pushing back against, why you’re pushing back against it. Very often what gets to us is something new that we’re not ready to let in to the space of our art yet. And once we’re able to let it in into the space of our art, the space gets bigger and better.

CJ: Tell me a little bit more about your Mentor Series experience, and working with the mentor participants, and what that’s been like.

LAM: There have been two very different kinds of experience in the Mentor seminars. There are the meetings with the larger group with mentees working in all three genres, poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and there are the more intimate meetings with the four mentees in poetry alone. At first, I wondered how I would address the larger group because they’re at different levels, as well as in different genres. Some are really new to writing and some have been at it for a long, long time and have been published and are well along in their careers. And so getting something for them to do as a group that’s meaningful to everybody in this vast range of levels and genres is tough.

I decided that I would give them a kind of project the first seminar weekend, which was way back in the fall, and then we’d check in about it as the year unfolded. The project was, essentially, to revisit a writer who may have meant one thing to them at some early point in their lives as writers, and who they would now revisit and reassess. The model for this project is an essay I’ve long loved, Robert Hass’s essay “Looking for Rilke” from Twentieth-Century Pleasures, which I shared with the group.  This revisiting of a long ago loved writer is something I’m doing myself as a project right now, so I thought that would probably work for anybody over the course of a year and give us a common struggle. Ideally, I thought each mentee might might get an essay out of it, but even those who may not have had the time or inclination to work toward a finished piece of writing about it could easily benefit from the process of looking again at a writer who surely must mean something different now than they did in an earlier stage of one’s writing life. I hope the group is enjoying that project, and even if they aren’t, I’m enjoying hearing what they’re doing. They all chose vastly different writers for vastly different reasons, and in some ways their choices and what they’ve done with them have given me more insight into the mentees than even their own writing samples have.

CJ: One last question. You mentioned that you’re working on something right now. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

LAM: Yes, my sixth collection of poems, Y, (think Y chromosome) is coming out September 1^st from Graywolf.  It’s in production now, so this period when the book is about to come out is one of the busiest ones. There are exciting decisions about design, cover art, cover copy, etc. to make.  This period when a book is moving out of the hothouse of one’s own mind and into the capable hands of the publisher is the first step toward real readers, and then reviews, so it’s both exciting and frightening as it moves toward physical reality.

Y is a natural outgrowth of The Resurrection Trade‘s extended meditation on the relationship between science and art focused very specifically through a series of medical images of pregnant women, but Y focuses on the child.  Y extends the meditation on (or mediation of) science and art, but in this collection, the subject matter and research materials include a more eclectic mixture of sources from the sciences (biological and social) on the Y chromosome; the social and cognitive development of children’s language acquisition; the fabled “wild children” of Germany and France; the rift between theology and science (belief and “fact”) that Darwin’s theories introduce into Western thought (and subsequent disciplinary divisions); some materials on the history and training of boy sopranos (a science of its own that links male physical and spiritual development); as well as historical and contemporary materials on the “reading” of the human face.  Uniting these interdisciplinary forays are more traditional poems addressing the moral and linguistic development of male children, the philosophical conflicts inherent in this task for the adults who must manage this development, and the parallel dilemma of the contemporary poet for whom traditional poetic strategies like narrative and extreme subjectivity are increasingly inadequate and/or in need of renovation.  Taken altogether, the poems in Y attempt to find connections between and among these areas of study as they probe the elusive mind/body, nurture/nature dichotomies in human male development– which cannot, of course, be seen or understood because they are dynamic, unstable, but they can, through metaphor’s momentary magic be glimpsed, the only satisfaction we humans are likely to get in contemplating this complex of ideas.

Leslie Adrienne Miller is author of five books of poetry, The Resurrection Trade and Eat Quite Everything You See from Graywolf Press, and Yesterday Had a Man in It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love from Carnegie Mellon University Press. A sixth collection, Y, is forthcoming from Graywolf in spring 2012. Professor of English at the University of Saint Thomas, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, she holds a PhD from the University of Houston, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MA from the University of Missouri, and a BA from Stephens College.

Chris Jones is the Loft’s marketing and communications director.

by Mary Carroll Moore

That first phone call came on a busy day at work. I was preparing 700 stuffed cherry tomatoes for a catering job that night and here was a publisher on the phone asking if I would consider authoring a book. It would be based on my cooking school, which had just been written up in USA Today. Of course I said yes—who wouldn’t? I didn’t tell the publisher I knew nothing about organizing a book manuscript.

That was the early 1980s, when authors worked under the careful counsel of editors at publishing houses. Back then, we were coached, and lucky to be so. Times changed in the 1990s, houses shrank their staffs, and I was still authoring books. But I suddenly found myself completely at sea: my first contract for a memoir in hand, and no help with how to structure it.

Back then, writing classes didn’t teach structuring or organizing a book manuscript. I searched for any guidance on how such books were put together. What did you leave in? What did you leave out? And most important, how did you combine the organic flow of writing with the necessary scaffolding that made a book coherent?

Outlining had served me well in nonfiction. But with this new book—in the newly popular genre of memoir—even chapter 1 seemed impossible to write.

It embarrassed me, a published author, to give up, to renege on my book contract. Before I finally made that phone call, a friend rescued me by lending me her well-worn copy of Kenneth Atchity’s A Writer’s Time.

I’d never heard of Atchity. I was already good at time management. I needed book management.

“It’s not about time management,” my friend told me. “Read.”

Former director of the UCLA writing program, Atchity was one of the first to detail a two-part process of book creation. Natalie Goldberg delivered the first step in her “freewriting” exercises in Writing Down the Bones. Atchity took it further. He proposed that books demand two sides of the creative self, both the random and the linear. Freewriting lets us craft random “islands” of writing. Then when we’ve created sufficient “islands,” we form them into continents using a storyboard.

I somehow knew this was correct. It was an organic approach for the writing process with an organization technique—storyboards—for the structure. I knew storyboarding from my work as a hired consultant at publishing companies. Storyboards were routinely used by small presses to plan work-for-hire manuscripts that would be produced in-house. Could a storyboard really organize the unwieldy mess that was my memoir?

I devoured the first five chapters of A Writer’s Time, then using what I’d learned, drafted the complete memoir in 45 days. Thanks to my storyboard, chapter 1 flowed together beautifully—a profound relief. That first memoir was published in 1991 and is still in print.

Storyboarding became the glue that held my manuscripts together as I wrote more books in more genres. I liked its organization, simplicity, and logic. But I still wondered how to craft a storyboard to show versus tell. Most storyboards were event trackers, and they did not reveal the emotional arc of a book.

As I transitioned into the genres of memoir and fiction, which demand an emotional arc, I was noticing that strong events weren’t enough. And sending my characters into their heads to ruminate the meaning of those events was not effective. I needed to show emotion, not talk about it. But how could I take my beloved organization tool to the next level?

Another friend to the rescue: a screenwriting buddy shared her discovery of the three-act structure. A method born in Aristotle’s time, the three acts delivered something called rising and falling action. These movements in story are primarily outer events, but they can also reveal the inner story—the emotion or transformation beneath an outer event that gives that event its meaning. Vivian Gornick’s dense little book The Situation and the Story gives marvelous examples of this phenomenon in memoir. Gornick excerpts passages from well-known writers, including Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed,” about that writer’s persistent migraines, which taught me new ways to “search out the link between a narrative line and the wisdom that compels it,” as Gornick writes.

Combining storyboarding with the three-act structure, referring to Gornick’s prompts on how to reveal deeper meaning, my book-writing approach slowly evolved. If you’re curious to see for yourself, here’s a short video you can watch. It shares the method I use to organize a manuscript, the same one I teach in my book-writing classes at the Loft.

Mary teaches storyboarding: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMhLvMJ_r0Y

In the end, books are all about organization, not just about sitting down and letting it flow. Good organization rescues us when we’re sinking into confusion about how to delve for meaning, it brings us ideas on how to infuse our manuscripts with emotion, and it gives us ways to structure outer events into a logical sequence that a reader can track.

That’s why storyboards work. They are an essential tool I wish I’d known about back in the 1980s (and I’m glad I know about now).

This essay originally appeared on A View from the Loft on March 7, 2011.

Mary Carroll Moore is the author of 13 published books in three genres, including the PEN/Faulkner Award–nominated novel Qualities of Light and the 2011 release Your Book Starts Here: How to Create, Craft, and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir, or Nonfiction Book. 

by Michael Fedo

When was the last time you received a rejection note from an editor? If you’ve been routinely getting editorial turndowns during the past few years, consider yourself lucky—not because you’ve been rejected, but because you were informed of those rejections.

It’s been my recent experience that many editors no longer notify writers that a submission didn’t pass muster, and I’m left wondering whether my manuscripts were lost in transit or, if submitted electronically, went missing in cyberspace.

I’ve made more than 50 submissions in the last three years and have been fortunate enough to place most of my writings eventually. But during this period I assume I’ve often also been rejected, since I’ve never heard about some of those submissions.

To be fair, a number of publications state on their websites that they only respond when interested in a submission. Others add that a piece should be considered rejected if the author hasn’t received a reply within a specified time period—usually two weeks to six or more months. Other editors announce they’ll respond to queries and manuscripts, but many fail to do so.

About ten years ago a friend who had completed a literary biography received a letter of interest from a major university press. The editors stated that the manuscript would be considered only if they were granted exclusive refusal. My friend acquiesced, but the press took more than a year before returning his manuscript, albeit with an apology claiming their outside evaluators had dallied in reviewing the text. Not a legitimate excuse.

Discouraged, the man abandoned the project for several years before finding a receptive editor at another publisher, where the book won an award for biography. The lesson here is not to guarantee an exclusive unless the editor agrees to respond within a specified time that seems fair to the author.

Because many editors either don’t acknowledge or hold manuscripts for months, I almost always make multiple submissions. And yes, on a few occasions I’ve received more than one acceptance. One book received three offers to publish within a week. I chose the best financial arrangement.

A few years back I made multiple submissions of a short story, sending one copy to a long-established literary quarterly. The story also was read by more than a dozen other magazines over the next 14 months before a small journal agreed to publish it. The next day the previously cited quarterly also accepted the story and offered a $250 payment. I obviously chose the $250 offer, but that magazine had held the manuscript for 14 months before making a decision. Since this editor had not responded to an inquiry regarding the status of the story months earlier, I assumed he had passed on it without informing me.

Even editors who have previously published my work sometimes have not gotten back to me when my submissions have been declined. It seems that for every dozen stories or essays I send out, I’ll only see three or four rejections, when in fact, all the pieces have been nixed.

There was one exception of sorts that maybe set a record. Late last year I opened a handwritten note in which the editor apologized for the “inordinate delay” in returning my story. Although this one hadn’t worked out, he hoped I’d send him others in the future. I had forgotten that I’d mailed him the story six years earlier, but it had been published two years after that by a different magazine.

I suppose I should cut him some slack because he at least responded.

So what are we to make of editors who fail to advise of a rejection even with a form notice?

For me the multiple submission is a partial solution, and I’ll make them unless I have a prior publishing relationship with an editor. I’ll do this even when a publication may insist on exclusives, especially if editors also indicate they may hold the manuscript for six or more months.

I allow that editors may be overworked; literary quarterlies or annuals may be operated by one or two persons. But how difficult can it be to slide a rejection slip into a self-addressed stamped envelope, or type “No thanks” and hit return on an e-mailed submission?

Having gotten this off my chest, I recently received a 180-degree turn on the form rejection—a form acceptance. While not a delight per se, it certainly beats its sister notification of “Thanks but no thanks,” and is clearly better than the implied rejection of an article or a story by an editor who doesn’t inform the author at all.

This essay originally appeared on A View from the Loft on November 8, 2010.

Michael Fedo‘s eighth book, A Sawdust Heart: My Vaudeville Life in Medicine and Tent Shows, by Henry Wood as told to Michael Fedo was published in May, 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press.

by Karin B. Miller

If the ladies would only realize that they are the torch-bearers of civilization, which, as the great philosopher Confucius has said, is the art of being civil, the world would be a more pleasant place to live in. (Book of Etiquette, 1923)

I can’t remember which volume in my large collection of turn-of-the-century etiquette guides first got me hooked. I only know that its unintended humor—not to mention sexism and classism—compelled me to search for more.

One hundred years ago, etiquette books proliferated—most filled with words of wisdom for young women. Subjects included what to wear (“Dress for comfort, not fashion”), what to say (“Never take a man to task about anything”), how to act (“Never laugh or talk loudly in public”), where to go (“Never visit unfavorable cabarets”), and much more.

Here’s a great definition from the Book of Etiquette (1923): “Etiquette will make you dignified. It will make your actions and speech refined, polished, impressive. It will make you a leader instead of a follower, a participant instead of a looker-on. It will open the doors of the highest society to you, make you immune to all embarrassment, enable you to conduct yourself with ease and confidence at all times, under all circumstances.” Phew. What young woman wouldn’t want to master etiquette?

Above all, the guides taught conformity, propriety, and rules for living—how to write letters, properly visit neighbors, and leave calling cards (the number of rules regarding calling cards alone is mind-boggling); which books to read (and to avoid); which household skills to learn; how to make conversation, behave at a dance, and meet, date, and wed young men. It was enough to make a girl’s head spin. 

A few bold voices of the era stood out, aiming not to keep women in their place but to help them recognize their own smarts and savvy. Take this example: “As a rule, women are better conversationalists than men, being endowed with a readier talent for repartee, a quicker wit, and a keener intuition of the fitness of things.” That’s a quote from 1891 in the Jenness Miller Monthly, a popular women’s magazine.

And this one from Tokology (1897) by Alice Bunker Stockham, a Chicago obstetrician and gynecologist: “The nation not only needs strong men but strong women, strong in physical as well as mental development. This strength is required for prosecuting a persistent warfare against prevailing and existing wrongs, as well as for transmitting health and vigor to the coming generation.”

But these writers were rare. Most etiquette books held up an idealized young woman—sweet, quiet, content, hardworking, and virtuous. And some etiquette books—like Beautiful Girlhood, published by the Gospel Trumpet Company, and The Mirror of True Womanhood by the Rt. Rev. Monsignor Bernard O’Reilly—were girded by religiosity. O’Reilly was a rare male etiquette writer; and no wonder: while men were required to know how to bow properly and ask a woman to dance, it was women who had thousands of such rules to live by.

Today, a good deal of the advice in these books would be considered dated and often offensive. But most books offered some advice that still holds true. For his part, O’Reilly warned mothers of both daughters and sons against “giving their boys . . . so large a place in the house that their daughters either seem in the way or are obliged to devote themselves to the pleasure and caprice of their brothers.” Unfortunately, it was also O’Reilly who advised mothers to “impart to every one of your girls a deep horror of the licentious and romantic literature of the day” and “to turn [your daughter’s] eyes and her whole mind away from an indecent engraving or painting or sculpture, as she would withdraw her hand or arm from the contact of red-hot iron.”

Into this mix of myriad etiquette guides came Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home (1922) by Emily Post, a journalist, fiction writer, and high-society gal—really a society insider who was willing to share the secrets of etiquette with everyone. She was also a divorcée—not that that hurt her sales: in 1923 her book topped Publishers Weekly’s sales list for nonfiction.

Unlike other etiquette books’ often-uninspired content, covering such scintillating topics as shaking hands and using a napkin, Post infused her copy with lively characters and gave them tongue-in-cheek names such as the Richan Vulgars, the Toploftys, and the Kindharts.

In addition, Post suggested in her introduction that anyone could be a gentleman or a lady simply by following proper etiquette: “Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which good form in speech, charm of manner, knowledge of the social amenities, and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.” What welcome words these must have been for newly arrived immigrants, society’s up-and-comers, the increasing numbers of young people moving to cities, and many more.

Still, rules were rules, and as I continued to find more etiquette volumes, I wanted to know how people, especially women, followed them back in the day. I started delving into turn-of-the-century newspapers to learn more about the time, and what I found were stories not about etiquette- and law-abiding girls and women but about the rule breakers.

One hundred years ago, women made headlines when they did the unexpected: suffragists led New York City police on a chase, working women protested unsafe working conditions, a teenage debutante worked to improve the lives of poor immigrants, female entrepreneurs built million-dollar businesses, and so forth.

I found the juxtaposition of what was expected of girls and women and how they actually acted in their everyday lives fascinating. That’s when I knew I had to start writing about all of this—both the rules and rule breakers of the day. 

A year ago, I launched a blog titled AttaGirl, circa 1900, with the tagline: “Not a good-old-day salute, AttaGirl, circa 1900, is more of a cheer for how far we’ve come.” Since then, I’ve written roughly 30 main entries—covering topics from turn-of-the-century interracial dating to corset controversies, plus lots of brief items, like recipes for homemade beauty concoctions, fashions of the day (i.e., shorter skirts to accommodate bicycle-riding girls), and quizzes to see if a modern understanding of etiquette would suffice back in 1900.

Over the year, the blog has experienced more than 8,000 page views, belying my small but loyal group of followers. Of course, you have to ignore a few hundred of those views as a whole bunch of Russian men (blogspot keeps track of reader geography) seemed to gravitate to my entry titled “Swimsuits and high heels.” It was not at all what they thought they’d find.

Americans still seek etiquette advice. The Emily Post Institute has obliged by publishing the 18th edition of Emily’s guide in October 2011, blogging, tweeting, and more. And just as at the turn of the century, the advice reflects the times. These days, however, the content offers not so much a listing of rules as “courteous behaviors and gracious actions.” Something that’s good for everyone.

You can find AttaGirl, circa 1900 at attagirl1900.blogspot.com. Karin B. Miller is also the editor of The Cancer Poetry Project, a Minnesota Book Award winner for best anthology. She is currently accepting submissions through December 31, 2011, for the second volume at www.cancerpoetryproject.com.