Abstract: Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a medical doctor, British Army veteran and self-styled film poet who created in relative isolation, based in her studio in an old kirk on her native Orkney islands. It was mostly on this archipelago in the Northern Isles of Scotland that Tait made 31 films between 1951 and 1982, only two supported by external funding. An inheritance from her grandfather in 1960 freed Tait from a wandering life as a locum, but she still grappled to finance her films “On shoestrings. On hope.” With no economic incentive to earn a living on the film market, her particular avant-gardism emerged almost incidentally, uninhibited as her evolution was from mainstream audiences’ whims and the constraints of commissioning studios. This unconventional path, however, without jobbing work on sets and the reassuring small talk of the cinema circuit, left Tait without industry peers. This sense of exclusion was compounded by gender: “It’s lonely to be a woman writer. There isn’t anyone to discuss it with.”
I will show how, despite her geographical solitude, Tait’s work still often centres on connection, which she found in the ecocentric and collaborative relationships of her lived and peopled environments. She uses her work to explore and revisit landscapes, sounds, and people familiar to her since childhood, speaking to a circular economy in her work which posits a distinctly feminine way of making. Tait is one of many mid-century women makers of all kinds emerging in response to the same structure of feeling. They felt called to find original ways to create, free from the constraints of systems devised without them in mind. Divested from any commitment to producing a shiny new object or some tangible proof of work, they are invested instead in the process, in the polishing, the deepening, the pause to return and remap and reimagine.
I will also consider how the time lag in making her first feature-length film, Blue Black Permanent (1993), presents the possibility of cross-generational kinship. While Tait made the film in her seventies, she drew its first sketches in her twenties: this half-century gestation period enables her to draw on her experiences as a woman through time to imagine and convene with a projected future community.
Bio: Emily Foister is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and American Literature at New York University. Her dissertation, “Fallow Feminisms: Women Makers and Uncreativity 1960-80,” looks at the place of collectivity and collaboration in women’s creativity. It emphasizes, in particular, the underexplored but vital links between artists and workers on the peripheries of the Women’s Liberation Movement, helping to redress the often unthoughtful divide between what is deemed “creative” and “uncreative” labour. Prior to moving to New York, Emily taught Anglophone Literature at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3.
Abstract: Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is the latest work in the burgeoning category of American memoirs that foreground parts of the country associated with rural cultural myths, such as the West, Appalachia, and the Great Plains. I refer to this genre as “rural memoir.” Published in 2018, Heartland recounts Smarsh’s upbringing as a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer and the child of generations of teenage mothers. Alongside her family’s narrative, Smarsh maps the destruction of the working class wrought by public policy. Like its rural predecessors—most notably, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and Educated by Tara Westover—Heartland was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Despite the success of Heartland, no scholarship exists on it or on rural memoir more generally. Rather than viewing rural memoirs as a passing fad or misreading them as regional, I foreground Heartland to begin filling this significant gap in American literary studies. In this paper, I trace identity as defined through place in Heartland. While rurality and rural womanhood are culturally and textually situated, Heartland complicates common conceptions of what it means to be ‘rural’ and theories of female development in women’s memoir. In making a case for—and hopefully exemplifying—rural memoir as a genre capable of producing generative literary scholarship, I unearth and examine America’s variegated understandings of ‘rural.’
Bio: Lily Nagengast is a graduate teaching assistant in the English Department of Georgetown University, where she is earning her master’s degree. She is from Bloomfield, Nebraska, and graduated from Boston College in 2018 with a degree in English and gender studies.
Abstract: Fairy tale retellings remain present in popular literature, and many of these retellings have a specific focus on the female characters of the original text. How do these retellings interrogate the traditional fairy tales and what might they have to say about contemporary critiques of fairy tales? The significance of feminist fairy tale revisions lies in their dialogue both with the original fairy tales and criticism thereof, situating them as participating in the fairy tale tradition while also intervening in its content and form. This paper examines the ways in which a diverse set of Jewish women authors have disrupted the original tales in their retellings. Naomi Novik’s short story “Spinning Silver” is analyzed alongside Veronica Schanoes “Among the Thorns”, and both confront implicit and explicit antisemitism in the fairy tales they retell while also being critical retellings published within the last decade. Each of these retellings makes a concerted effort to disrupt the original tale through its revision, and this disruption has a distinct critical approach. Together these women work alongside each other in a relatively new literary tradition—feminist fairy tale revisions—one that continues to draw attention today as evidenced by the work of Novik and Schanoes.
Bio: Jayde Hoppe is a current student of the class of 2022 at the University of Saint Thomas where she studies English Creative Writing and German Studies. Her current interests include the history of fairy tales, their retellings, why exactly so many other people like her are enamored with them. She has previously presented on the topic of feminist retellings/re-visions at the 2021 Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities (ACTC) English Majors Virtual Conference and was awarded a grant in the fall of 2021 from the undergraduate research department to deepen her understanding of this topic.