Q&A with Michele Meek

Michele Meek is the editor of the new book Independent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle Through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Salon.com and MovieMaker Magazine. She is a filmmaker and an assistant professor in communication studies at Bridgewater State University. 



Q: How did you choose the filmmakers you highlight in the book? 

A: It was incredibly difficult to narrow down the list of filmmakers to include in the book. 

However, one of the constraints was that the filmmaker had to have a significant interview or manifesto in The Independent Film & Video Monthly between 1976-2006, since I was paying tribute to that magazine along with featuring the women filmmakers in the collection. So, that definitely narrowed down the list quite a bit. 

Of course, any list like this is subjective, to be honest. I tried to choose filmmakers whose work, I believed, still resonated today, whether or not they were still making films now. It was more important to me that their work should be a prominent part of North American film history. These are the filmmakers whose films should be continued to be watched, taught, written about, etc.

Q: You write, "Many of the women in this book express the potential for increased opportunities and equal pay for women in the post-#MeToo era, but they also recognize the urgency to continue to advocate for equality..." What do you see looking ahead?

A: It has been invigorating to see the success of #MeToo, because the widespread discrimination and harassment that has been part of so many industries are finally being brought out in the open. I think that is definitely the first step for change.

I saw that The Wrap just reported that Hollywood will be releasing five times more films with female directors this year. This is great news. 

That said, we still have a long way to go until we see equality in the industry. Even though five times more films is a tremendous boost, it still means only 18 percent of films from six major Hollywood studios will be female-directed. So we need to be glad for the gains we are making, but not accept less than full equality until we get there.

I do think that women will ultimately be successful in reaching parity—how long it will take will likely depend on how much noise we make about it. I personally was disappointed with how little fuss celebrities and fans alike made over women directors again being excluded from the Oscars this year. 

But I’m equally concerned with how we can re-examine our own film history, which has been traditionally quite discriminatory. 

When you see a list like American Film Institute’s “100 Greatest Films of All Time” and there’s not one female-directed film on the list, it hits you—women have actually been making films since the invention of film, but their legacy is in danger of being forgotten. Looking forward is not enough. We also have to change how we look back. 

Q: How did you decide which filmmakers you would write about for the book?

A: I wrote three chapters for the book—I wrote the introduction and chapters on Martha Coolidge and Jennifer Fox. 

I chose Jennifer Fox because I had interviewed her about 10 years ago when she was working on another project. I had no idea at the time that her film The Tale would actually be such a relevant fit for me. 

My academic research has focused largely on “consent puzzles” or moments that portray consent in ways that make us as readers or viewers uncomfortable. 

Her film The Tale is a perfect example—because Fox fictionalizes her own story, and in it, the girl she was insists that her sexual relationship with her adult male coach was consensual, while the adult she becomes knows it to be abuse. It is absolutely the most groundbreaking film on childhood sexual abuse that I have ever seen. So it was an honor to talk to her about The Tale and her other films.

I also knew I wanted to interview Martha Coolidge for a number of reasons. 

First of all, she is an iconic director who directed both independent and Hollywood films, and there is so much to discuss in terms of her career. Her works are incredibly different from each other, but all interesting—Valley Girl, Reel Genius, Rambling Rose, and Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. 

Second, she was the first—and still only female president of the Directors Guild of America, an experience that I was eager to learn more about. 

And last but definitely not least, she has been a strong advocate for independent film—she even was one of the founding members of the Association of Independent Video & Filmmakers (AIVF), which created The Independent Film and Video Monthly.  

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: More than anything, I want to preserve the legacy of the women filmmakers in the book. Each of them has made beautiful and ground-breaking work, and I hope people who read the book will come away with a list that they will watch and enjoy. 

I think the book can be appreciated by people on different levels—fellow filmmakers will learn a lot about the obstacles they faced and how they overcame them; academics will get a clearer context for some of the important works of the last several decades; and film fans will develop an appreciation for the creation of great works and discover some new ones along the way. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m actually working on a non-fiction book about failure, inspired by my participation in the first Mastermind Failure Club, which is a small group of like-minded creative people who meet regularly. 

The group combines the concepts of a mastermind—incorporating peer creative and business support, accountability, and brainstorming—and a failure club—a challenge to pursue what you want to do despite the high likelihood of failure. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

April 5

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
April 5, 1588: Thomas Hobbes born.

Q&A with Polly Rosenwaike

Polly Rosenwaike, photo by Michael Lionstar

Polly Rosenwaike is the author of the new story collection Look How Happy I'm Making You. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 and The New York Times Book Review. She is the fiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review, and she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  

Q: Why did you decide to focus on motherhood and babies in this story collection?

A: Well, these things have significantly occupied my mind, my life, over the past decade. My daughters are now 8 and 5, and I’ve found motherhood endlessly fascinating and perpetually challenging. 

The particular time during which a woman is seriously thinking about having a baby, experiencing pregnancy, and then becoming a new mother can be incredibly emotionally volatile and demanding, but the image we often get is of a beatific pregnant woman, followed by a shining, happy mama and baby. 

I wanted to create a fuller portrait of some of the complexities of this stunning experience—stunning in the sense of both amazing and confounding.  

Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in this book, and how did you decide on the order in which they’d appear in the book?

A: I wrote the first draft of one of the stories over a dozen years ago and most of the others since my daughters were born. There are 12 stories in the book, so I guess you could say I’ve averaged one a year: a snail’s pace. 

The writing of them actually resembled a game called Snail’s Pace Race that my partner and younger daughter like to play on Saturday mornings. A bunch of wooden snails of different colors edge toward a finish line based on the throw of colored dice. They thus all move forward at an erratic pace—sometimes green is way ahead, sometimes pink is stuck at the starting line—until everyone finally gets home. 

So each of my stories was a snail, and I kept throwing the dice, taking turns inching each one forward. I enjoy working on multiple stories at once; yellow looks pretty refreshing when all you’ve been seeing for a while is blue. 

Because the collection has a chronology to it, the order didn’t require much deliberation. The first story is about a couple struggling to conceive, and then subsequent stories focus on abortion, miscarriage, early and middle pregnancy, postpartum depression, life with a new baby. 

The book ends with a story about sleep training, which, if you’re like I was, you might not attempt until the baby is close to a year and you’re at your wit’s end trying to get her to fall asleep on her own.  

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: For a long time, I had no idea what to call this thing I was working on. 

When I submitted it to agents, I’d settled on the tentative title of Baby Person. One of the characters, who wants to have a child, but is drawn to the idea of parenting an older kid rather than a baby, says, “I’ve never actually been much of a baby person.” 

This is the sense in which I intended that title, to get at what it’s like to become a mother to a baby when you’re not really a baby person, as well as what it means to bring a baby into the world: a new person, and yet someone who doesn’t quite seem like a person yet. 

But the agent who agreed to represent me was concerned about submitting it to publishers with that title. She was afraid people wouldn’t get it. Also, a friend told me that “Baby Person” made her think of an infantile-looking man with very small hands. Like in Boss Baby. That was no good. 

I spent countless hours searching for the right title. I wanted it to hint at the collection’s themes, but not to be too on the nose. I wanted to avoid the sentimentality that often congeals around the images of mothers and babies. Hoping to steal someone else’s great idea, I pored over lines from poems, phrases from stories, quotes about motherhood.

Finally, combing through my own manuscript again, I lingered over a line of dialogue in the first story, “Grow Your Eyelashes.” When the narrator’s sister tells their mother that she and her husband don’t want to have children, the mother tears up and says, “You can’t know the joy until . . . You just can’t know it.” The daughter replies, “Look how happy I’m making you.” 

It’s an ironic moment, of course—the daughter calling the mother out on her declaration of the joy children bring. Considering the statement in isolation, I like the oddness of the direct address: who would say this to someone? And it resonates with the collection as a whole. Children do bring their parents happiness, but there are a lot of other emotions involved as well, if we’re being honest about it.  

Q: Who are some of your favorite short story writers?

A: Lorrie Moore, Lauren Groff, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, Helen Simpson, Anthony Doerr, Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, Aimee Bender. 

As fiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review, I’ve had the opportunity to select fantastic work by emerging writers to publish in the magazine. I can’t wait to see more stories out in the world by Anthony Inverso, Jai Chakrabarti, Onyinye Ihezukwu, Ally Glass-Katz, and so many others.  

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on some essays and feeling humbled by how tricky I find it to try to follow the thread of an argument, to be clear and sufficiently detailed about my own experiences and perspectives. I’m also stockpiling a bunch of books I want to read as research for my next fiction project.  

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Now I understand why writers thank their agents and editors so effusively in the acknowledgements to their books. After years of being on my own with my writing, it’s been amazing to have other people so dedicated to improving, supporting, and promoting it. Hooray for all the publishing midwives who bring books into the world.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Jennifer Sattler

Jennifer Sattler is the author and illustrator of the new children's picture book Dollop and Mrs. Fabulous. Her other books include Bully and Chick 'n' Pug. She lives in upstate New York. 

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Dollop and Mrs. Fabulous?

A: My daughter Lili used to put on all of her dress up clothes at once and goofily walk around the house saying “Hello. I’m Mrs. Fabulous!” She had to find her way into a book.

I have two daughters and they have very different personalities. But they’ve always been close and good about figuring out how to have fun together. Plus, I’ve never done a book about sisters, which seemed strange to me! 

Q: Do you usually focus on the text first or the illustrations first--or do you work on both simultaneously?

A: I usually start with an idea for a character. I’ll draw them hundreds of times as different animals. I don’t make books about human kids because I want the reader to relate to the personality of the character and not their specific human characteristics.

After I have the character and the general story down I start to make a dummy. This is when it’s like a movie playing in my head. The words and images come simultaneously. 

Q: What do you hope kids take away from the story?

A: My kids are so different. A simple game might take a turn in a direction that one doesn’t relate to, but instead of thinking, “Well, I guess I have to play alone,” they would make it work for both of them.

This certainly seems like a lesson we keep learning all through our lives. Having girls, it’s always important for them to know that there isn’t a WAY to be a girl. There’s no script.

Q: What are some of your favorite picture books?

A: Hmm… some of my favorite picture books. That’s always changing. There are books I love as an illustrator: Pirate Girl, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer, On a Magical Do Nothing Day by Beatrice Alemagna, and I love Julian is a Mermaid by Jessica Love.

There are books I love when I’m reading to a kid or two on my lap like The Gruffalo and books that will always have a place in my heart for nostalgia’s sake like ALL of Sandra Boynton’s books. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now I’m finishing up a book that will come out the end of the summer called One Red Sock. It’s a picture book that’s also a color book. I’m really excited about it. It stars a purple hippo that I just love. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Although I’m most known for my picture books, I have a love for board books. I love how they feel in your hand. I love their immediacy and, ask any baby, they’re delicious!

Sleeping Bear Press has been publishing a line of Jennifer Sattler board books that have been so much fun to do! So far there’s Dirty Birdies, Jungle Gym, and Bundle Up! The latest comes out this summer. It’s a sound book called “Oink,Oink,Moo, Cock-a-doodle-do!” 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

April 4

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
April 4, 1914: Marguerite Duras born.

Q&A with Dena Moes

Dena Moes is the author of the new memoir The Buddha Sat Right Here: A Family Odyssey Through India and Nepal. She is a certified nurse-midwife, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Midwifery Today and Minerva Rising. She lives in Chico, California. 

Q: What were some of the reasons your family decided to travel in India and Nepal?

A: I had dreamed of going to India since I was a young woman. As a Jewish American who had studied both Buddhism and hatha yoga for 18 years, I longed to visit places where the Buddha actually taught, to trek in the Himalayas where yogis live in caves, and to spend time Kerala where Hinduism is vibrant and pervasive.

I wanted to connect to the physical places where my spiritual practices came from. I wanted to take a pilgrimage and step away from the ordinary routines of my life, to make space for deeper understanding about reality, and life’s meaning, to come through.

My husband Adam spent a year in India in his 20s. He considered that year the most important, transformative year of his life. He came home from his time in India a devout practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. (North India has large communities of Tibetan refugees living there.) We had talked about going to India together when we first fell in love, but babies, houses, businesses postponed our plans.

My sister lived in New Delhi, India, where she worked as a foreign correspondent. When she had a baby, I popped over for a quick trip to stay with her and the baby, and see a few sights. When I returned home, I could not sleep. The colors and vibrant energy of India consumed me – I told people that India was a fire in my blood.

Once our children were old enough to carry their own backpacks, I realized I did not want to wait until the children were grown to make this trip– there are no guarantees about the future anyway.

I wanted my daughters to get outside of our California bubble and gain new perspectives about being a citizen of our beautiful planet. The only way human life will thrive in the next generations, is if humans cooperate across borders and cultures – as a global family.

And to be honest, the lonely working mother-hamster wheel lifestyle was eroding my sanity. The clutter and busyness of American family life was overwhelming me. So we rented out the house, shuttered our businesses, and went, following my adventurous dream right in the middle of raising our children.

Q: At what point did you decide to write this book about your experiences?

A: I did not take the trip with the intention of writing a book!

I love to write when I travel, though. My whole mindset becomes poetic and imaginative when I am in unfamiliar lands, navigating my way through places that are fresh and new to me.

I journal religiously, to document not just the locations, but the feelings, and incredible moments, that happen when one is on an adventure, outside the usual routines. I want to be able to look back later and remember the details of things, and how it felt to be there.

When we returned from our eight-month sojourn in India and Nepal, and were back in our cozy California college town, people kept asking me, “How was India?”

I answered, “Great. Amazing.” Then I felt ridiculous, because how can those words possibly do justice to the gorgeous, fascinating, challenging time we had? I thought, I can only answer that question by writing a book. It felt almost selfish to have taken such a profound journey, and then keep all that I learned to myself. So I started writing, and the writing become a journey of its own.

Q: What impact do you think the trip had on you and on your family?

A: The trip was transformative for all of us. Our girls were at an age where they were starting to disappear into the realm of their peers. This trip gave us one extra year to have their time and attention.

There are so many facets to our trip’s impact – Let me describe one: The degree of togetherness that living in India requires. India does not have the same understanding of, or capacity for, personal space that we have in the West. We all slept in one room for most of the eight months, three in a big bed and one on a mat on the floor. We spent many nights on night trains, sleeping on narrow berths stacked three high.

And when we arrived at our destinations, we all four would pile into an auto-rickshaw–the girls sitting on Adam and me, our backpacks on top of them. This is the norm in India – where you might see six people riding one motorcycle, no problem,. For us, it was a grand adventure and chance to re-invent the meaning of “togetherness.”

In many of the places we stayed, spirituality infuses life, and people have been making pilgrimage to these places daily, for thousands of years in an unbroken stream. It is hard for an American to imagine what that kind of devotion and reverence feels like.

Instead of amusements, attractions, and parks, we went to the ghats of the Ganges in Varanasi, the tree where the Buddha awakened to enlightenment, and the ashram of Amma, the Divine Mother. We met His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and lived among Tibetan refugees for six weeks in Dharamsala.

Being immersed in such communities definitely shifted things for us all. The message of all these teachers, and all these holy places, is that love and compassion are at the heart of everything. And money, fancy cars, and possessions are not what lead you to there. Your own openness and presence does.

Lastly, I must also mention that the great disparities in the world between those with wealth and those in poverty is starkly obvious throughout India. We all gained a deep appreciation for the privilege we have of living in abundance in the U.S. and take much less for granted since our trip.

Q: What do your family members think of the book?

A: My family is proud of me. My daughters have each said, “Wow Mom, you set out to write a book and you did it!” They have read portions of the book, and of course, some of their diary entries are in the book.

My husband, as always, has been supportive of this latest wild scheme of mine. He has not read the whole thing, but he has read most of it. He has vetted all the parts in which I wrote about our marital conflicts. Those bits, he has read over and over. It is a balancing act to write about marriage problems and keep the marriage!

The writing, and now publishing of the book had been a journey unto itself. The book was a joy to write. In many places, the narrative just flowed through me – I felt more like a conduit than a writer. I love writing, revising, then shaping and reworking the text until it sings.

The publishing has not been as easy – it was a rocky road. I landed a top-flight NYC agent, who then could not sell it due to my lack of a “platform.” That took an entire frustrating year. After she gave up, I refused to throw the manuscript into the back of my closet and forget about it. So I pitched to small independent publishers, and got picked up by my intrepid, wonderful publisher Brooke Warner at She Writes Press.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Now I am working personal essays to publish in conjunction with the publication of this book. I am busy working on the publicity and promotion. I am going on a book tour to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. The tour is up on my website.

Additionally, I am doing radio and podcast interviews, and generally hustling as best I can to help my book find its readers.

I have a second memoir gestating, about my career as a home birth midwife. I have an early draft of the proposal, and am tentatively calling it Rebel Midwife. But that’s another story for another day.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: People may wonder if this book is for Buddhists only. The answer to that is “no.” My book is for anyone who dreams of travel, for parents who thirst for adventure, and for people who are open to seeking meaning in their lives beyond the acquisition of material things.

What I learned about Buddhism is woven through the memoir, but the themes of love, compassion, and peace are universally relevant.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Donna J. Stoltzfus

Donna J. Stoltzfus is the author of Captive, a new middle grade historical novel for kids. She also wrote the picture book In the Trunk of Grandma's Car. She lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Q: You note that the inspiration for Captive came from your grandfather's experiences with German POWs during World War II. How did you come up with your fictional characters?

A: The character Reuben was inspired by my grandfather, who shared that name. There were some details in the experiences of Hans —a German POW in the novel— that were similar to a POW named Karl, who worked with my grandfather and had kept in touch with my grandparents after the war.

The other characters were products of my imagination. Their voices came to me as I began to write. I knew I wanted two young teenagers in the story, and that there would be tension as they would have different views on religion and war, but I also wanted respect and friendship to develop.

I felt it was important to represent the political differences between the POWs themselves, which influenced additional characters in the novel.    

Q: What did you see as the right blend between the historical and fictional aspects of the novel?

A: That was often tricky. I had historical details I wanted to work into the novel that I found fascinating, but I obviously didn’t want it to seem as though I was adding superfluous scenes to add in historical facts. I tried to write through the lens of the question, “Does this take the reader out of the story or does this make the story richer?”

I liked to include historical details that were unusual. For example, even though it may have seemed strange that a German POW would learn calligraphy in a prison camp and sit in an office on a farm writing family names in Bibles, this happened to Karl. I felt it added an interesting dynamic to the story.

The role of art in the novel began to come to me as I discovered a book of paintings done by combat artists during the war, and when my uncle passed on to me a poem penned in Old English calligraphy, written by Karl at a prison camp in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1945.  

Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?

A: My research was a combination of family stories and photos, first-person interviews with people who had memories of POWs or had been POWs themselves, books and newspaper archives.  

Many things surprised me as I researched the book. I knew POWs had worked on farms in the United States, but I had no idea of the scope of their contribution.

One thing that made an impression on me was the tension between the German POWs themselves, based on their politics, and the violence that sometimes happened in the camps to those who were less militant.

I was also struck by how the U.S. strictly followed the Geneva Convention, and made an effort to provide an atmosphere where prisoners not only had their physical needs met but could also participate in a wide range of activities after their work day.

POWs could engage in sports, music, drama and religious services, as well as choose from a variety of classes—even earning college credit. The U.S. government wanted to show POWs the benefits of a strong democracy and hoped U.S. prisoners would be treated fairly while in captivity abroad.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

A: I hope readers gain some knowledge about a part of U.S. history that I feel shouldn’t be forgotten.

Human kindness, even small gestures, can change someone’s life and give them hope. Sitting at the same table and sharing a meal can be significant. And sometimes showing kindness takes courage.

Everyone has their own story. War is complex, with many layers. I tried to capture a glimpse of the effects of the war on a range of people—from Mennonite pacifists to German POWs to an American soldier returned home from the war—who end up interacting on a farm in Pennsylvania.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m in the very early stages of research for another historical fiction novel.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’ve been going to retirement homes to give a presentation and have book signings, and there are always a couple of attendees who approach me with stories about POWs who worked on their family farm.

“My mother didn’t think she was allowed to feed them, but she always filled a basket with food and put it at the end of the lane after a work day for them to pick up. She thought the men were too skinny.”

Or this one: “One time they brought SS officers to work at our farm. My uncle told the guard we don’t want those men here. Don’t bring them back.”

Those stories are out there and it’s intriguing to hear what people remember.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb