Interview

AS A TWENTY-SOMETHING feminist in the early-nineties recession, I hit the job-jackpot: Ms. magazine. I’d grown up with the magazine. I’d internalized its references to back- alley abortions, men who “just don’t get it,” and workplace discrimination. The fact that nothing we published was by or about feminists of my generation or younger who’d grown up taking women’s rights for granted was, weirdly, not weird to me. One fateful editorial meeting, Barbara Findlen circulated “Your

Sheila Smith, Martha Scott, and Diane Stevens, arrested in a 1972 raid of the underground abortion service Jane. After Patricia Highsmith’s death in 1995, her friend, playwright and filmmaker Phyllis Nagy, committed to adapting The Price of Salt for film. Nagy expected homophobic resistance—Highsmith herself used a pseudonym when she published this classic lesbian love story—but the real barrier to financing was that it starred two women. Nagy kept the faith and, a mere twenty

Diana Goetsch. Photo by Svetlana Jovanovic Diana Goetsch is the author of eight collections of poetry and the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar. McKenzie Wark talked to Goetsch about gender transition, writing through the body, New York nightlife, and her new memoir, This Body I Wore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2022). McKenzie: You were an established writer as a poet before you transitioned. How did that change your writing? Diana: In

A.M. Homes. Photo by Marie Sanford. When A. M. Homes was growing up in Washington, D.C., her teachers were skeptical that she’d successfully write a check, much less a book. She dropped out of high school and eventually found herself at Sarah Lawrence, where she met Grace Paley. Homes’s books—The Safety of Objects (1990), The End of Alice (1996), and Music for Torching (1999), among others—have been translated into twenty-two languages, adapted for film and