Reviews of Desire: Women Write About Wanting

An Interview With The Southest Review Online

Q: Editing an anthology is often time consuming and tedious work. What made you want to edit Desire? Did you set any goals?

Yes, editing an anthology can be time consuming, but the subject matter intrigued me and the number of writers who were interested in the project excited me. Having edited magazines for years I should have been aware of just how much time would be involved, but of course I wasn't. The publisher and I set goals together: the manuscript had to be to them, complete, by early May. Then the in-house editing would take place. I began the project in September. From contract to publication it was a little over a year.

Q: How did you come up with idea for the anthology?

Desire had played a huge subject in my fiction for years: thwarted, punished, gotten and then discarded. It seemed that it would be interesting to explore the subject of desire in non-fiction; that with non-fiction there would be no "disguises" and that the writing would have to be bone honest. Originally, I thought the book would only be about sexual desire, and I wanted personally to write about that. But all that changed with the actual book.

Q: Did you reach out to writers first, or did you get a publisher first?

The book's road to publication is actually kind of a funny story. I originally conceived the idea and proposed it to a fellow writer (Jenny Siler, who appears in the book) as a project we would do together. She had just gotten a new agent and so we pitched it to him. He didn't bite. Jenny was under pressure to finish her new novel and she had to back out. In the meantime, I had gotten in touch with several writers who wanted to write for the anthology and so I was really committed. I tried another agent and she didn't go for it either. I was planning my next strategy when I received a call from Brooke Warner of Seal who said she had read some of my work (specifically an essay I had done for an anthology of theirs called France, A Love Story, and a piece for Brain, Child, on middle school bullying) and liked it a lot and wondered if I had a book in me. I told her about the idea for Desire and she was interested it but she originally wanted something just from me about desire, not an anthology. I mulled that over and was working on proposals when she got back to me and said she had changed her mind, that she liked the Desire anthology idea. We worked together on the concept and the proposal, and I began contacting writers. They helped shaped the book into what it is: an anthology that explores all kinds of women's wants.

Q: Because this anthology is directed toward women by women, did you find it more difficult to get a group of writers together?

Not at all. Women like to write for women. I probably could have found many more women writers. They loved the idea of getting to write about their own personal desires.

Q: When compiling the list of authors to include, how did you decide whom to ask? Did you have a personal wish list of authors that you wanted to include? If so, which of the authors that you included did you want most?

I know a number of authors whose work I like. I also asked for recommendations from writer friends. Seal suggested one or two writers they thought would be good. I had heard some wonderful writers at the AWP in Vancouver and kept them in my head. And then I just picked out some women I liked. I contacted several of them, some of whom wished to be in the anthology but were in the middle of other projects, others who could not bring themselves to write as honestly as I required, and a couple who never got back to me. And of course some who accepted. I also found one writer from reading her stuff in the New York Times. She and I have since become friends. Initially, when the anthology was supposed to be more about sex, I had thought about Toni Bentley, Sally Tisdale, Daphne Merkin. Toni said yes, but by the time I found a publisher, she had to say no. Sally, I never found a contact for, and Daphne never answered any of my emails.

Q: You also write fiction. Do you have anything up and coming for publication in that genre? Would you consider doing an anthology of fiction?

I have two relatively new stories just out in Meridian and literarymama. Both of them are on my website. I am working on a novel, of course, and have one completed I would love to find an agent for. My last agent and I parted company when she couldn't sell two of my previous novels. I would never do an anthology of fiction, though. It just wouldn't make sense for me. Another non-fiction anthology, sure! In fact, I am working on pitching one now.

Q: What would you like the women (or men) who read Desire, to take away from the book?

What the readers who have talked to me or written to me have already taken away from the book is all that I could have hoped for: they see honest, visceral, from the heart writing about all kinds of desires. They are stunned by the realness of the writing and the revelations. They have told me that so many of the essays speak to them. Men in particular have told me that the essays have given them real insight into the way women think and feel.

Q: Did the book, or working on the book, teach you anything?

The book just confirmed my opinion that women are wonderful. Wonderful to work with, grateful for the chance to express themselves, eager to write about things that have deep meaning for them. Both the writers and the readers have thanked me over and over for doing the book. That has been most gratifying.

Now for the fun stuff:

Q: A writer who is currently making you jealous:

Lionel Shriver.

Q: What kind of child were you?

Old before my time. Serious.

Q: What is your relationship with rejection like?

It depends on the day and my mood and how many rejections or acceptances I have gotten recently. But mostly I hate it.

Q: What book did you suffer for the most and why?

The latest one, my current one, the one I am working on: what I call a novel from memory. It's hard to write. It will upset people, I think.

Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?

In putting together Desire I was surprised and very very pleased by how much I liked the women who wrote for the book, and how, when I met some of them for the first time, much we had in common. I was also surprised how easy it was for all of us to be honest.

Q: What writerly habit would you most like to break?

Procrastination.

Q: What did you have for lunch today?

A bottle of protein water.

From Reader Views

Desire - Women Write About Wanting, Edited by Lisa Solod Warren

Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (6/08) "Desire: Women Write About Wanting" is an outstanding collection of essays by modern-day female writers. Edited by Lisa Solod Warren, this lineup of fantastic stories opens our eyes to the great range of emotions and desires each of us possibly carries within.

Brave and smart, challenging our perceptions of what a woman could and would desire at a particular stage in life, these stories make the reader pause and think repeatedly. While it would be unlikely -- or better yet, quite impossible for a reader to find herself in each of the twenty-three stories within "Desire," I am willing to bet that each of us will be able to connect on a very intimate level with at least a handful of them, since they encompass a great range of emotions and desires. Some of them are more intimate than others, some are downright daring and others yet make your eyes mist with the deep emotions they invoke. All of them are worthwhile reading and all of them try to answer the very challenging question about that it is that we really, truly, deeply and madly want and/or desire.

Reading this brilliant collection of essays should make everybody question where they are in their lives at the moment and whether they have done all that was possible to attain their dreams and desires, whatever they might be. "Desire: Women Write About Wanting" should be required reading for all women of legal age -- since there are a few rather graphic pages in the book, which would not be suitable for very young readers. This book is to inspire, a book to make us dream, a book to make us question the world and our place in it and on top of all of that, just plain good reading. Grab a copy for yourself and a couple for other women in your life!

From Curve Magazine

Desire - Women Write About Wanting, ed. Lisa Solod Warren (Seal Press): Captivating voices speak out in this collection of smart, bold essays about desire and the social restrictions imposed on women's sexuality. Daphne Gottliebs' "Make-up and Mud Puddles" explores the desire to transcend the femme-butch stereotype in a sassy tale of lust and longing. Julia Serano is "At Odds" in her essay about her lifelong desire to be a girl. This is an empowering collection about burning inner flames and how liberating it is to give them room to breathe and flourish on their own. (sealpress.com) -- Colleen McCaffrey

From blogcritics.org

Book Review: Desire - Women Write About Wanting, Edited by Lisa Solod Warren

Written by James David Dickson
Published December 13, 2007

What do women want?

That question, like any other, is easiest to answer when asked properly.

I was watching TV the other night and saw a Helzberg Diamonds commercial. The husband, presumably a stay-at-home type or otherwise stereotypically 'weak' male, blows on his wife's toes, pleased with his work in painting them.

"How do they look?" he asks.

"They're beautiful," she responds, glancing down, before quickly returning to her more-interesting magazine.

"I don't know," he says, "I think they may need another coat."

The Voice of Helzberg brings us back to our senses. "Because you're not that guy, the narrator intones, in 'real man' voice, "there's Helzberg Diamonds," all said during a montage of the season's newest earrings, necklaces, and rings.

Advertisers have crafted three images of the modern male: oafish, subservient, and subservient in an effort to excuse their oafishness.

Between Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day, men are golden. Christmas offers the hope of a Get out of the Doghouse Free card if we buy a big shiny diamond in return for all the time we missed since last Christmas and that year's big shiny rock — the equivalent of giving big tithes to a church the one time you go, rather than doing something from the heart each and every week.

But between February 15th and Thanksgiving, men are simple beasts, existing solely to pay the mortgage, do home-improvement projects (always at their wife's behest, but okay because it means a trip to Home Depot), scream at the television during football games, and drive the minivan during family vacations.

Tear Down that Wall

Lisa Solod Warren's latest effort, Desire: Women Write about Wanting, thankfully reveals a female gender that's more complete, complex, and tougher to please than the materially-validated women depicted in advertisements.

The women writing the essays in Desire run the experiential gamut: from old women with still-powerful sexual urges (S.S. Fair's "Still Horny after all these Years"); to mothers obsessed with providing for their children -- even at risk of questioning the assumptions of their left-liberal upbringing (Janice Eidus's "The Root of All Evil"); to women whose sexuality knows no bounds, not even familial ones (Vicki Hendricks's "The Ketchup-Lid Skirt"). The selections in Warren's collection are diverse, to say the least.

It's not all about sex. Entries cover "the body, the soul, and the real," though each entry necessarily includes elements of both.

Women will appreciate Desire if only to see its writers delve where few woman will ever go in writing their urges, their fantasies, their fears. Feminism, after its short-lived "free love" phase, began to adopt a puritanical tone regarding sex — "my body: ask before you touch," for instance, makes verbal consent a necessary condition for moving forward; if the cavemen had operated on the verbal system, it's unlikely any of us would be here. Feminism taught that the personal was political. That the reason women dressed a certain way or behave sexually in certain ways is because of male society's need to control women and their natural urges. The women writing Desire bask in, and give into, those urges freely and openly.

Though you'll find Desire in the "Women's Issues" shelf, one of the worst kept secrets of any "for us, by us" venture is that outsiders are encouraged to — and not prevented from — breaching the city gates.

Men reading Desire will come to see that women are just that: women. Individuals. Imperfect ones, with their own quirks and foibles and desires and secrets. That they love sex, not only because it pleases their man, or produces children, or because it's anniversary night, but because it feels good — sex for sex's sake, if you will.

Rachel Kramer Bussel presents the tale of a sexually liberated woman driven to face her demons by her boyfriend's remark that she is a "really good blowjob giver."

"Was his a compliment or an insult?" Bussel wonders, the remark too neutral to classify either way. "I couldn't bear to ask." This causes Lustlady Bussel to re-evaluate her entire sexual history — specifically, whether she had too much of it.

"I realized," Bussel writes, "that although I may think I'm as sexually liberated as a girl can get, there remain demons lurking in the far reaches of my mind, wanting to label me a slut."

Though she initially tries to blame her boyfriend for the way she feels, in the end she admits that the voices she hears are coming from her own head, and it's her job to quiet them. At some point in life, Bussel learns, you have to be who you are. An adult woman sexually liberated enough to write about sex for a living can't very well blame society, or her parents, or the Catholic Church for the way she feels about sex. "Where Sluts Fear to Tread" reveals a rare woman whose journey towards sexual accountability came to a happy resolution — at least, in the moment.

Lisa Solod Warren is another. Warren, Desire's editor, "had long been a reader of fairy tales," but always thought something was missing from the "happily ever after" narrative style — like, what happened "After the Happily Ever After." (Interesting sidenote: the American "happily ever after" derived from a German saying that "if they haven't died yet, they're still alive today." When you hear someone say that original fairy tales are grittier than their Disney counterparts, this is exactly what they're getting at).

As Warren learned in her first marriage, "real fairytales don't always have happy endings." After 20 years of a passionless, communication-less union, Warren decides to call it quits.
"My ex was a perfectly good man," she admits, "but he just wasn't good for me. This is a hard thing to realize, an even harder thing to do something about."

Divorce was the something she did, despite her doubts that she'd ever be able to find the love she longed for, especially as a divorcee on the north side of 50.

"Enter Michael. He was my real life doppelganger, my soul mate, my Vulcan mind-meld."

Warren, to this day, still harbors doubts, well aware that her fairy tale could end prematurely.

"But I am deeply committed to the happily ever after," she writes, "to the true end of the story."

The Timeless Question

What, I ask again, do women want?

The man who can ask that question at the individual, and not the corporate level. The man who'll sacrifice when he knows what the girl he wants, needs. And someone who doesn't need Kay Jewelers to tell him what a good Christmas present is.

From Publisher's Weekly

"Warren has collected an enjoyable and thought-provoking variety of essays."

From Library Journal

This collection of 23 new essays maps a lot of terrain, not simply that of physical desire or lust. The longings here range from joyous to bittersweet, from abstract and philosophical to practical and gritty. In "Death and the Desire to Live Deliberately," Maggie Bucholt describes how her friend, diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer, takes charge of her life by aiming to live and not waiting to die: she assists hospice patients until she is too sick to volunteer and requires hospice care herself. In "Still Horny After All These Years," S.S. Fair drives home her point that sexual desire does not fade with age. "Desire has its own circulatory system," she states, and "as long as you're upright and breathing, you're riding its eternally recurring loop of lust and satiation." Julia Serrano, who was born male and desired more than anything else to be a girl, writes of her loneliness and turmoil in "At Odds." These writers cut across age and cultural and religious lines. Some use graphic language but not in an exploitative manner. This moving and eye-opening collection is recommended for medium to large public and academic libraries.

—Lisa Nussbaum, formerly with Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst., Harrisburg, PA