Please enjoy Leeandra's blog. 

Tell me something about you--age, sex, where you live, where you grew up, any siblings, any children?

 I’m a 28-year-old woman living in New Orleans. I grew up in rural, southeastern Indiana. I have one brother who is two years younger. No husband, no children.

 What jobs have you had? Please include all caregiving.

Babysitter for too many children to count, age 12 to the present. Bedpan wrangler, cigarette break supervisor, and general untitled grunt, nursing home, ages 15-16. Reporter, D.J., and jill-of-all-trades, small-town country-western radio station, ages 16-present (whenever I’m home for a visit, I end up filling in and covering a city council meeting or child beauty pageant or police-and-fire-station run because they’re ALWAYS short-staffed).

News reporter, then news director, college radio station, ages 18-21. Editor of college literary magazine, age 21. Spanish tutor, ages 18-21 (I lost 30 lbs senior year of college running myself ragged with three simultaneous jobs and classes). Preschool teacher, ages 22-23. Writing tutor, age 23. Bookstore stock clerk, age 24. Writing teacher, ages 24-26. Gallery salesgirl, ages 26-present. I make ends meet.

 Oh, and one hellish summer I worked for Wal-Mart. I try to block out that experience as much as possible.

 At what stage was the women’s movement when you were a child and teen?

 I’m not quite sure how to answer that, as there were 3 billion of them on the planet at the time. What was going on with them in Afghanistan is not what was going on with them in Iran was not what was going on with them in Mexico was not what was going on with them in the U.S. was not what was going on with them in Sweden. And so forth.

 What did you first notice sexism, whether directed at you or anyone else? Men can experience sexism just as much as woman.

 Hmm. I don’t know. It was just always there. Relatives on my Dad’s side treated my brother much differently than me—as the only son of the only son, from a very early age it was made clear that he had the important job of “carrying on the family name.” Not that we’re royalty or that our family name is in any danger whatsoever of dying out—half of Seymour, Indiana, shares it. It struck me as odd, because he was just a LITTLE boy at the time, and who knew if he’d have children, and what if they were all girls?

 If you identify yourself a feminist, when did that first happen?

 I do identify myself as a feminist, can’t remember NOT doing so. The problem is that there are so many definitions of “feminist” that no one really knows what it means, so this causes problems.

 What does feminism mean to you?

Men and women should have equal rights and protections under the law.

 Would your mother consider herself a feminist? Have you ever discussed the question with her?

 Yes, she does. We disagree on several issues, though.

 Did you ever take a woman studies course in high school or college?

 No, I didn’t. As an undergrad, the University of Evansville just began a women’s studies minor when I was I think a sophomore or junior, possibly even a senior. Before that, there were pretty few classes to pick from, and none of them particularly interested me as electives. With the requirements for my Creative Writing major taking up 60 credit hours and my minor (Spanish) I think 27, 9 hours of required World Cultures courses, and then other core curriculum requirements in math, science, history, health, etc., I didn’t have a whole lot of leeway in choosing courses outside the English department. With the electives I did have to play around with, I took religion/ philosophy/ theology classes, as they interested me more.

As a grad student in Creative Writing, I was pretty much limited to taking classes in the English department. Half of those classes were writing workshops, half were literature, and of those lit classes, half had to be in the genre I had chosen to write my thesis in. Just simply not enough time to consider WS courses.

 What books shaped your ideas on women?

 Harlequin romance novels. Let me explain. When I was in grade school, my mother was the director of the senior citizens’ center down the street. My brother and I would, as often as possible, go into work with her and then walk to school, then walk back to the center in the afternoon and hang out till Mom got off work at 4 or 5. There was an honor-system lending library there that the old ladies would donate their old books to.

One day when I was 10 or 11, I wanted to walk down to the courthouse square like I did a lot (there was a used bookstore and a drugstore that sold candy there), but I was in trouble for something or other or it was raining and Mom wouldn’t let me go. So, bored out of my mind, I looked at the lending library. I was never much interested in romance novels, looked down on them as being fairy tales that little old ladies read for some reason, but that was because I’d never actually looked at one before.

They were porn! All of them! Chock full of explicit sex scenes! All the dirty books my friend Sarah and I had heard about, and tried desperately to acquire, and couldn’t find anywhere in our houses (previously, our strategic smut reserves had consisted of a copy of Playboy she’d stolen from her uncle, The 1976 Woman’s Day Book of Family Medical Questions, and the dirtier parts of the Old Testament)—they were right under our noses the whole time!

Even as a fifth or sixth-grader, I realized what these books were for, that the plotlines were pretty laughable and were really just there to string together the sex scenes. That, and the bindings were always broken at the dirty parts.

 I have never looked at little old ladies the same way again.

 Who is your favorite woman novelist? Do you think she is a feminist?

 Without a doubt, Flannery O’Connor.  As to whether she was a feminist…her own words on the subject were “As to the whole feminist business, I just never think, that is, never think of certain qualities which are specifically masculine or feminine. I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.”

Truthfully, I don’t think feminism was a big issue in either her writing or her mind. Her concern was not in writing the wrongs of the earthly society she lived in (and she’s come under heavy criticism for not doing more to support the Civil Rights movement), but first in accurately capturing the individual members of that society on paper, and then in showing those characters’ depravity and need for salvation. Men, women, blacks, whites, old, young, middle-aged…they’re all equal targets.

Part of this comes from her fervent religious faith, and part also comes from the near-total overlap of her writing career with her life with a painful, terminal disease. She knew that she would die young—she could not escape constant reminders of her own mortality, and the irony of the treatments for her disease being almost worse than the disease itself was not lost on her. Her biggest worry was not discrimination based on her sex, but in being spiritually unready for death, and she saw herself as being called to remind the world that they were no different than her, since the world mortality rate holds steady at 100%.

In her life, well, she went alone “up North” to seek her fortune as a writer, and for a few months lived alone in New York City when good girls from Milledgeville just didn’t do that sort of thing. (It’s been implied that the only reason local tongues didn’t wag more than they did was fear of the wrath of Flannery’s mother, the formidable Regina Cline O’Connor.) Then she developed lupus at 25 and died of complications from that after an emergency hysterectomy to treat fibroids at age 39. In the 14 years between, she was in and out of the hospital.

She was left crippled and dependent on her mother for some of her day-to-day care. Yet, she managed to support herself financially, not just through the sales of her books, but through grants, fellowships, royalties from the sales of one of her stories to the film industry, and stipends from speaking engagements all over the U.S. The only “real” job she held in her life was teaching freshman comp. at the University of Iowa when she was a graduate student. Her letters mention that she’s constantly pursuing this or that grant or fellowship or prize not just for the honor associated with it, but for the cold hard cash.

She then took this cash, invested in real estate, and became a landlady. In the early 1960s in the Deep South, she was a fairly young, never-married woman who bought a house in her own name, dealt with finding/keeping tenants, and lived off the rent money. She figured out a way to get by and be as independent as her disease allowed her.