Travelling Together: Our Secret Sisterhood book tour of the USA

Regular readers of Something Rhymed will perhaps recall that we’ve sometimes likened our friendship to that of Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth, and Winifred Holtby, who penned South Riding.

We find ourselves particularly drawn to this pair because, like us, they met when they were at the very start of their writing journeys and each soon committed to becoming the ‘travelling companion’ of the other.

When Holtby spoke of this, she meant it in a metaphorical sense. But, as young friends in the 1920s, the two also enjoyed more literal travels when they spent a summer holidaying together in Cornwall and another in France and Italy.

The Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto, which we visited together during our early twenties (Image by Martin Falbisoner – Wikipedia Creative Commons licence)

When we were first getting to know each other, while working as English language teachers in Japan, we did a lot of travelling. We look back on our joint-trips with great fondness – not just because they gave us the opportunity to explore new places together, but also because the conversations we had, walking the streets of ancient cities or the rough paths of mountainous regions, really cemented our fledgling friendship.

Although the years we spent working intensively on A Secret Sisterhood have been – all in all – a wonderful experience, we have sometimes lamented the fact that, during this period, it sometimes felt that work had taken over all other aspects of our relationship, and that important events in each of our lives had passed by without much opportunity for sharing them with our friend.

The two-and-a-half weeks we’ve just spent touring the USA together, to mark the American publication of our book, turned out to be just the chance to put all this right.

We began our tour in New York City, with an interview with Kory French for Book Talk on Breakthru Radio, which has recently gone live. This gave us the chance to reflect – as we would many times over – on the highs and lows of writing a book together, including the joys of joint discoveries, and the frustrations of late-night quarrels about turns of phrase and the points we each felt our book ought to be making. All of these, we’re relieved to be able to say, ultimately brought us closer.

Image by Ravi Sunnak

Our first event was at the NYU bookstore, with Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own.

Next up was a talk at Shakespeare & Co. with Miranda Beverly-Whittemore (writer of novels including Bittersweet and June). This event was organised by the Brontë Society’s American chapter and the Jane Austen Society of North America – NY Metropolitan Region.

Our sell-out event with Miranda Beverly-Whittemore (image by Shakespeare & Co)

We had known Kate and Miranda only through their books before, and so it was a real pleasure to meet them in person. But at our event at Book Passage in San Francisco, it was lovely to collaborate again with Mary Volmer (Reliance, Illinois), who had also chaired the conversation at our northern book launch in the UK, back in June.

At Vroman’s in Pasadena, another dear friend of ours Elizabeth L. Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton and The Tincture of Time) ran a discussion between us and another pair of author-friends Julia Fierro (Cutting Teeth and The Gypsy Moth Summer) and Caeli Wolfson Widger (Real Happy Family).

And finally, it was wonderful to be interviewed at UCLA by Professor Michelle Liu Carriger, an old friend from our Japan days.

With our book on the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt shelves behind us

In between our events, we went to meetings together, saw an interview we’d given to Alexis Coe for Lenny Letter go live, and visited the headquarters of our American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in Boston and New York City.

We caught up with mutual friends living in the USA, and worked on book-related feature articles, including this one, recently published in The Millions, and this one just out in TIME – Motto. In the gaps between all these things, we enjoyed a bit of sightseeing, and, perhaps most of all, caught up on all that personal news we’d managed to miss, and just enjoyed each other’s company as friends.

 

 

Released today in the USA: A Secret Sisterhood: The literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf

In London tonight we plan to celebrate together with a glass of bubbly and a home-cooked meal. We’ll be raising our glasses to the US edition of A Secret Sisterhood, which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are publishing stateside today. And we’ll also be toasting all the readers of Something Rhymed who encouraged us to write a book on female literary friendship.

It won’t be long before we get to help this edition make its way into the world during our US book tour.

We’d love to meet some of you in person at the following engagements in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles:

Thursday 26 October, 6-7.30pmEmily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney in conversation with Kate Bolick at NYU Bookstore, New York City

Saturday 28 October, 2-4pm – The Jane Austen Society of North America – NY Metropolitan Region and the Brontë Society American Chapter: Conversation with Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney (chaired by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore) at Shakespeare & Co, New York City

Wednesday 1 November, 6pm – A Celebration of Literary Sisterhood: Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney in conversation with Mary Volmer and Cheryl Crocker McKeon at Book Passage, San Francisco (event sponsored by the WNBA-SF, Saint Mary’s College MFA in Creative Writing)

Tuesday 7 November, 7pmEmily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney present and sign A Secret Sisterhood, in conversation with Elizabeth L. Silver, and joined by Julia Fierro and Caeli Wolfson at Vroman’s Book Store, Pasadena

Wednesday 8 November, 6pm – Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney in conversation with Prof. Michelle Carriger at UCLA (event sponsored by UCLA’s English Department and Friends of English)

In the meantime, we have upcoming UK events at Chawton House Library, Bloomsbury Literature Festival and Wantage Literary Festival.

We long ago promised each other that we would try our best to enjoy the process of getting published, because we knew all too well that chances to celebrate can be few and far between. Today seems a good time to reflect on A Secret Sisterhood’s publicity highlights to date:

Reviews

Medley of vivid narratives – The Atlantic 

Midorikawa and Sweeney have committed an exceptional act of literary espionage. English literature owes them a great debt – The Financial Times 

Glorious insights into female rivalry and female solidarity and the delicate balancing act required to ensure one doesn’t override the other – The Herald

These forgotten friendships, from illicit and scandalous to radical and inspiring, are revelations – Kirkus 

Evocative and well-researched ode to female solidarity – Publishers Weekly

Best Holiday Reads 2017 – Observer 

The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2017 – Publishers Weekly

Articles, essays, excerpts and interviews

Daily Telegraph

BBC History Extra

I newspaper

Irish Independent

Irish Times

Red Magazine

Times Literary Supplement  

And there’ll be more soon in Kirkus, Lenny, LitHub, The Millions, The Paris Review, Smithsonian, and TIME.

Next week…

We’ll be back with another guest blog from another pair of modern-day female writer friends.

 

 

 

 

Celebrating Female Friendship

When this month’s guest bloggers, Harriet Levin and Elizabeth L. Silver, let us take a look at one of their on-line chats, we felt privileged to be witnesses to a conversation that so clearly conveyed their mutual appreciation of each other’s support.

This has, of course, been a common theme in all of the guest posts this year. Like them, Rachel Connor and Antonia Honeywell, and Sarah Butler and Tessa Nicholson, have gone from living close to their writer friend to being separated by geographical distance. But they all wrote of how they’re still able to rely on their pal’s advice, even though they are physically far apart.

IMG_1146Jill Dawson and Kathryn Heyman, too, who live on opposite sides of the world, told us how their frequent phone conversations, about ‘writing, gossip, lipstick’ amongst other things, keep the relationship going.

Kadija ‘George’ Sesay and Dorothea Smartt spoke of the pleasures of working with each other professionally. Rima Haque shared a story about hearing valuable literary advice from Susan Barker on a crowded London night-bus.

Julie Sarkissian and Haley Tanner, and Emily Bullock and Ann Morgan, were keen to emphasise how much they valued having someone with whom they’ve been able to share the struggles and eventual triumphs of their books-in-progress.

We are grateful to all of this year’s guest bloggers for posting these inspiring words about the crucial role that the friendship of another woman has played in their writing lives.

Since launching Something Rhymed at the beginning of the year, we’ve often found ourselves wondering why the literary friendships of our most famous female writers are generally less well-known than those of their male counterparts.

Recently, we’ve been mulling over a number of theories, but one conclusion we’ve come to is that the all-too-common depiction of ambitious women as inevitable jealous rivals could have played a major part in this. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf are two writers, in particular, whose reputations have suffered in this way. This month’s pair, Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, are another, historically later, example.

At Something Rhymed, we’re keen to try and promote some more positive representations of women’s friendship, so with this in mind we’ve just launched our #SomethingRhymed hashtag on Twitter with this tweet: Women’s relationships are too often seen as bitchy & backstabbing. Tell us about a time when a female friend supported you. #SomethingRhymed

We’ll be sharing our own stories (in 140 characters or less!) of helping each other out personally or professionally. Whether you’re a writer or not, we’d love to hear about your positive experiences of female friendship too. If you’re not on Twitter, but would still like to add your voice to the conversation, why not leave a message in the Comments section below?

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