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How did the book come to be?
A look at American women writers hasn’t been done before, which is really shocking. This is the 21st century and it hasn’t been done!  My goal was to find things that were really fun to read and really memorable.
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Did you face any limitations in the writers you featured?
I couldn’t include novelists, which leaves out an enormous range of writers.  Toni Morrison has only ever published one short story and it’s constantly anthologized.  There are so many extraordinary women novelists, but I thought, people will just need to buy more of their books, that’s a good thing!  I didn’t have to leave out anyone because they objected to being in a woman’s anthology.  30 years ago, some writers would object– I’m not a ‘woman’ writer, I’m a writer!’  Being a woman writer was not respected.  To me, if you’re a woman, and you’re a writer, you’re a woman writer!
There are other considerations, like how expensive pieces are.  The 1st book I ever published, Women’s Liberation and Literature– the title really gives it away!– was at the beginning of the Women’s Movement, 1971, and it was a very radical idea to a lot of people.  I wrote to Sylvia Plath’s sister-in-law and asked to reprint a couple of poems, and she wrote back and said I could have this poem for $100 or 2 poems for $50 each.  It was a real shock to me as this young scholar; it never occurred to me to think of poems like that!  Of course, writing operates on a market, and I adjusted to that.  All the writers I feature in this book operated in a market.  You can’t be a writer just scribbling alone.
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What kinds of challenges do contemporary female writers face?
The assumption that there shouldn’t be a problem, that the playing field is level and that there’s nothing about women’s writing that requires a special focus.  That’s not at all true.  For instance, there are real problems with reviewing. When some young women critiqued the reception of Freedom, there was this tidal wave of reviewers declaring it to be the Great American Novel before they even read it.  People do not look at women writers to capture The American Experience, because it’s defined as a male experience.
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When women write about experience, it’s described as a domestic drama, or ‘chick-lit’...
What a terrible term, chick-lit!  I’m  keen on women becoming more assertive– you don’t see women writers talking about their theories, their writing processes.  They’re too self-effacing and they get overlooked.  When writers like Salinger die, there are always these lists of Great American Novelists, and there’s maybe one women included.  But there are women writers who are producing astonishing fiction right now!  We still struggle with this idea of The Great American Novel, the GAN, like it’s the GNP.  If a woman says anything she’s dismissed,  ‘you’re so old-fashioned, stop complaining!’   On the other hand, women can write about anything they want to now.  They don’t have the cultural censorship, where they’re not allowed to even write certain words. It’s really about the attention they get, so I hope this book will begin to remedy that.  If you ask people, who are some great women writers from the 20’s, they don’t know.  You can’t remedy that if the women writers are not available to be read!  You have to be able to see the writing coherently in a historic way.

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