Cheryl Strayed

Dear Friends,

I wrote recently, on Twitter, that I was getting the word “feminist” tattooed on my ass. I was only joking, but I might as well have been serious. It’s true that in all the most important things I am—mother, writer, hiker, wife, daughter, seeker—feminism is at the center. It’s a descriptor so clear and permanent it seems to me it’s inked on my ass whether it’s literally there or not. I’ve been a feminist since before I knew what a feminist was. It’s an indelible part of my identity and it informs everything I do.

“Who says women don’t write serious nonfiction?” ask the editors at Creative Nonfiction, the largest literary magazine dedicated to publishing exclusively high quality nonfiction prose. The meaty essay section in their winter issue, titled “Female Form,” happens to feature (surprise!) solely women writers. In a fortuitous coincidence, the release of “Female Form” dovetails with the most recent national count of the gender of media-makers, the VIDA count. 

The VIDA count is a staggering annual statistical breakdown showing the rates of publication between women and men in several respected literary outlets. This year, the count reveals that men continue to have 70 percent of bylines in mainstream media. VIDA, a burgeoning organization of women in literary arts, conducted the first count in 2011, hoping to initiate a long overdue conversation about gender discrimination in the publishing world.

“We did not go into this thinking we knew the answer to something and this was going to illustrate it, because this is a complicated issue,” VIDA co-founder, Erin Belieu, told Mother Jones last April. “But you can't deny the starkness of such an incredibly wide discrepancy.”