Hypertext Magazine asked Gwen Goodkin, author of A Place Remote, “why did you write most of the stories in A Place Remote from the male perspective?
By Gwen Goodkin
Because all of the stories in the collection are written in first person, I needed a way to create distance between the characters and myself. Writing from the male perspective gave me that space. Then, after a couple of stories, writing male characters became a challenge – could I keep doing it and could I do different male perspectives well? There is a certain freedom that men have in what they say that women don’t. Women often have to walk a tightrope between polite behavior and self-advocacy. Men don’t have that tightrope – their self-advocacy is expected. I find this divide becomes even starker when viewed through the lens of parenthood. The women who are considered the best mothers by society are those who put their wants and needs last. I rail against this and have even written an essay about it. There are men who break the mold, of course. One of them is the protagonist of my story “The Widow Complex.”
Some of the men in these stories aren’t on their best behavior, which gives me pause, but in the end, is an authentic view of a certain type of man. After writing a couple more stories from the male perspective, I saw it as a reclamation. Men have been telling women’s stories for millennia. Not only did I reverse that dynamic by telling men’s stories, I also challenged this construct as it relates to women’s stories, emphasized by the story in the collection titled, “As I Lay Living.”
I consider writing from a male POV to be a feminist act. I am in control. I decide what happens to these men, whether they get what they want or not. I found this particularly satisfying in “Just Les is Fine.” I refused to give Les what he wanted. I even call myself out in this story. Les and I have an argument. Guess who wins?
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Gwen Goodkin writes fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, teleplays and stage plays. Her short story collection, “A Place Remote,” will be published by West Virginia University Press in 2020. Her essay collection “Mass for the Shut Ins” was named a finalist for Eyewear Publishing’s Beverly Prize. She has won the Folio Editor’s Prize for Fiction as well as the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Gwen’s novel, “The Plant,” was named a finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Novel-in-Progress competition. Her TV pilot script, “The Plant,” based on her own novel-in-progress was named a quarterfinalist for Cinestory’s TV/Digital retreat. She won the Silver Prize (Short Script) for her screenplay “Winnie” in the Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest. She has a B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and has also studied at the Universität Heidelberg. Gwen was born and raised in Ohio and now lives in Encinitas, California with her husband and daughters.