The bad news is that, by the end of the eight issues, you’ll be head over heels in love with Barbara “Bobbi” Morse, aka Mockingbird, you’ll be desperate for more, and it will be over. 

This short run of Chelsea Cain’s Mockingbird is the embodiment of the phrase “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

A Brief Overview of Chelsea Cain’s Mockingbird

Mockingbird first appeared as a Marvel Comics character in 1971, had a run-in West Coast Avengers in the 80s and 90s, and popped back up as a regular cast member of various Marvel runs in the 2010s. She’s been an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D, including in the TV show played by Adrienne Palicki, married to Clint Barton aka Hawkeye, and has died and been resurrected, among many other things.

Chelsea Cain’s Mockingbird is something special. Bobbi, a longtime superhero, is a smart, sarcastic, take-no-crap woman who knows that plans tend to go better when she’s in charge and has no problem saying so. 

There are two main plotlines in this run: in the first, Bobbi is looking for an anti-viral serum for a virus that has given her new superpowers and turned a bunch of dead bodies into zombies. As this must be done within S.H.I.E.L.D’s healthcare facilities, she makes do with what’s available: Miles Morales aka Spiderman, at the doctor for chickenpox, and a clinically depressed Howard the Duck. Together they save the day while highlighting the inadequacies of the American health care system (they are all on, after all, their employer’s health insurance).

The second main plotline is a murder mystery on a cruise ship, the noir language juxtaposed against the imagery of the superhero fan convention taking place on the ship. Here Bobbi teams up with her sometimes lover Lance Hunter, the ship’s staff, and a bunch of corgis (including, it must be said, mer-corgis). It’s whimsical and funny but ends with Bobbi facing off against her stalker, which is given enough emotional weight that the reader has no choice but to remember that the greatest danger to any woman, even superheroes, are the men who think they have a right to her body.

Chelsea Cain’s Mockingbird and Feminism

Bobbi talks frankly about what it’s like to be a woman in the workplace because even superheroes aren’t immune from workplace sexism, and shows us, through a teenage girl with dangerous superpowers, the difficulty of growing up in a society where womanhood is vilified and demonstrates the difficulty of being taken seriously as a woman in STEM (she has a Ph.D. in biology, after all). 

Her relationships are on her terms, and the men she allowed to get close to her understand their place in her life and are more than happy to fall in line. The men who don’t end up, more often than not, on the floor after a kick to the head.

The artistic and editorial choices Cain and Niemczyk make are obviously intentional. Bobbi still has blonde hair, a small waist, and a thigh gap, but she feels like your most conventionally attractive friend, rather than the anatomical anomalies that exist as women’s bodies in other mainstream comics. 

The men are the eye candy, and Clint and Lance are more than happy to wander around in their underwear (while Bobbi is fully clothed) for no reason other than to make a point about how women are usually portrayed in media historically made by and for men. 

The comic is very straight and mostly white, but I have a feeling that if the team was allowed to continue, the diversity of the characters and storylines would have continued to expand.

The unfortunate decision to cancel the series was made halfway through its run due to low sales, despite excellent reviews, but the first volume of collected issues would later hit #1 on Amazon. There was a lot of misogynistic ugliness surrounding this series’ run, which ended in Chelsea Cain quitting Twitter over the hate she received after the last issue published: the cover showed Bobbi on the beach, lemonade in hand, wearing a shirt that reads “ASK ME ABOUT MY FEMINIST AGENDA.” I was initially going to go into it here, but I’d rather focus on the comic itself: smart, feminist, funny, and deeply necessary in a world where men will chase a woman off the internet for sticking up for herself. While gone too soon, I can only hope it inspires future writers to choose this path. And order Man-Eaters, Chelsea Cain’s follow-up comic project.

Marina is a West Coast native living in Washington, DC. She loves writing anything, from sci-fi to creative non-fiction to romance, often drawing inspiration from the frequent travel required by her day job. Her work has appeared in such literary magazines as DistrictLit and Corner Bar Magazine. When she’s not writing, you can find her hosting bar trivia, baking something involving peaches, or bothering her extremely patient dog, Daisy. You can read more of her work at marinabarakatt.com and find pictures of Daisy at @marinabarakatt.

The post Not Just Dudes in Tights: Chelsea Cain’s Mockingbird appeared first on DIY MFA.

While what worked for us might not work for others, here’s how we did it. Here’s how we decided, in our late forties, to try something new—in the words of Brene Brown, daring greatly—and ended up as published co-authors and closer friends than ever.

We worked and we talked and we worked some more.

We talked about everything

Day after day, while our kids were at school, we sat side-by-side. Some days we talked more than we wrote. Other days we wrote more than we talked. Some days it was a 50-50 proposition. But what we came to realize was that even when we were talking, we were working. Writing together meant talking about the articles and books we were reading. It meant talking about our feelings, about our friendships and our parenting and our worries. And of course, we talked about our characters, our plots and how to develop our writing skills.

To stay healthy, we aimed to move our bodies at least five minutes every hour. Some days we walked to town to do an errand. Other days we walked the dog. Some days it was so rainy we walked around and around the dining room table. Some days one of us resisted, and it was up to the other to persist. (“It’s been 55 minutes—we have to move!” “No, not now, I’m in a flow.” “Swimsuit season is around the corner.” “Who cares….” “Being too sedentary will kill you.” “Oh fine.”) We came back refreshed, and we wrote. Writing together sounds tough, but it needn’t be.

It can be fun.

We had so much fun

Most days we laughed while we wrote. Some days we laughed so hard we pushed the limits of our fragile bladders, ever-so-slightly damaged from childbirth. On a whim one day we googled “urinary leakage in mothers,” and we laughed again. But this time the laughter was colored by the reminder that we were in a new phase of life. We leaned into the idea of ourselves as wise women, did a few kegels, and wrote some more.

Some days we were so organized! We brilliantly planned and prepped our respective family dinners before we began writing. Together, we gathered our ingredients, rinsed and minced and stirred them, and victoriously filled our matching crockpots. We set the cookers for five hours, and then turned to our novel. The aromas of chili powder, cumin, and garlic intensified as we wrote. When the timer went off, we rejoiced that dinner would be a success, even if our words that day were not. (And success was defined loosely, as in: No matter how the concoction tasted, at least we would not have to revisit the question “what’s for dinner?” until tomorrow.)

Our characters were never far from our minds, even during the hours we tended to our families. Each night, we looked forward to that blissful moment when our kids were “studying” and our husbands were watching TV. We slipped away to resume our exhilarating text-storms about the fun new plot points we’d work on in the morning. 

It wasn’t always easy

From time to time, a sick day interrupted our scheduled face-to-face writing sessions. With the help of our digital-native offspring, we learned how to make better use of collaborative technology. We worked through scenes remotely while pots of chicken soup simmered away on our stoves. We always found a way to honor the commitments we’d made, in sickness, in health, and even in a pandemic (little did we know how handy those Zoom skills would turn out to be). We know, we know, those are marital vows. But we were also married to our book, this joyous joint endeavor. We were writers who wrote—together.

We calmed each other through the anxiety of college applications and the interminable waiting. Although we hadn’t been perfect, we reminded ourselves that we—and our kids—had succeeded in all the ways that truly mattered, and no specific college outcome would change that fact. This awareness made it easier to absorb the sadness of the shifting contours of our families as our boys headed off to college, one by one. What would life be like without the sound and the fury, and the mess? Would we ever adjust to the quiet and the freedom? We pondered this and more as we wrote.

As middle-aged women, we no longer had the luxury to ignore our routine healthcare. We paused our work for mammograms and Pap smears, and exchanged wholehearted hugs to drive back the fear. When the unimaginable happened, we sat together in the chemo suite while one of us received treatment and the other tried to distract with laughter. We raged and we grieved, and then we accepted. We rewrote our life stories on the fly.

Through months of hardship, together we propelled ourselves forward, usually (though not always!) with grace. We dove deep into questions of what binds us together—as women, as friends, as community members. We reflected on villages we’d created and ones we’d left behind. And how crises can sharpen our dreams and our focus. We wrote about all this and more. On those rare occasions when our worries threatened to overpower our combined coping skills, we put on our blinders, and took refuge in our story.

We escaped the drudgery of life

Every now and then, we ditched our families and spent a few days on retreat. Just the two of us. No laundry. No meal prep. No driving. For fifteen hours a day, we would plot, write, and edit. Head-clearing walks and simple grilled cheese sandwiches punctuated these marathon sessions. When we returned to our nests, our husbands gave us sideways looks. A girls’ weekend without wine? Yup… though we must confess about that one time we brought brownies, with a super-fun, extra ingredient. It’s legal where we live and we swear it was research. Don’t judge us, please. We can’t take it!

Along the way, there were many nights of sleep lost to hormones or anxiety. Those mornings required more coffee, but still we wrote through the fog. It often took two to remember a detail: a plot twist, a joke, a scene, or who wrote it. The blessing in disguise? The old was new again. We were our own “unbiased” readers! Would two chaotic minds add up to one engrossing book? That was our fervent hope.

There’s no generic formula for writing together, though we recommend giving it a try. Writing is a gigantic leap of faith. And for us, so was starting a second career from scratch. What we’ve learned is that it’s a lot easier to take risks, endure challenges, withstand rejection, and still come roaring back when you’re in it together with a trusted friend (especially one who’s extremely stingy with adverbs). Also, it’s way cheaper than therapy.

After supporting each other through two decades of motherhood, Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman thought: “Let’s write a book and really test the friendship.” Several years later their friendship is not only still intact, but they would even go so far as to grade it an A+. With such a perfect GPA, maybe they should apply to Stanford? Just kidding! They would never leave Seattle where they live (not together, though it often feels that way) with their husbands, pets, and last remaining school-age kiddo. You can find them at dobmeierkatzman.com and @katzndobs on Instagram. Or in Tracy’s kitchen.

The post An Idiosyncratic Guide to Writing Together appeared first on DIY MFA.

I don’t know about you, but in my day-to-day, I tend to protect people from my darkest feelings (hello suppressed anger, my old friend), and I hide my most difficult experiences. I avoid being too much. But writing is the place where I get to be too much, where I can bring the full range of my emotions and experiences to the page.

Because as women we’re socialized not to tell our stories, reading and supporting women and non-binary writers can be both transgressive and exhilarating. (Woo-hoo!)

Alas, the literary establishment hasn’t been as exhilarated about us. Our writing has often been classified as not literary, confessional, navel-gazing, or—my favourite pejorative—domestic. (I refer you to VIDA and CWILA for some of the evidence of bias against women’s writing—as well as those against LGBTQ+ writing, and writers of colour.)

Ready to resist and revel with me on this International Women’s Day? Here are five ways to celebrate women and non-binary writers.

1) Read women and non-binary writers and attend their readings

There are so many great lists out there. You can grab one you fancy, or start your own and get reading. Make sure your list has plenty of writers whose experiences differ from yours in race, class, or sexuality.

Consider challenging yourself to read x number of books by women and non-binary people this year, then buy the books if you can afford it, or request copies in your library if you cannot.

Share your list with your book club, or found a book club that exclusively focuses on women and non-binary writers.

Because it’s even more celebratory to hear the words of women and non-binary writers spoken aloud, you could attend events and readings in your area. (Hint: Growing Room: A Feminist Literary Festival is on this weekend if you’re in the Vancouver, Canada area.)

And, last but not least, encourage emerging women and non-binary writers by reading, sharing and commenting on what they publish in online lit mags.

2) Review women and non-binary writers

Women’s writing gets less ink when it comes to reviews (see the VIDA and CWILA links above). The good news is, this is changing, and you can be part of the change by making reviewing women and non-binary writers’ books an element of your writing practice.

This is a profound celebration of their writing because you must absorb and aim to fully understand the work before you share your opinion. (Bonus: reading this way will teach you a lot about writing.)

You don’t need to review for a formal publication, though you may find you love reviewing and seek out a gig when you have a portfolio of reviews ready. Your blog is an excellent place to start. You could also go for short, snappy, sweet reviews on social media to encourage others to read works you love.

3) Listen to and believe women and non-binary writers

With the reckoning happening in other artistic communities, we can’t ignore the need for reckoning around abuse and gender inequality in our own industry—from the shady mentor who dates his students to a sea of lost opportunities based on unconscious biases against our writing (domestic, confessional, too much).

Believing starts with listening. And I’ll start by directing this specifically at white women because we need to listen to women of colour about their experiences. It’s also important that straight women listen to queer women on this.

Then we need to follow up our listening with belief in the form of supportive action: speaking up, having uncomfortable conversations with literary gatekeepers, and making decisions to put our energy and money into efforts that genuinely support all women and non-binary writers.

4) Mentor women and non-binary writers

We need more mentors who will unequivocally encourage emerging women and non-binary writers. (See above re: shady mentors.) You can do this no matter what stage you are at in your writing career by simply sharing all you’ve learned from your experience so far in writing and publishing.

This can be as formal as a talk in a classroom of aspiring young writers or as informal as reading the work of a friend-of-a-friend starting to try her hand at poetry.

5) Write the story you must tell

Women and non-binary writers, please bring us your too much, your domestic, your confessions, your rage. Or bring us your thoughts on string theory, contact sports, politics, cheese. Whatever you do, write the stories you have in you that haven’t been told.

In the words of Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

When you do, know it will give so many of us joy, visibility, and powerful change to read your words.

I hope you have a beautiful, celebratory, and revolutionary International Women’s Day, writers!

Author and literary magazine editor Rachel Thompson helps writers develop the skills and confidence to publish. You can find out more about her writing community, courses, and biweekly love letters to writers on RachelThompson.co.

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