Amy Goldwasser

'RED' editor tells all

Okay, maybe not "all," but RED: The Next Generation of American Writers -- Teenage Girls -- On What Fires Up their Lives Today editor Amy Goldwasser has a lot to say about the book of essays she edited, her career path and what a person does with more than 800 essays written by teen-aged girls.

You've had an impressive writing career. Please tell us about your background and how you started in the business.

Important distinction: I'm actually an editor (not a writer), in about a 90/10 mix. I love editing, love being the one who gets to have the ideas, make up magazines, THEN work with the writers. Writing makes me anxious and just seems so hard—I'm not sure how people do it, at least not for a living in NYC. So I mostly edit and only write for fun, when it's a story I think is important or an editor or publication I love. And even then, it doesn't come easily or really feel like fun while I'm doing it...
   Editing does, however. I think people don't know what editors do, so writing seems like the glamour job. No one grows up proclaiming, "I want to be an editor!" It's like directing to acting, and I suspect people's personalities drive them toward one or the other. Anyway, I was much the same, grew up wanting to be a writer, and I wrote from nearly as far back as I was talking. My father was a fiction writer and English professor, my mother a journalist (former Detroit Free Press reporter, covered the race riots) so I grew up with novelists and newspaper people and such around, always considered these things professions.
    I studied English and creative writing in college, UW-Madison, and junior year abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris. After school--after some temp jobs and a brief period at a PR agency--I was lucky enough to get an internship at Outside magazine in Chicago. The first story I worked on, fact-checking, was Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. It was a great, non-hierarchical magazine, so I got to really work on the words and with writers from the start. I moved with the magazine to Santa Fe, New Mexico, then came to NY in 1996 to start one of the first "content-provider" websites, called Charged. Our tagline was "action sports/extreme leisure," and there was no such industry then, so we didn't even know who to hire. We had skateboarders, a video porn director, and our art director was still in college, b/c he was one of the few people in the world who knew how to do Flash animation.
   Quickly from there, staff editing jobs at Epicurious (when CondeNet was new), then back to print at Metropolis. Been freelance since, about eight years now. Like I said, mostly editing, and specializing in launches and relaunches, making up magazines. At Elle now, have edited or written for the New Yorker to Runner's World, US Weekly to Vogue, Seventeen, Modern Bride, New York Times, so on.

What attracted you to the idea of collecting the voices of teen-aged girls?

This is kind of in my intro, so forgive me if I'm repeating. I was volunteering more and more, teaching writing at the Lower Eastside Girls Club, a not-for-profit for disadvantaged girls in my neighborhood. And I was loving what I was seeing from them—scripts for films and podcasts, college admissions essays. Every one was so original, so THEM. A surprise every time.
    Meanwhile, in my day-job, at magazines, I was less excited with the writing I was getting from adult professional writers. Not their fault, and I'm as guilty as anyone, but we learn how to please--our editor, our editor-in-chief, the magazine's readers--and stories, especially personal essays get formulaic. 800 words, epiphany here, happy resolve. But at the Girls Club, things started in the middle, had no endings, could be all dialogue, etc. It's more honest, fearless, rawer. So the idea was really my selfish motivation, to turn the editing I was loving into my work.

How did you go about collection 800 essays? Wait, more importantly, how did you go about PROCESSING 800 essays?

Again, kind of in my intro, but this started with a call for essays to a few dozen friends--and turned into 800 submissions. I had no idea. I hadn't even thought to set up a separate email box, so I panicked as they started coming in that I'd ruined/lost my early-adopter address! (See Internet startup 1996, above.) I largely credit this to my friend Stephen Dubner, one of the authors of Freakonomics, posting it on their site. The long arm of Freakonomics, found me submissions from all around the world, including Japan, Israel, India, all over Europe. Processing was me, with folders of essays on me, wherever I went for a year—on the subway, on many airplanes and vacations (in the shade on a beach in Mexico, reading, reading, reading...) My husband is a saint. He turns 40 in April and it's going to be our first vacation where I'm not away, really, with teenage girls.

What overall impression did you get about young women from those 800 essays?

So many overall impressions--maybe the overarching one being that these are 58 very different people, and we as adults have to watch our tendency to want to label, teenagers today are this or that. There are girls in this book who are as unlike each other as they are to me, the full range of personalities--and parents' personalities. But my overall impression was so optimistic, and I felt, still feel, a strong urge to defend this generation against the mounting charges of apathy. They do care. They care a lot--and they miss nothing, whether that's how presidential candidates are trying to present themselves or the power dynamic between mother and father in their home or why this war goes on.
    They're the perfect combination of things--angry enough, idealistic enough, paying attention enough--to really change the world. The stereotypes are so far off and so unfair. This is why red-not-pink. I'd say the sole disturbing overall impression I got is how epidemic eating disorders and other body-image issues have become. I can't believe the proliferation since I was in school. Breaks my heart where it's gone in the past 10-15 years, and the worry is what's next. Cutting is so prevalent now that I had girls who recognize what kind of knives their friends are using to do it. Though then again, the fact that it's out there and being addressed might be a good thing in the end. But what I'm really left with is that they're wiser, funnier, more engaged than we like to imagine. Easier to just paint them as unknowable and checked out than to reckon with them.

I have to admit, I harbor some prejudices about the way young people communicate these days. Text messages contain no vowels, blog posts seem to ramble aimlessly. You've said these technologies have actually improved communication for girls. How so?

Oh jeez. I could and do talk about this for hours--so if I type it here, fear I'll slip into text messaging style w/out vowels. Here's the basic point: They're writing! They're communicating (hey, even 15-year-old boys are sharing some part of their inner lives with someone out there now), they're connected. They're activists and storytellers. The Internet has taken away the fear and preciousness of writing. They write freely, and by choice--which is what any writer will tell you is the key, to do it every day. Here we have an entire generation, the first, who lives this way. Even worst-case scenario, what's wrong about a rambling blog post? And why is that different than a girl rambling in her diary 20 yrs ago?
    No one begrudged teenagers when they were doing these things in a hard-copy world, in fact, I'm sure parents and teachers would be delighted to have, encourage the teen who writes letters to her friends every night, movie reviews, editorials for the school paper, and makes short videos. They don't really see it as writing. They see it as hanging out with friends, socializing, venting. But I go very far in the direction of, if people are reading, whatever it is, or writing, whatever it is, fantastic.

I read somewhere that you said you wanted to edit your young contributors the same way you would adult writers. Why did you take that approach and how did it work out?

Said I'd edit them with the same attention and respect--but I actually got to edit them differently, which is what I was hoping for. Back to the we-as-grownups-learn-to-please bit above: If you're an editor at a national publication, you learn what the voice of that publication is, what your boss wants. This makes it easier and very tempting to just rewrite your writers. In the case of RED, the girls' youth and range of voices kept me honest. I wouldn't dare put words in their mouths, speak as a teenage girl about what it's like to be in a wheelchair or learn to rock climb or obsess about Stephen Colbert. I only edited as much as I asked a lot of questions, but I never rewrote.
    If you saw the most "edited" essays from RED annotated, some would be cut-and-pasted from a dozen email exchanges. But every word in there except intro was written by the girls. Including the title, which was supposed to be "Bloody Red Heart" (written by Emma Considine and still the title of her essay). Only it was too much for the publisher, so only a third of Emma' s words now... I got so tired at the teen mags of seeing women in their 20s, 30s, 40s assigning to writers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, pretending to channel teen girls and their life experiences. Only the teen girls can tell you that. Even editing grownups, I'm an editor who believes the writer can ALWAYS say it better, certainly truer, than the editor can.

Have you established relationships with the contributors? How are they reacting to their new-found fame?

Again, this is the 58 very distinct personalities issue. My relationships and their reactions to RED's publication cover the whole range. There are some girls I've gotten really close to (helps when they're in NY with me) and really consider friends, some who I don't know so well but who have emailed me really intimate things or late at night, and some with whom the extent of our relationship has been "This looks great, Ms. Goldwasser. Thank you for your work, I look forward to seeing my essay published in the book." Same with their responses to being published. Though I will say, as time's gone on, and we've done more readings, and the girls have seen how audiences respond, overall been a huge boost in self-esteem.
    And they're proud, at last! When working with writers this young, easy for a 16 year old to dismiss something she wrote when she was 14 as a totally other person. When the book first came out, there was a lot of this: The girls didn't like what they'd written and write much better now. Or the simple fear that their friends and school were about to read it and how they'd react. But response has been so positive that the girls are feeling buoyed these days. I think. I hope. I've written a LOT of college admissions rec letters, so I hope it's improved their lives that way, too. And they're getting more and more fan mail through the site from girls out there who they've inspired, helped, made feel less alone. That's everything.

What has this project done for you, on a personal level? Has it changed the way you look at teen-agers?

It's become harder and harder for me to see adults patronizing them, because I feel quite the opposite: I'm kind of in awe of them. Particularly the girls. I think they're growing up in a truly post-feminist period, like it doesn't occur to them that Hillary Clinton's the first woman with a shot at the presidency or that there are things they should or shouldn't be doing b/c they're girls. In fact, I worry they might be running circles around the boys... Which brings me to the next book: boys' essays!

Your Web site indicates you'll be looking for more essays, and I found an article that mentioned you had an idea for a magazine with girls as contributors. So...what's next on your agenda?

I love magazines, and obviously it's what I do. The book kind of started as a detour, but now I'm realizing it can lead to all kinds of things. I'd like to make RED annual, in a Best American Essays series kind of way. And a book of boys' essays, maybe RED international, RED city-by-city. I'm currently adapting RED for theater, which is brand-new to me, so learning a lot. Teachers seem to be picking it up, bringing it into their classrooms, which is most important for me, the educational possibilities for this: for girls to learn from girls their own age. It comes out in paperback in October, which I'm really looking forward to--because it'll be in a price range more accessible to girls out there, and teachers can put it on their course lists.
    Once this all clears a little—which I'm starting to think may be never, in the best way—hope there's a magazine at the end of it. It's an education process though: where we're all familiar with teen fiction now, there's not really a category for teen non-fiction, especially talking about some things we don't expect young ladies to talk about. Bookstores don't have the areas to display it, and so on. When you get into a magazine, meaning advertisers, takes a lot of fight to keep these girls real, even when that risks our preconceived notions about teens.

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