Aunt Lute Books on Controlling the Narrative . . . Or Not

Abstract

Aunt Lute Books on Controlling the Narrative . . . Or Not M. Bałut Fondakowski (bio) Joan Pinkvoss, the cofounder of Aunt Lute Books, isn’t really looking forward to this interview.1 She’s not keen on journalists, because too often they take stories and words out of context. But, as the 2019 recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Artist Legacy Award, which acknowledges the impact of an artistic leader who has served a San Francisco–based organization consistently for twenty-five years or more, she said yes to my request. I was on assignment for a local magazine, and Pinkvoss knew the free media attention would be good for Aunt Lute Books, the small press she cofounded with Barb Wieser in Iowa City in 1982. Aunt Lute Books, which publishes on average three or four books per year, defines itself as a “radical feminist press publishing literature by those who have been traditionally underrepresented in or excluded by the literary canon” (Aunt Lute Books 2018a). The conversation feels awkward at first, so to break the ice, I tell her that I first read Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza in 1996 in a class at Mills College,2 but it was not until we sat down at the table in the Aunt Lute offices in the renovated brick building at 2180 Bryant Street that I realized Aunt Lute Books is its publisher. Certainly, few readers commit to memory the publishers of the books they love. But I now feel woefully unprepared for an interview with someone whose life’s work is so essential to my—and many of my generation’s—intellectual formation. Pinkvoss smiles as she watches me realize this. I ask what it was like to publish the book. “We kind of created this book together,” Pinkvoss begins. “It was very mutual[ly] respect[ful] and caring.” Although Anzaldúa passed away in 2004, her shared sentiments toward Pinkvoss, “whose understanding, [End Page 64] caring, and balanced mix of pressure and gentle nudging not only helped me bring this creature to life, but helped me create it” (Anzaldúa 1999), live on in print in the work itself. To this day, Borderlands, Anzaldúa’s ground-breaking semi-autobiographical work that remaps our understanding of what a border is, remains one of Aunt Lute’s most in-demand books, though it took years for the book to find its readership and place in the canon. “When [Anzaldúa] was at UC Santa Cruz, she wanted to be recognized by academia,” Pinkvoss says of the early years after the book’s publication. “Now, finally she is being recognized by academics how she always wanted, because there are Chicanas in academia who can bring forward what her intentions always were.”3 Working with Anzaldúa, whom Pinkvoss always refers to fondly as “Gloria,” is one of Pinkvoss’s fondest, most foundational memories of Aunt Lute Books: “It is the best book in the world to be out there . . . [Anzaldúa] invites everyone in . . . anyone who views themselves in a borderland situation . . . she invites them in.” First published in 1987, the book is now in its fifth edition. Despite graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the early ’70s, Pinkvoss, now nearly eighty years old, knew from the start she did not want to be a writer: “I would almost get sick when I sat down to write,” she says. But she never stopped loving the printed word, and she left the workshop with a particular affection for writing with “more rawness . . . than the polished voice that had gotten into the workshop.” Pinkvoss managed to pay her way through graduate school as a computer programmer, saving up enough money to travel to Switzerland to teach literature while she figured out what she was going to do for the rest of her life. When she left Iowa City, Pinkvoss “was one of the few lesbians in town—there were no Out groups and no discussion,” but when she finally returned to the States, the Iowa City she once knew was pulsing with change. “It was the ’70s, and there was a burgeoning women’s movement...