Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner (born 1947) is an novelist, journalist, and professor.

Quotes

My novels are usually ignited by a question–a philosophical, spiritual, moral, political quandary. My stories are usually imagined from a particular scene. Place is very important in all my fiction. (2021)

History shows that often artists first envision the change feminist activists seek to bring about.

I’ve always regarded writing as a vocation more than a career. Vocation as in “calling,” as in “being summoned,” from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.”

I still want to change the world, and if my political principles have remained steady, the belief in my own powers has shifted. Now I can say that the goal of my stories is understanding. As I grow less prescriptive, I hope to become more receptive.

As a feminist, I want to involve readers in the story and give them time to pause, reflect, argue, and engage.

I don’t like the term “political correctness” because conservatives tend to employ it to distract from serious racial, class, national, and gender discrimination. It’s a divisive phrase that perpetuates the so-called culture wars. I first heard the term in the 1970s, when it was used among progressive people as a safeguard against our own rigidness and the rigidness of other people on the left. Many political meetings ended with a period of evaluation and this was one of the problems acknowledged as something to avoid. The term has been bowdlerized since then. I welcome a range of opinions in my classroom and we always discuss the importance of genuine disagreement on the first day of term. I aim for a stimulating, surprising, awakening, collegial, and safe classroom, and try to foster this by encouraging everyone to speak and by creating assignments in which students work in a variety of small groups. We speak, we agree, we argue, we laugh, we learn.

Literature is the story of our many and diverse lives—in fiction, poetry, drama, and so forth. Unfortunately, women’s books are much less likely to get published then men’s books. They are much less likely to be reviewed then men’s books.

book edited by Donna Perry

the literature that we read in the late sixties--I graduated from university in 1969--was really British literature by middle-class or upper-class white men. My people, working-class people, were not represented in the material I was reading.

I think this American reflex judgment that if you write political fiction you are writing didactic fiction is funny because I see my fiction as the opposite. I see myself as somebody who is learning as I write, motivated, mostly, by questions. For me the process of writing a novel is to be thinking about the questions.

One of the reasons I became a writer was to try to develop some kind of empathy for my fellow human beings. If I'm always writing about the same kinds of people, I'm not going to get very far.

I'm very much an Irish Republican, in the sense that I believe that the troops should be out of the north and that the north should be part of Eire.

I didn't actually intend to write a murder mystery when I wrote Murder in the English Department. That's just what happened when these people got together. Every book is, in some sense, a mystery.

I care a lot about accessible prose. People often fail to see the subtlety in a sentence that has been honed, worked, and reworked, unless it's written by Ernest Hemingway and has a penis in it.

We also should develop an international consciousness of our work as writers - that's crucial to our own individual welfare and to the kind of imaginative collectivity that I mentioned.

to have a steady diet of American writers is like eating Rice Krispies for 365 days; it is boring. I find international literature appealing because, as a writer, I'm curious about place and find it provocative to see what people do with place. I'm very interested in rhythms in language, in seeing and hearing on the page how people write English differently. And, of course, it's fascinating to see how translators translate into English differently.

for me, being out as a lesbian has to do with honesty and the vitality I get from honesty. It isn't a moral act or a question of conscience so much as it's a way of engaging more fully in the world by being who I am. In some sense, coming out as a lesbian writer is a process of discovery, a journey, just as coming out as a writer from a working-class family or coming out as an American writer [she laughs]. And it's something that continually surprises me with new dimensions.

As a writer, I still strongly identify as a worker, partially as a consequence of working with those other people [the co-editors of her first two books] and partially as a result of my class background. I see my work emerging from some kind of imaginative collectivity, not from solitary genesis.

I feel as if I've been trespassing my whole life in one way or another: Literally trespassing, as someone who has lived abroad a lot and traveled widely; but trespassing morally, in the sense that I've made some unconventional choices in my life and, although I certainly am not a practicing Catholic anymore, I still have echoes of a Catholic conscience that tell me that I'm trespassing. I'm also trespassing in the sense of being from the working class and moving into a middle-class environment; and trespassing in the sense of transgressing literary conventions because that book plays with a lot of different forms.

I am not saying that working-class men started that war. But a number of them were complicit in fighting it. The rhetoric of Vietnam, particularly in the last five years, has made all of the soldiers heroes. Not just survivors, but heroes. And I don't think that's true, and that's one of the things that has led us into further aggression in the Middle East and in Central America. So there is some urgency in confronting this...To say that working-class men during that war were heroes and to exonerate them is the worst kind of castration. It's taking all their power and all their culpability away from them. In the book I am trying to look at working-class protest against the war and support of the war. One of the things that really bothers me is that often working-class lives are presented as having no choices.

I have come to depend upon Valerie Miner as an uncommonly honest novelist, humorous, acute, and kind.
- Ursula K. Le Guin, used as blurb for Trespassing and Other Stories

Miner is a writer of reach, audacity, range, uniquely important to understanding our time... She gives us the beat of everyday urban life"
- Tillie Olsen, used as blurb for The Night Singers