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We had an inspiring and far-ranging conversation with feminist economist Myra Strober about her new memoir, Sharing the Work:What My Family and Career Taught Me About Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others). We examined differences between memoir writing, fiction, and academic writing, and how Myra used theme as a filter to shape and cut her memoir. We talked about changing names, asking for permission, and sharing the work ahead of time with the people who are in it; uses of summary and scene and the balance between the two; tight writing and loose writing; memory versus invention in scene and especially in dialogue, and the unexpected relationship between truth and guessing. We delved into the economics of being a writer, and into writing habits or the lack thereof, and into time as a character. Literacy and its far-ranging impacts came up, as did dream writing, writing in dreams, and writing in the middle of the night.
LINKS:
Diane Middlebrook/ her biography of Anne Sexton
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse
Bill Clegg Did You Ever Have a Family?
Myra Strober
Myra Strober is a labor economist and Professor Emerita at the School of Education at Stanford University. She is also Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University (by courtesy). Myra’s research and consulting focus on gender issues at the workplace, and work and family. She is the author of numerous articles on occupational segregation, women in the professions and management, the economics of childcare, feminist economics and the teaching of economics. She is also co-author, with Agnes Chan, of The Road Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family in the United States and Japan (1999).
Myra is officially retired, but she continues to teach a course on work and family at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Myra was the founding director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. She was also the first chair of the National Council for Research on Women (now called Re: Gender), a consortium of U.S. centers for research on women, which today has more than 100 member centers. Myra was President of the International Association for Feminist Economics, and Vice President of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (now Legal Momentum). She was an associate editor of Feminist Economics and a member of the Board of Trustees of Mills College.
Over the years, Myra has consulted with several corporations on improved utilization of women in management and on work-family issues. She has also been an expert witness in cases involving the valuation of work in the home, sex discrimination, and sexual harassment.
Myra holds a BS degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University, an MA in economics from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.
Myra is married to Dr. Jay Jackman. She also has one ex-husband, two grown children, three grown step- children, one son-in-law, three daughters-in-law, and six grandchildren.
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.