Small Strokes Big Oaks

Bio
My name is Mary Lee Shalvoy and I am 49. I was born in New Jersey on July 1, 1960. I grew up in northern NJ, 10 miles due west of New York City and lived there, pretty much until I left for college. I went through 12 years of Catholic school, four at an all-girls’ high school. I graduated from Mount Holyoke College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, in 1982, after spending my junior year at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. It was after college that I had a series of jobs and moved several times.

I worked as a traveling teacher for a year, living on Long Island, NY; Syracuse, NY and then Alexandria, VA. I moved back to the NJ/NY area and worked for Scholastic writing classrooom reading magazines and after about a year moved into Manhattan, where I lived for five years. I changed jobs a couple of times, working as an editor for Scholastic and a computer textbook publisher, a freelance textbook writer and then a reporter for a computer business trade newspaper.

That last job got me transferred to Los Angeles, where I lived for five years. In L.A., I met my husband and experienced a bout with cancer (malignant melanoma). We moved to northern San Diego county for a job for my husband, which is when I launched my freelance writing and independent consultant career, in 1992 and have kept it going ever since. My husband and I had three kids–fraternal girl twins and then two years later a single girl–while we were living there. We also started a small company, just expanding the business writing I was doing into deeper consulting and market research in the computer industry.

From San Diego, we moved to the San Francisco Bay area, after another five years (see a pattern?). We settled in Alameda, which is in the East Bay region. Here is where we divorced and I continued the consulting business and I started writing for many small, regional newspapers and magazines. One was a column called “Mom, Mom, Mom” in which I write about being a single mom to three girls here in Alameda.

Blog: http://maryleeshalvoy.wordpress.com/

1. Define the online feminist blogging community.
I don’t define myself as a feminist or as a blogger. I guess I’ve always just considered myself a woman and a writer. Also, I wouldn’t define the blogging community of women as “feminists.” I know that there is a community of feminists online, but the women I have connected with are either part of the Mom community or just the general community of women online.

During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, I went to an all-women’s college (Mount Holyoke in MA), and perhaps because we all felt strongly about the role of women in society and our purpose in life, we would never call ourselves feminists—the only feminists at school were very militant lesbians, another reason we (the heterosexuals) were hesitant to call ourselves feminsts! I once had a lesbian at Mount Holyoke tell me that she wished we could send all men to the moon and just keep and harvest their sperm, because that’s all we needed from them. She was an active “feminist” and I did not share her opinion, nor did I want to be considered part of her group.

I am not sure whether it’s helpful for “feminists” to have a presence. I believe that the term “feminist” is outdated and carries a negative connotation at this point in time. It brings up images either of women early in the 20^th century fighting for suffrage or of women in the 1970’s fighting for further equality (or of the whole militant lesbian ideology that men are only needed for their sperm for procreation). The first two groups were critical for the advancement of women in society and we wouldn’t be as far as we have come today without all of their hard work and activism, but I still think that to make progress, we need to move forward as a group of women—all together, not separated into niche communities, such as feminists, Moms, Career women or single women. We could really make a big difference if we united as women first.

I inadvertently became part of the Mom community through Twitter! My Twitter username is mommommom because of the column I write for a tiny local newspaper. However, I use the community now to try to connect with women because it makes me feel a part of a larger world; it makes me feel better about myself and my life as a Mom and a woman working in the world. It’s fun!

I struggle with the commoditization of online writing in general. I don’t think this issue is restricted to the feminist or even the women’s community. I think it’s a challenge to all writers across the board. How do you establish writing as something of value when anyone and everyone can write a blog, with no standards and nothing set up to ensure quality? As newspapers continue to die, the community of editors and copyeditors is dying with them. Blogs do fine whether the writing is good or not. In fact, in one blogging seminar I attended, the teacher insisted that it was better to write a post with a certain disregard for grammar, punctuation and even word smithing because it made the blog appear more timely and real. This mindset is horrifying to me because it contributes to the downgrading of online writing (and writing in general) and makes it much more difficult to make a living writing. (It’s hard enough as it is!)

In terms of awareness, I am not sure about feminists per se, but I do believe that women have been gaining considerable power through online writing. Women are finding a voice and an audience online that didn’t exist before.

2. Tell me about how you came to be a blogger.
Again, I am not really a blogger. I was a writer and a trade journalist for many years. When I married and had children, I steered away from writing using my own byline. I was a business writer and I did a lot of public relations work and market research report writing—nothing that really required a byline. I did a lot of ghostwriting, too. After my divorce, I realized that I missed having a byline and started writing articles for small local papers to build my portfolio. I soon started writing a monthly column called “Mom, Mom, Mom” for one of the town newspapers about my life as a single mom raising three daughters in Alameda, CA. I set up a WordPress blog as a place to host my writing portfolio and published works, including the column. Three years and 37 columns later, plus some additional freelance work, I now have a decent “blog.”

3. Tell me about your blogging experience now.
What I plan on changing moving forward is to actually blog! I would like to just write more, and now that I have somewhat of an audience on Twitter, I think it would be fun to write more often about the things that interest me. Unfortunately, I am a generalist journalist by nature and I am hesitant to focus on any one area. Most likely, I will continue to write about my life as a mom and a woman and a sort-of entrepreneur.

4. Tell me about a time you were misread or misunderstood on your blog.
The only time anything like this happened, it was someone commenting on a book review I wrote. They really disliked the book and really didn’t agree with my favorable review. It wasn’t that serious and no one had to come to my defense.

5. Describe your process of writing online.
When I do write specifically for online purposes (I have ghostwritten many blogs and have written posts for some of my clients using my own name), I use the same routine as when I am working on any other business-related writing. Technically, I write in Microsoft Word and then cut and paste into the blogging software. As far as the actual writing process goes, it depends on what I am writing about. If it’s an opinion piece or more of a personal essay, I just write from my head and it takes some writing and then I step back and re-read and re-write until the deadline hits or until I like the piece enough to publish. I do a lot of research for most of my pieces, online research and phone calling, depending on the subject.

6. Describe your online reading habits.
I used to do a lot of web surfing, but lately I’ve found that I spend time reading through Twitter posted links to find a lot of my reading material! I share in many ways—email, retweeting on Twitter, posting to Facebook. And, absolutely, it creates a community. I’ve made friends and learned so much about others by sharing online. That’s how I met you, right?

You can follow Mary Lee on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mommommom.
For more information on the Literacy  in the Feminist Blogging Community project, and to see all of the interviews, click here. Have something to add? Comment or e-mail me at smallstroke (at) gmail (dot) com.