ARTICLES BY VANESSA
Don’t Just Write a Novel This November. Write a Bad Novel.
One of the many ways that we can resist this idea that our capital defines us is to do things separate from the market and do them with gusto. And that’s where the brilliance of NaNoWriMo is. Because here is the thing about writing 50,000 words in a month: What you do write will be bad. Very bad. I am co-teaching a romance writing workshop right now, and our advice to participants is to just keep typing. Do you not like the chapter you just wrote? At the end of the chapter write: “That’s what our characters would have done if they were idiots.” Or, as one of our students pointed out, excitedly, “If you type I don’t like anything I just wrote, then that’s seven more words!”
Slate
November 7, 2022
Bridgerton Gave Romance Its Very Own Marvel Cinematic Universe. Uh Oh.
There haven’t been many Avengers style series created for the female gaze, so this is very exciting. In fact, romance fans have long bemoaned that there aren’t more onscreen adaptations of the incredible stories we love. Now, we are finally getting exactly what we want.
But.
I can suddenly understand how comic book nerds became gatekeepers. I know what it’s like to be a fan of something that has traditionally been maligned. And one consequence of romance going mainstream is that people who haven’t loved the genre since the womb will now have … opinions.
Slate
June 15, 2022
On being the madwoman in the attic: What JANE EYRE taught me about women's anger
I have spent years of my life reading and loving Charlotte Brontë's novel "Jane Eyre." But in the last few years I have realized something: The main character of this novel isn't Jane, but Bertha; the woman who we call "The Madwoman in the Attic." As I have looked closer and closer at Bertha over the years, I have realized something important. I don't think she's a madwoman. I think she's an angry woman. I think she wields her anger like a scalpel, and I want to learn from her precision.
Salon
July 17, 2021
The Holocaust Is My Nationality
In this excerpt from "Praying with Jane Eyre," Vanessa Zoltan writes about learning the art of hospitality in a family of Holocaust survivors.
Hey Alma
July 6, 2021
Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text
Eventually, we decided that sacredness is an act, not a thing. If I can decide that Jane Eyre is sacred, that means it is the actions I take that will make it so. The decision to treat Jane as sacred is an important first step, surely, but that is all the decision was—one step. The ritual, the engagement with the thing, is what makes the thing sacred. Objects are sacred only because they are loved. The text did not determine the sacredness; the actions and actors did, the questions you asked of the text and the way you returned to it.
The Paris Review
July 12, 2021
Bertha Mason is Sacred
Now we were sitting in my dorm room, and one thing still seemed to be on all of our minds: the violent death of Bertha, the famous “madwoman in the attic.” Why does poor Bertha, who has been locked in a tower for more than ten years, jump to her death after setting Thornfield Hall on fire? In comparison with Jane’s cruel Aunt Reed, who gets pages and pages of a pre-Dickensian death scene, all that Bertha gets is “dead as the stone on which her brains and blood were scattered.” Listening to the conversation, it occurred to me that we were all tripping over this because it is a moment when a great injustice is being done. For a novel so obsessed with respect, where is the respect for Bertha? I had asked everyone to treat the novel as sacred. We had met week after week in order to love it, and we are all predisposed to find good in the things we love. But in our group’s last moment together, we were coming up against our faith in the novel as a force for good. We were being confronted with a real victim.
Harvard Divinity Bulletin
Summer/Autumn 2016