watched Phantom of the Opera. Movie does not live up to the stage show. But a good watch nonetheless.

I was just looking over that last post, and good gravy, I sound like a damned liberal…or worse: a writer.

Norway decides to cull 25% of wolf herds currently in the country.

All well and good, considering they’re doing it to protect sheep farming. Here’s the kicker though:

they’ve only got, according to the story, 20 wolves.

20. Not thousand. Not hundred, not million. 20. one more than nineteen. And they plan to kill 5 of them. In order to protect an industry(sheep herding) that is done over 90% of the territory. Come on here, you stupid vikings. 20 goddamned wolves do NOT pose a serious threat against an industry that is using that much land. Also, according to the article, they’ve got 250-300 THOUSAND MOOSE AND THIRTY THOUSAND REINDEER.

but apparently 20 wolves are just too many. I’m sorry, but I can’t see it. I’m ashamed to call these people part of my heritage.

Now I don’t know what kind of things were said in defense of the editors or the creators of the book, and I don’t really care. I’m going to respond solely to this post by Jon about the potential need and supposed equality scale inherent in women’s only/men’s only journals.

I think, Jon, what set most people off right away was your word choice in the first sentence: “why people felt threatened by the the fact there was an imbalance” in reference to having only a women’s journal and no men’s journal. I, myself, as an editor of the book last year and this, and website head both last year and this, never once felt ‘threatened’ at the thought of having a women’s only journal on campus. Never in the 6 years of going here was I uncomfortable with having a women’s only journal in Dust And Fire.

As for a need to react to the ‘imbalance’ provided, I can honestly say that getting and keeping this book going was never a reaction to an ‘imbalance’ where I was concerned. Rather it was to do something new, and to offer yet another place for people who want their writing to be published. The question here was niche: what could a new book offer that wasn’t already here? BSU has a book already here for everyone(Rivers Meeting Project) and it is difficult for them to get enough stuff from the campus already. We have a book for high school kids(New Voices), we have a book for Women’s Only(Dust & Fire). That leaves us really with limited options: We could limit it to genre writing, but then our ability to get people to submit would be even more strained. Rather, what could we offer to the writing community that was both unique and able to give BSU something that we, as a community, could be proud of?

The answer was a men’s only journal. Again, I can only speak for myself here, but that’s how it’s always been for me. Another venue of publishing for a regional group of people that make up close to half of the population. That we could point to Dust & Fire and say “Hey! BSU has all these publishing opportunities, here’s one more that is in the same vein of creative fire!” Boom. there we were.

That’s how I see the creation and maintenance of Fire Ring Voices as holding up. Now onto your article. You say there’s an imbalance, or there was by BSU having a women’s only publication. Again, your choice of words speaks oddly. The women on the editorial board last year, out of their mouths, I never heard the word ‘imbalance’. This could be because, if there is a state of imbalance, they were the ones who benefitted from such. The “ruling party”, if you will in the same rhetoric of inequality, never sees an imbalance. We, as male editorial board members, in our meetings, never uttered the word ‘imbalance’. We males, who last year and the last however many years that D&F has been going, never brought up the word imbalance, or equality. We may have said “it’s only fair” in response to D&F last year, but that was to rationalize our existence in first year jitters and difficulties in starting and running a new book. In retrospect this was unneeded and silly. In creative worlds, there is no imbalance, there is only space for different kinds of creation. This book was to offer another space.

This book was never about, as you put it, “who should be able to say what and how much they should say it”. This book was offering a space for creation, to highlight and celebrate the different creative fires that make up the 53% and now the 47% of our human population. You could argue that we(as men) have had this for the last 6000 years. No we haven’t. Northern Minnesota, it is safe to say, has never had this before in this time span. You could argue buddhist/hindu theories of the world’s circularity in time ages, but again, though this may have happened a million years ago, that earth was different than this one and is nothing but a dream of Visnu. What seems to be forgotten in this argument about the equality of the sexes is the importance of a creative space. Writing opportunities are made up of smaller communities striving to be heard. If we choose to ignore one of these communities because of a societal(NOT A CREATIVE) deficit in the last 6000 years is not only foolish, but inhibits the abilities of the human race to create art.

This book creates, in the words of a class from Mythological Studies, a Sacred Space. This space allows men to explore their writing, and give them a community place to do so with other like minded individuals. This sacred space gives the ability to share and to grow, without fears of misguided feminists who have a chip on their shoulder about men, or misguided men who have a chip on their shoulder about crazy writer dudes. Your statement about how “we shouldn’t dwell on the imbalances but instead work on improving ourselves” is directly relevant to creating this space that FRV and D&F gives. When we see what drives us creatively, allows us to make art, from the two different standpoints of our sexualities, we will only improve. To deny one side or the other in a misguided effort to restore ‘balance’ to a balanceless world of creative force is only hurtful to both the world and ourselves.

Why would some women support a male only publication is a question you bring up. The real question is why not? For the amount of years that D&F has successfully been run, why is this the first time that a men’s only publication has started? The answer obviously isn’t a misguided need for, as stated above, a non-existent balance in writing. Rather, we saw a need for a space, and we created it. Kudos to the women and the men who support such a cause, because nobility of the spirit is to be found wherever difference is set aside in order to encourage others to create comfortably.

Now that the ‘balance’ issue has been set aside, perhaps the ‘need’ issue may be addressed. Do we need a men’s only journal? Do we need a women’s only journal? No. We don’t ‘need’ either of these. What we need is creative space, and we have offered two such spaces in an unprecedented ability to gain from the creative fires of the sexes. Since there is no balance issue, no need to set anything ‘right’ or ‘equal’, we can appreciate the viewpoints that both books give us. D&F may have started with the equality goal in mind, but I think that it has grown much more beyond that, and in conjunction with FRV, I hope that the communities can appreciate them both.

Your suggestion to “make sure that all magazines are gender-free” is worthy…to an extent. We need magazines like that, journals like that, free of boundaries. I would be careful when you compare creative magazines and literary things with magazines seen on a stand in a store. Those magazines have no place in a discussion about gender equilibrium in creative magazines. They are a commercial interest run by advertisers. They are no where near the realm that non-profit creative journals inhabit. I’m making no calls on proximity to that realm, but I think it is safe to say that all comparisons in the sexes that those magazines bring up are easily and gratefully put to rest and ignored. However, the discussion at hand deals in creative journals. In these, we should NOT ignore the differences between us that have yet to be explored fully. Nothing makes me shudder like the rumors of combining D&F and FRV. We have not yet seen the full possibilities of two partner journals approaching the creative world from two very different sacred spaces, set aside for our respective genders.

We cannot ignore gender. It is who we are, for some who they will become. If we ignore these differences it leads to psychoses. If we ignore differences in environments and try to live in the desert as we live in northern minnesota, we’ll die and vice versa. Our genders are more of who we are than our environment, how much larger the risk when we ignore them? The unique creative drive of each gender should not be homogenized. We separately are more than the sum of our parts.

Fire Ring Voices is not about a ‘balance’ or ‘equality’ issue. It is about a sacred space for creative forces. The same may be said about Dust and Fire, whether they realize it or not. To limit that space would be to limit our creations, to limit our abilities and to limit what our world could be, even more so that history limited the role of women in the past. In some people’s efforts to restore a ‘balance’ that may never have been there in the first place, is to repeat the mistakes of the past, because once a movement is started to restore a balance, in inevitably overshifts. Rather than seek a balance through a gender free world, as you suggest be done, we should seek a way to celebrate difference. We are not the same, we are all different. The question that now should be asked is whether or not, in our efforts to equalize the world, we steamroll those differences that are especially useful in creative force into something that can never be used or reclaimed.

Fire Ring Voices is an effort to give more people a chance to create, not a journal that touts its men only exclusivity in response to Dust and Fire’s women’s only writing. To view it otherwise is to mistake its intentions and the creative forces that form our writing.