 Martha Roth showed early promise as a
writer in the 1950s with mordant short stones that viewed the world through what she later
called “an unblinking feminist eye.” She wrote about her generation of young
women and men; girls who satisfied their appetites without suffering; boys who discovered
sexual hypocrisy; drug experiences; politics; menstrual periods. Other writers liked her
work, but editors were squeamish. Although a literary agent sold several of her stories,
agents and publishers told her that if she was going to write what she wanted she would
have an uphill struggle. In the only creative writing course she ever took, at the
University of Chicago in 1958, Saul Bellow picked up her story between two fastidious
fingers and said, “No one wants to read this.”
All this happened before
she was twenty-one. Discouraged, she gave up writing for
ten years while she married, worked as a medical and scientific
editor and raised a family. During the Vietnam war she was
stung into writing again - poetry, this time - by the Kent
State shootings, the mining of Haiphong harbor, her friends
going to prison for resisting the draft. While working as
managing editor of several scientific or scholarly magazines,
she published poetry and essays in literary journals and
wrote a play about prostitution, The Life, for
Minneapolis’s feminist Theater at the Foot of the Mountain.
She then co-wrote a small handful of self-help books, trying
to bring her politics into the budding New Age and Twelve-Step
markets.
With
friends she started the women’s quarterly review
Hurricane Alice, for which she served as executive
editor from 1984 to 1995. Her work began to appear in collections
of essays and stories, and she co-edited the two collections
shown here, Mother Journeys and Transforming
a Rape Culture, in the early 1990s. A revised, updated edition appeared in 2005. Her first novel,
Goodness, was published in 1996 and her book-length
essay-memoir, Arousal. Bodies and Pleasures in
1998. Essays and stories have appeared in Western Humanities
Review, Other Voices, Sojourner,
Esquire, Threepenny Review, North
Stone Review, Harper's, and Another
Chicago Magazine.
She
is currently working on “The White Girl,” a nonfiction
book about painters and models in the mid-nineteenth century.
In 2003 she edited a family memoir written by her mother,
Sylvia Silverman, and published it privately as Yesterday
They Made a New Tsar: A History of the Weinstein-Relkin
Families.
Books
by Martha Roth
available from:
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