V OICES
C
BOOKS
ALYX Books explores literary
waters that have been feared
and ignored. Since 1976, this
independent Corvallis press
has published the literature and
artwork of emerging women artists. Like a
flower’s calyx, the whorl of leaves that sup-
ports a flower’s bud, CALYX has support-
ed more than 3,500 women writers, many
of them now renowned authors in their own
right, including Natalie Goldberg, Barbara
Kingsolver and Ursula K. Le Guin.
CALYX is one of a handful of feminist
literary journals that has survived and thrives
beyond the second wave of the feminist
movement. In 1973, three feminist journals
existed in the United States. “I had always
been a big reader,” founder Margarita
Donnelly said. “Then as I became a feminist,
I realized I had read mostly men. After that I
spent a year reading only women writers.”
Donnelly began discussing women’s lit-
erature with others. Out of those meetings
came the four founders of CALYX: Barbara
Baldwin, Elizabeth McLagan, Meredith
Jenkins and Donnelly. They solicited funds
from the newly established Women’s
Resource Fund. “We applied along with a
group that became a women’s crisis center.
We all drove to Portland together for an
interview and sat in a circle,” she said.
“[The fund] had a lump sum of money to
give out and wanted the applicants to decide
how much money everybody got. I think we
got $600 and the crisis center got $1,200.
And from that came our first issue.”
In the beginning the journal was called
CALYX Northwest Literary Review. Soon
the press was receiving submissions from all
over the country, and then the world. I spoke
with New Mexico-based author Natalie
Goldberg, who has published 10 books and
whose 1986 publication, Writing Down the
Bones, has sold more than a million copies.
CALYX published Goldberg in 1979. “Once
I got my voice as a woman I really wanted to
write,” she said. “I had determination to put
women’s experience out there.”
It was a few years ago that I discovered
CALYX and 30 years since Donnelley real-
ized she had not read enough women as part
of her academic training. In some ways, I
guess things haven’t changed that much.
I sat fuming in my college library. I had
nearly earned a BA in English, but women
were almost absent from the required canon.
When I was assigned to read Emily Dickinson
and Kate Chopin, I jumped like a starved ani-
mal. I needed to hear women’s words. The
same impetus that propelled Donnelley and
three others to sit around their kitchen tables
and put women’s writing between hard covers
led me to their journal decades later.
It was a spring afternoon and rain soaked
into the mountains as I drove to the coast. Ani
DiFranco played on the stereo. That evening
in Newport, four contributors to CALYX’s
25th anniversary anthology, A Fierce
Brightness, were to read from the book. I was
excited and nervous to be travelling alone,
underbelly
S O L D I E R S O N . by Kate Storm
hearing women I admired, and spending the
night in my car beside the ocean.
In Newport, a windowless, bleak-looking
building called The Dogwood turned out to
be the place. Donnelly read several of her
favorite poems from the book. I remember
being struck by her mix of gentle voice and
tenacious speech. I was starkly aware this
woman had worked very hard for a very long
time. She read a poem by Wislawa
“rather than writing with an overriding
political agenda. Perhaps it’s partly because
I am Native American, and what’s impor-
tant to the Native community are our sto-
ries, the stories of who we are, the story of
how we have survived this culture.”
Gould was published in CALYX’s 1984
anthology of Native American and Latina
women’s work, Bearing Witness/Sobreviviendo.
“When I began looking to be published,” she
MARGARITA DONNELLY,
CO-FOUNDER OF CALYX BOOKS
PHOTO BY TODD COOPER
C A LY X
FROM THE
Szymborska titled “Drinking Wine:” “I am
dancing, dancing/ in astonished skin, in/ an
embrace that creates me.” Szymborska won
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
Portland author Janice Gould was very
comfortable on stage, and she had a sweet-
ness about her. She read several newer
poems, and one from A Fierce Brightness
about the death of her grandmother. Later,
after the other women had read, Gould
came back on stage and strummed flamen-
co from a borrowed guitar. It was great.
“I’ve always written my story,” she said,
said, “it was small presses like CALYX that
were seeking the unheard voices of Native
and lesbian women. It was part of a political
and social commitment. Today they still pro-
vide an alternative voice to the big, well-
known established world of publishing.”
Small presses continue to push radical
literature into the mainstream by distribut-
ing work that lies outside the norm. For
example, the feminist literary movement of
the late 20th century created a market for
women’s writing that had not existed
before. Today, most corporate publishers
have substantial women’s lists.
“I do CALYX and so do the rest of us
because we believe women’s voices contin-
ue to be overlooked in the world,” Donnelly
said. “We believe in giving voice to those
who would not otherwise be published.”
I imagine the multi-million dollar pub-
lishing world as shiny white offices full of
windows and soft lighting. CALYX’s office
walls are gray. The company is hidden over
a clothing shop, up a long flight of stairs
and down a dark hallway. The entryway is
stuffed to the ceiling with books.
“This is where we keep other small
press journals that are sent to us,” Donnelly
said with a wave of her hand. The other two
rooms were dim and full of papers, awk-
wardly placed tables and desks, and more
books. “And here is my office,” she
announced. The room we stood in was
about 15 feet long and 4 feet wide. As
Donnelly spoke with me, a few sunbeams
crept through one of the few windows and
moved across her shoulders. Her desk was
brimming with notes on grant writing and
fund raising. These days, Donnelly is pri-
marily concerned with financial survival.
“CALYX is keeping literature alive in
America,” Goldberg said. “For some time
now the publishing world has been very
generic, only shooting for best sellers. Small
presses are the underbelly of that world, the
ones supporting real literature and supporting
voices [that are] distinguished and varied.”
Gould agreed, noting that CALYX is
committed to literary writing that is “inter-
esting, intense, innovative and experimen-
tal.” That kind of work has a smaller audi-
ence of readers who are choosy about what
they’re going to read, she said. “CALYX is
a place where that hunger will be met.”
The press has been supported by the
National Endowment for the Arts and the
Oregon Arts Commission. Several of their
publications have been nationally recog-
nized, including Forbidden Stitch, which
won the American Book Award.
CALYX continues to move against the
tide of the publishing industry. “The changes
in the industry have been horrendous,”
Donnelly said. “Since the introduction of
superstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders,
we’ve lost 50 percent of our independent
bookstores.” Small booksellers sell the major-
ity of CALYX’s work.
Still, CALYX continues. The press recent-
ly released a book of poems by Carol Guess,
Femme’s Dictionary, the next issue of CALYX
Journal of Art and Literature by Women will
be out this winter and they are set to release a
revised edition of Barbara Scot’s book, The
Violet Shyness in Her Eyes: Notes from Nepal,
which won the PNBA book prize.
I asked Donnelly about the consistent qual-
ity of CALYX, something both Goldberg and
Gould remarked upon. “We have always been
committed to publishing a literary journal of
good quality to show that women writers are
serious and important writers and artists,” she
said. “We let the work stand for itself.” A
WHAT’S HAPPENING Corvallis • 3