Mackenzi Lee and Joy McCullough know a badass woman when they see one, and for Women’s History Month, they discuss how they tackle writing about them.
About the authors
Mackenzi Lee is the New York Times bestselling author of The Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue and Bygone Badass Broads, a book based on her Twitter series highlighting remarkable and trailblazing women from all over the world.
Joy McCullough is a writer and playwright from Seattle, Washington. Her much-anticipated debut novel, Blood Water Paint, is out now.
Writing historical women
JM: Mackenzi, I am SO excited for your upcoming book, Bygone Badass Broads! I have followed your Twitter threads for ages. In a completely hilarious and conversational manner, you share the stories of totally kickass historical women — sometimes known to history, but often quite forgotten.
How did you get started writing these threads? Were you surprised by the response? At what stage did you start thinking they might make a book?
ML: My first Bygone Badass Broads thread was about Mary Shelley, and it was on her birthday. I posted it mostly because my only book out at the time was a Frankenstein retelling, and I was (and am still) obsessed with Mary Shelley and her incredible life. I expected to be unfollowed en masse because in my experience, long tirades about history don’t win you many friends, but instead it got a huge and positive response. A little while later, I was researching a book about Annie Oakley, another incredible lady, and was so in awe of her awesomeness that I had to tweet about her too. And again, got a huge positive response. It was this, combined with the fact that I kept coming upon amazing stories of women in history that I was desperate to share, that led me to start the series. I never thought it would take off, let alone be a book. It was just something I did because I love history, and especially women in history whose stories have been largely untold in comparison to male counterparts.
My turn for a question! Where did you first learn about Artemisia Gentileschi because in spite of the fact that I’m pretty well versed in my historical ladies, I had never heard of her until I picked up Blood Water Paint!
JM: I first heard a reference to Artemisia in The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. A character speculates whether an Artemisia Press is named for the Persian lady general from Herodotus, the Roman matron who ate the ashes of her dead husband so her body could become his living sepulcher (!!!), or the Renaissance painter. I hadn’t heard of ANY of those, so I went searching. When I learned about Artemisia Gentileschi’s story, I was outraged I hadn’t heard of her before. I think it’s so important to examine whose stories get told and whose get shoved into the darkest corners of history.
ML: That’s how I find so many of my badass broads–a passing mention in something, and then I go investigate.
JM: How did you go about choosing which women to feature in Bygone Badass Broads?
ML: When I chose women from the book, I created a spreadsheet of hundreds of women, mapping out where they were from, when they were from, their religion, sexual identity, gender identity, race, and what field they were in. I wanted more than anything for this collection to reflect the diversity of history’s most kickass broads. There are a lot of super cool books about women in history coming out right now, and I love them all, but I’ve been a little frustrated by how 20th century and western focused they are. So all of that went into consideration when I chose the women to feature. But really, it’s less a matter of choosing and more narrowing down–I could have made this book a thousand pages and still not talked about everyone I wanted to.
JM: Well maybe you can write a whole series of Bygone Badass Broads books! We’ve got to get more of these awesome stories out in the world! (Though you’re certainly doing your part already!)
ML: Get my agent on the phone because gosh I’d love to write a whole series of them.
One of the most striking things to me about Blood Water Paint is that it’s written in verse! I’m not usually a verse novel reader, and I admit, when I opened it I panicked because verse is scary. But it was so readable and so perfect for the story, I can’t imagine it any other way. What made you choose to write in verse? What were the challenges of it?
JM: My mother didn’t fully understand what verse meant. When she finally saw it, she said, “Why did you write it in poetry? Why would you make it harder than it has to be for teen readers?” And of course, teen readers can handle as much complexity as adult readers. But setting that aside, it’s such a common idea that poetry is hard. I think it comes from mind-numbing English classes spent parsing the poetry of dead white guys. After my mom had read just a few pages, she looked up and said, “It’s not hard! It’s actually really accessible!”
I think verse novels are very accessible, especially to teen readers. With verse, basically everything is stripped away but the emotional core of the story. And with a historical novel—especially a distant historical novel like mine, set in 1611—it can be really easy for the details of day-to-day life to distance the reader. When those things are stripped away, though, I think it makes it easier for the reader to relate the story to their own time and life.
Now, your wonderful book The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is a prose historical novel that goes into rich detail about all aspects of the historical period without distancing the reader in any way—it’s period-accurate, while also feeling completely fresh and engaging. That’s very hard to do.
I’ve heard you say that you wrote Gentleman’s Guide as something completely fun that you never thought anyone else would read. Can you talk about your process of figuring out what your next story is, and when you invite that first reader in?
ML: Usually my process is to torture myself writing the wrong thing for a long time, cheat on that project with something on the side that I’m working on “just for fun,” and then realize after a lot of angst and tears that what should actually be my work in progress is the fun project. In the case of Gentleman’s Guide, I had an “Untitled YA Novel” under contract with my publisher, and I was killing myself trying to pry the book out of me that I had first proposed to them. It had a cool setting, and a cool magic system, but I just couldn’t make it work. After missing deadlines, getting a new editor, and retooling the over 10 completely different drafts, I was sick of it. I had bled all the joy out of this project by trying to force something that just wasn’t right.
So I started writing something on the side simply to prove to myself that writing wasn’t terrible and that I was capable of it. I love adventure novels, and I wanted to write the silliest, tropiest historical adventure novel I could. My rule in those early days of drafting was nothing too insane or ridiculous, no joke too inappropriate so long as it made me laugh. But I always considered it as something that was just for me, my weird historical fanfiction to inspire me to work on the book I should be working on (I should have caught on a lot quicker than I did). Eventually, I hit a point with the original book where I had to either commit to revamping it entirely (again) or bail. And I chose to bail. And then chose not to bail. And then chose to bail again. All over the course of about 20 1:00 a.m. emails to my agent. But in the end, I showed her the first chapter of what would become Gentleman’s Guide, and she said write that.
JM: So many writers think having books under contract is the dream. No longer toiling alone! Someone excited to read your next book! Getting paid to write it! But it brings a very new and different pressure from when you’re writing that debut novel with only your own deadlines and expectations. When I wrote Blood Water Paint, I had gone through so much rejection and I was utterly unconvinced there was any chance this book was going to sell, so I stopped thinking about the market. I let it be what it wanted to be—completely feminist, and surreal, and just plain bizarre in some ways, and it turned out to be the book that would finally sell.
ML: You say verse is really stripped down and I’m so curious about that. For me, as a historical writer, the setting and time and place and those lush details that make up the world are the things that really get me excited about historical fiction, and I rely so much upon them to create the story and the world. How do you build a historical world in verse? Because in spite of how stripped down verse is, I never forgot it was historical, or felt like I was detached from the world because of it.
JM: I think part of why verse and historical feel like a natural fit to me is because I was a playwright first, and indeed Blood Water Paint was a play first. I’m used to telling a story only with dialogue, which is always about either revealing or masking feelings. As a playwright, I leave the rest of the historical detail to the designers and directors. So while I love to read a lushly built historical world (like the ones you write), it’s not where my skills lead me. Honestly, just about everything in the book that indicates the historical period came through revisions with my agent or editor. I’m so grateful to both of them.
Okay, final question: Which five historical figures would you invite to a dinner party?
ML: Only five? This is unreasonable. Teddy Roosevelt, Mary Shelley, La Maupin, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Julia Child to cook!
JM: You’re right, it’s so unreasonable I’m not even going to try to answer it myself—I’ll just come to your dinner party!
This was so fun. Thanks for chatting with me, Mackenzi!
About ‘Bygone Badass Broads’
Based on Mackenzi Lee’s popular weekly Twitter series of the same name, Bygone Badass Broads features 52 remarkable and forgotten trailblazing women from all over the world. With tales of heroism and cunning, in-depth bios and witty storytelling, Bygone Badass Broads gives new life to these historic female pioneers.
Starting in the fifth century BC and continuing to the present, the book takes a closer look at bold and inspiring women who dared to step outside the traditional gender roles of their time. Coupled with riveting illustrations and Lee’s humorous and conversational storytelling style, this book is an outright celebration of the badass women who paved the way for the rest of us.
About ‘Blood Water Paint’
Her mother died when she was twelve, and suddenly Artemisia Gentileschi had a stark choice: a life as a nun in a convent or a life grinding pigment for her father’s paint.
She chose paint.
By the time she was seventeen, Artemisia did more than grind pigment. She was one of Rome’s most talented painters, even if no one knew her name. But Rome in 1610 was a city where men took what they wanted from women, and in the aftermath of rape Artemisia faced another terrible choice: a life of silence or a life of truth, no matter the cost.
He will not consume
my every thought.
I am a painter.
I will paint.
Joy McCullough’s bold novel in verse is a portrait of an artist as a young woman, filled with the soaring highs of creative inspiration and the devastating setbacks of a system built to break her. McCullough weaves Artemisia’s heartbreaking story with the stories of the ancient heroines, Susanna and Judith, who become not only the subjects of two of Artemisia’s most famous paintings but sources of strength as she battles to paint a woman’s timeless truth in the face of unspeakable and all-too-familiar violence.
I will show you
what a woman can do.