There's still sexism in the world, so there's still sexism in publishing and in graduate school. But it is different. Now, it's more coded and harder to detect. It was more explicit when I was in school. There were no rules against male professors asking out female students. The reverse didn't happen since female professors were rare or nonexistent. Visiting writers came, 90% of them male, and some expected that a female student would materialize as his date for the visit.

I started writing nonfiction because nonfiction is well-suited to subjects that, if you wrote them as fiction, people would say, "I don't believe this. This is a little outlandish".

There's still sexism in the world, so there's still sexism in publishing and in graduate school. But it is different. Now, it's more coded and harder to detect. It was more explicit when I was in school. There were no rules against male professors asking out female students. The reverse didn't happen since female professors were rare or nonexistent. Visiting writers came, 90% of them male, and some expected that a female student would materialize as his date for the visit.

The advice I give is , "Don't think of your career as a plan or blueprint. Think of it as growing toward the most light. Keep your eyes open about where the best experiences are happening." Everyone wants to see how someone else managed, defying odds.

Grading creative writing is always an ethical dilemma. But what you brought up about grading personal stories versus the research paper is of course a truly volatile issue in teaching memoir or the personal essay, because there's no pretense that the narrator is a character.

I know a few women younger than me who have careers and children, and so the burgeoning career and family happen at the same time. A few have said something like, "During dating, he was all about feminism. But now I have to ask him to help with the children, I have to ask him to do the dishes, and every time he does, it's like a favor. Where's the feminist I married?" That's theoretical feminism, not practical feminism. I don't think we're all where we need to be. I don't know if we will be in my lifetime. Life is imperfect. But interesting.

Historians will look back on this era and how the Internet changed what we value, what we consider art, the way we think, the way we define what it means to be human. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling describes the changes that occurred between about 1850 and 1920, due to the Industrial Revolution and the resulting migration of people from small communities to relative anonymity in cities. Because of that paradigm shift, ideas about what it means to be an individual underwent a transformation that leeched into all areas. Art, psychology, history, marriage, gender.