Fifty Years of Herstory
A Series of Interviews by Anaïs Godard
Get the 50th anniversary issue of CALYX Journal here
When Brenna asked if I’d like to interview people connected to CALYX for its fiftieth anniversary, I said yes immediately. I hadn’t fully considered what it would mean to sit down, sometimes virtually, sometimes across decades, with women who had built, carried, and occasionally mortgaged their lives for a feminist press.
This series began as curiosity and quickly became something else: lineage.
What I learned, over and over, is that feminist publishing does not survive on manifestos alone. It survives on car titles used as collateral. On chocolate chips thrown at children mid–career-defining phone call. On editors taking out loans while nearly bankrupt because they believe in a book. On taping issues together in the back room of a local printer until 3 a.m., then showing up to work at eight. On writers being rejected two dozen times before a small feminist press says yes—and that yes echoes across the world.
We didn’t think this would last forever. We just thought it was necessary.
CALYX has always been a place where impossible work is taken seriously. Work that doesn’t fit a shelf. Work that doesn’t behave. Work that doesn’t apologize. Over the past few months, I spoke with founders, editors, designers, artists, poets, and prose writers who told me versions of the same story: We didn’t think this would last forever. We just thought it was necessary.
And it still is.
I offered to do this series because, like many writers—especially women and gender-marginalized writers—I have learned that the literary world does not naturally tilt toward us. We build our own gravity. Feminist presses like CALYX are not relics of a past struggle; they are living infrastructures. They are how voices are preserved when history would rather misfile, minimize, or erase them.
What moved me most in these interviews was not nostalgia but continuity. Women passing work, belief, grit, and stubbornness to one another. Editors who remember stapled journals and light tables. Writers who still feel like rock stars because someone showed up to hear them read. A chorus, not a ladder.
These conversations are funny. They are angry. They are tender. They are deeply practical. They are full of devotion: to craft, to community, to the idea that words matter enough to fight for.
I am honored to have gathered these stories. I am grateful to the women who trusted me with them. And I am reminded, once again, that feminist publishing exists not because it is easy or profitable but because it refuses to go quietly.
Fifty years in, CALYX is still here. Which feels, frankly, radical.
Anaïs Godard is a Franco-American writer based in Los Angeles, CA, and former television producer who spent a decade interviewing celebrities. She is the 2025 Mike Resnick Memorial Award winner and a Letter Review Prize recipient. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s, Hobart, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere.