This article is part of “Romancing the Smithie,” a series of interviews with Smith alums writing in the romance genre conducted by Sophian Features writers. To explore more articles in this series, click on the author’s names: Sylvie Fox, Sarah Maclean, Shannon O’Brien, Meredith Wild.
Karelia Stetz-Waters ‘99J, a former Duckett resident and current community college professor, is a romance writer who writes happy endings for women in love. She balances her full-time job with her writing career and works to spread awareness of “cliteracy,” with the goal of using her writing as a way to teach people about female sexual pleasure. Her books include “Worth the Wait,” “For Good,” “Something True,” “Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before” and the “Dysphoria” series. Since graduating from Smith, she received her Masters in English and now works and lives in Oregon with her wife. She took a few minutes out of her day to talk to me about her journey into romance, what she learned during her time at Smith and what it is like to be a minority writer in a huge, heteronormative genre.
Serena Keenan: How did you first get into writing?
Karelia Stetz-Waters: I always liked stories, and I came from a family where we have lots of books. When I was a little girl, before I could even write, I loved to tell stories. My mom would set up a tape recorder, so that I could record my stories. I guess that was the start of being a writer for me, but I got serious about it in 2003, when I had to decide between — I had just gotten my master’s degree — and I had to decide between going onto a PhD or not. I realized that if I went on to a PhD, I would have to dedicate most of my time to academic writing, and I really wanted to be a fiction writer, so I decided to not pursue a PhD and threw my heart and soul into fiction writing.
SK: Have you always been drawn to writing romance, or was it mostly fiction and then turned into romance?
KSW: I think that I was always drawn to romance, even though the first few books that I wrote weren’t romance. I wrote a coming of age story that was loosely based on my own life, like a lot of authors do. Then, I wrote two thrillers, but the part of the thriller that I really loved, that really drew me to the writing, was the romantic element in them. They all have female protagonists, and female love interests, and I think that growing up when I did — I came out in high school, in the 90s— and there was still a lot of anti-gay sentiment in Oregon, where I lived at the time, and so love between women was just this unimaginable thing. I really wasn’t sure if I would ever find anyone, if a relationship between two women would last — I was sort of convinced that every woman I loved would leave me for a man. This was like the holy grail, this idea of happy lesbian love. I think that that just stayed with me, that wanting to hear stories about women finding each other and being happy together. Maybe I’m writing those for my younger self.
SK: Traditionally, the romance genre has been dominated by heterosexual couples, and it seems like it could be hard to break that heteronormativity. I was just wondering what your experience has been with that, and whether or not going to Smith helped you feel more confident in doing so?
KSW: It is definitely been a heterosexual genre, and there has been a little niche of gay male romances, but those are mostly written by straight women, for straight women. There’s definitely independent, indie publishers, self-published authors and small presses that are publishing a lot of queer romance, but in the big five — which are the big five publishing conglomerates — it is still really new. I think that I was the first lesbian romance writer at the imprint that I write for. There still are not a lot of queer women romances being published by big mainstream publishers, although I do think that some of the big mainstream — well, I can say, I feel like my publisher has been very supportive of my work, and probably cut me a little slack in terms of sales, knowing that this is a new niche and that it’s harder to sell hundreds of thousands of copies when you are a minority in a genre like this…. I do feel like my experience at Smith gave me confidence and work ethic, too, because I work full time and I write, and there’s a lot of pressure in romance to produce books really quickly, and I don’t produce them nearly as fast as my publisher would probably like, but I definitely learned that crazy, “I can do anything,” work ethic.
SK: Yeah, I feel that.
KSW: You know that work ethic, I’m sure.
SK: On your website it says that you’re really passionate about the concept of cliteracy, so I was just wondering how that became so important to you and what are you hoping that the education will eventually achieve?
KSW: My next novel, which hasn’t come out yet, is set in a feminist sex toy store. When I started researching for that — I always do some research for my books — I just thought that I was going to find some funny stories or interesting products–you know, just get a sense of the culture that you’d experience if you were working in one of these stores. What I found through my research, in addition to that, was that there’s a huge lack of information on women’s pleasure out there. We have porn, most of which is totally male-centric and would be a poor model for how to make love to a woman, and then a lot of abstinence-only education, and even the more inclusive sex education doesn’t talk a lot about pleasure. The book that really made me passionate about this issue is called “Becoming Cliterate” by Laurie Mintz. She is a professor of human sexuality and talks about her young students — women — feeling broken, feeling wrong, thinking there’s something wrong with them because they’re not responding sexually the way they see women in porn respond. The things that they think they’re supposed to like they don’t enjoy, and they come away feeling bad about themselves, bad about sex, and I just felt an enormous amount of sympathy — in part I guess because that demographic are my students, too. I teach at a community college, I care a lot about the young women that I teach, and also feel a lot of sympathy for a generation that grew up with internet and internet pornography and the pressures of social media… there was less information available when I was a teenager, and there was less access to sexual content or gay friendly content, but in another sense I think it was so much easier to be a young woman when I was growing up. So, at least, I think my experience growing up was a lot easier in a lot of ways than what women are experiencing now. It got me really fired up, and a lot of the misinformation that people are getting about female sexual pleasure is due to the fact that the model for sex is male. It’s about the man, his pleasure, penetration, the penis — so I thought, who better to change that narrative than a lesbian romance writer? You take the man out of the equation, and then present an image, a vision, of what entirely woman-centered sex would look like. My hope is that women who sleep with men or men that sleep with women would look at this and say “oh, here’s a model of something we could incorporate.” Not to exclude the other stuff, but to say, “this is equally important.” That’s my hope. We’ll see if that happens.
SK: So, culturally for romance, it feels like there’s definitely a stigma around women reading and writing romance. I was just wondering if you’ve ever experienced any of that, and if so how you’ve dealt with it?
KSW: I definitely think that’s true. I look at how little romance is studied in academia, compared to other popular genres like science fiction, fantasy, or speculative fiction, and I definitely think it’s sexism, because romance is written for women, by women for the most part. It gets discounted as a silly, stupid, trivial genre, and I live a sort of charmed life when it comes to the perceptions of romance in that I am in academia, but we’re a teaching college only, so there’s no pressure to publish books. It’s just a fun thing I do on the side, my boss doesn’t care. But, I think if I had my eye set on an academic position at a university or an MFA program, I don’t think that my career in romance would be respected anywhere near as much as someone who was writing even something like speculative fiction, and certainly not someone who’s writing literary fiction. I even caught myself falling into kind of internalizing some of those stereotypes myself, and when I went to the Romance Writers of America conference last year — I went for the first time…. I met all these incredibly powerful and successful and talented women, and I realized that I had some stereotypes about romance writers myself which I recognized when I noticed my own surprise. I shouldn’t have been surprised that these women were so talented and so successful.
SK: Along those lines, what advice would you give to young gay women who are wanting to break into the romance genre?
KSW: I think that the thing that I would recommend the most would be for them to take their time. Minorities always have to work harder. If you’re going to break in as a minority writer, you have to be better than a lot of the writers who get in with the majority group. I see a lot of people rushing to get their first book out, they’re so excited — and I’ve done this too, I’ve done this too — so excited to be published and get out there that they don’t take time to do their very best work, and I think a first novel should probably take two, three years. After that, the pace picks up a little bit — especially in a genre like romance where there are some conventions to guide the writer — and it’s possible to write faster. I really want to see young queer writers just slow down and really find their own voice, find their style, feel absolutely confident in that first book before jumping out into the world of publishing.
SK: What do you think is the most romantic place at Smith?
KSW: The most romantic place at Smith… I think it’s the little pond outside the greenhouse, especially at night in the spring.
SK: What do you think is the number one thing that you learned in college–whether that was about yourself or about life in general?
KSW: That is a really good question. I think that people probably would’ve said that I had social anxiety when I went to school. We didn’t use that language then, but let’s just say that I was really shy sometimes. I had the areas of my life where I was fairly confident, but it could be really hard for me to assert myself, to stand up for myself, to put myself out there socially and professionally. I think that being at Smith, I really learned and practiced how to navigate in a world that is full of different people and different opinions and conflicts. It gave me at least the foundation from which I built up a great deal of self confidence.
