A Feminist With Funny First Novel

Willis Jane Digby wears a tuxedo and rabbit ears to get into the mood for reading the letters-to-the-editor at SIS magazine, “a bimonthly cross between a feminist Time and a liberated Ladies’ Home Journal.”

Digby wears her ears for a newspaper photographer in poet Carol Muske-Dukes’ wacky first novel, “Dear Digby,” newly out from Viking. But her creator isn’t about to follow suit.

Muske-Dukes owns a pair of wired-together rabbit ears someone gave her as a joke, but she blushes at the idea of putting them on. Instead, she offers the ears to her 5-year-old daughter, Annie, who wears them willingly.

A picture of herself in rabbit ears “is the sort of thing that could follow you for the rest of your life,” the writer says. “I don’t think I’d ever live it down.”

Muske-Dukes draws clear lines between herself and her character in every way. “I really dislike the idea that when you write a novel, you’re writing autobiography,” she says. That idea “gives no credence to the transformative power of the imagination.”

At 42, Muske-Dukes seems both self-assured and somewhat demure. Married for six years to actor David Dukes, she lives in a light-filled house on a quiet street in Hancock Park. She teaches fiction and poetry writing at USC, where she’s an assistant professor.

David Dukes puts in an appearance to say hello, then takes Annie and the 5-year-old family dog, Digby, for a walk. (“I figured if you name your dog after your novel, it’ll embarrass you enough to make you finish” the book, Muske-Dukes says.)

Well-respected in literary circles (she’s won praise from Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Carolyn Kizer and Donald Justice, critic Marjorie Perloff and others), Muske-Dukes has published three books of poetry and continues to publish poems and essays under her maiden name.

She reviews poetry for the New York Times Book Review and her fourth book of poems, “Applause,” is due out from the University of Pittsburgh Press in May. Although she’s published under the surname Muske all these years, the writer added her husband’s last name for her novel because “the novel felt so different.” The part-time name change “doesn’t really make sense but it does to me in some writerly way,” she says.

Mixed Reviews

Early reviews of the book have been mixed. Publishers Weekly called the novel a “silly, sentimental valentine of a book saved by Dukes’ natural flair for comedy” while Library Journal tagged it “funny, sad and highly recommended” and Kirkus Reviews described the book as “something of a Miss Lonelyhearts for the liberated Eighties.” Several film companies, including Bette Midler’s All Girl Productions, have expressed interest.

Like her character Digby, Muske-Dukes was a tomboy. She grew up in St. Paul, Minn., with four brothers and a sister, attended Catholic schools, studied English and journalism at Creighton University in Nebraska and earned a master’s degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University.

Also like her character, the writer is a strong feminist. “I was always a feminist, from the time I was a kid, actually. I thought certain things that are considered masculine would be open to me, and I was quite shocked to discover they weren’t,” she says. “I expected to have no obstacles in my path, the way young men expect. I was quite a happy child but an unhappy adolescent” when, at puberty, she began encountering societal expectations that women be “fragile, and weak, and indecisive.”

After she finished school, Muske-Dukes went to Europe for a year and stumbled into a job singing in the French stage production of the musical, “Hair.”

“I was disastrous,” she remembers. “My French was inadequate, so when they said ‘stand up’ I’d sit down.”

Back in the United States, she lived in New York City for 12 years, free-lancing articles to Ms, the Village Voice and other publications, teaching part-time at Columbia University, working as an assistant editor for the literary magazine Antaeus and founding a writing program for Rikers Island prison inmates, “Art Without Walls.” For a few years she was married to Edward Healton, a neurologist; metaphors drawn from the human nervous system run through some of Muske-Dukes’ poetry. She also taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, UC Irvine, George Washington University and elsewhere.

Numerous Grants

Muske-Dukes has won numerous grants, including a 1981 Guggenheim fellowship in poetry that paid her way for a year in Italy. There she met David Dukes while he worked on the television miniseries, “The Winds of War.”

“We traveled all over the Italian countryside together. It was like a fairy tale. It was very romantic, I have to admit,” she says. Back in the United States, they were a bi-coastal couple until her pregnancy, when she moved to Los Angeles.

“I think our marriage works because we’re from different worlds and we can teach each other a lot about what we do,” she says. “We have friends in both worlds. It’s invigorating.”

David Dukes is “a very good critic” of her writing, Muske-Dukes says. When she reads things to him “he’ll give me his instant feedback, which is uncannily and annoyingly right. He’s a natural editor, I guess.” The two have written a screenplay together, and “I’m trying to get my husband to work with me, to write a (stage) play. I don’t know why I keep trying these projects that terrify me!”

The idea for Muske-Dukes’ novel originated in her New York years, from conversations with a good friend who worked as letters editor at Ms. But SIS, the author hastens to add, “really isn’t Ms. It’s just a mythical feminist magazine.”

At first, Muske-Dukes and the letters editor planned to write the novel together. The editor, however, lost interest, and Muske-Dukes also found herself losing steam. She put the manuscript away for six years.

But the idea stayed with her, and she returned to it in the summer of 1987, when she and her husband lived in London while he acted in the Eugene O’Neill play “Strange Interlude,” with Glenda Jackson.

“I guess I had been writing (the novel) all those years in my head, because (in London) I found myself sitting down at 9 or 10 at night and writing” steadily, Muske-Dukes says. “It was a remarkable experience; it just came all of a piece; it just flowed.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever write another novel,” she adds. “I’m not a natural fiction writer. I feel poetry comes much more easily. In poetry I feel like I’m working on long-term themes, life themes. With fiction, there’s that linear release, that sense of a door closing” once an event is described.

“I think poetry can save the world. I’m a real believer in its power of healing and transforming. I wish more people read it. . . . Poetry is probably as close as I would get to religious feeling. I think poetry makes the world stand still,” Muske-Dukes says.

Yet she turned to fiction, she says, because “there’s a point at which you feel poetry is so cut off from the majority of people in the world, or the majority of people in the world are cut off from it. (With fiction) you at least have the illusion people can pick up your words and understand them.”

Her first book of poetry, “Camouflage,” was published in 1975 by University of Pittsburgh Press. Muske-Dukes’ poems, particularly those of “Skylight” (Doubleday: 1981) and “Wyndmere” (University of Pittsburgh: 1985) and the coming “Applause” “are probably a lot closer to my self” than the fiction, she says. “They draw on my life; they’re closer to the voice I cannot use in everyday life to express what I feel.”

These days, much of the writer’s energy goes into teaching her USC classes and taking care of her daughter.

Annie appears in a number of the writer’s newest poems. “I’m not consciously trying to include her, but she’s part of my psyche and she just keeps turning up. She functions as a kind of touchstone in the poems.

A writer who seems to have everything--work she loves, enough money, critical acclaim, charming husband and child--Muske-Dukes asserts that she’s worked hard to reach this point in her career, but she also feels “there’s a special blessing in my life; there’s an angel.

“Guardian angels, I believe in those. There’s something out there, something that’s kept me safe and blessed me. I think if you leave yourself open to possibility, the world is filled with miracles.”