Santa Barbara’s Advocacy Press Takes Off

With Mother’s Day fast upon us, it seemed a good time to take a look at “Mother Daughter Choices,” the latest offering from Santa Barbara’s own Advocacy Press.

“Communication between mothers and daughters is one of the banes of existence,” said Mindy Bingham, the publisher of the 6-year-old nonprofit venture. Bingham is a single mother herself, having reared her high school freshman daughter Wendy on her own since the child was 2.

Advocacy Press was little more than a toddler itself when its first book “Choices” (subtitle: “A Teen Woman’s Journal for Self-Awareness and Personal Planning”) came out six years ago. Like many small presses that spring into existence because conventional publishing houses do not share their objectives, Santa Barbara-based Advocacy was launched as a nonprofit endeavor that sought to develop “equity-oriented” publications.

Six years later, Advocacy is approaching sales of $1 million per year. The runaway success of “Choices,” now used in schools and public service programs across the country, prompted Advocacy publisher Bingham to co-write and publish “Challenges,” a companion volume for teen-age boys. The two books now boast more than half a million copies in print. In turn, they have spawned “Changes,” a guidebook for re-entry women and displaced homemakers, and “More Choices,” for men and women balancing careers and families.

But “Choices” and “Challenges” could not by themselves erase the tough realities that Advocacy was created to address. Every 90 seconds in this country, a teen-age girl becomes pregnant, and about 95% of those girls who complete their pregnancies will keep their babies to rear themselves. With well over 50% of the mothers of children 2 years old and younger in the workplace, employment outside the home is no longer an option for most young women. Advocacy’s quiet propaganda may have sought to instruct teen-age girls not to expect a future in which Prince Charming arrives to rescue them from all their woes, but it seems that the seeds of that mythology are planted much, much earlier.

So Bingham and her colleagues decided to set their sights toward a younger audience as well. Advocacy Press’ children’s books began with “Father Gander Nursery Rhymes,” a combination of rewritten and original nursery rhymes that attempts to take ageism, sexism and violence out of the traditional Mother Goose stories. Next came Bingham’s own “Minou,” an allegorical tale about a cat in Paris that teaches self-reliance.

Books about individuality, growth and change and winning and losing came next. In the meantime, however, Bingham had her own confrontation with the Advocacy-approved principles of introspection and self-sufficiency last year when she was suddenly taken ill with a mysterious affliction. Doctors at first dismissed her condition as a result of stress and nervous exhaustion. Later, they revised their opinions and told her she had a tumor of the adrenal gland.

“It comes from having too much adrenalin pumped through your body,” Bingham said. “It’s either how to start a publishing company, or what happens when you do.”

Confined to her hospital bed, Bingham dreamed up a line of Advocacy books for young readers that would capture the experiences of important, but perhaps lesser-known women in history. Still flat on her back, she then wrote the first one. “Berta Benz and the Motorwagon” tells the story of the first automobile in history.

Advocacy Press funnels its proceeds back to the Girls Club of Greater Santa Barbara. Its next book will focus on the problems of teen parenting, based on interviews with teen-age parents. Bingham, meanwhile, is working with New York literary agent Julian Bach as she shapes a proposed book on how to rear financially responsible children.

What success Advocacy has had, Bingham contends, can be traced to “staying in our niche.” But Bingham is a businessperson who believes that “if you’re going to be an entrepreneur you have to constantly keep your goals an arm’s length ahead of you.” Her endeavor may well grow even larger, she said.

“If it hadn’t been for my health,” Bingham said, “we’d already be even bigger.”

Novelist James Salter, 63, has been named the winner of the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his collection of short stories, “Dusk” (North Point Press, 1988). Salter’s five novels published between 1957 and 1979 are “The Hunters,” “The Arm of Flesh,” “Light Years,” “Solo Faces” and “A Sport and a Pastime.”

Salter will be presented with the award of $7,500 at a ceremony May 13 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.

Four other writers who were nominated for the award will receive $2,500 each and include: Isaac Bashevis Singer (“The Death of Methuselah,” Farrar Straus Giroux), Thomas Savage (“The Corner of Rife and Pacific,” William Morrow), Mary McGarry Morris (“Vanished,” Viking), Thomas Flanagan (“The Tenants of Time,” E. P. Dutton). The judges were Alan Cheuse, Marita Golden and Frank Conroy.