Outsiders on the Inside
SANDRA Gail Lambert took a roundabout path to publication. She didn’t start writing or publishing in earnest until her fifties, after working for years as the co-owner and manager of Charis Books, a collective feminist bookstore in Atlanta. She doesn’t have an MFA or connections to a major publisher. She’s a sixty-six-year-old woman and a self-identified lesbian who also uses a wheelchair. Diagnosed with polio as an infant, Lambert spent her childhood as a military brat, rarely staying in one place for long and moving with her parents to countries such as England and Norway. Along the way she developed a deep love of reading and an intense connection to landscape and nature, which is reflected today in her fiction and essays. The first person in her family to graduate high school and get a college degree, she began working at Charis in 1980. During her time at the bookstore she attended numerous literary events and readings and began to dream of being a writer—one who got to go behind the ropes at book fairs and participate on panels at literary conferences. Today she is living her dream. Her debut novel, The River’s Memory, was published in 2014, when Lambert was sixty-two. Her memoir, A Certain Loneliness, is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. She also received a 2018 NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing and recently took on a mentorship position with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program.
So how did an outsider like Lambert—an older, disabled, gay woman with no MFA or literary agent—break into the seemingly insular American literary community? The answer is as multifaceted as Lambert’s life and as complex as the concept of the outsider itself.
Although the history of Western literature is rich with legends of outsider writers who found success, the scales have always been tipped in favor of men. This imbalance continues today, as evidenced in the annual count conducted by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Since 2010 VIDA’s researchers have collected and analyzed data representing gender disparity in publishing, surveying bylines and coverage in fifteen top print publications each year. The 2017 count, which was
