Cate Wiley (she/her) graduated with a Ph.D. from UW-Madison in 1990 in English with a Women’s Studies minor
Check out her work here and listen to her talk about her new play Sheltered here.
Bio and Background: share anything you’d like to about yourself and what you are up to now!
I grew up in Penfield, New York as a bookish theater nerd hoping for a career on the stage. Bookishness prevailed and I did an undergraduate degree in Humanities at the University of Chicago, combining Theater with Medieval Studies and French (they did not have a theater major back then). I was cold in the Windy City, so moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico for six months where I taught English and learned Spanish. Then graduate work at the University of Texas-Austin and a crash course in politics around US aggression in Central America and a trip to Nicaragua. I moved to Madison in 1986 to do a PhD and got hired at the University of Colorado-Denver where I taught in the English Department for many years. In Denver, I published poetry and started to write plays and spent a lot of time hiking. I adopted my daughter, Claire, from China and was fortunate to have on-campus daycare and decent public schools for her to thrive. She is now a Social Worker living in Philadelphia. In Denver, I volunteered with women experiencing homelessness at a church shelter, and conversations with those incredible women led to my play, Sheltered. I moved to New York City in January of 2020, caught Covid in March and spent the pandemic feeling immune from the virus and was lucky not to get sick again. I wrote some Zoom plays which I hope never to do again, and am working my way into the rich and diverse theater world of NYC, with an off-Broadway production of Sheltered coming up in January.
How does Gender and Women’s Studies/LGBTQ+ studies matter in the day-to-day of your professional life?
I write about women in part because women’s stories are still underrepresented in all the arts. I mostly know why, thanks to my work at UW-Madison. I will always focus on women characters, some of them feminist some of them not, and I’m learning not to take feminism for granted.
Do you have advice for students who may share your interests and may want to pursue a similar graduate degree and/or career?
I got side-tracked with an academic career but it did allow me the financial security and stability to raise my daughter. It has taken me a long time to figure out what I really want to be doing, but teaching drama and women writers in Denver was a lot of fun. Those of you with an impractical passion should try to follow it, even realizing it may not be the way you pay the bills.
What do you remember fondly from the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies? Favorite class? Instructor?
One of the most important things I did in Madison was working with other graduate students, mostly in History and English, on abortion rights. Our group DARE (Defend Abortion Rights Emergency) organized clinic defenses at a Dane County clinic, facing off with aggressive anti’s and helping clients access the clinic. This organizing work involved many hours of meetings (in person! Our high-tech device was a phone-tree), rallies, and protests. One of my recent plays, Viable, has a scene in a clinic parking lot based on my work in Madison.
Academically, I had many brilliant professors at UW. Two who were quite different, and who sadly are no longer alive, were Nellie McKay in English and Elaine Marks in French. Nellie taught standing-room only courses in Black women writers and insisted that no matter what we were writing, we had to examine racism. Elaine introduced me to French feminist thinkers whose theories felt profoundly liberating to my twenty-something self. Both Nellie and Elaine had wicked senses of humor, rarely indulged, but a great reminder that laughter can be smart. I use humor in my plays as often as I can.
What, if anything, do you wish you could tell your undergraduate self?
I wasn’t an undergrad at Madison but I would tell graduate students to support each other as loudly as they can! Writing a dissertation (or even an undergraduate thesis) is lonely work and leads, for many of us, to agonizing self-doubt about whether we are good enough. I know women, women-identified, and LGBTQ students can still feel this way, especially in a national culture that denigrates us. We’re not all the same but we’re all in the fight together.