Rebecca Solnit is smarter than you, and she's not sorry about it. Photograph: David Levene
Rebecca Solnit is a prolific author (she's working now on her sixteenth and seventeenth books), historian, activist and a contributing editor to Harper's. Her most recent book, Men Explain Things to Me, is a collection of Solnit's essays, including the title piece that launched a million memes. Solnit, on the road in Seattle, took some time to explain "mansplaining", writing and how the post-Isla Vista misogyny conversation is a little like climate denialism.

JESSICA VALENTI: How do you feel about being considered the creator of the concept of "mansplaining"? Your now-famous essay – which really gave women language to talk about the condescending interactions they've had with men – certainly gave birth to the term, but you write in the book that you didn't actually make up the word.

REBECCA SOLNIT: A really smart young woman changed my mind about it. I used to be ambivalent, worrying primarily about typecasting men with the term. (I have spent most of my life tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of men, though of course the book Men Explain Things to Me is what happens when I set that exhausting, doomed project aside.) Then in March a PhD candidate said to me, No, you need to look at how much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience every woman has but we didn't have language for.

And that's something I'm really interested in: naming experience and how what has no name cannot be acknowledged or shared. Words are power. So if this word allowed us to talk about something that goes on all the time, then I'm really glad it exists and slightly amazed that not only have I contributed about a million published words to the conversation but maybe, indirectly, one new word.