Women Speaking Up
At first, the authors of these books seem to have little in common but gender. Look more closely, though, and you'll find a shared sense of adventure, a willingness to throw off insecurities and embark on daring creative journeys.
To exploit the power of writing, women first have to find the power to write. Write from the Heart: Inspiration and Exercises for Women Who Want to Write (Ten Speed Press, 1-58008-505-9) by prolific fiction and children's author Lesla Newman, is aimed at women who want to stop making excuses for not writing~such as "I'm too old, too dumb, too sentimental." Most of the exercises are guided free-writes, such as making lists of forbidden activities like telling lies, then writing fictional scenes about them. Newman enlivens her chapters with anecdotes from her own life. "My life is quite ordinary," she writes. "I get up, shower, dress, eat breakfast, and sit down to write at 9:15 five mornings a week: You may be wondering, 'What in the world does she have to write about?' Nothing much. Absolutely everything. The stuff of my life, which is ordinary yet extraordinary."
Women tend to devalue their writing and experience, says Janet Lynn Roseman in The Way of the Woman Writer, Second Edition (The Haworth Press, 0-7890-1832-2). Roseman, a writing workshop leader and clinical instructor in family
medicine at Brown
University, concentrates on women's autobiographical writing, urging her readers to stop taking an "apologetic stance" and being their own harshest critics. Roseman offers practical advice~such as encouraging writers to make an appointment to write, even if it's only once a week, and mark it on their calendars. At the same time, her approach is far from prosaic. She asserts that writing should be a meditative, almost spiritual experience. The chapters of the book add up to a writing roadmap~each building on the next, showing readers the way to confident, unapologetic self-expression.
Claiming A Room Of One's Own
Women who've already found their voice explore how they did it in Herspace: Women, Writing, and Solitude (The Haworth Press, 0-7890-1820-9), a collection of essays by female writers addressing issues that trouble many women, not just those who want to write. Edited by Jo Malin and Victoria Boynton, both professors at SUNY, and created by writers such as poet Christina Pugh, these essays explore the search to achieve equilibrium, touching on themes including the correlation between solitude and being able to write; finding a space, both mental and physical, for the creative process to flow; and balancing a writing life and a home life. Finding that balance may require anything from working late at night while the family sleeps to choosing to live alone. What matters is acknowledging that women, be they mothers, professors, or antique dealers, have as much right to a room of their own (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf) as any other writer.
The next natural step is to leave solitude and show the work. Women Poets: Workshop Into Print (In(her)itance Press, 0-9741797-0-1) features six women who have taken that step, in a collection of essays and poems edited by Kay Murphy, who has written two books of poetry, and Beverly Rainbolt, a poet and winner of the 1999 Associated Writers' Program Intro Journal Project. This collection, by a New Orleans writing group, promotes creating a supportive environment of fellow writers. The group has met twice a month for the last seventeen years; its members have published chapbooks, won literary competitions such as the Maryland Arts Council Statewide, and published poems in journals like Chelsea, Crazy Horse, and Spoon River Review. Their voices and styles differ greatly, but they agree that having a support system, such as a workshop group, can be the lodestar for a writer who has lost her way.
Strong Women Writing For Survival
Writing is not just about looking inward. It can also be a way of protecting a culture threatened by extinction. Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival (Sumach Press, 1-894549-21-X) is a collection of fourteen essays by Canadian aboriginal writers, all but one of them women. They write to explore ideas of community and womanhood, and to express their distinct, individual perspectives. The writers vary from residents of an aboriginal reserve to urbanites. The book, edited by Kim Anderson, a writer, editor, and educator and Bonita Lawrence, a professor at Queen's University in Kingston, is a complex study in reconciling traditions lost, or nearly lost, with modern sensibilities. The idea is to rebuild community through the telling of small, personal stories. These small stories add up to a greater whole, which can ensure the survival of both these individuals and their collective heritage.
Many of the writers in Strong Women Stories are academics, and the same is true for The Madwoman in the Academy: 43 Women Boldly Take on the Ivory Tower (University of Calgary Press, 1-55238-081-5), edited by Deborah Keahey and Deborah Schnitzer, both English professors at University of Winnipeg. This collection of essays focuses on the difficulties that women face in the academic world. The collection contains not only essays and poems, but also stories told through e-mails and conversations. The writers strive to reveal the honesty of impromptu conversations~those moments in which women look to each other for support and ways to cope with the pressures of academic life. The forty-three pieces in this book touch on subjects like sexual abuse, racism and ageism in the workplace, cultural differences between colleagues, and balancing work and motherhood. In the essay "Avoiding the Fridge," Mary Monks vents about her hectic academic work schedule in a series of e-mails to her sister, which peak in a humorous comparison between the mess on her desk and the mess in her refrigerator.
Another collection, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (Routledge, 0-415-93682-9), edited by author Gloria E. Anzalda and Ana Louise Keating, a professor at Texas Women's College, builds on the editors' last collaboration, This Bridge Called My Back. Their first book addressed the victimization of women by men. This new work looks at how women harm each other and how they can change that behavior. That's not to say that conflicts are always negative. In fact, the authors believe that conflict can jumpstart understanding. At the heart of this collection of essays, poems, drawings, and journal entries is the idea of writing as a tool for discovering the healing moment. In "Standing on This Bridge," Chandra Ford writes about being raped: "I won, not because M. went to jail, but because I spoke when he and others counted on my fear to silence me." Through writing about the rape, Ford found a kind of peace.
Relationships are often anything but peaceful, especially among young girls. In Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls (NYU Press, 0-8147-9915-9), Lyn Mikel Brown, professor of education and human development at Colby College, studies the reasons why girls~and women~are so tough on each other. They tease and torture their own friends. They police their fashion sense and body size. They attack one another, both subtly and directly, in ways they never would attack boys. They buy into false truths~they must be thin and pretty, and less smart than their male counterparts. Brown discovers that girls find refuge and self-expression through private conversations, journaling, and story writing, all often hidden from adult eyes. Ultimately, the written word provides escape from what can be a harrowing passage to adulthood.
Remembering To Understand
Maureen Murdock, a psychotherapist, creative writing teacher, and author of The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness, explores the power of self-expression through memories~even inaccurate memories~in her new book, Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory (Seal Press, 1-58005-083-2). She embraces the notion that memory is selective and distorted. But why is it so? Why do two people who share a memory come up with drastically different versions of an event? Murdock speculates, "perhaps it is the nature of memory to glow with contamination." That is to say, it's the job of the memoirist to invent memory, because in doing so, she is creating her own identity. Through re-creating experiences, she extracts as much meaning as possible from those experiences, and she writes them down, not for the sake of recording factual events, but to make sense of the past.
Women do not always have to be in a room, pen and paper at the ready, to express themselves. Women Who Risk: Profiles of Women in Extreme Sports (Hatherleigh Press, 1-57826-124-4), by sportswriter Marilyn Olsen, who has covered women athletes at the Eco-Challenge and other extreme sporting events, may seem at first like an odd choice for inclusion in this list of books. Olsen talks to eleven women, including a racecar driver, a sled-dog racing musher, and a surfing champion. Even while excelling in these most physical of activities, these women keep sight of the inner dimension. Lynn Hill, a rock climber who is the only person to have scaled Yosemite's El Capitan in less than twenty-four hours, says that the sport "involves listening to your inner voice. Using your intuition. Focusing on the whole."
Like the writers in Herspace, Olsen's athletes know that to do something well, they must block out distractions. If Hill were to meet writing instructors Roseman and Newman, they might all agree: whether the quest for self-expression propels you to a mountain or writing desk, the journey takes guts.
