This week VIDA published The Count. In response, Vela decided to compile an Unlisted List. Take action and celebrate women writers by listing names of your favorite nonfiction women writers. They are seeking suggestions.
Elissa Bassist shared the Vela link with me, which made me remember The Women of McSweeney’s.net. I was the first person to comment on the entry and wrote, “I love this.” That statement is still true.
If you take interest in VIDA’s The Count, I highly recommend Tillie Olsen’s Silences. If you’re a woman writer, consider it necessary reading. Years ago, I read the book from start to finish, feverishly.
If you don’t want to devour the book like I did, then start with the essay “One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century—1971.” The center of the essay is the question: Why are so many more women silenced than men?
In this essay, Tille Olsen encourages you to “for a week or two, make your own survey whenever you pick up an anthology, course bibliography, quality magazine or quarterly, book review section, book of criticism.” It’s an interesting exercise to do.
This week I was being interviewed and the interviewer asked, Why do you write? I told her I write because I can write. By that I mean, I’m literate. Unlike my abuela in Colombia, I was taught to write. I write because I can write. By that I mean, I’m physically and mentally able to do so. There have been times when I have been too physically weak and times when I’ve been too depressed to write. There have been times when all my energy goes to making ends meet. I write because I can, by which I mean I have the economic resources to do so.
Sometimes I am too busy having a life and don’t write. During those times, I often think of Dear Sugar telling Elissa, “It goes without saying that your life is more important than your writing.” Of course it is. I love writing but I love living more.
In honor of International Women’s Day and the VIDA Count, I pulled books written by women from off my shelves. Below are some excerpts from those books. Treat the excerpts like links.
“My search for love led me to feminism…My first women’s-studies class was taught by Tillie Olsen. Sharing with us memories of the pain of her own struggle as a working-class woman coping with marriage and family while trying to build a career as a writer, she offered us firsthand accounts of the sacrifices and the wounds. Her testimony stirred my soul.”
–communion by bell hooks
“Elly Gross is part of a class action suit seeking compensation for the slave labor forced upon her, and thousands of other Jews, in 1944. What struck me to my soul was her spontaneous, on-air declaration. She said: ‘I guess it was my destiny to live.’….She meant that to live is not just a given: To live means you owe something big to those whose lives are taken away from them.”
June Jordan’s Some of Us Did Not Die
The issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment are the incalculable genetic effects of fallout and a documentary article on the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America…Does this influence the kind of poetry I write? Yes, but in a sidelong fashion. I am not gifted with the tongue of Jeremiah, though I may be sleepless enough before my vision of the apocalypse. My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighboring graveyard.
-Sylvia Plath’s “Context”
In 1966 I helped organize a read-in against the Vietnam War, at Harvard, and asked her [Anne Sexton] to participate. Famous male poets and novelists were there, reading their diatribes against McNamara, their napalm poems, their ego-poetry. Anne read—in a very quiet, vulnerable voice—‘“Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman’”—setting the first-hand image of her daughter against the second-hand images of death and violence hurled that evening by men who had never seen a bombed village. That poem is dated 1964, and it is a feminist poem.
-Adrienne Rich’s “Anne Sexton 1928-1974”
What I want to say, Linda
is that there is nothing in your body that lies.
All that is new is telling the truth.
-Anne Sexton’s “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman”
Do the work. Keep the faith.
-Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things
