Writing in a magic house

"No one tried to dissuade me from writing; they simply talked about what I would do to make a living. Writing, in their eyes, could be done when one came home from work. It was not that they did not respect writing. It was that they saw it as having nothing to do with real life... I was not at all interested in making a living. I thought then that my destiny could be just like Emily Dickinson's. I could stay alone in my little house and write. Of course as a young girl believing in magic I did not think in concrete terms about how I would acquire the house, the means to survive. I thought it would happen like magic. I let no one dissuade me from my dream of becoming a writer."

(from Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, by bell hooks)

Life in the margins

"The mathematics of our lives, the practice runs that make up what we offer the public as real, are proven in the margins. We whisper there, perfecting what we want others to hear, often editing out truth. And yes, we dream there... Women writers have practiced our craft from the outskirts. Our lenses have been aimed at the public spaces which have marginalized our voices....To find ourselves we hold up a mirror to the worlds we all inhabit."

(from "Foreword: From the Margin to the Page" by Suheir Hammad, in Word. On Being a [Woman] Writer, edited by Jocelyn Burrell)

--Submitted by Beth Blevins.

To not be forgotten

"I will and bequeath this book after my husband and myself are through with it, to my oldest grandson Bertie Williams....I trust what is worthy of emulation he may profit by.

"It is of more value to me than it could possibly be to my children, but I desire that it shall be kept in the family and treasured as a relic of by-gone days, not from any especial merit it possesses, but because I do not want to be forgotten."

(from Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866, by Mollie Dorsey Sanford, U of Nebraska Press, 2003. p. xx).

Kicking the door off the hinges

"I had sworn my love to Graham (Nash) in a way that I didn't think was possible for myself. And he wanted me to marry him. I had agreed to it. And then I just started thinking. My grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician, she kicked the kitchen door off the hinges, on the farm. I thought about my paternal grandmother who wept for the last time in her life at 14, behind some barn because she wanted a piano, and said, 'Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you'll never have a piano.'

"And I thought, maybe I'm the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women. As much as I loved and cared for Graham, I thought, I'm going to end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges. And it's like, I better not. And it broke my heart."

(Joni Mitchell, speaking in the documentary, Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind, part of the American Masters series on PBS; 2003.)

--Transcribed by Beth Blevins.

A dog's life

"Every dispassionate investigator of the subject has agreed that woman's comparative lack of accomplishment cannot be entirely due to her not having enjoyed such opportunities, as in music, the arts, philosophy, spiritual leadership, invention, and science; yet until recently their accomplishments in these fields have been far from startling. Why have there been so few outstanding representatives of the female sex in these fields? There are many reasons....

"The truth is that if it is continually being reiterated that the individual belongs to a group that has never achieved anything and never will, and that everything ever achieved in the world has been accomplished by persons of another kind;... if you make laws to prevent her from owning property as well as laws that assign her to an inferior position in the hierarchy of statuses; if you exclude her from all activities except those limited to the menial tasks of domesticity and executing the will of her superior in looking after children; and if you conduct yourself as if you were her natural lord and master, you will succeed, have no doubt of it, in convincing her that such is the natural order of things. You may, in fact, succeed to such an extent as to engender a doglike fidelity and an utter devotion to the principle that dog is dog and master is master, each occupying the station to which God and nature have called them."

(from “Women and Creativity” in The Natural Superiority of Women, Fifth Edition, 1999 by Ashley Montagu [original edition published in 1953]; p. 204)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

On the absence of female writers as literary characters

"(T)he girl or woman who tries write...goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over...she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men. She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds La Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salome, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together."

(from "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, p.39)

The path of writing

"When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year."

(from “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard, included in Landmark Essays on Writing Process, edited by Sondra Perl, p. 225)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Why Barbara Kingsolver became a writer

"... She is asked how she knew, as a young woman growing up in a rural area in Kentucky, that she would always work to support herself.

"Because I am flat-chested," she says flatly. She explains:

"I was 5-9 and weighed 99 pounds. The basis of value for women in my county was very primal. It was strictly in reproductive terms. The most popular girls were the ones who were the most physically mature; they married and had babies very young. I could see that I was not going to be a success in the world of Nicholas County, and that I needed to get out and find some other way to excel.

"And I have."

(from "Novelist In Hog Heaven; `Pigs' Brings Home the Bacon While Its Author Writes Her Heart Out" by Megan Rosenfeld. The Washington Post, Jul 14, 1993. pg. D.01)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins