Making time to write--by losing sleep

"Empowerment is what the emerging artist needs to win for herself. And the initial sense of urgency to create can easily be dissipated because it entails making the one choice many people, especially women, in our society with its emphasis on the 'acceptable' priorities, feel selfish about making: taking the time to create, stealing it from yourself if it's the only way."

-- "5:00 A.M.: Writing as Ritual" in The Latin Deli by Judith Ortiz Cofer, p. 168 (reprinted in Sleeping With One Eye Open)

The whispers of grandmothers

"You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil."

(from "Women Like Us" by Edwidge Danticat, reprinted in reprinted in Word. On Being a Woman Writer, 2004.).

Not having it all

"Children. There's the rub; I accept that childlessness might become the price I pay for my decision to become a writer.... I do not believe that I can 'have it all'— that is, that I can be effective both as a mother and as a writer."

(from "Earning Virginia Woolf's Room" by Eileen Tabios, included in the anthology, Sleeping with One Eye Open, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Judith Ortiz Cofer, 1999).

Birthing creativity

"There's so much that I don't want to die with. Not sharin it with somebody. That's what give me the idea to do a book because I have so much experience in here that I want to explode."

(from Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story by Onnie Lee Logan, Katherine Clark, 1989; excerpted in The Norton Book of Women's Lives, edited by Phyllis Rose, 1993)

The heartbreak of the tenderness of being

"The stuff I need for singing by whatever means is garnered from every thought, every heart that ever pounded the earth, the intelligence that directs the stars. The shapes of mountains, cities, a whistle leaf of grass, or a human bent with loss will revise the pattern of the story, the song. I take it from there, write or play through the heartbreak of the tenderness of being until I am the sky, the earth, the song and the singer."

(from "Finding the Groove" by Joy Harjo, reprinted in Word. On Being a Woman Writer, 2004.).

There is no essential truth about being a female writer

"There is no essential truth about being a female writer. The best writing comes from the boundaries, the ungendered spaces between male and female.....

"I like to think of writing in limitless terms, with no particular contract with the reader, especially that of gender. When I have discovered that unmarked and fearless territory then I am free to write, even more free to be a woman writing. Sometimes the light coming through my window has been much more important than the fact that I am a woman writing."

(from "Writing Near the Bone" by Yvonne Vera, in Women Writing Africa: Volume 1: The Southern Region, p. 488-) 

--Submitted by Beth Blevins.