Writing in the quiet, the void

I feel strongly that one cannot have a family, even a nontraditional one, and be a committed artist without tremendous struggle — a tremendous giving of one's self. ... I believe doing it all, trying to do it all, is a trap women fall into. Why do it all!!!! Then one is running around like a chicken with its head cut off accomplishing things. But what of the quiet moments—the necessary leisure to just experience without structure — Life. If you try to do it all that is gone.

(Bell Hooks, "Black Woman Artist Becoming," in Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women, edited by Patricia Bell-Scott, p. 152.)

Time ran out

"I just haven't felt to have any identity under the steamroller of decisions and responsibilities of this last half year, with the babies a constant demand....

"It is the starting from scratch that is so hard—this first year. And then if, I keep thinking, if only I could have some windfall, like doing a really successful novel, and buy this house, this ghastly vision of rent bleeding away year after year would vanish.... How I would like to be self-supporting on my writing! But I need time."

(from Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, p. 495; letter written on Jan. 16, 1963--Plath killed herself on Feb. 11.)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

The courage to speak

Our histories, our experiences call to us, always speaking our truths in a deep and resonant voice; they ask us only to listen. When women have the courage to write their stories, to write their truths, to address their silences—only then can their authentic journeys begin.

(Janet Lynn Roseman, "On Writing Women's Autobiography" in The Way of the Woman Writer, (Second edition), p. 13.)

The lady as novelist

For all this, the part-playful, part-hostile nineteenth-century distinction of women writers as 'lady novelists' has stayed very much alive. Consciousness of sex difference is as marked as ever it was. The distinction, however, has become hallowed as 'writers' and 'women writers', the phrase still operating to confine creative women to a pejorative subsection of the real thing, the great world of literature.

(from The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel by Rosalind Miles, 1987, p. 7)