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)

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.