Art as a form of survival

We need art to live fully and to grow healthy. Without it we are dry husks drifting aimlessly on every ill wind, our futures without promise and our present without grace.

(Maya Angelou, "Art for the Sake of the Soul," in Even the Stars Look Lonesome, p.133)

Unfavorable conditions for a writer

When a woman was liable, as she was in the fifteenth century, to be beaten and flung about the room if she did not marry the man of her parents' choice, the spiritual atmosphere was not favourable to the production of works of art.

(Virginia Woolf, in "Women and Fiction," in Women and Writing, p. 45)

Creating art with limited moments of solitude

I have made for myself the following credo: it is perhaps true that a mind freed of care creates the "best" art. But I do not strive to create "good" art; I simply strive to continue creating.

--Katherine Smith, "The Artist as Single Mother," reprinted in Sleeping with One Eye Open, p. 94.

The body as writing paper

"I learnt to write when I was almost six and at the same time also discovered the magic of my own body as a writing surface....

"We felt the words in gradual bursts of pain, the first words we had written would become less felt, the pain of that scratching now faded, and the last words where we had dug too deep would be pulsating still, unable to be quiet."

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

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.