I've struggled daily this month to write. Partly to take a summer
break. Partly because I'm still learning how to write actively and
have an interesting hook. Lastly, because I got distracted with
gardening.
I have to write, to analyze and go under the surface of my life. I need to explain myself and document other
people in my life who didn't write. The more people who approve probably
means it's not very good art. Where did that come from and why? Maybe I'm acting superior? Believe me, this writing should tell you I'm not. In pop culture, people follow mainstream
media to find something interesting. Get online and follow the
media leads. This is my art. To take what interests and excites me
and write about it. I'm learning to write a book about my life. If
you are thinking you could make a list of
books by women authors who document their process while writing their
story, I would love to see it.
We had an intense thunderstorm in July that resulted in the loss of
an oak tree that provided much needed shade. The evening it happened,
all I could see out my windows was driving rain. Lightning flashed
all around us and thunder rolled non- stop. Pine cones and branches
hit and skidded across the metal roof. A sharp staccato strike of
lightning cracked nearby. I stood at my back porch door and saw the
old oak trunk split in half, with sharp foot-long splinters sticking
out of the break. The top half took down a power line and lay
over the concrete garden table and chain-link fence. The next day,
wheeling by in my power chair, I smelled burnt oak and saw chunks laying on
the ground that looked like redwood.
The night of the storm, the power went out, so my daughter and I lit
candles and talked about Black Lives Matter and cops, college coming
up, and her boyfriend. Usually, we spend a lot of our time online. I
had just been reading “The Age of American Unreason” by
Susan Jacoby... “The more time people spend before the computer
screen or any screen, the less time and desire they have for two
human activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual
life: reading and conversation. The media invade, and in many
instances destroy altogether, the silence that promotes reading and
the free time required for both solitary thinking and social
conversation” (247). It's hard to remember infotainment is
distracting us when we're caught up in it. So I'm trying a sabbatical
from my Facebook habit. That's a story in itself.
I've
been reading “Writing a Woman's Life” by Carolyn
Heilbrun, a Columbia University Literature professor. She also wrote
15 mystery novels under the pseudonym Amanda Cross which I've been
reading also. (Thank you SC Lends! My local library.) She interests
me in her examination of male biographers of women's lives. Back in
the day, women wrote with pseudonyms to protect themselves against
accusations of being unwomanly, angry, even “shrill”.
Hugely talented, they still ended their novels with women safely
tucked away either in marriage or in death. Carolyn knew women needed
new examples or scripts of an autonomous, working life and she does
not disappoint.
Talking about
writing autobiographies, Heilbrun wrote, “Nostalgia, particularly
for childhood, is likely to be a mask for unrecognized anger.” and
“If one is not permitted to express anger or even to recognize it
within oneself, one is, by simple extension, refused both power and
control” (15).
She was a second
wave feminist, happily married and raised three children; at the same
time challenging society's conventions with her non-fiction works and
novels.
“Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar
struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform them into her
own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledged—
desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women
whose lives and writings they read and women call the bearer of that
courage, friend” ( The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty)
