When a play by a woman is reviewed, I notice, certain attitudes prevail. Of course there are exceptions, but the rule is that the play is treated with condescension if not outright hostility. Women authors face the same barrage but it is much more intense, and more universal, for playwrights.
Blog Posts on Writing and Authors
The Passion That Drives The Green Shoot Through The Flower: The Reason Many Women Take Writing Workshops
A while back, or perhaps it was more than a few years ago, we all became aware of the epidemic of violence against women in this country, and memoirs began to be written as the survivors felt empowered to describe what they had gone though, battling through shame and the fear of family repercussions. We all have our lists of these titles, some of them bitingly effective, others less so, and perhaps I was not alone in imagining that writing about the problem would make the problem go away, or at least diminish it.
How Is It That a Place Becomes Home, If Only Briefly?
Years ago when I was living in Manhattan with three small sons, desperately trying to continue the writing to which I’ve devoted my life, I stumbled on a hidden jewel: The New York Society Library, on 79th Street just off Madison.
In The Heart of the Heart of the Country
My last reading—this month—in Kentucky was for another of what I call a dear audience, at the second floor library above the police station in the little outlying town of Prospect. Years ago this was a farming community; now, it has sprouted prosperous subdivisions, green with trees and grass, strip malls, gas stations—but also a small wildlife sanctuary, in easements, and residents who still remember the value of the land.
The Dearest Audience
Now and then I have the privilege of reading to an audience I can only describe as dear. That was the case with the group at the Jeffersonville Public Library this evening: twenty or so people who hung on every word of my story, “Selling The Farm,” as though the two sisters in the story were their own friends, or even their own sisters.
Hometown Reading: Carmichael’s Bookstore
I always find that a reading in my hometown is both warmer and more disconcerting than reading in other cities, warmer, because so many old friends and relatives are sitting on the chairs at the back of the bookstore, disconcerting because they are old friends and relatives who do not view me first of all as a writer. Either they know too much about me, or not enough. They have come out of that mixture of kindness and curiosity—what we call support—that leaves me a little breathless, like a hearty slap on the back.
After the Kentucky Women Writers Conference
Twenty-five years ago, a group of women from all over the state started to put together what would be, for the area, the first gathering of women writers. I remember the first meeting I attended, in a tall office building set in the middle of the green University of Kentucky campus. Women writers came together who would become well known: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bamberra, and many others. We were all at the beginning of something big—we knew it, rejoiced in it, and wondered how time would define, or change, our original dream.
Getting Ready to Teach and Read at the KY Women Writers Conference
Like all authors, I face an interesting paradox when I travel to teach and read in my hometown—or, in this case, my home state.
I am grateful that the hometown aura will bring in listeners, both to my class and to the reading I will give next Saturday.
We are all curious about people who grew up near us, or are our age, or nearly, with the expectation of a shared point of view (and prejudices)—or at least shared experiences.
After reading at the Alamosa Bookstore in Albuquerque, NM
I’m always a little nervous before my first reading from a new book, so far untried by readers although with two wonderful reviews, some of my best (Library Journal, Publishers’ Weekly) but without the surge of comments that gathers slowly, in the media and in the form of email from strangers and friends, over a period of months.
Getting Ready to Read: 48 Hours Ahead of Time
Preparing to read from my new collection Mending: New and Selected Stories, at the Alamosa Bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, goes beyond wondering who will be there, which is always impossible to predict.