The Writer on Her Work: Seventeen Essays by Twentieth-Century American Writers
Edited and Updated Introduction by Janet Sternburg, Preface by Julia Alvarez.
(W.W. Norton & Co.: 1980; reissued in 2000)
Jody Lucas Kulakowski
“Inherited Fears and Real Dangers: Being Visible as a Woman Writer”
All I needed was a decent copy of Joan Didion’s “Why I Write.” I found several online, all excerpts, and when I combed the digital archives made available to me through the university where I teach, I found The New York Times Magazine backlog stopped just short of the issue in which it first appeared (December 5, 1976).
I wanted to use “Why I Write” as a companion piece to “On Keeping a Notebook.” My summer composition course began in less than two weeks, and I wanted to teach these two pieces. I wanted to start a conversation about freedom, about writing as a means to express perspective, memory, and, in the case of “Why I Write,” as a vehicle for uncovering thoughts and ideas.
I finally stumbled across the essay in an anthology called The Writer and Her Work: Seventeen Essays by Twentieth-century American Writers. I ordered it, and it arrived several days later. I didn’t think about it again for a couple of weeks until I was tired: of reading student papers; of staring at blank screens, waiting for my own words to appear; of trying to be wife and mother a hundred miles from my home, my heart; of questioning myself, wondering what the hell it was that made me think that, at middle age, I should be, in my mother’s terms, gallivanting, shrugging my responsibilities in favor of pursuing what I want, what I’m driven to do, not what’s good for everyone else. Woman, take up thy cross.
I picked up Writer and Her Work and began reading. Janet Sternburg collected these seventeen essays (nineteen, actually, as the second issue includes an essay-length preface by Julia Alvarez and a second introduction-in-miniature by Sternburg) because, she says, “we have very little by women that intentionally and directly addresses the subject of their own art.” I don’t know if, in the intervening thirty years since its initial publication, ten years since its reissue, that statement still holds true—we women writers today seem much less reluctant to commit our process to the page—but the value of these women writing of their craft and their writing lives in the decades that feminists’ heralded the cracking and crashing of glass ceilings everywhere, it’s comforting for this woman writer to know my own insecurities, my fears, my occasional sense of isolation is not a regression or a betrayal of my sisters who’ve come before me.
Sternburg set criteria for this essay collection: First, they must be written by American writers (her rationale: “to ‘go abroad’ would scatter the impact of our own experience.”). Second, they must represent “many different kinds of writers, especially those who have worked in more than one literary form.” Third, the backgrounds of these women must be diverse, while at the same time “suggest what women writers have in common.”
Sternburg solicited and received material from Mary Gordon, Nancy Milford, Margaret Walker, Susan Griffin, Ingrid Bengis, Toni Dade Bambara, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janet Burroway, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gail Godwin. Among them are novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, essayists, literary critics, memoirists, feminist and Womanist critics, documentarians, and authors of children’s books.
They are recipients of many awards, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Emmy and many others.
Julia Alvarez, in her preface to the updated edition, calls the book, “a liberating text for so many women writers who, like me, felt isolated and afraid.” Isolated and afraid? Check. I had to keep reading.
Anne Tyler addresses the Woman-Having-It-All Syndrome in her essay, a condition that began developing among independent-minded women sometime in the mid-sixties, morphed several times over the intervening decades, has been disputed, disproved, redefined, and, lately, appropriated in the most twisted sort of way by certain far-right conservatives [halting now my derisive tangent]. Tyler’s recounts the many intrusions into the writing life and brings a reader like me, one who “always did count on having a husband and children” back down to earth. She offers hope, says, “I’m surprised to find myself a writer but have fitted it in fairly well, I think.”
Not what you’re looking for? Then turn to Alice Walker, who begins her essay by answering the question about women artists and motherhood—you know, that one that implies we can be only one or the other, so what’s it going to be? She says: “Yes….[women artists] should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one….Because with one you can move….With more than one you’re a sitting duck.” (Is that what I am, as a mother of four? A sitting duck? Hmm.) This is not to say that Walker maintains for nearly twenty pages a discussion limited to this one narrow (narrow?) consideration. No, she expands, blossoms, even, from womanhood to black womanhood, to criticism and representation (nonrepresentation?) of black women artists in feminist thought. She covers a lot of ground, ending, just prior to her closing poem, with the words: “We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.” It’s worth the read to discover on one’s own what comes between.
Michele Murray’s[1] essay, entitled “Creating Oneself from Scratch,” resonated most strongly with me. It is a posthumous creation, comprised of selections from her diaries and covers a twenty-year period where she contemplates writing, motherhood, the agonies of motherhood in relation to her writing, and, the motivating force—cancer—that drove her on, in spite of the challenges of raising four children, to produce four books, two children’s books, an anthology of women’s literature (her bio mentions it being one of the first of its kind), and a book of poetry prior to her death. She yearned to live long enough to see the publication of the last, The Great Mother, her poetry collection. She died seven months too soon. It makes me wonder at we women artists, especially those of us for whom prominent identifying labels often shift, one day more mother than writer, another more writer than any incidental markers of DNA. What would we do, what would we produce, knowing our time is limited? How would we shift our time, how would we choose our priorities, what would we leave for our daughters, our sisters, what words of wisdom or folly would we commit to the page, not leave to chance and stardust?
My recommendation? If you’re a writer, pick up this book. If you’re a woman writer, pick it up and don’t put it down. Hold it close to you. Create.
Jody Lucas Kulakowski is current MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She writes about pain and spirituality, motherhood and rural womanhood, growing and dying. She lives between Pittsburgh and her home in Punxsutawney, where she much prefers peacocks to groundhogs.
[1] As a matter of trivia (though these days, perhaps no trivial matter), Michele Murray is one of only two of these women who does not have her own Wikipedia entry. Janet Sternburg, ironically, is the other.