In our own lives as writers and educators, we have felt buoyed by, and thirsty for, dialogue about the creative process. We think it is particularly essential to gather a collection of process/craft-based essays by women who span several different generations. We hope that an anthology such as this will serve as both a historical document of the times and lives of a sampling of women writers, but also as a rare look into some of the concerns of a diverse body of writers writing about craft, process, and their relationships to the literary arts in different personal/socio-political contexts.
We are open to a variety of styles, from the more personal to the more academic. Based on the suggestions of a guiding group of women writers, we have drawn up a list of questions (see below) which can serve as a guide for your essays. Please feel free to use them in any way that is helpful to you (or not at all). We are also interested in re-publishing relevant essays by some of our luminaries (dead and living): Audre Lorde, Muriel Rukeyser, June Jordan, Cherrie Moraga, Adrienne Rich... In addition to contributing your own, if you have read any essays that you think should be included, please send them our way.
Please submit essays by March 15th, 2011, to discuss with publishers who might be interested in April. Please send essays to elanzobell@gmail.com and agia@hampshire.edu
We really hope you’ll consider contributing an essay to this important project.
Aracelis Girmay and Elana Bell
Guiding Questions
1. Why do you write? When did you begin? How do you begin?
2. Where does your writing come from? In what ways is it connected to others? Are you writing for/in response to someone else? (Perhaps someone who couldn’t write for herself/himself…?)
3. What does it mean to “write like a woman”?
4. Do women writers write the body in a particular way? How does the body, particularly a woman’s body, with its specific cycles (menstruation, puberty, pregnancy, birth, menopause, aging) inform your writing, process & product?
5. How aware are you of your voice as a woman? In what ways do you try to/feel you have to overcompensate for being a woman (the "feminine") in your work? In what ways do you exploit/make use of this?
6. What are the particulars of your writing process? How do you take a piece from initial impulse/spark/genesis to “completion”? How do you keep your work new? How do you keep challenging yourself? Is writing a secular process for you? A spiritual one?
7. Is writing activism? Is art enough? Do you feel a sense of your own particular cultural/historical moment as you work? When you work, do you have a sense of social obligation or is it important for you to work free of this?
8. What feeds you & what impedes you?
9. “I have read essays on when women stood up. Triumphed. And why… I want to hear when they stayed seated & shut down & scared. I think I need a human naming of their fears & faults.”
10. What are your roots, language, culture? How do they inform your work? How important is nomadic movement to our writing? How important it belonging?
11. What do you do for work? How do you earn your living and how does this impact your writing life & process, if at all?
12. How do you respond to the claim that women’s work has been relegated to the realms of the personal (domestic, confessional, the body) in contrast to the epic, transcendental themes of work by men? Do you find yourself embracing, responding to, or resisting this in your own writing?
More information here.
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