It would take an archeological dig to find all the strata of gifts, cares, duties and dreams of the 21^st century woman.  What do we hide from others?  What do we hide from ourselves?  And, key, why do we hide from ourselves?  What is the cost to all of us that too many of us are hunkered down in dark places with our hands over our eyes?

Since 2000, Gail McMeekin has been introducing us to women who have dared to look directly into the sun.  And the stories of these brave women have lit up our dark places.  Whether it is a nightlight, a disco ball, or a strobe our spirits crave to be out among the company of others.

Gail’s magic is deceiving. There’s nothing ‘ta-dah’ about her style.  Moving stealthily from highly creative women to highly successful women she sends us the subliminal memo that they are one in the same.  And even more surprising we learn that we have more in common with these brave women than we would have ever imagined.  In a typical passage Gail drops a smart bomb, “You have more power in almost any situation than you may realize or utilize.  Write down all your options, even far out ones.”

In 2000 A Room of Her Own (AROHO) was for me a “far out option”.  What began as an irresistible urge to seek my purpose evolved into a transformational collective of thousands of women writers and artists.  At the beginning, the very existence of Gail’s book legitimized in important ways the mission of AROHO.

Oprah says that the pure experience of feeling ‘seen’ by another is what we really yearn for in life.  Gail ‘saw’ us when we weren’t even looking at ourselves.

Darlene Chandler Bassett, Founder of AROHO

Gail McMeekin serves on AROHO’s Advisory Council.  Her books are available on her website, Amazon, and at Barnes & Noble.

Author Gail McMeekin, image by Russ Street

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Until women are writing bestselling business books we will be reading those written by men.  (On the May 20, 2012 New York Times Bestsellers Hardcover Business list of 15, there is one ranked 11^th by a woman, Yes! Energy, the Equation to Do Less, Make More by Loral Langemeier.)  The latest happens to be written by my former boss and mentor, Eli Broad.  I was fortunate to be a member of his “tribe” (reference Seth Godin’s Tribes, We Need You to Lead Us, also a terrific book) for 20 years while we built what for a decade was the most profitable corporation on the New York Stock exchange.

The lessons for women are important and not in the “Mini-Me” men look-alike way of the formulaic and awful Dress for Success craze of the eighties.  What’s important is the attitude of “Why not me?”

I love the title, The Art of Being Unreasonable, Lessons in Unconventional Thinking, and Broad jumps right into it with these tenets:

“Nothing sets me off more than being told I can’t do something,” and “Why not? should be something you ask yourself every day.”

If being unreasonable is thought of as art perhaps it will appeal to us women more.  Steven Pressfield’s perennial seller, The War of Art, Break Through the Blocks and Win your Inner Creative Battles, is heralded by Esquire as a “kick in the ass.”  Isn’t that exactly what too many of us are doing to ourselves without experiencing forward movement?

Consider this excerpt from The Art of Being Unreasonable:

“The lessons I’ve taken to heart from nearly 60 years in business and philanthropy are ones I still use every day:  ask a lot of questions; pursue the untried; revise expectations upward; take risks; be restless; and most important, seek out the best in your work—the best deal, the best investment, the best people, the best causes, the best art—and the best in yourself.”

Why Not?

Darlene Chandler Bassett, Founder of AROHO

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The first time I realized Valentine’s Day was supposed to involve gifts, I was twenty-seven.  Where I grew up, no one celebrated holidays, let alone Valentine’s Day and for some reason in college, I never dated boys who got around to it, so I didn’t really care until one February day, one of my girlfriends called me and said, “What is your husband doing for you for Valentine’s Day?”  I peeked into the living room. 

            “What are we doing for Valentine’s Day?” 

            He kind of waved. “Basketball,” he said.

            I told her.  She said, “Don’t stand for it!”

            “What should I ask for?” 

            “Chocolate. Flowers. Dinner out.”

            I went back into the living room.  “Honey,” I said, he was kind of sprawled the way men do when they won’t have to move for months.  Chili and turkey drumsticks and Budweiser will be brought to them. “I’m going to need chocolate, flowers and sushi for Valentine’s Day.” 

            He waved royally at the door.  “Well, go get ‘em,” he said. 

            I put my baby girl on my back in her little blue back pack and took off for the liquor store at the end of the street.  We lived in Van Nuys in a seedy neighborhood.  I bought a box of chocolate and some slightly droopy red roses and when I got home, baby girl and I each had a chocolate, and we got her dad up and moving and he took us out for sushi. 

            I like remembering that when I think of A Room of Her Own.  Because the princess model is dead.  You cannot sleep for a hundred years and be wakened by your prince to castle and life. 

            Sometimes you are given a gift.  But don’t wait for those gifts.  If you really want to take a journey, don’t stand on the dock, build a boat. 

            A Room of Her Own is for Mrs. Sees who decided to make her own chocolate.  It’s for Margaret Thatcher who didn’t wait for a man to change her country.  It’s for Mary Johnson and Meredith Hall, Summer Wood and Barbara Johnson.   It’s for every woman out there who is willing to take the audacious act of claiming to be not only a writer, but an author.  Who is willing to claim that she deserves a room of her own to perform acts of the intellect and the imagination.  Who believes in her own creative power.  Who can pick up the baby and walk into her own destiny and future. 

            Sleeping Beauty waited for her prince.  We wait for no one.  We pick up our pen and begin to write.  We connect with other women in a space that is both sacred and alive at Ghost Ranch and we apply for the Gift of Freedom, for NEA’s, for all the awards and prizes and reviews that have been handed out to men for centuries, we do not wait, we step forward. 

            So I invite all women writers to participate in 2012 in the audacious act of applying for the Gift of Freedom.  And I invite all of you on Valentine’s Day to ask the universe for the day you want, the day that would make you feel loved and then to make it happen.

Kate Gale, Ph.D.

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I was nineteen when I first read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and I remember that these words of hers impacted me deeply. I carried this quote in journals for many years, but it wasn't until I was completing AROHO's Gift of Freedom Award Application in 2008 that I had the opportunity to revisit them. I so completely identified with that sense of stifled/stymied/repressed creativity--not just individually but generationally. At the same time, however, I felt powerfully that my mother and her foremothers had never had the luxury of sitting indoors. And I wanted to speak to that--to the struggle of working class and poor women of many races to honor their creative impulses in the midst of daily battles for survival. This poem is in honor of my mother and Virginia Woolf, as unlike as their worlds may have been, for all the ways they've inspired me.

i come from women illiterate and rough-skinned

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. ~Virginia Woolf

i come from women illiterate and rough-skinned all their creativity

bent to the tasks of survival

                                          enslaved women conquered women

who watched the world they knew die mute and screaming silent

and weeping women whose lives were worn short abandoned

women violated women

                                           fractured women who nightly mended

themselves with threads of faith and resistance and endurance

women who toiled in fields picked cotton shelled corn milked

cows and goats collected eggs hunted and skinned and

disemboweled the meat served at the table

                                                                        women who nurtured

babies in their wombs embraced them buried them women who

made walls with their own hands who sewed and washed and cared

for the sick women who took in laundry cleaned houses cared

for the children of others

                                        women who prayed on their knees prayed on

their feet prayed working living dying

                                 i come from women who never sat indoors

my mother was a silent mother she died with a thousand songs

unsung a thousand canvases still blank a thousand stories unwritten

my mother died the chemotherapy and radiation fueled a fire

that burned from the inside ravaging her skin

                                                                             and as she lost her

vision she told me when she closed her eyes it felt like she was flying

over greening valleys the blue peaks of mountains in the distance

incandescent forests alive with color

                                                                  no one knew my mother

was an artist she would draw me pictures when i was little i remember

a woman.s profile with short curls and a heart-shaped necklace a flock

of seagulls ocean waves on a cloudy day birthday cakes on birthday

cards she could only sign her name until she learned to write

Happy Birthday carving one letter at a time

                                                       my mother was an artist she made

blankets to keep us warm she made tortillas and meals that nurtured

a family of ten she was a gardener who made

the hard earth blossom

                                my mother was a mystic she dreamt god without

a face she dreamt the pure energy of the universe she learned

to meditate without knowing the word she was a healer who learned

to listen to her hands her intuition

                                               even in dying my mother was my teacher

what terrible force their longing still exerts volcanoes of longing

hurricanes of longing deserts of longing

                                                                            to create to be free

to speak their truths and own their own bodies their own voices

                                                                                for millennia

their frustration like rotted seeds has left a dark stain and the earth

shudders takes them in

                                                             these fiery phantoms restless

and relentless unrealized unweeping unresigned

                                                           burning in my blood in the blood

of women like me the children of silent mothers who dream

of freedom haunted by longing

running between

working and caretaking

                                                     their longing and ours taken root

in our soul rising through the earth of our lives branching

and leafing and blossoming as we write and sing and dance and

breathe and dream

                                                  raw and spontaneous bursting weeping

                                                                                     healing our lives

--ire’ne lara silva

ire’ne lara silva lives in Austin , TX . Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, most recently in Acentos Review, Pilgrimage, and Yellow Medicine Review. She is the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldua Milagro Award, a Macondista, and an inaugural CantoMundo Fellow. ire'ne is the author of two chapbooks: ani’mal and INDíGENA. Her first collection of poetry, furia, was published in October 2010 by Mouthfeel Press and received an Honorable Mention for the 2011 International Latino Book Award in Poetry. She is also Co-Coordinator for the Flor de Nopal Literary Festival.

Website: http://www.irenelarasilva.webs.com

 http://flordenopalliteraryfestival.wordpress.com/

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          The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove and Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries by Helen Vendler were both on my Christmas list this year. Dove’s long-awaited anthology is a book to be savored. Not only is its design handsome, making the book a pleasure to hold, but its contents are immensely satisfying. Dove presents us with American poems she sees as, “emblazoned on pennants along the road we have just traversed.” Dove explains that these are poems “interpolated with the times in which they were forged and upon which they exerted their spirit.” The anthology includes poets who have been canonized and whose work has been taught throughout the century. It also presents us with accomplished and significant poets who might have been overlooked twenty years ago by a literary establishment bent on maintaining a stranglehold on the canon of contemporary American poetry.

            Helen Vendler’s 2010 book on Dickinson is one that I have been waiting to own as well.  Many of us now working in academia, as well as students and lovers of poetry, cut our teeth on Vendler’s literary criticism. We admired it for its finely-wrought prose and insightful analysis. Vendler’s careful work illuminated important texts (like Shakespeare’s sonnets and Wallace Stevens poetry), thus instilling in many of us a life-long love both of poetry and literary criticism. It was, therefore, with anticipation that I approached Helen Vendler’s review in The New York Review of Books of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

            I looked forward to Vendler’s intelligent commentary, adroit comments, and keen observations. Stunned, deeply disappointed, and almost embarrassed for Vendler were my emotional reactions to reading just the first two paragraphs of the review. Vendler’s “Are These the Poems to Remember?” disappoints and fails as legitimate critique. It is more diatribe than review, riddled with thinly veiled ad-hominem attacks and elitist meanderings of the most repugnant sort. Vendler’s piece does not even give the reader a sense of the anthology, for it is difficult to discern any reasoned analysis beneath the vitriol. “Out of touch,” “inaccurate” and “racist” were my initial thoughts. This was not the Helen Vendler I was expecting; this was not the review worthy of her vast talent. It was nothing short of astonishing to read Vendler’s caustic spew and relentless excoriation of Dove’s anthologizing and essay writing.

             How is this review to be taken seriously? How could Vendler get it so wrong and be so out of touch with the ethos of contemporary American poetry?  Vendler asserts that no century is capable of producing 175 poets (the number of poets in the anthology) “worth reading.” This is the jumping-off point for Vendler’s rant, prefaced by her whiny observation that Dove’s anthologizing “shift[s] the balance” by “introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors.” At no time does Vendler consider that institutionalized racism is to blame for these poets having been excluded from the canon in the first place. At this point in our nation’s history, it is astounding that there are people left in academia still having this conversation.

            Vendler queries, “Why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value?” Vendler’s surly question reveals the mindset of one so entrenched in an elitist literary establishment, so imbued with prejudice (in every sense of the word), that she is unqualified to assess an anthology such as Dove’s.  Vendler is so enraged by Dove’s inclusion of those who have been, or would have been, dismissed out-of-hand because of race or gender that she renders herself impotent.  Does she become blinded because she sees herself losing her tight-fisted grasp on American poetry?

            That any reviewer in the twenty-first century would count the number of authors from “minority communities” in a book she is reviewing is as telling as it is provoking. Is this the Helen Vendler to remember? There are so many things right about Dove’s anthology and so many things wrong about Vendler’s piece that it is hard to know where to start, to decide which of Vendler’s criticisms or invectives to answer.  I think it best to watch Rita Dove do so herself in, “Defending the Anthology,” her response to Vendler’s review:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/22/defending-anthology/

For Helen Vendler’s “Are These the Poems to Remember?” click here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/are-these-poems-remember/?pagination=false

Marguerite María Rivas

NYC  10 December 2011

Marguerite María Rivas teaches English at The City University of New York.  She holds a doctorate from Drew University and a master’s degree from CUNY, both in literature. Her work has been published in The Americas Review, Earth’s Daughters, Multicultural Review, Acentos Review, Changing English, and The Más Tequila Review, among other publications. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the Marg Chandler Memorial Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation and was cited by the New York State Assembly for her contribution to the literary arts. Her book of poems, Tell No One: Poems of Witness is forthcoming from Chimbarazu Press in 2012.

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This entry is cross-posted from Chloe Yelena Miller's blog:

A good memoir does more than simply retell someone’s personal story.  It illuminates a larger world through an individual experience. In the case of Mary Johnson’s memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life, she offers her own tale of joining, and later leaving, Mother Teresa’s order.

Reading this book, I knew I was reading something important. It is a respectful and thoughtful meditation on one woman’s experiences.  Considering the intense privacy of the Catholic Church, this book offers an inside view into the real joys, the possibilities for joy and the many abuses.

Johnson enters the order an intellectually curious and emotionally hungry young woman. She does nothing without considering its implications within the order and church, and its relationship to the outside world. Towards the end, Johnson writes in Chapter 31, “I was angry with the Church for demanding celibacy of her priests, and mad at God for giving me a vocation that demanded I sacrifice intimacy and intellect.”  The demands on the women in the order are extreme and hard to imagine. Mary makes it possible to see why the nuns and the church made certain decisions while that very insight makes it clear that changes need to be made.

I met Mary Johnson in 2009 at the A Room of her Own Retreat in New Mexico. I remember listening to her read a section from the memoir and not wanting to wait until it was published to hear the rest. After (or before) you read the book, be sure to check out her website. There are interviews, photos, readers guide and more. While you're waiting for your copy of the book to arrive, you can browse the beginning of the book.

In the epilogue, Johnson writes, “So much depends on the stories we tell ourselves, and on the questions we ask, or fail to ask.” Such a good lesson for life and writing.

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What I think I like most about Mary Johnson's memoir AN UNQUENCHABLE

THIRST: FOLLOWING MOTHER TERESA IN SEARCH OF LOVE, SERVICE, AND AN

AUTHENTIC LIFE is that it satisfies curiosity. It answers questions that I've nursed a

very long time. I went to Catholic school as a youngster in Washington, D.C. It was a

good, educational alternative to the District's school system in the sixties. My father was

a Catholic though my mother was not. My sisters and I were baptized, confirmed,

attended the schools, prayed in the parish church and had rosary beads.

A former nun’s memoir? Wow! Of course it is the sex that fascinates. How could

they swear to go without? This is bull session fodder for Catholic school girls

everywhere I suspect. It's what my suite-mate and I discussed in our college freshman

year at a formerly Catholic girls' school that went secular. We had our "firsts" that first

year and we shook our heads and asked how the nuns could have given up a thing like

that without knowing about it -- without experiencing it. How much we pitied the poor

girls that had.We figured the girls who'd gone to the convents had really been duped --

giving up the wonderful world of sex.

I've had that stuff in a drawer for a long time. I've had two marriages, a child that

came and went and other exchanges since I've thought much about the Catholic

Church. AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST has made me think back about a few things.

But that wasn't all of it. Maggie and I both knew that sex wasn't the all of it about

nuns. These weird women and girls had made a bold choice. We had more honor and

understanding of it -- the nun's vocation -- than either of us would have admitted in the

late nineteen sixties. We knew nuns were supporters of the status quo. We knew them

as individuals, too. We admired some of them. Paradoxically, some of them pointed us

away from the provincial world of Washington, D.C. toward a wider world.

AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST satisfies curiosity about vocations, the day to

day schedule in the convent and and the personalities of nuns. A lot of water has flowed

under the bridge since I thought nuns were truly fascinating. I felt a bit of that admiration

and understanding return with the reading.

And I was moved to tears while reading AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST. It made

me long to be a naive believer again. I continue to be too cowardly to admit publicly that

I am an atheist. I prefer to say that I am agnostic. I can then be polite about how I feel. It

is sometimes very difficult to assert yourself as a decent and moral individual who

questions religious organizations. And it is tempting to say that you are no longer

influenced by the tenets of the religious organization you were raised with. I attended

Catholic elementary and high school. It was a very good education then -- and

affordable. So my thoughts about my life with the church are mostly about academic

rigor. I was a successful student -- encouraged as being smart -- you know: a smart

Black girl. But the summer that I worked on The Poor Peoples' Campaign in

Washington, D.C. and the nuns who taught at my high school refused to allow

desperate people to shelter in our buildings I knew finally that they suffered from the

same shortcomings as everybody else. Though they were pledged to charity they

weren't much better at applying it to day to day living than anybody else.

The strength of AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST is that its exploration of the nun’s

vocation validates it as a life choice not an ignorant, unexamined, desperate act.

Unfortunately, many still hold to the idea that nuns are rejected, undesirable women

whom only God would want. It’s a frequent point of humor. That we don’t know much

about the day to day life of nuns is probably because to expose the private side of the

vocation as Mary Johnson has so bravely done, is to open a sack whose contents can’t

be controlled. I hadn’t realized how imperiled the individual personality was in the

traditional religious order. Mary Johnson gives us a unique and unsparing glimpse at the

destruction to individuality while honoring the grand design of it. The cult of selflessness

itself is what destroys the nun’s utopia. Human beings being at their best when they

give and receive love and friendship. So that the extreme celibacy of religious orders

would seem to work against a social human's true vocation: to love one's neighbor AND

one's self. For the truly troubling thing that AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST elucidates is

that it is not only sexual intercourse, genital to genital contact and sexual foreplay that

are prohibited, but everyday, ordinary touches and friendships -- interactions that make

a woman or man socially adjusted.

Then there is Mother Teresa herself. AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST:

FOLLOWING MOTHER TERESA IN SEARCH OF LOVE, SERVICE, AND AN

AUTHENTIC LIFE is a book that reads like less about Mother than her work and the

organization of her sisters -- her confederates. This is perhaps the thing about which

she would be the most pleased.

Mother Teresa emerges from AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST as a broadshouldered

charismatic -- a John the Baptist kind of person, a Joan of Arc - type -- filled

with God's fervor and acting on direct instructions from God. We are well able, through

Mary Johnson's soulful testimony, to see her magnetism. We can feel her bursting

through the doors of other peoples’ limitations and getting it done for the desperately

poor of the world. One is not left wondering why any woman would join with Mother, but

why there could not have been an easier way to do so.

Like the vocation of Mother Teresa the language of this memoir is simple -- not

elemental, simplistic, naive or raw - but un-embroidered and clear. Mary Johnson has

managed to be gentle in her treatment of the subject and loving without being nambypamby

and unquestioning. I was so surprised to be tearful -- to be moved when Sister

Donata left the order. It broke my heart some that she couldn't make it work. How else

would I have met Mary Johnson though? How else could she have written this

fascinating and affecting memoir?

An interesting connection also is the remarkable story of the founding of A ROOM OF

HER OWN FOUNDATION based on the surprising coincidence and commitment that

brought Mary Johnson and Darlene Chandler Bassett together. Check out the

organization’s story at:

http://www.aroomofherown.org/home.php

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Breena Clarke is the author of two historical novels set in the Georgetown

neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Her debut novel, RIVER, CROSS MY

HEART(1999) was an October 1999 Oprah Book Club selection. Her

critically reviewed second novel STAND THE STORM is set in mid-19th

century Washington, D.C. and was chosen by the Washington Post Book

Review as one of 100 best for 2008. Breena lives with her husband and

dog in Jersey City, NJ. She is currently at work on a novel that creates a

community of mixed racial identity in the highlands of New Jersey set at

mid-19th century.

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09.13.2011

I just finished reading Mary Johnson’s book, An Unquenchable Thirst. I want to speak of it and of what knowing Mary has meant to me over the past several years.

For 20 years, Mary was an aspirant, and then a nun, in an organization in which individual expression was not a community value. Everything external worked to prevent her from becoming an artist. When I know that Mary has tiptoed downstairs at 5:00 on the morning of a retreat without waking me up, and when she devotes so much of her writing year to planning the next AROHO event, I remember that she has lifelong habits cultivated inside a kind of mind I will never experience. I am reminded of Sylvia Plath’s beehives in her five bee poems: a humming goes on inside “the mind of the hive,” while its singular work is sealed unseen, accomplished by many. 

Mary has taken the best of the convent mind and deployed it to serve in an alternate universe. Ours. She is a most extraordinary illustration of how stamina lifts talent. Her habits of preserving something of internal value while running a decade-long marathon allowed her to complete a draft of her first book; a proposal to an agent, a revised proposal for publishers; and the many revisions of her book—and to unearth and articulate the complex feelings of growing up in an cloistered, religious society—I would call it a “cult” if I didn’t think I would offend my Catholic sister-in-laws and friends. 

It would have been far easier for Mary to have worked as a full-time conference organizer or Italian teacher than to write her memoir. Once she started the project a decade ago, she must have realized how difficult reliving her early life would be. The only story worth telling was the story that demanded she reveal her secrets, sexuality, trespasses and broken promises—those she broke and those she suffered; how she disappointed the world’s most famous woman; how she experienced and lost love. There is talk that a publisher will not risk printing the book in England (where libel laws are more stringent for authors and publishers than they are in the U.S.) because of its revelations about the church and the Sisters of Charity, Mother Theresa’s order. Much more daring, however, than anything she has to say about institutional religion is her frank portrayal of her younger self.

It would also have been easier for Mary to settle for her publisher’s marketing plans for her book; instead she supplements them with her own web page and social media. She would rather be writing, but she is determined to use the full range of her skills, even those she’s not crazy about deploying. She has to learn to put on makeup, for god sakes, a step she skipped in the convent.

After two decades in a convent and one as an apprentice writer, she has made at least two enormous leaps—if marriage to god counts as one—but she’s at the beginning of her adventure, not the end.

Mary is one of the most spiritual people I know, by which I mean she draws light to every personal encounter. To hear her laugh and watch her red curls shake—to look into eyes that see me—makes me feel strong, reveals to me the contours of my own life, and how they might come together as hers have. If I can locate that life, it is worth living.

What has Mary to teach me? (1) Talent without stamina is like a boat in dry dock. (2) Most of us don’t get to write and only write, even if we’re good, even if we snag a book deal. (3) An artist need not be a loner: she may care deeply about community—may be attached and rewarded by community—but not necessarily during her writing time. (4) An artist must at some point, maybe more than once, take a leap off a steep cliff. I leave that cliff for each of us to define. The thrill is the moment in mid-air. (5) There is a market for truth. Amen.

Jayne Benjulian

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More to come about the official launch of AROHO Speaks, a new opportunity for AROHO participants to share their writing experiences, successes, and wisdom.  

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