Happy Birthday, Olive Schreiner

It was after I decided to write my M.A. thesis on Olive Schreiner that I became acutely aware of how effectively women writers are “disappeared” by the male literary canon. Yes, it happens to all writers to some degree, as fashions change, but the disappearance of once famous women is much more dramatic. The uppity Monstrous Regiment of Women are put back in their place, their contributions mocked if remembered at all. I was amazed to discover that Schreiner’s essays and novels had once been read all over the world; that she had met Gandhi in South Africa, had influenced Stephen Crane, had had an influential role in the British and South African movements for women’s suffrage. How had I never heard about her before? I kept finding her unaccredited picture in photos of women’s suffrage marches in Britain (at 4′ 11″ with a very pointy nose, she was easy to spot) and references to her in the papers of the famous of the time. Women writers who embodied the cause of their times seem especially susceptible to revisionist rancor, and there’s no question she was an oddity. She wrote about race and class and feminism, but her preoccupations were just as much on the spiritual and moral plane. I finally decided her writing embodied a tragic philosophy, in the way Dostoevsky’s fiction and Nietzsche’s writings did. She was a spiritual evolutionist, a transcendental feminist. Even in her time she was hard to classify, but Virginia Woolf’s parents made sure she was taken to tea to meet the famous author, when she was only a child. It rankled her later that the child had been in no position to ask the questions she later had as an adult.

Born to missionary parents in British South Africa, before South Africa as we know it today even existed, her biggest literary influences were not novels, but rather the philosophical musings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herbert Spencer, the author of Spiritual Evolution. She theorized, with the urgency of her time, about what should replace our moral compass in a world where pressure from science and evolutionary theory rendered belief in the conventional idea of God no longer possible. Like Thoreau, Emerson, and Spencer, she replaced God with Nature, and with human intelligence that can see for itself the logic of cause and effect teaching us what we should and should not do, for our own sanity.

The Story of an African Farm is a strange and wonderful book, passionately felt, with an extended parable in the middle, written in Biblical language that completely flummoxed the modern Marxist feminists I read. Schreiner’s sophisticated writings on feminism, economics, and colonialism were comprehensible to them. But the acute spiritual pain she was addressing, her need to replace timeworn pieties with something vital and alive confuses feminists today. At the time, this was as urgent as the political struggles of the suffragettes.

That was part of what prompted me to write about her; it’s rare in graduate school to come across a book or writer where the literary critics all seem to get it wrong. The two exceptions were South African women themselves: Doris Lessing wrote a brilliant essay on the landscape, physical and emotional, that shaped Schreiner and it’s still one of the best essays on Schreiner’s most famous novel, The Story of an African Farm.

The other was Ruth First, who wrote the definitive biography at the time I was writing. When the biography was published, she was an ANC member, working from exile in Zimbabwe before she was killed by a letter bomb from the apartheid government’s secret police. She addressed Schreiner’s writing with great empathy and insight into the moral and social dilemmas Schreiner tried to address in her work.(Ruth First was portrayed by Barbara Hershey in the film A World Apart.)

Schreiner’s other attraction for me was the brilliance of her social analysis of women’s place as mediated by economics and culture — all the things Simone de Beauvoir left out — creating a more grounded analysis. She had grown up witnessing the stark differences between the place of women in the African, Boer, and British cultures around her. In some ways, she was a more accomplished social theorist than novelist. Her small treatise, Woman and Labour was more sophisticated, especially in escaping from the trap of thinking your own milieu somehow reflects “nature.”

I was in the process of recovering from reading too much social science theory (and the passive-voice writing that goes with it) for my cultural Anthropology degree, and here was a marvelous cross-cultural analyses of colonialism, cultural subjugation, and women’s identity defined by her role in the economy (hence her coinage of the term “sex parasitism”). She pointed out that the African women around her were more valued and contributed to the economic well-being of their households in ways English women were unable to do. Hobsbawm and the Marx circle took up her work and popularized it. Havelock Ellis popularized her ideas about women and his own theories about female sexuality (hot stuff at the time!). The suffragettes read her stories and essays to bolster their spirits in between forced feedings in Holloway prison during their hunger strikes.

But I digress.

Recently I read a wonderful “alternate history” set during WWI, Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers. About half way through the story, the main character mentions The Story of an African Farm, remarking that all her female colleagues seem to have a copy. She’s trying to decide if it had been used as a code book to encrypt messages. Kowal did solid research on the role of women in fighting the war, and amplified it with her “ghost talkers” in a way that felt true to the period, if somewhat macabre. I enjoyed it, but I was even more delighted to see Olive referred to as a popular writer. She was!

Happy Birthday, Olive.

Crow Lore #2

At least two of the definitions used to separate humans from other animals that were common when I was a baby anthropology major have since fallen by the wayside.

The first to go was the idea that our species was the only tool-using species. Of course, research on chimpanzees, dolphins, even dung beetles, suggested maybe that was too easy a definition. Meanwhile, the crows were sitting back and laughing at us.

The other rubric, which seemed even more persuasive, was our effortless, embedded capacity for language. But there’s growing evidence that other species have something very like language, and in fact it may be our own lack of precise observations that led us to that conclusion (also the difficulty of observing animals who swim and fly).

Crows speak in dialects, and they change their pronunciations when they move to join a new group so they’ll fit in. According to ornithologist John M. Marzluff and author Tony Angell (In the Company of Crows and Ravens) their calls “vary regionally, like human dialects that can vary from valley to valley,” and “When crows join a new flock,” they wrote, “they learn the flock’s dialect by mimicking the calls of dominant flock members.” Crows have popular kids, too.

Listen to crow calls here.
What do they mean?

(Thank you Cornell ornithology lab.)

Crow Lore #1

In honor of Coalfeather and Kaark, two characters in The Third Kind of Magic,
I will be posting about crows today. Because you can never know too much about crows.

Crows routinely take on hawks, vultures, raptors of all kinds.
I’ve seen them attack the local hawks around nesting time several times, especially on the high power lines where there seems to be some jockeying for territory.

“Things as it is”

So today is the official ebook birthday of my book, but one of the reasons I chose today for the launch was because it’s the birthday of my late Zen teacher, Katherine Thanas. She was one of those once-in-a-lifetime people who arrive in your life like a gift, a real teacher, and she transmitted the flavor of the Soto Zen tradition she received from her teachers with directness and compassion. I found her zendo in Monterey at a fairly difficult time in my life, and it changed me.

She has a book out now, too, posthumously, called The Truth of this Life. The title makes me uncomfortable, if I’m honest, because it sounds pretentious. And Katherine was never pretentious; her subtlety and insight deepened her students’ understanding of zen, buddhism, and life far beyond sweeping summations of “truth.” She offered her own experience, her own uncertainty and questioning that made it impossible for us to settle on too glib an answer, too facile an understanding. She modeled “don’t know” mind in a way that felt absolutely true to the spirit of the teachings.

She often used Suzuki Roshi’s phrase, “Things as it is,” which captures the flavor of that. Slightly off, poking at you grammatically, but there’s a message there, asking you to examine your assumptions about what you think you know, vs. experiencing reality.

The nature of things as it is, is that we don’t really know what that nature is. Or our own. We have to stop thinking and experience it. Or try.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Katherine. We miss you. I am so grateful to have your book, but even more grateful that I was able to experience your dharma talks and let them percolate into my life.

It’s T-minus 11 hours and counting

The Crow book launches in about 11 hours, at least for the Pacific Coast. It will be earlier/later in other time zones, (I think Australia will actually go on sale later today) but this is the one I’ll track, because it’s all moonshine anyway until there’s a sale somewhere, and it’s all I can do to keep track of GMT with silly daylight savings putting us back on a war footing for no good reason.

All I can think about is all the stuff that was supposed to be done by now and isn’t, since I’ve had to scramble to find someone else to do my taxes this year after the first guy unexpectedly bowed out. But we shall perservere.

And that’s incentive to get everything done this weekend, right? The rain will help.
I will be doing a little bit of tweeting and FB posts, and will try to be as un-annoying as possible.
I know how that can boomerang – (“I don’t know you but I dislike you because you keep tweeting about your &^$# book!”)

We’ll see how tasteful I can be while saying “look at my book!”

hands of two people bowing to each other, gassho

Time for a gratitude list

So today was the end of the local “genre” (aka sf/f CON)FogCON, wherein our heroine finally admitted to real people, in person and outside of her day job, that she is publishing a book and it’s not all just something happening in the confines of her skull, or between her and the glowing screen.

I’ve never really publicly thanked all the people who helped me to get to this point – and let’s face it, it takes a village to nurture a book until its ready to spread its fledgling wings and leave the nest, pages flapping happily in the breeze.

So in no particular order I’d like to thank:

My first Beta reader, Bryan-Kirk Reinhardt
My second Beta reader and long-time intellectual inspiration, Kathy Whilden, who read the book aloud to her grandkids
The unnamed grandchildren, especially K who wrote me a wonderful letter about the book. You know who you are and thank you for encouraging me.
The wonderful writer Ginny Rorby who ‘doesn’t like fantasy’ but liked what I gave her to critique anyway and then generously agreed to blurb it while trying to meet her own deadline for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference
My stalwart copy-editor, Laura Blackwell (I added a comma there just for you)
Every cool writer who took the time to talk to me at writing conferences – Terry Bisson, Jo Walton, Catherine Ryan Hyde, John Lescroart, (I know I’ll forget someone)
The workshop participants in Barbara Rogan’s online writing workshops, and Barbara herself for her support and critiques
U.K. Le Guin for inspiring me in so many ways, and for talking to me about dragons
Kelley McMorris for making my dream of a cover come true
The generous authors who have critiqued part of my book, especially Christine Fletcher during the Oregon Children’s Book Writing Workshop
The kind strangers who read my book and then wrote reviews on Amazon, giving me invaluable feedback
And last but not least, Jude at Borderlands Books for letting me put out my print copies during the Con!
The wonderful person who bought the first copy, making me a real author (and publisher). You know who you are. Thank you!

I’m grateful to you all.

A big thank you to my new readers

I just want to give a shout out to the generous folks who have graciously written reviews of my debut novel. I know it’s hard to find time to do all the things we have to do, so taking a chance on a newbie writer is a big commitment and I am so grateful for the support.

Sometimes writing seems a bit insane, spending so much time talking to yourself about people who don’t really exist. But getting positive feedback from readers makes it all worth it.

Thank you!

International Women’s Day and Jane Addams

Yes, I’m a day late, but that’s because I’ve been thinking about this for several days and wanted to get it right.

Jane Addams is one of those amazing women who were famous and revered in their day, and then somehow disappeared from sight, in spite of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, her contributions and influence swept away by changing fashion, and dare I say it, because her social ideals are labeled too “feminine.” Ideals like feeding starving children, providing healthcare and education for immigrants, and keeping us out of World War I (for which there was a great deal of support across the country). Oh yes, and for supporting something as outrageous as the 8 hour working day.

You know, all those girly things.

She was a great hero of mine when I was a child, one of the few women included in my K-12 curriculum. A little hint of 1890s radicalism remained in our curriculum, thanks probably to the influence of Dewey and the Lab School in Chicago, since I grew up near Chicago. When I hear the nonsense spouted about immigration in our country right now, I think of her wise and thoughtful approach to considering the value immigrants bring to their new country, as well as what we owe to them. The same arguments and rhetoric we are hearing now have been used over the last several hundred years with astonishing regularity, from the time California passed a law to expel the Chinese, to deploring the “dirty and degenerate” Irish or Italians or Poles or Greeks in Chicago in the nineteenth-century.

Jane Addams addressed this head on at Hull House, set up to provide assistance to the wretchedly poor and exploited labor pool fueling the wealth of the stockyards, the railroads, and the other companies run by the titans of industry in Chicago.

I read her autobiographical account, Twenty Years at Hull House in college and was surprised at her cultural approach to the immigrant communities. The arguments she was making were anthropological arguments for the differences in how the different communities adapted. And her insights about the embarrassment the children of immigrants felt for their parents’ old country ways were very shrewd. Hull House’s Labor Museum of crafts and industries from the ‘old country” helped the younger generation appreciate the skills and knowledge of their parents:

“There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her mother was “the best stick-spindle spinner in America.” When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life—how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways.

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother’s whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctities—to the shrine before which she had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church—and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore.

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired.”

Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams

What has this to do with International Women’s Day? Addams was especially active in the International women’s movement, becoming one of the founders of the organization later known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. If you read the historical accounts of the conference they held after Hitler came to power in Germany, it’s chilling to realize that every one of their assertions about the danger of Germany re-arming (with American arms and resources) proved true. If the boycott they urged had happened, if Americans had forgone the profit they were making from Germany, who knows how history might have been different. It’s a complex subject and you can read more about it here.