International Women’s Day Festival March 7-9th, 2008

This year Her Circle Ezine will celebrate it’s first International Women’s Day Festival. Join us beginning March 7th for a weekend of virtual events, including interviews, readings, contests and more!

For information on sponsorship opportunities, please contact us at info@hercircleezine.com.

Happy Holidays

The staff of Her Circle Ezine wishes you a safe and happy holiday season.
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Women in Chant: A CD Review

by Diane Saarinen

As we are coming up on Christmas, it seems Women In Chant: The Announcement of Christmas by the Choir of Benedictine Nuns of the Abbey of Regina Laudis is an excellent choice of music to accompany the season. The choir, under the direction of Mother Abbess David Serna, O.S.B., begins the Announcement of Christmas with chants for Advent all the way through to Epiphany.

These are Gregorian chants that are sung as acts of prayer rather than performances. Regina Laudis is a monastery of contemplative women; a land-based community. Their foundress and first abbess, Mother Benedict Duss, insisted on continuing with Gregorian chant when other monasteries were experimenting with different types of musical expression. “I had an intuitive conviction that the Chant had the power to communicate the life of God as no other music does,” she said.

The enhanced CD, available through Sounds True, comes as a set with a digital booklet that includes translations of the Latin chants as well as photographs of the nuns. “Images of Advent awaken us to a deep and ancient sense of expectancy,” says the accompanying text, while “the vigil of Christmas, December 24, brings us to the hushed still point when the expectation gives way to reality.” Not surprisingly, the chants evolve from understated prayer to exuberant celebration throughout the course of The Announcement of Christmas.

The highlight of this work is “The Women of the Genealogy”, to whom the nuns dedicated this CD: “Their stories of courage and their tenacious drive to meet God in the line of sacred history challenged and inspired us, and anchored us throughout this work.” In the Genealogy, the names of the lineage of Jesus are recited, and, though this succession is predominantly male, the names of five women stand out: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary.

A dramatic photograph of the nuns is included of the Genealogy being chanted by candlelight with, according to the medieval custom, the nun who is the book bearer kneeling down with the book placed on her head before the singing Abbess. Also included in the digital book is a summary of the story of each of these five women, told by the women of the community of Regina Laudis.

The triumph of the women of the Geneaology is summed up: “These women from different lands and nations each represent an improbable, unconventional, and ultimately miraculous leap forward in the line of succession. They are all in some way cast off by others and have the boldness to claim their own legitimacy when they are regarded as outside the law.” It is the choir’s triumph that they have subtly spotlighted these women while continuing with seasonal tradition.

Diane Saarinen’s writings have been seen in numerous publications including Women’s eNews Daily and Quiet Mountain: New Feminst Essays.

To Be or Not to Be…”The Writer” At the Party

Karen Harrington

Absolutely true comments made to me at a recent party after the host introduced me as a writer.

Guest: Oh, what’s your book about?
Me: A family tragedy. A husband is shocked to learn his gentle wife has committed murder and begins looking for clues about impulsive violence in her family tree.
Guest: Ooooooh. Maybe the next one will be more hopeful.
[Goes in search of dip.]

Guest: Where do you get your inspiration?
Me: I like exploring the perspective of being the fly on the wall when something happens.
Guest: My ex-husband is a psychopath. Now there’s a story.

Guest: Really? You wrote a book? I have a great story. Let me tell you about it. . .
[Ten minutes tick by]
Me: Really? You should write that. You have a lot of passion for it.
Guest: No, this needs to be told. These people ripped people off. They were bad people.
Me: So you quit?
Guest: No way. It’s a good company to work for.

Guest: Your book is about generations? Let me tell you about mine. I know I just met you but. . .
Me: [accepts grateful drink from passing waiter]
Guest: Okay, so I wasn’t my father’s favorite child.

Guest: A book? A big person book?
Me: Uh, yes.

This got me to thinking: I wonder what kind of responses artists of all disciplines receive when they are introduced as The Writer. The Painter. The Photographer. The Sculptor.

So tell me, what’s the most interesting thing someone has asked or said to you?

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY (spring 2008). Visit her at www.karenharringtonbooks.com

Still Fighting for the Women’s Room

by Diane Saarinen

While I do occasionally blog in the Her Circle Ezine Blogging Circle, I am also the moderator. I coordinate other bloggers’ posts according to the calendar, and on occasional scout out fellow bloggers.

HCE has a mission: Her Circle Ezine has a decidedly political slant and we actively seek creative works that incorporate women’s socio-political issues into the narrative. Therefore, the content of our blogs will work to promote these themes by highlighting historical and contemporary creative works, thereby furthering our mission to generate awareness for women’s socio-political issues and supporting female artists.

One way we would like to support female artists is to provide a woman-only space for us to safely express ourselves. Misty Ericson, publisher and editor, and I have discussed that men have had their own men-only spaces for centuries and as an international feminist ezine/magazine, we would continue to search out representations of the feminine experience — as experienced by women.

A male acquaintance, who we will call Jeff, began asking questions about the new blog I was coordinating.

“It’s for an international feminist literary magazine,” I said.

“Oh! I always wanted to write from the guy’s side for a woman’s magazine. I used to read my sister’s Tiger Beat and Glamour and wanted to be like that column, “Jake - A Man’s Opinion.”

“But it’s really not that kind of magazine,” I said. Perhaps if he had checked out the link I had provided him, he might have known that.

“But I can write as a woman. I can write under a woman’s pseudonym. I want to be one of the bloggers.”

This seemed ridiculous to me. Jeff had never struck me particularly as feminist. Why would we have a so-called feminist blogging, when it was in fact a man writing under a female pseudonym? Were we so desperate for bloggers that we would try to pull the wool over the collective eyes of our readership? Of course not! I found his request frankly amusing, even silly. I told him, perhaps condescendingly in retrospect, that for now we were “no boys allowed,” but that I would check with Misty in any case.

Misty and I decided that there would no men writing under female pseudonyms in this blog.

I didn’t know quite how to tell Jeff that his plans were thwarted. “No male writers” sounded hostile — as well as so final. Perhaps we would have male writers some day. But for the female pseudonym? I simply decided to tell him “Sorry, no boy bloggers.”

That gave way to a side of Jeff I had not seen before. Snidely, he wrote in an email: “Congratulations, you’ve managed not only to be sexist but racist in the same sentence.” For further clarification, he mentioned that African-Americans would take offense at the use of “boy.” Jeff is Italian.

“Sexist, racist, anti-gay, fill-in-the-blank go away” went the protest chant. I wondered how he did not somehow deduce that I was against homosexuals while he was at it.

I thought about feminists as sexists and research proved that it was hardly an original accusation. In the f word , Catherine Redfern has this response to the same insult hurled at her:

“You can just imagine the guy’s thought pattern as he sits tapping away at his keyboard: ‘She’s a feminist; feminists are against sexism. I’ll call HER sexist! Hoisted by her own petard… Hah ha! Oh, I’m so clever! I bet she’ll never have heard this one before.’”

Later, I had a short conversation with Jeff. I mentioned my supposedly being sexist. We were on the phone now. He wasn’t able to hide behind email. Just as he would never be able to hide behind a female pseudonym.

“I was kidding. You know that. I was kidding.”

Very funny.

And I knew he had still never once checked out the link to HCE as well.

Anne Bradstreet - Still Relevant Today

by Lee Conell

I’m not in the habit of thinking about Puritanism, except maybe around Thanksgiving, when we are inundated with images of turkeys and pilgrims. In the past, when I heard the word “Pilgrim” or “Puritan” I imagined a woman with her hair in a tight bun, wearing a stiff dress and a stern look. Then, I read some of the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, and began to see Puritan women as something other than a cardboard cutout you see on a store window (before the Christmas decorations go up, anyway).

Born Anne Dudley in England in 1612, as a child Bradstreet had many tutors, unusual for the time; girls were generally barely educated. Her family was well-off — her father was the steward of the Earl of Lincoln’s estate — and Bradstreet had access to an extensive library. Perhaps because of her access to education, she was able to grow up knowing that women were not witless beings: She herself was proof of that.

At 16, Bradstreet married her father’s assistant, Simon Bradstreet. Two years later, she undertook a voyage to the New World with her husband, her mother, and her father, who was one of the leaders of the venture. Bradstreet was more than a little reluctant to leave the comfortable England for the unknown New World. However, part of her Puritan upbringing meant obeying what the men around her said. Ultimately, Bradstreet accepted her situation. She joined the church in Boston and had eight children.

The men in her life were important people; both her father and her husband served as governors of Massachusetts. Still, Bradstreet clearly had some confidence in her own abilities, leading her to pick up the pen to write poetry. Women were not encouraged to write in Bradstreet’s society. It was assumed that a female writer must be neglecting her household duties if she had the time to compose poetry. But this did not stop Bradstreet from writing, or from viewing herself as anything less than a devout Christian woman.

The first poem I read by Bradstreet, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” certainly concerns her devotion to her religion. The poem is a dialogue between two “sisters,” the world-loving Flesh and the heaven-loving Spirit. Of course, Spirit’s argument about the weakness of Flesh wins out. Such abstractions, which appeared in the first edition of Bradstreet’s poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, are more imitative of other male poets than Bradstreet’s later work would be. As she continued to write, the subject of her poetry increasingly turned to her own life. She began to write love poems for her husband, who was often away in his work, or elegiac poems about the death of her children and grandchildren.

In her later poetry, Bradstreet continued to use the tension between worldliness and higher religious thoughts seen in “The Flesh and the Spirit” However this tension manifested through Bradstreet’s own life struggles, rather than abstract theological beings that might alienate a reader. In “Upon the Burning of Our House” for example, Bradstreet mourns the loss of her beloved material items in a fire — a loss a modern reader can sympathize with — and then quickly reprimands herself, asking “Didst fix thy hope on mouldring dust,/The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? /Raise up thy thoughts above the skye.”

That struggle between material items and something larger (whether that larger thing is God or, in a secular society, personal morality) is one that is still relevant today. What’s more, by writing about her own daily life and thoughts, Bradstreet’s poems are a precursor to confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, and to a more personal poetic voice overall. We can look at Bradstreet today and see not just a Puritan, but a struggling human being. After reading her, suddenly, those stiff Pilgrims on the store windows seem more like caricatures than ever. Bradstreet brings a strong female voice to a seemingly distant cultural past.

Sabrina Kherbiche’s La Suture: Writing in Search of the Self

by Shannon K. Winston

Sabrina Kherbiche is one of the most compelling emerging women writers writing in French today. I first discovered her work when I read L’Anorexie Créatrice and Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures by Isabelle Meuret, which examines the relationship between writing and anorexia as limit experiences in which the subject is continually in question. Meuret argues that the act of writing is a moment in which food and words rival each other. Writing, therefore, is both In her own words: “It seems that some fall prey to the disease following a language problem, and can paradoxically get back into life through writing itself, which is their saving grace” (Meuret, Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures, 3).

The interrelationship between writing and anorexia is quite pronounced in La Suture, which is why Meuret draws on Kherbiche’s work. Kherbiche’s “hybrid” (Meuret) identity as a daughter of an Algerian man and French woman is central to the narrative. Through her writing, she struggles to unite non-Western and Western parts of her self. Equally prominent to her autobiography, however, is her battle with anorexia and depression, which stemmed largely from her with her traumatic past: Kherbiche lost her virginity before marriage and had a hymen reconstruction surgery (or a “suture”) before her wedding. However, her secret was found out on her wedding night and afterwards escaped to France (Ibid, 4).

Kherbiche’s narrative, then, is her attempt to “suture” herself and to move beyond her past. Her style is poetic and, at times, difficult to grasp because of its deeply fragmented quality. And it is not difficult for readers to intuit Kherbiche’s detachment from herself, her uncertainty and, at times, her desperation to find herself. Her anorexia is not just corporeal but, as Meuret suggests, also related to her writing; she suffers from a verbal and creative anorexia, which continually disorients her and upsets her already troubled sense of self. The most powerful aspect of his autobiography is that it does not offer any solutions or remedies to Kherbiche’s diffiuculties but exists, rather, as testimony to her troubles. Her voice is an important and poetic one that grapples with important questions of the body, women and immigrant narratives, and relationships of ex-colonies to their colonizers.

It is my hope that Kherbiche’s work will receive more attention in North America. As it stands, she is being read more widely and she now writes in English as well as French. She has also done some translation work.

For more on her work: Kherbiche, Sabrina. La Suture. Alger: Editions Laphomic, 1993. Meuret, Isabelle. L’anorexie Créatrice. Paris: Klincksieck, 2006. Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures. Brussels: Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2007.

Excellent Women of Manga

by Suzanne Kamata

Every year, the Japan Media Festival is held in a different prefecture in conjunction with the national holiday, Culture Day. This year, the festival was held in Tokushima Prefecture, where I live. I attended the exhibition of prize-winning manga, electronic games and anime with my eight-year-old son. While he was off checking out the video games, I had a look at the award-winning manga.

I was pleased to see that three of four excellence prizes were awarded to women artists. Of particular interest was Ohoku, drawn by Fumi Yoshinaga , in which historical roles are reversed. In this story, women are shogun. Although in reality powerful men had hundreds of beautiful women at their disposal, in this drama, women wield the power. When they seek sexual satisfaction, they choose from the 3,000 beautiful men in the inner palace (ohoku).

In Japan, manga stories are serialized in monthly magazines and then, when complete, later published in book form. Although Ohoku is not yet complete, the judges were so impressed with this social commentary that they awarded Yoshinaga an Excellence Prize.

Other prizes went to Ima Ichicko for her gorgeously drawn Hyakkiyakosyo, in which, according to judges’ remarks, “beautiful and scary specters make us aware that death and life exist very close to each other, ” and Hiromi Morishita, who employs a singular style to tell stories about the lives of the denizens of a big city neighborhood in Osaka Hamlet.

Kazuko Chikuhama, the writer of Shiritori, was awarded an encouragement prize along with illustrator Kenichi Chikuhama.

In a nation where women leaders in politics and business are few and far between, it’s encouraging, indeed, to see women making waves in media.

_________________
Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

Remembering Grace Paley

by Lee Conell

We all know about the myth of the writer: He (it’s usually a he in the myth) is a recluse, sitting in his cabin in the woods, contemplating this and that, avoiding other human beings even as he seeks to emulate their problems in prose.

Then there’s Grace Paley.

When the New York writer and activist died on August 24 at the age of 84, the obituaries didn’t just appear in major mainstream publications – The New York Times, The Washington Post – but on websites devoted to feminism, to anarchism, to nonviolent activism. The legacy Paley leaves is not just found between the pages of her books, but in her commitment to being actively involved in major issues in the world today.

Sometimes this involvement showed its face in small, local ways: Every Saturday for years during the ’60s, Paley stood on a street corner near her home in New York City, handing out protest fliers to the passerby.

But Paley’s activism took her out of her neighborhood too. It brought her to Hanoi on a peace mission, and to Moscow for a world peace conference. It took her to Washington D.C., where she was among the “White House Eleven” arrested in 1978 for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn.

The strong female voice in her short stories parallels Paley’s own actions and role as a feminist. In 1972 she signed a petition in Ms. Magazine for women who had abortions in a pre-Roe v. Wade world. She added her name to a similar petition in 2006, the year before she died, as a woman’s right to a safe abortion again came under fire in South Dakota.

Paley did not publish frequently, but the stories she wrote forged her reputation as one of the leading American short story writers of the 20th century. The stories, like Paley herself, often engaged the world and questioned it, too. In the story “An Interest in Life,” the main character Virginia, whose husband has disappeared and left her with four children, decides to go on the gameshow “Strike it Rich.” When her neighbor’s son John finds out about her plan, he is scornful. The people who go on that show, he says, truly “suffer” in ways Virginia can’t understand. Paley revealed that the difficulties women faced were frequently and patronizingly dismissed as nothing more than “little disturbances” in life. Just as Paley handed out fliers to inform, she used her writing to shine a light on these difficulties.

When asked during a 1998 interview with Salon.com if writers have a moral obligation, Paley replied that all human beings do. “So if all human beings have it,” she added, “then writers have some, too. I mean, why should they get off the hook? Whatever your calling is, whether it’s as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there’s a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it.”

Through her words, which remain alive and active, Paley will continue to contribute justice to the world. Her unique voice illuminates the lives of women working to maintain their own voices under duress. It is this illumination, as well as Paley’s fearlessness in engaging the world, that guarantees her importance both as a feminist and as a writer.

Lee Connell spends her time drinking coffee, scribbling, and studying literature at SUNY New Paltz.

Mary Moody Emerson: Giving “High Counsels” to Women Still

by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Mary Moody Emerson was a New England philosopher living from 1774 to 1863. Only now is her place as an inventor of American Transcendentalism and model for independent women being acknowledged through such works as Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. She is also an inspiration to modern women seeking new ways of being and perceiving themselves.

Mary’s biography shows how women of her time functioned effectively in community. When her father died in the American Revolution, Mary was sent to nearby relatives, beginning life in a series of households of women who came together to cope with widowhood, motherhood and raising children, poverty, and illness. Mary raised and tutored children, nursed young and old through serious illnesses, and assisted in raising money through home-based businesses, all in households run by women.

At the same time, she forged for herself an uncommonly independent life. She chose not to marry. She owned a farm, but usually preferred the freedom of living as a boarder elsewhere. She largely ignored decorum and was not always popular for speaking her mind and for her eccentric ways, such as wearing a shroud and sleeping in a coffin-shaped bed to welcome death.

She considered her “home” to be her journals in which she wrote the largely spiritual thoughts used, sometimes word for word, by her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Transcendentalist works. In correspondence and conversation she gave what Ralph called “high counsel” to young people, encouraging the girls to as incisive intellectual rigor as the boys. Just as she was part of women’s domestic communities, so she also formed intellectual communities among women through exchanges of journals, letters and meetings.

She was a woman of her time and her thoughts reflect its religious morays. She could be quite traditional and she would most likely disagree with much of current feminist spiritual thought. Yet, the spiritual connection she felt to the Earth and her desire was for a direct relationship between her own sacred soul and the Divine was, in its way, forward-thinking and might seem familiar to today’s women’s spirituality practitioners.

Mary lived in a time of transition between Puritan and Victorian societies as do we as we chart our way towards a 21st century global civilization. Her life gives many concrete lessons for women wishing to live effectively: solve problems through women’s communities, abjure social obligations for greater freedom, and mentor younger women. She also brought the best of the past into the present by creating women’s intellectual communities, as well as envisioning the future through letting her mind roam free to catch the impulse towards Transcendental and modern spiritual thought. But perhaps her best advice for women on untrodden paths is simply to always be true to yourself. Mary deeply influenced those around her and the world for generations to come by knowing who she was and expressing her ideas and values forthrightly in her own way. May we all have the courage to do the same.

Sources:

Battiste, Janice. A Good Aunt Is More than a Patron: Mary Moody Emerson, a Model of Self-Reliance. Women in Life and Literacy Assembly, Vol. 5, Fall, 1996. Available from: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/old-WILLA/fall96/Battiste.html.

Cole, Phyllis. Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Mary Moody Emerson (Eulogy). Paper read before the “Woman’s Club” in Boston in 1869 under the title “Amita.” Available from: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/mme.html.

Carolyn Lee Boyd writes stories, poems, memoirs, and other pieces for feminist and women’s spirituality publications including SageWoman, The Beltane Papers, Matrifocus, The We’Moon Calendar, and Moondance. Her novel, The Temple of the Subway Goddess, is scheduled for publication by Creatrix Books in the Spring of 2009. You are invited to read more of her writings and keep up with what’s new with her at her blogsite, http://Goddessinateapot.wordpress.com

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