Natsuo Kirino’s novels are not for the faint-hearted, nor are they for westerners loath to abandon the cultural stereotype of the Japanese woman as a delicate and beautiful “oriental flower”. Wendy Nakanishi explores the role of women in Japanese culture and society through Kirino’s popular works of crime and suspense.
Elsa Dorfman describes life as a creative female among writers of the Beat Generation and beyond, and gives a bit of advice to creative women now.
“It was just one of those things,” says living (and still writing, performing) Beat generation poet, ruth weiss, of her first readings of jazz-inspired poetry set to jazz music in 1949. She always knew that things would come together at the right time and place. Always a poet, the true poetry of her life continues to unfold.
“‘Sacrifice everything’ we would write on our apartment walls…” wrote Diane di Prima, prolific Beat Generation writer. What was life like for female writers and artists who joined a movement to rebel against conformity in the 1950s golden era of female domesticity? Lourdes Acevedo begins a new series on women of the Beat generation.
In our culture, “witches” are often friendly and cartoonish, but in different times and distant countries, to be a witch has meant that one is distinctly Other, and dangerous. When the ‘Five Witches’ of Croatia were publicly derided for speaking out against the nationalist state, they refused to be silenced.
Lourdes Acevedo writes about Musine Kokalari and the fear surrounding freedom to write. Who was Musine Kokalari, and what made her so powerful that she was bound, even after she was dead? Reading her story, if not her banned works, reminds us of the power of our written voices.
Irmtraud Morgner began her career as a writer in the late fifties with works which were inspired by this genre, but she would ultimately confound the state’s expectations and embark upon journeys of exploration into the surreal, the fantastical and the magical.
Maxie Wander is, in several respects, an exception in the context of this series. One of the things which sets her apart from the other featured writers is the fact that she migrated to the German Democratic Republic from Vienna, Austria, where she had been born in 1933.
The female writer most closely associated with the German Democratic Republic in the public imagination is probably Christa Wolf. Christa interacted with the regime as its antagonist and its enabler, as an ideologue and an artist.
by Shannon K. Winston I write To shout To live You write To shout To live But who will silence The shouting between us? -Habiba Muhammadi, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi Habiba Muhammadi was born in Algeria and attended the University of Algiers where she studied philosophy. She then moved to Egypt where she earned a degree [...]
Traci reveals the impetus to her life journey of writing: “I needed to love something badly enough to change my life, and that thing was poetry.”
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