Julie Unplugged

Drawn to Their Faces, Their Stories, Their Lives & Their Words: Loving Literary Women

Before the Government provided help, widows needed to figure out means to support their children after their husband's died. Kate Chopin wrote and wrote well. Her book, The Awakening, is one of my favorites.

I am taken with their faces

Lucy Larcom: Lowell Mill Girl & Writer

Their courage

And her granddaughter says

“She was only taking care of her children.”

Before there was welfare for widows

there was writing. There were people, interested.

There was engagement, wonder and word~love.

I wonder if I could learn to trace her face?

I wonder if I could learn to paint by tracing her eyes

By learning the shadows and light in her hair’s curls?

I am drawn to the women of the literary past and present. I am drawn to my literary Grandmothers, my great Aunties, my

Elinor Wylie: Misunderstood Poet, Mother & Literary Outsider

neighbors,  my sisters, the artists who went before me. I want to know them, I want to spend time with them. I want them to know that we know and notice and appreciate.

I want to share their stories, their wisdom, their humor. I want to dive into their connections and friendships with other creative women. I want to learn how they Mothered, if they had children. I want to read their letters and diaries, I want to thumb through the photos from their lives.

I want to know how they dealt with loss, how they wrote their grief onto the page or into the paint.

I crave visits to archives to touch the papers and pages they also touched.

The US National Archive keeps treasures like this. There are also archives at Libraries, Colleges and Universities. If you are interested in a particular author, search Archives - Author's Name or look in bibliographies about your favored writer.

I am beyond words drawn to the women of the literary past and present.

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© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott

    Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.

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Painted Desert Outside My Bakersfield Window

I got a text message at three o’clock this morning which I didn’t notice until my alarm went off at 5:45. It was something about deception in a he said/she said where is she I don’t know I’m trapped she said but I don’t believe and on and on and on in a well worn pattern between a long unhappily married couple.

It feels like one layer of sediment atop another atop another atop another and there is so much swirling dust it never gets cleared, it just piles another layer of dust where it wasn’t before.

I don’t understand the layers of deception.

I can’t tune into the accusations and the drilling into what it is or isn’t.

It isn’t because I am saintly because I am not.

I just don’t know why there is so much investment in the energy stream of someone who consistently tells untruths unless it is a mutual whirlwind of lies and cover ups and swirling messes of sand crisscrossing each other’s paths.

I look out the window and write a quick haiku of what I see:

Painted desert sky

Right outside my window pane

Bakersfield morning

I am choosing to take this five minutes of writing to let it go.

I pop a Hershey’s kiss I shouldn’t be eating into my mouth. I take a gulp of coffee and look again at the sunrise which now doesn’t look so much like the painted desert, it looks more like the threads on a pastel baby blanket.

I’ll save that metaphor for tomorrow’s haiku and leave the swirling sand of deception to others to bear.

This was a five minute stream of consciousness exercise written in community with others who also take five minutes to write on Tuesdays.

Click on the "Just Write" icon at the opening of the blog post above or here are a few more details for you from Heather, who started this writing adventure.

Please come and link up to Just Write every Tuesday here at The Extraordinary Ordinary–tell your stories! It’s best to do this whenever you’re struck with inspiration, so write at any time and just save your post for Tuesday.

If you’re not a blogger, please still join us! Grab a notebook or a new doc on your computer and Just Write! (If you ever want to share what you’ve written with me, I’d love that! – heatheroftheeo @ gmail dot com)

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© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott

 

Women in Literary History from A to Z: Yosano Akiko

Yosano Akiko is a poet I didn’t know of until the past week.

I still don’t know exactly how I found her, but somehow, someplace, something most likely having to do with feminism lead me to her poetry.

I started reading more Japanese love poetry only recently because I bought a book at one of my favorite places for book shopping – Goodwill – and found a collection of poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mario Aratani titled The Ink Dark Moon. The ancient court was filled with women geniuses. It was expected then for the women to be more insightful and more gifted with words than the men. The poetry I found was both erotic and spiritual, sensual and insightful.

From centuries ago and now to the beginning of the twentieth century, I happened upon Yosano Akiko. She was very ahead of her generation in her intellectual thought and practice. She was a feminist, she was a social activist – she was a mother of 13, 11 of whom survived into adulthood.

She was married to another poet, Tekkan Yosano, who was also an editor. Some of their poetry intertwined with his poem starting a thread of tanka and her poem in response to his tanka.

She wrote more than twenty volumes of tanka in her lifetime.

Roger Pulvers, author, playwright and director who is also a Japan Focus associate had these words to say about Akika Yosano:  “Had Yosano Akiko been writing in English or French or German, for instance, her influence on 20th-century poetry around the world would have been immense.”

A brief sampling of her Tanka:

Two stars deep into heaven

Whispering love

Behind the nighttime curtain

While down below, now, people lie

Their hair in gentle disarray…

= = =

The day lengthens...

I snap off wild roses

Grasp them, put them in my hair...

I am weary of waiting in the field

For you!

= = =

We leaned against the railing

That runs along the bright bank

Of the wide Oi River at night

Dressed in light blue

In our very own summer!

= = =

Perhaps it is my search for feminist quotes that brought me to this phenomenal poet. She declared in 1911, “All the sleeping women are now awake and moving.”

My 2013 self says, “Are we?”

I feel as if she is daring me to not only wake more completely, but to serve as an agent of awakening for the women in my life.

Are you awake?

Are you moving?

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 © 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

 

Quotes (and images) from Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald: Her portrait overlaying her painting, "Marraige at Cana"

Quote highlights, all from Zelda Fitzgerald.

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”

“She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.”

"I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.”

“The trouble with emergencies is," she said, "that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.”

“memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for”

* * * * *

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.

Writing Writing, Please Tell Me, What is my Subject Going to be?

The first thought to pop off the end of my pencil this morning was, “I woke up thinking what I am to write today…” actually, my conscious mind thought, “What am I to write today….” But in the translation between my mind and my pencil, my pencil won.

Its stubborn word-flip flop asked me to investigate who I am as a writer and a communicator for the world rather than looking around for some assignment to float, featherlike, into my line of vision and pluck it from the air to write it and share it with you.

What am I to write today?

The clichés push their way to the forefront of my mind: love, community, presence, passion, family.

My secondary clichés show up, wishing I would for once make them first: color, harmony, friendship, creativity, poetry and travel.

I close my eyes and again, automatically put my hands into a prayer position and rest my face on them. It isn’t even six a.m. yet this writing – right here – this writing you are reading is not letting me go. This writing is holding me in its arms, asking me to give it voice.

I request permission for coffee which it grants. I put socks on my feet before I pace across the hardwood floor of my dining room. I hear my household beginning to awaken.

My journey into my kitchen includes feeding my cat, Alice, who meows for my attention. I grant it to her. I pour my coffee into the Zion National Park mug which asked to come home with me from Utah last Summer. I turn to see the Christmas lights were left on all night. It is still so dark outside, it could be midnight.

It isn’t, it was 5:56 when I last looked at my clock.

I grab my phone to record the darkness next to the color.

I hear water, a shower, perhaps.

I hear Emma’s alarm sing: Taylor Swift, to be precise.

I walk into the cold to snap a shot, to catalog my day visually.

I walk back into the house and hear the jingle bell on the inside. I smell the coffee.

I return to my desk, realizing in each and all of those steps I am writing.

Today may become a day for drawing writing subjects from a jar.

It may be a day of brainstorming or mindmapping or perhaps a day where freewriting reigns.

I may stay plugged into my desk for most of the morning or I may go to meditation, instead. I may republish an old gem. I consider one from last December, writing about community. I decline that invitation.

I reflect on the weekend in San Francisco and scribble, “No destination leads to my exact destination” and realize that is who I am what I am how I am to write today.

 

Will you come with me, too? Who are you to write today?

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Sc

Unexpected Passion: Our Literary Grannies, Aunties and Older Sisters

It wasn't a passion I expected.  It started with a challenge and turned into something much bigger.  For a long time I have actively sought quotes from women because I discovered how infrequently women were quoted as compared to men.

My blood started heating up because many women writers even today didn't use their given feminine names for their writing because "boys won't read books by women." I remember as a teen feeling bothered that S.E. Hinton who wrote The Outsiders was actually Susan Eloise Hinton. She didn't enjoy "girl books" so instead, she wrote a novel heavy in male characters and using an ungendered identity.

I realized women and girls needed role models from our literary history. I realized American girls and women needed to search for the American Woman writing voice. Yes, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters are phenomenal, but who were their American contemporaries?

I have barely scratched the surface but now that I have, I can't research enough.

It got hot and heavy in April. I decided to participate in the A-Z in April Blog Challenge. I decided this year – since I failed miserably the year before – I would use a theme. It stirred up such a passion for me all surrounding Women in Literary History.

I had such a blast I surprised even myself.

I want to print all 26 blog posts and the ones I have written since then. I wrote my first in a long time yesterday about poet Alice Corbin Henderson. I specialize in 19^th and early 20^th century writers, though I have been known to go higher and lower.

Two women I plan to include in 2013 were Courtesan Poets between the 8^th and 11^th century. I just never know where my adventures will take me. Oh, I have a women writer with a “Z” name. I use given names, not surnames because those were often passed along to women via marriage. The most difficult in English is X.

I am currently creating  my list for 2013 and am looking for women writers named Xochitl or Xantha or anything at all with an X.

So there you have it… and hey, if you want to check out any of my women in literary history, check out one (or more) of these:

Lucy Larcom, Mill Girl & Writer

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Social Reformer & Writer

Ina Coolbrith, First Poet Laureate of California

Kate Chopin: Novelist, Short Story Writer (with her Children)

 Thank you for the visit!

Writing at Ina Coolbrith Park

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© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott

 

 

 

This is my twenty first post (of 31!) for the January Ultimate Blog Challenge. Watch here for challenge posts which will include Writing Prompts, Writing Tips and General Life Tips and Essays.

 

Women in Literary History: Alice Corbin Henderson, Poet, Mother, Activist, Curator

It has been a while since I have written a biographical sketch about a woman writer in literary history. Today I went through my file filled with photos of these women and randomly selected Alice Corbin Henderson as the subject of today's sketch. Enjoy!

I adore this portrait of Alice Corbin Henderson!

 

"I saw the world go by and laughed as it was going."

Alice Corbin Henderson.

I knew when I first saw her photo that poet Alice Corbin and I would become friends. Now, I could tell she was also long gone – a revered woman poet, critic,  an early associate editor of Poetry Magazine – I knew she belonged in my women in literary history knowledge bank.

She was an avant-garde poet, an imagist,  who was originally from St. Louis, joining the ranks of Kate Chopin and Zoe Akins as late 19^th and early 20^th century women writers from that city.

She studied at the University of Chicago. Her first collection of poetry, The Linnet Songs, was published in 1898. In 1904 she rented a studio in the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago,  where she met her future husband, visiting professor. William Penhallow Henderson. He was a painter, architect and furniture designer. Together they had a daughter, Alice Oliver Henderson.

In 1912 her second collection of poems, The Spinning Woman of the Sky. She left Chicago for Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1916, after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis. She continued working on Poetry Magazine by long distance until 1922. Later, she was curator at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

When she arrived in Santa Fe, she was not only inspired by the people there, but also the cultures and art from the native Americans she met along the way.  She became an activist on the behalf of Native Americans.

She also was in a group of poets in Santa Fe who called each other “Poet’s Round Up”  and included DH Lawrence, Witter Bynner, Yvor Winters, and several other poets. The group fizzled out until resurrected by Alice Oliver Henderson when she returned to Santa Fe as an adult. The group evolved into "Writer's Round Up" and was quite a big part of the Santa Fe art scene, especially in the  1930's.

 I fell in love with this poem, published in Poetry Magazine in 1916.

Apparitions

A thin grey shadow on the edge of thought

Hiding its wounds –

These are the wounds of sorrow

It was my hand that made them

And this grey shadow resembles you

Is my own heart, weeping

You sleep quietly beneath the shade

Of willows in the south

 = = =

To find out more, here is a fascinating chronology and list of papers held by the library at the University of Texas.

I had better luck searching simply "Alice Corbin" if you would like to do research on your own to get to know this fascinating woman more deeply.

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

 

The Final Five Minute Friday of 2012: Wonder... Which Direction to Go?

It’s #FiveMinuteFriday free write time! <—click to tweet this! 

We are a flash mob of folks spend five minutes all writing on the same topic and then share ‘em at LisaJoBaker.com.

Words from my five minutes on....

WONDER

Wonder.

I have absolutely no idea what direction to go.

And that makes me want to cry because it mirrors much of my life lately. I want to be in a space of wonder like I have been in the past, but it seems like since I have been dealing with the melanoma I have lost the capacity for wonder.

I’m trying so hard to be a good mother, a good friend, a contributor to my community, but somehow every day I feel like my wound is growing deeper, both physically and metaphorically.

I wish I could look at my scar/wound with wonder, but fear sits on top of my ear, gazing down at my wound as it isn’t healing correctly so says my doctor. The spot where the melanoma lived the deepest in my face has had some “stitch malfunction” a very medical term and now there is an amoeba looking spot on my wound that changes almost daily.

I was told three weeks ago we would wait for six to eight weeks and then look again, if there isn’t improvement, more surgery will be needed.

More surgery.

I could so easily spout trite stuff here. Part of me feels really guilty for not being able to leap into the bible verses like I used to, you know Romans 8:28 and all that, but I wonder how on earth I am supposed to see the good in this right now?

I hear about cancer survivors who are so enrapt with life afterwards, but perhaps it is because I still feel like I am in limbo that I just can’t manage it anymore. I just can’t do it.

I want to be in a space of wonder, it is Christmas time. I need to be able to “perform” as if wonder is surrounding  me or even nod to wonder. I think I pull it off in front of the kids most of the time, but just now I’ve been sitting here typing away sobbing with my face as still as possible and the salt just stuck to my eyeballs because I don’t want my daughter, who is having her own personal tough time, to know how bad I am feeling.

I’m a few minutes over, but I suppose one moment of wonder in the past week was when I was feeling so alone and God reached out and put his arm around me and reminded me he is my heavenly father all the time. He partners with me on my projects, he shines the flashlight when I can’t see.

He will show me the way back to wonder.

TIMER sang four minutes ago. I needed to wipe my eyes and blow my nose.

Once again, I’m done with my Friday Five ~ I'll look forward to seeing all you beloveds in 2013.

The guidelines for Five Minute Friday -

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.
2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. And then absolutely, no ifs, ands or buts about it, you need to visit the person who linked up before you & encourage them in their comments. Seriously. That is, like, the rule. And the fun. And the heart of this community..

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.

Did you enjoyed this essay? Receive emails directly to your inbox for Free from Julie Jordan Scott via the Daily Passion Activator. One inspirational essay and poem (almost) every week day. Subscribe here now -

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Word-Love to You from Elements of Style, Strunk & White, Buzzing Memories & Me

I can’t help falling in love with my Strunk and White Word-Love Roses.

This bouquet is made from the pages of Elements of Style,  a tiny little text book that fed generations of writers wisdom and inspired them to exceptional writing. I also relate to it from the teacher/student perspective – all those red pens smashing the hopes of young writers.

Will you give me just a moment for a story?

When I was in the fifth grade I was in Mrs. Wilson’s English class. We were brand new to Middle School – it started in Glen Ridge in the fifth grade - and it was a sad time for me: students were discerning who was cool and who wasn’t cool and although my winning personality USED to get me a ticket to the cool kids’ lunch table, now I was a cast off and felt very sad and lonely about that AND next, the unbelievable happened.

Mrs. Wilson took a group of seven or eight of us out of the classroom to discuss and correct our sub-par first papers we turned into her. I was horrified. There I sat with, wait, let me remember.

There are only two who I remember because I had my head down almost the whole time in that small room. Sitting here in 2012 I can still see the way the light was shining, I can still see the wooden walls, seeming to mock me.

Beth Williams, who became a dear friend  was there as was Perry Keane, who tried valiantly to comfort me when I couldn’t hold the tears back any more. Perry and I always sat side by side when teachers alphabetized seating charts and after that episode, I carried the shame of being pulled out of the class with him by my side so we never became the good friends we probably could have been.

Perry, if you are out there reading,  thank you for trying to comfort me.

I may write to make my living now, but back then I was a little girl who had excelled and now was being told my work was “fair” at best and I believed I was destined for a life of failure and the dreaded red pen would dangle relentlessly above my word-loving page. Mrs. Wilson might have put a slash through that last sentence and shouted “RUN ON!” with her red pen.

My writing students often give me the feedback they haven’t written in YEARS because of the dreaded red pen and through my teaching are reborn as word-loving writers.

For this, and many other reasons, I love these red roses. The color and flower of love and the washing away of “mistakes” in our writing and “bad form” in our writing: Strunk and White and all our writing teachers truly only hoped to make us into better writers.

Thank you, Mrs. Wilson, for believing in me after that fateful day.

And thank you for casting me as the Cook in The Dispeptic Ogre. While that memory was also tarnished by the meaning I bestowed upon it and the choices I made afterwards, I now see it as cherished and lovely.

I am even posting this photo, where I see the roses very clearly and I also see on the right side of my face, the fading pink slash mark of my surgeon. It could almost be mistaken as an indentation, but it is a part of my scar.

It must be a day to celebrate mistakes made whole. It must be a day to take hurts and integrate them, choosing to see them, finally, as just right.

This post was inspired in part by Art Every Day Month. Click the link here or over <--- there, on the image.

 

 

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

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More Photo Collages: Featured Authors JK Rowlings & Anais Nin (with some surprises in between)

I wanted to post some photos of my word-love flowers in their upcycled vases but alas, I left my camera at my besties house so instead, here are a couple of my latest women author photo collages.

I created some of JK Rowlings specifically for my daughter. I want to do more with the pencil sketch of Rowlings, though, am thinking I will watercolor her so it is more vibrant without relying on the photo editor.

The photo above  is of Anais Nin in 1920 along with some flappers from this era. Love the way the two, together, turned out. Will also be doing more along this vein… but here is where I am today.

 I aim to work on my pendants today and do more with my word-love flowers. They are so pretty! Yesterday I spent much of the day watching cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies and sculpting flowers from book pages. Yes, I was in Word-Nerd heaven.

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott