Julie Unplugged

Collage: Mixing Up an Artform with Soulfulness, Literature, the Women's Movement & Laughter

I spent my afternoon at a Soul Collage retreat which was both restful, refreshing and inspiring. I knew my intention was to focus on honoring women whose presence on the planet has influenced me both creatively and also as a woman overall.

Here are the outcomes, including a little collage humor at the bottom.

I included information for you in the captions, in case you are curious who some of these women were/are. Can you see which collage has a pointillism version of me within it?

 

Home & Hearth, Suffragists - Millworkers... You and I are all a part of the Women's Movement

I was concerned my painting of a woman's unclothed torso might get me "in trouble" with online censorship. So far, so good. I posted this on instagram as a test. No problems yet at all!

 

We love our Literary Grannies: still have edits to do on Anais collage and Vincent collage... oh, for realistic red hair...

I am a writer who respects my writing lineage. Too many literary studies only focus upon the male side of our creative lineage. One of my aims is to bring our Literary Grannies back into our consciousness. I'm Vincent's hair looks ridiculous, but I wanted to bring out that famous black and white photo of her with the magnolias. I learned last Spring that this particular magnolia breed was planted as far north as possible - in Upstate New York and Western Massachusetts - by landscape architect Frederick Olmstead who designed Central Park in New York City and other notable places. Now you know the amount of (not very useful) facts rumbling about my head!

 

 

Be alert for Billboard Man - Coming to Save an Artform in Your City!

This is an example of my flavor of art humor. I collaged my friend, Cameron Brian, into a broken billboard frame I photographed a while ago. I didn't know how or where I would use that photo and while collaging I couldn't help myself. :~)

What is happening along your adventures in Art Every Day land?

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You may still join Art Every Day Month - Leah Piken Kolidas has been inspiring many of us for years! Check it out -

 

 

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This is me, writing in a Baltimore Park. I am sitting across the street from an apartment building where Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived.

Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.

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© 2013

 

Such a Word: Yearning. Such a Deep Chasm. What an Incredible Gift.

This is me, three days after melanoma surgery last September. My tactic in 2012, after my melanoma surgery, was to shut off yearning.

I read the prompt from Meredith today for AugustMoon13  – all about yearnings: what did I yearn for last January, what do I yearn for now, what has changed? Or something sort of like that. I actually read it and closed it, read it and closed it, read it and closed it, which started my repetitive phrasing here and the search for quotes from women writers I respect.

 

This is actually what Meredith wrote:

                                Have you developed new yearnings so far this year? Let go of old ones?

Yearning.

 “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

Yearning.

“Why is love intensified by absence?”
― Audrey Niffenegger

Yearning.

“How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.”
― Sylvia Plath

Such a word.

“I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

Such a word.

“I am tired, Beloved,
of chafing my heart against
the want of you;
of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.”
― Amy Lowell

Such a word.

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
― Margaret Atwood

Yearning is one of those words that is so deep – it is one of those words that makes a slow, careful incision in my chest, intentionally scoops out my innards and then leaves me hollow inside but all stitched up, almost like new again.

I found a quote from a writer who is not a woman and it was as if a hole was punched into that hollow shell.

“Unopened gifts contain hope.
”
― Jarod Kintz

Maybe this is why I have pushed my yearnings away or haven’t chosen to recognize them as such. If I open the gifts of my yearning, the hope, my warped belief taunts, will vaporize.

It is so interesting that AugustMoon13 arrives right on the year anniversary of my melanoma and very close to the two year anniversary of the darkest day of my life, September 30, 2011. On that same day, a giant sequoia fell along the trail of 100 Giants at the Sequoia National Monument.

My hypothesis is my heart was squeezed flat by my circumstance at that same moment that giant tree fell.

Because of my melanoma, I stepped aside from a lot of my usual activities and cocooned with myself and my children. I stopped my involvement in theater, I stopped working with coaching clients, I stopped teaching almost all of my classes.

Here I am, writing at Workhouse Arts Center. This was once a notorious prison where suffragists were force fed and held illegally. Now, it is a space for artists to thrive.

This choice allowed me the space to if not examine my choices with a searchlight and a magnifying glass, it did allow me to gently watch the unopened boxes accumulate.

 

That’s where I am now. Sitting here, surrounded by unopened gifts of hope which I now know will not vaporize, just like hope will not vaporize for you, either.

The quotes from all these glorious women writers appear to be written with the yearnings aimed at another human being to complete her in some way. My yearnings are not for another, my yearnings are for me to come even more deeply into myself and to continue to examine, gently, what I offer the world in me simply being me using the gifts of my unique circumstances and my one-of-a-kind way of looking at the world.

I look at the last quarter of 2013 with a completely different perspective I looked at the last quarter of 2012.

In 2012 I yearned to surrender and retreat, to not be compelled to be responsible to anyone or anything beyond myself and my children.

In the last quarter of 2013, I am looking toward the “What can I do with what I have in the circumstances I find myself in?”

I am facing at least one more surgery. I don’t want to retreat this time nor do I want to surrender nor do I want to fight. I want to stand, strong, with gifts opened and unopened, knowing each gift of yearning offers me and my world more light and love and hope and authenticity than I can put into words right now.

 

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© 2013

 

 

Literary Granny Julia Ward Howe: I'm Not Exactly Her Namesake AND I'll Claim Her

It would be very obvious to say I was named for my Aunt Julie, but that is not exactly directly the truth. She was actually named Juliet and my parents almost didn’t name me Julie for fear I would get teased because of the character Julie Jordan in the musical Carousel.  I didn’t get teased as a child, but when I was younger I regularly got sung to by teachers with the opening line of the song.

Historically and literarily speaking, most Julies were Julia or Juliette or Juliet I suppose.

I am glad to claim Julia Ward Howe as a Julie in my literary lineage.

She was known mostly for her song, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but besides this

Literary Granny Julia Ward Howe

accomplishment she was a poet, abolitionist, and activist. She also wrote plays and creative non-fiction, including a work about Margaret Fuller, another woman I claim in my literary lineage.

The story of Battle Hymn of the Republic goes like this: Mrs. Howe was visiting, along with the Secretary of War for the Union, some of the army camps. The soldiers were busily singing “John Brown’s Body” and that tune must have entered into her poet’s mind because she was awakened with the first stanza of the famous poem written and complete in her mind.

By the time dawn arrived, the entire poem had been written by candlelightand started its life as a song sung to the tune of John Brown’s Body.

Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the lord,
He is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He hath loosed his fateful lightning
of His terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

I have seen Him in the watch fires
of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar
in the evening dews and damps,
I can read his righteous sentence
in the dim and daring lamps,
His day is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

I have read a fiery Gospel
writ in burnished rows of steel,
"As ye deal with My contemners
so with you My grace shall deal,"
Let the Hero born of woman
crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

He has sounded forth the trumpet
that shall never call retreat,
He is sitting out the hearts of men
before His judgment seat,
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him!
Be jubilant, my feet,
Our God is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on


The following stanzas are presented
as sung by The Mormon Tabernacle Choir in 1960

In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom
that transfigures you and me,
As He died to make men holy
let us live to make men free,
His truth is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

He is coming like the glory
of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty
He is honor to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool
and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

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© 2013

Thank you, Florence & Annie - Women Standing Together for a Cause

Three women are in this photo, each with a definitive purpose.

Florence & Annie: Women Standing Together for a Cause

The woman in the center was Annie. She was jailed more than nine times for such things as picketing – as she was doing here – and demonstrating on our behalf. She spent an incredible sixty days in Occoquan Workhouse in August-September 1917 for picketing.

In other words, she held up a “propaganda sign” reading something like these did:

The woman on the left, whose unseen face appears to be reassuring and confirming to Annie to know what they are standing for was right and worthy, is Florence Youmans of Minnesota.

 The woman wearing white is a policewoman. She is arresting the other two woman, sending them to jail sentences of unknown length at the time. She was doing, I suppose, what she felt was write.

In July of 2013  I participated in the Ultimate Blog Challenge.

I continued with my Literary Grannies series as well as focusing on the history of Women – Standing Together for a Cause. There are many causes women have stood together for over time, but the Suffragists have been exceptionally compelling to me recently.

I hope you enjoy this series and please note, I will still be writing my usual pieces as well.

I hope you’ll continue to appreciate these special series of articles and essays. I appreciate each and every visit.

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Motherhood, Friendship & Literary Grannies – May We All Have Courage ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay & Elinor Wylie

There is creative fire in friendships, just as there was between Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay

It has taken me longer than I thought to this experience on paper.

Sometimes it works like that for me: I find something too evocative to put into words, so I don’t. I wait for the right words to come. I wait longer. What I have discovered about myself is sometimes I never get to writing them down. I wait and then forget.  

Slowly and meanderingly, the memory and the core feeling it brings up in my belly stops itching like it once did.

It was several weeks ago I sniffed out a place that has haunted me for at least eight years. Since the first time I “got to know” Edna St. Vincent Millay – because she haunted me and wouldn’t let go – I have had a yearning to visit her home at Steepletop.

The Home at Steepletop

In 2008 I wrote of her haunting:

“Someone from history will start tapping on my shoulder and over time I hear the name enough times that it becomes like a familiar song on the radio, the one you didn't know but all of a sudden could sing along quite well without even thinking about it. Edna St. Vincent Millay comes to mind as another woman who haunted me, as did Martha Graham for a time.”

I noted back then there was an artist’s colony there, but no tours of the home or grounds for literary travelers such as I. I tabled the thought, although the idea of an artist’s colony stuck with me. I still haven’t responded to that yearning: an artist’s colony for multi-generations so that parents and/or grandparents and caretakers who are responsible for their children could come and so could the children.

This is how my writing camp idea was initially born and now has been thriving for several years both virtually and in person.

So Lovely! The office across the street from Steepletop.

I also became a fan of Elinor Wylie via my series on Literary Grannies from 2012. I noted her friendship with Millay and I bought her poetry  collection Trivial Breath. I was fascinated by her history as a mother and then, her many children that never came to be. I felt an odd kinship with her as I suppose was her haunting.

I literally stumbled and then tenaciously stalked Steepletop that day in April. I was so close I simply could not leave the Berkshires without a visit.

What I got was better than a visit.

I backtracked after reaching Auesterlitz and couldn’t find my way to Steepletop. I drove back to the hamlet and telephoned, expecting to get an answering machine. Instead, I got the warm voice of Peter Bergman, the Executive Director of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, although I didn’t know at the time to whom I was speaking. He gave me simple directions and invited me to tour the grounds “anytime”. With my heart pounding and my passion guiding the car’s forward movement, I found myself able to experience the grandeur and silent wonder of a place I have dreamed of visiting not on my own or with a crowd. I was blessed to experience Millay’s home on a one-on-one tour with the curator. When I found more of Elinor Wylie’s work on the shelves in the store I literally shouted, “Elinor!” as the reality of their friendship wasn’t at the forefront of my mind until I took her book off the shelf.

Millay was the more famous of the two women, but she loved Elinor with a strength beyond what many ever come to know. In the home at Steepletop there is a bottle of wine meant to be shared with Elinor but instead shared by her widowed husband and Millay shortly after Wylie’s death. It has been left empty on the mantel ever since as a forever altar in honor of their friendship.

I cried several times during the tour. There were times my feet seemed to be glued to the floorboards as I didn’t think I could take another step. When we arrived at the doorstep of Millay’s library, I literally thought I couldn’t go inside.

I’m not sure when you are reading this, but I am writing to you on Mother’s Day. It seems fitting I share this poem written by a woman who was never a mother – Millay, and her friend – who left her three-year-old son with his father and only faced stillbirth, miscarriage and infant loss after she left.

Mr. Bergman recited this poem as he stood next to the spot Millay was found dead on October 19, 1950.

“The courage my mother had," by Edna St. Vincent Millay from Collected Poems (Harper Collins). 

The courage that my mother had

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she'd left to me
The thing she took into the grave!-
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

Motherhood and friendship, friendship and motherhood weave through the lives of women whether their art form is poetry or mommying or quilting or being a book keeper.

May we all have courage like a rock – to remember our literary grannies and our sisters, mothers and friends of today with a similar passion as these remarkable women shared.

 

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© 2013 Julie Jordan Scott

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J is for Judith Sargent Murray: Our Literary Grannies from A to Z

 

Judith Sargent Murray: Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Reformer

Judith Sargent Murray was one of those women who is frequently called “a feminist” because she worked toward equality between women and men, but there wasn’t a name for this yet. She would never call herself a feminist because that might be like one of the Viking Captains calling himself an astronaut.

 She was born to a wealthy and prominent family in Glouchester, Massachusetts family in 1751. Like most families of that time, the girl children were not educated beyond the basics they learned at home. The Sargent brothers are the ones who went to Harvard, but thankfully, her parents were liberal enough to allow Judith to study alongside her brother as she prepped for Harvard and continued alongside him when he came home from school in the Summer months.

This was the beginning of her unwavering belief in the education of girls and women. Her first published essay (under the pen name Constantia) was titled: “Desultory Thoughts of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms,” which appeared in 1784. It is, perhaps, a chapter from one of her earliest drafts of the work she published in 1790, On the Equality of the Sexes,  which she reportedly completed its first draft in 1779 but was not ready to have it published at that time.

In addition to the pen name of Constantia, she also wrote under the name “Mr. Vigillius” because she believed he would have a wider readership than Constantia.  “He” wrote fiction which described and illustrated Judith’s views on religion, politics, education and the manners and  customs of the day.

Judith also had literary leanings in poetry, playwriting, fiction. She was well respected, usually, but had a few anti-admirers. The most notable of these was Thomas Paine. He went so far as to lambast her plays and encourage people to not attend. While her plays were somewhat popular, they were never critically acclaimed.

Another little known contribution of Judith Sargent Murray is she was the founder of the first academy for girls in the United States.  She believed in a more rigorous education for women in order for them to assume their responsibilities in the new nation. She and several women founded the academy in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and it began educating young women not only in the area, but from afar. Some of these girls even boarded at the Murray home while being educated.

Long ago she wrote, “I may be accused of enthusiasm; but such is my confidence in THE SEX, that I expect to see our young women forming a new era in female history."

May we continue to form a new era in history of women and men, together.

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Tomorrow’s Literary Granny:Katharine Lee Bates

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This post is a part of my series Our Literary Grannies from A t0 Z which was inspired by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Find out more about the Challenge by clicking here.

 

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Julie Jordan Scott is available to speak to your group (or in your teleconference) about the creative process, writing and will create a session individually according to your wants and needs. Contact her at 661.444.2735 for more information.

Tomorrow’s Literary Granny: Katharine Lee Bates, Writer of “America the Beautiful”, among other things.

F is for Fredrika Bremer: Our Literary Grannies from A-to-Z

I found another Literary Granny who astounds me and makes me wonder where she has been all my life. She never married nor had any children, but her impact on the social justice movements of her day through literature left her mark upon the world in grand ways.

Fredrika Bremer, a celebrity of the 19^th Century, was a Swedish author whose books were oftentimes published in English and German before her native Swedish. Her reach was wide and her impact was significant.

Her novels were written in a realist style with sketches of “everyday life.”  Her women characters did what the women in her world were doing. They expressed everyday joy and pain and made it interesting rather than leaping into the wildly romantic that was popular at the time. While she couldn’t speak directly about her beliefs, she did put a certain “writer’s code” into her work.

Even men read her novels, which she, at first, published anonymously, citing the philosophical questions posed within the well crafted prose.

What I noticed right away was Fredrika’s unbridled curiosity. She traveled to the United States in 1849 when she was nearing her fiftieth birthday and had gained popularity. She was single and she traveled alone which had special challenges in that time. While she was widely interviewed, her main purpose was to ask questions and to get a closer look at this “new” place which she thought might give her some answers about how to improve Europe.

She carried her sketchbook with her (as did yesterday's literary Granny, Ellen Emerson) and as she went different places, she had conversations with people – from the Native Americans in the north to the Southern Plantation owners and their slaves. She visited the Five Points district in New York to get a clearer image of the slums and the people who made this frightening neighborhood their home.

She visited prisons and attended meetings of Quakers and Shakers and sought out others from Sweden who had made the move to the United States. She was welcomed into people’s homes where she carefully sketched and documents her vivid impressions of the status of American culture, including the rights of omen.

In her homeland, she was passionate about the law of legal majority for unmarried women which would allow them to own property and manage their own money. Her novel, Hertha, opened dialogue on these topics as well as a formal higher education for women. It opened debate much like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did here in the United States.

I giggled to realize the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women were read from Fredrika’s work by their mother.  Interesting that Alcott’s books were some of the first “realist” novels in the United States.  It seems obvious she used Fredrika  for inspiration.

When Fredrika died of pneumonia she had worked hard and had not seen the full impact she had on social reforms which would come to fruition after her death.  She was eulogized by many, but quite notably was many years after her death by future Swedish Nobel Prize winner,  Selma Lagerlof, who was only a seven-year-old when “Miss Fredrika” died.

This post is a part of my series Our Literary Grannies from A t0 Z which was inspired by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Find out more about the Challenge by  clicking here.

 

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Our Literary Grannies from A to Z: E is for Ellen Russell Emerson

When I decided to do a profile on Ellen Emerson, I knew I wouldn’t have many resources to guide me.

Women without much of an ongoing following are among my favorite Literary Grannies to highlight here. Ellen Emerson did phenomenal work and had at least one international “first woman” status, but I would guess most people just shrug and think she is one of “THE” Emersons, meaning the lineage Ralph Waldo Emerson, et al, sprang from. She was actually Waldo’s contemporary and there is no word of them ever interacting or even knowing the other existed.

 

On the Left is one of the few portraits of Ellen Russell Emerson, on the right, a drawing she made of one of the people she met while studying Native Americans.

Ellen Russell Emerson was born in New Sharon, Maine in 1837.  When she was a little girl she met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow whose epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, ignited her lifelong interest in Native Americans. I can imagine a wide eyed little Ellen listening to those famous opening words:

 

On the shores of Gitche Gumee,
Of the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood Nokomis, the old woman,
Pointing with her finger westward,
O'er the water pointing westward,
To the purple clouds of sunset.
  Fiercely the red sun descending
Burned his way along the heavens,
Set the sky on fire behind him

This little girl went on to become a wife and a mother but her passion for learning continued beyond the traditional walls of education.  When she was twenty-seven years old in 1884 her 700 page Ethnological Study titled Indian Myths: Or Legends, Traditions and Symbols of the Aborigines of America Compared with Those of Other Countries.

Her widely regarded volume included her knowledge of Native American cultures (in her day called by many other names which are now very politically incorrect) and she compares and contrasts these myths and legends with those in other civilizations in the world such as Hindus, Chinese and Persian. She not only wrote this enormous book, she also served as Illustrator and mapmaker.

When her daughter was grown, she went to Europe and began studying with the leading ethnologists in Europe.

She even studied Egyptology in Paris. The European scholars were very impressed by her literary work as well as her approach using words and also sketch books and paint to render her subjects in a variety of ways. She was, after all, a gifted illustrator and thoroughly enjoyed making comparisons and contrasts in order to learn about her subjects more deeply.

Through her book Masks, Heads and Faces, Ellen sees the movement from mask as protection to the creation of art. Perhaps this lead to her stretch into the world of published poetry. This, more than a century before Muriel Rukeyser sang out "No more masks!" and discussed the power in just ONE woman telling the truth.

I have a feeling Ellen Russell Emerson was among the truth-filled.

She was honored as the first woman in the Société Américaine of Paris

Her opening sentence in her well known (and still in print) book of essays, Nature and Human Nature, goes like this: “Estrangement is impossible between nature and human nature for any length of time, the spring and source of all life being one.”  Such poetry in a scientific book! Perhaps there is a bit of Ellen Emerson in today’s writer, Diane Ackerman. Both women are naturalists and poets, biologists and studies of humans, plant life, culture – how interesting to make that connection.

After she returned from France, she settled into a quiet life living in Boston with her daughter in a home filled with enjoyable study and fellowship together. I attempted to find her daughter’s name, but in this research, I could not. I do have an upcoming trip to Boston so I may seek out more details of her life when I am there.

She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1907. I know how she spent her life would have made Longfellow very proud.

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August 2016 Addendum: What a joy the internet is! A woman whose husband is a descendant of Ellen Russell Emerson wrote to me recently and may help me flesh out this story. Isn't that exciting?

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This post is a part of my series Our Literary Grannies from A t0 Z which was inspired by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Find out more about the Challenge by either clicking here or on the icon.

 

Please stay in touch: Follow me on Twitter: @JulieJordanScot    

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C is for Christine de Pizan: Literary Grannies from A to Z

I would like to thank Elizabeth Anne Mitchell whose knowledge of Christine de Pizan helped me to mold my research into a much simpler to understand profile. Hopefully after you read this brief biography you will want to learn more about today's Literary Granny. I have linked to Elizabeth’s blog below where she goes into far more detail and with more interesting tidbits than I have room to do here.

Bear with me a moment: I can’t remember when I first heard the term widow’s succession, but I remember as a little girl in the 60’s at Linden Avenue School in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, we heard about the rare woman who held elected office – well, more like she saved the seat until the next election, never expecting any sort of political clout to come as a result.

In my adulthood, I remember when Sonny Bono (perhaps you only know of hearing about the long ago ‘Sonny and Cher’ died suddenly while a Senator and his wife took over his office when he died. She managed to build quite a career which ended only in the last election. Her “Widow’s Succession” became more than a body to keep the seat warm on behalf of a political party. She leveraged herself into a career from 1998 to 2013.

Christine de Pizan, (born around 1364- died around 1431) our Literary Granny of the Day, had a unique life from her early childhood. Her father, an Italian astrologer who was called to France to serve in the court of Charles V, raised his daughter not as a subservient girl, but as an intellectual as well. He insisted on the stretching of her intellect as well as the cultural norm of womanly arts.

I wonder if her father saw in the stars how the world was going to change for women – but not for centuries?.

I must remind you, this is not in our world today, this was Europe – Italy and France – of the late 14^th and early 15^th century – before “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” started out as a poet who wrote poetry on demand for the wealthy patrons within the court. Her husband died leaving her responsible financially not only for her children, but also for her mother and her home because she was also a widow.  She more than likely took over his position as court secretary. She had experience as a court copyist seems a natural to take over as secretary, thus doing the “widow’s succession” like Mary Bono Mack did in our lifetime.

It is hazy what exactly happened, but we do know she wrote poetry and then prose for patrons until she amassed enough money to write what she wanted to write: words critical of the court and championing some rather radical ideas of the day such as the education of women, as well as criticism.

She actually had the poise and gumption to debate the great intellectuals of the day. They were all men, naturally, who thought Christine couldn’t possibly think critically or write as she did simply because she was a woman. Nonetheless, she did think and she could write and she had gained financial success so… she did exactly that: she debated and critiqued and supported herself, her mother and her children as well as had a very fulfilling career.  Her work, The City of Ladies,  is still published in several versions today.

I am also sad that I didn’t even know the name Christine de Pizan until I started choosing names for the 2013 A-to-Z Literary Grannies project. That is why it is so important you are reading here today, discovering this granny and realizing there are more women writers out there like her. As writers, we can look back into our lineage as writers in the days when some of our ancestors believed the world was flat and the other ancestors had no concept of life beyond their villages and family homes.

Somewhere in us the spark from Christine de Pizan continues.

This Literary Granny is one I claim with my heart, my pencils, my pens and all my notebooks.

Thank you so much for reading here today. Happy April and A-t0-Zing!

- Read more here, from Elizabeth Mitchell -

This post is a part of my series Our Literary Grannies from A t0 Z which was inspired by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Find out more about the Challenge by either clicking here or on the icon.

 

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Join the Walk on Washington, Albany & Straight Into History of Yesterday as well as History Being Made

Women Leaders of the Suffrage Movement, Preparing for Walks on Washington, DC and Albany, NY

For some people this is the last week of February. For me it is the countdown to Women’s History Month followed by the countdown to April’s A to Z blog challenge. It is almost like I get two months of women’s history because I focus on women writers during April.

This year’s Women’s History Month is themed like this: “Women Inspiring Innovation Through Imagination: Celebrating Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.”

You might have figured out at first glance, I abhorred this theme.

Then I settled down and thought, “Hey – women have passion in all areas. Just because I don’t equate imagination with these “hard side” arenas doesn’t mean… wait. These areas DO inspire and evoke imagination. They also tend to be more highly dominated by men then the soft side of literature and the humanities.

Naturalist Alice Eastwood

Suddenly, my mind shifted as I thought of my beloved women naturalists across time. They were scientists, first and foremost. To use visual arts terminology, nature and natural studies is their medium and their palette. When I sketch in my nature journal I am combining both skill sets: the scientist and the artist, the naturalist and the curious, the imaginative and the completely alive side of me who has become more observant with age, not less observant.

I know women are thought of less in the world of science, mathematics and engineering. I am one who struggles with the math of my sixth grade son from time-to-time and am reteaching myself statistics, elementary algebra and geometry. We certainly didn’t cover all this material in the sixth grade, but today’s students are on an accelerated course of study in these areas.

It makes sense.

In March, then, my personal Women’s History Course of Study will include some of my perennial favorites like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but I will also dive deeply into the areas I don’t normally dive into so that I may learn about a greater spectrum of women always in hopes of educating all people about the contribution so many women have made which so often goes unacknowledged.

What will you do to celebrate Women’s History Month?

Perhaps you have never thought about it before – there is nothing wrong with that at all, you are in the majority.

Just consider the idea of learning something this month, of talking about women’s

Raise our Voices, Words and Support of Women Everywhere

contributions including the traditional womanly gifts.  Each and all is valid. There are no more important or less important.

There are, instead, simply glorious women walking side-by-side throughout the past and into today. Men, too, are taking our hands.

I am grateful you are among us.

 

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Writing at Emily Dickinson's House (see the Yellow Home in the background?

Julie Jordan Scott is a Creative Life Coach, a Poet Performer, a Writer and a Mommy Extraordinaire. Stay in touch with her via twitter or facebook or you may always call or text her at 661.444.2735 to arrange a complimentary coaching session.

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© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott