I’ve just taken a peek at the first chapter of a “debut” novel by a woman I used to know back in my salad days within the seemingly safe harbor of the Minnesota literary scene.
There were four writers per city block back then, and it appears, as I surf around, that there are at least eight today.
Those were golden times for me; I had real support and was part of a real community, with real friends. That’s three “real’s”— really. I was blessed with a number of good things– the attention of National Book Award winner Robert Bly, who founded the Minnesota Writers Publishing House, a collective, and edited my first chapbook, In Pursuit of the Family. I received a National Endowment for the Arts Award in Literature, as a poet. I was appointed full-time Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools– a job I held down for four years before returning to Colorado after my father died and I had to come home.
Together with the woman whose book I noticed last night and perused a little this morning, and other women, we organized for one another to break into what had been a male dominion for the most part. Google Women Poets of the Twin Cities and you’ll find a collector’s item.
I still remember being invited to this young writer’s apartment for dinner. I even remember that she made something with brown rice and fresh vegetables in it. I remember that I was having a very rough time, and had started to talk to her when she stopped me.
“What makes you think I want to hear about all of your problems?” she asked. “What makes you assume that I’m even interested?”
I remember how it felt to take this in the solar plexus, and the shame that drenched me.
This is not an isolated incident in my experience. Can there be anything more painful than to take a hit from another woman? I doubt it. Many of us have had hard lessons where men are concerned, but don’t we view other women as sisters, as other mirror images of Eve herself?
And remembering this makes me feel that we should all take a long hard look at what we mean when we use the word “community” or the word “network” –and especially, the word “friend”: are we honest? Do we really value each other?
Those of us who keep on despite uphill battles, who have overcome many obstacles and are still fully clothed and in our right minds, much less engaged in a writing life, should be accorded all due respect. Period. We have not walked in each other’s moccasins.
For me there is but one overall solution: to enjoy community, and the building of platforms but not depend upon these things. To support one another with gentle honesty and sustained communication: the two biggies, but to never assume that you are making a life-long friend, even though that can and does happen.
And most of all, because people do get claimed by their own daily lives, and fallings out are part of being human, to cultivate self-love and not need anyone else to tell us that we are good writers or bad, or that our lives and work have beauty, meaning and purpose.
We have all heard this ad nauseam but perhaps that’s because it is true: without self-love and self-respect, it doesn’t matter who validates you: it could be God herself.
Loquaciously Yours 
I wonder how many friends this “young writer” has, and how many of them are true friends, and whether she’s ever been nailed in the solar plexus (because as we know, what goes around comes around). In any event, when I read that comment it about knocked the air out of me, too. And I find myself wondering how you made it through the rest of the night and what you DID end up talking about. But this isn’t about me, lol.
I enjoy the community you are building with this blog and am glad to be a part of it. My life was sedate compared to yours but I have always been fascinated with the stories people tell of the paths they’ve been on. Anybody who is brave and honest enough to share from their experiences should, as you say, “be accorded all due respect.” Keep up the good work 🙂 ~p
Very interested to read this, inasmuch as I was in the early stages of seeking some sense of community myself in the poetry world here in Minneapolis during those same years.
The moment with the young woman that you tell about was a shock to me when I read it also. No way of knowing, perhaps, what may have been going on with her, or what course her life may have taken since then. I surely can’t imagine inviting someone to dinner and then saying something like that to them.
It was, as I remember it, a strange time, in the world in general, a culture (or multiple of cultures) very much at the end of its tether. I never had a conversation with anyone like the one you describe here, though I can remember some pretty strange days and nights here and there. A lot of ghosts walked the earth then.
I’ve had my own ups and downs with the local poetry community here over the years, and have functioned mostly outside of the various literary organizations. Though have usually found a nucleus of other poets here to make contact with, as well as poet friends scattered across one or more continents.
It truly takes an almost unearthly (so it seems at times) resolve to keep going, by which I mean, most essentially, to keep writing. One must learn to trust that silence before words, from which (if one listens) the words may come.
Once or twice over the years I’ve come across a copy of the Women Poets of the Twin Cities anthology. I did Google it, and (among others) pulled up a link to the Colorado Poets Center about Bea (Beryle) Williams, one of the contributors. I don’t know if you’re in contact with her these days. I know of her only by name, never met her or heard her read when she lived here.
Her webpage in the Colorado Poets Center website is here, if you care to check it out.
I’ve attempted to insert a link in the above sentence, though just in case the html code doesn’t work, here’s the web address in plain text also:
http://www.coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/williams_beryle/index.html
Thank you Lyle, for this thoughtful response and for looking into the anthology. I did send an e-mail to Bea. I’ll be in touch via e-mail…. but yes. I often look for what the Minn women writers are doing and it seems that a number of them have enjoyed an upward trajectory of sorts. Names coming to mind: Keenan, Sprengnether, Chamberlain, Hampl, others. I did encounter one extremely nasty, divisive Minn blogging voice– a man– perhaps you’ve run across him. best– J