Susan Sink

My last semester of college, in 1986, I took a course on American women poets that had a profound effect on me– as a writer and as a reader. The few poets I’d been introduced to by the more traditional English  Department faculty had been great, but the only living ones were Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, Mark Strand and Louis Simpson. I liked Nemerov and Larkin immensely and detested Strand and Simpson. But none of them touched my experience in the slightest way.

This senior course introduced me to Adrienne Rich, among others. I devoured everything I could about her. And through her and the course, I followed the path to women writers as far and as deep as I could go.

After graduation I moved to Atlanta, and my boyfriend took me to Charis Books. He came in for a minute, then went to the used record store down the street while I browsed. Finally, he had to come back and drag me out. He asked if I’d noticed anything about the place. “Of course! All the books are by women!!!” I shouted. “Yes,” he said, slyly. “It’s a lesbian bookstore.” No wonder he’d gotten out of there so fast and behaved so oddly.

I became a regular customer at Charis those two years, making my way through the works of Marge Piercy, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Mary Gordon.

Still, these books and these authors were decidedly out of the mainstream. Their feminism was often rawly expressed, sometimes even the point of the story. This felt like specialized stuff.

Throughout the years, I’ve continued to be especially attentive to women writers. Early on I read Louise Erdrich, Kaye Gibbons, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison, and others. In my classes I taught Willa Cather’s My Antonia, which my male students were often skeptical about given the romantic cover, but which always went over tremendously well.

In recent years I’ve stopped buying fiction, depending instead on good libraries. But this December I stood before the New Fiction wall in the college bookstore to treat myself to a hardcover book. What a difficult decision I had before me! There were books by Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro and Barbara Kingsolver all on display! What giants of literature! What trustworthy storytellers! What serious, excellent writers!

I bought the Alice Munro collection of short stories, Dear Life, thinking that I might go back to them again and again, and so it would be the best one to own. After Christmas, however, I got myself an iPad, which has meant I can easily and affordably acquire “new” books and find I love reading them on my shiny new device. So I have now read all three, as well as Junot Diaz’s collection(engaging, wonderful, but decidedly difficult to read from a woman’s perspective) This is How You Lose Her.

In the end, I was disappointed with the Munro collection. This woman can write stories like nobody’s business, stories that have blood in their veins and dirt on their feet. As a writer, I’m often pulling apart what I read, trying to figure out how it’s constructed, what’s going on, how the writer is getting this or that effect, what moves she is making. Many of Munro’s stories succeed as gorgeously literary and cunningly constructed– I can’t pull them apart. Unfortunately, this new collection is bloodless. It feels like British manners pieces. They’re opaque, the voices flat and indistinguishable, the plots unmemorable.

What was right away noticeable about the Kingsolver book, Flight Behavior, and Erdrich’s The Round House, was their overt political context. I often read the acknowledgements/ notes at the back before reading the book, and these two both had statements that place the books in a political context: for Kingsolver, it is climate change and the effect on insects; for Erdrich it is the tangle of jurisdiction statutes that make it difficult for Native American women to find justice for acts of sexual violence committed against them.

The difference between the two books, for me, was how successful (or not) they were at telling stories beyond these political contexts. In this way, Erdrich was completely successful, writing a book that is nearly perfect in its construction, characters and telling. I had thought I might not read such a perfect book again!

Kingsolver’s book was not nearly as satisfying. It felt overworked and overdetermined; it frustrated me by showing both its agenda and its writing seams. In the end, it did have an impact on me, and I am glad I read the whole thing, but it does not compare to her better novels.

Still, what I love most was the experience of standing before that wall and seeing those women there. What joy not to have to seek out a women’s bookstore anymore (though I’m still mighty grateful for the work they do and never miss a chance to visit Women and Children First in Chicago) but find them wherever I go. What a joy to have multiple titles to read and think about by women such as these.

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