We’ll see you again soon.
November 28, 2023
Edward Lear, “Agia Paraskevi, Epirus, Greece” (1857)
I’ve been more moved by the interactions I’ve had throughout this inaugural season of Women of Letters than I can say.
I’m grateful to you, reader, for having read along with us over these past six months; it’s been a real privilege to prepare these interviews knowing there was someone who would be looking forward to them. I’m grateful to Eden Friesen, not only for her contributions as an Associate Editor but also for her friendship. And I’m grateful to everyone who has championed this initiative, across countries and across continents, for their emails and calls and messages of support.
I’m especially grateful to our incredible interviewees, without whom there would be no interviews to share: thank you again for your kindness, your time, your expertise, and your care. I’m particularly grateful to those very first few who signed on to take part in this initiative at a time when there wasn’t anything more to it than a two-page website and a list of questions. To have agreed to become involved at that stage was an immense act of generosity and of trust, and it’s a gift I’ll not soon forget.
While this first season is coming to a close, I couldn’t be more excited about all that’s to come in future seasons of Women of Letters. If you’d like to contribute to that ongoing work, here are a few ways you could do that:
As we look forward to what’s next, I hope you’ll enjoy this retrospective featuring a selection of moments from each of our nine interviews this season. Happy reading, friends; we’ll see you again soon.
Jana M. Perkins
Founder, Women of Letters
Candace Savage: “I discovered that regular jobs made me very miserable. My ‘clever’ summary was that, for me, a job meant going someplace I didn’t want to go, to do things I didn’t want to do, with people I didn’t particularly want to be with. And so, out of that terrible attitude comes some kind of desperation. As that desperation was setting in — this would have been post a four-year degree in English literature — I had the good fortune to be living in Saskatoon, where at that time there was a trade publisher, Western Producer Prairie Books. I’ve always written, and always have loved books, and even though I was the scaredest beginner in the world — is scaredest a word? — even though I was so nervous that, for many years, I wrote with a hot water bottle on my stomach, there was a door open in my town.”
Continue reading here.
Kasia Van Schaik: “I would love to say I’ve had a host of strong creative mentors as well, but that has not been the case unfortunately. As a young person, most of my creative writing instructors were male. The line-ups for the local poetry events we attended usually consisted of variations of the same five or eight men. I would watch them form bonds with young male writers, clink late night pints with them, introduce them to visiting authors (also often male), facilitate publishing contracts, facilitate careers, but I knew that as a young woman — I say ‘woman’ though I didn’t feel like I’d chosen or particularly wanted this gender marker — I did not have the same access to these spaces and forms of camaraderie.”
Continue reading here.
Miranda Dunham-Hickman: “I’m wrestling with the question of what constitutes deep literacy. I’m trying to figure out, I think, why I am convinced on that point, that something that has belonged to a time that feels like a ‘before time’ — why I’m convinced that something is slipping away from us that is affecting our very modes of cognition. Often it’s really largely inarticulate, and often opaque to me, but when I walk into cultural spaces like old book stores, or record stores — like the record store by McGill, ‘Cheap Thrills,’ where they sell lots of vinyl — I know that there is this fund of not only cultural knowledge, but even ways of being, like modalities of being, that we’re just not inhabiting anymore. And I don’t feel nostalgic for it. I’m just concerned that it’s sort of flashing up to us as a moment of Benjaminian danger.”
Continue reading here.
Beth Kephart: “There was a time — a long stretch — when I was working eighty-hour corporate consulting weeks so that I might pay off the mortgage and make certain our son would have the college tuition he would need and that sort of thing. I became brittle — depleted and sharp-edged. After many years, I made the decision to leave much of that work behind and to begin writing, instead, for magazines. It wasn’t easy financially. It was anything but certain. But I was no longer the person I wanted to be, and I knew that to save us, and to save me, I had to take that risk. The lesson, for me, was that you must protect your own soul, you must still harbor your own dreams, in order to be the wife, mother, and friend you believe you were meant to be.”
Continue reading here.
Charlene SanJenko: “It was interesting to play in that space — there wasn’t a name for it at the time. I’ll never forget quitting a corporate position, a national management position in the financial services industry, at an investment firm, and literally walking away not being able to explain to them what I wanted to go and do. There weren’t words like social impact, social innovation, social enterprise. I had to walk out of this amazing position and say, ‘I’m not sure what I’m going to do, I can’t really explain it right now, but I think to start with I’m going to be a personal trainer.’ And they looked at me like I was going to Mars because I was quitting this exceptional position to become a personal trainer! It just did not compute for these poor men.”
Continue reading here.
Sheila Liming: “I took a big risk in accepting my current job and in leaving my previous post. And as with any big change, I spent the first year convinced that I had made the wrong decision. My previous academic post felt safe, in certain ways, but also doomed in others; in the end, I opted to make a change and leave it for one that felt comparably less stable but also more invigorating and exciting. As a result, I am conscious of having crafted a less knowable and less certain future for myself, which remains terrifying.”
Continue reading here.
Nancy K. Miller: “Let’s say that though I rather quickly accumulated academic degrees, going to school was primarily a pragmatic response to the need to earn my living. I did not see work, however enjoyable at times, as a good or an end itself, but rather a necessity. When the marriage failed and I returned to New York six years later, I continued pursuing degrees. To what end? I spent one miserable year teaching high school French (my mother’s career path for me), hated that, and realized that if I wanted to teach ‘college French,’ as the phrase went, I had to get a PhD. In my mind, however, I wasn’t pursuing a career. I was providing for myself; work meant income. Feminism changed all that.”
Continue reading here.
Jenna Butler: “I grew up with a deeply creative mother and a wishing-to-be-creative father who surrendered their creativity in order to survive as immigrants. For my parents, work and security were precarious, and I remember them both putting in incredibly long, hard hours at difficult jobs to anchor our family. My mother had been sent away from Tanzania as a girl of fourteen, fleeing violence, and the feeling that life could be swept away in an instant underpinned childhood for me, my sister, and my brother. We grew up with astronomical pressure behind us, the weight of both our parents’ lost countries and our mother’s lost childhood, culture, language, education, and family. There was no question that we would do everything we could to succeed when our parents had given up so much.”
Continue reading here.
Frances Dickey: “My advice to anyone interested in literature is to read, read, read. Put your phone in another room. After an hour of reading you might feel that you haven’t made very much progress, but after a day, a week of reading? Suddenly your brain is humming, crackling, and expanding. Humans have been reading for thousands of years. It’s one of the things we’re really good at. The low level of sensory stimulation you get from letters on a page liberates your brain to examine and play with ideas, with language. You never know where this adventure will take you.”
Continue reading here.
Get every new interview sent directly to your inbox as soon as it’s published: