Synopses & Reviews
In 1955, Maxine Kumin submitted a poem to the
Saturday Evening Post. Lines on a Half-Painted House
” made it into the magazinebut not before Kumin was asked to produce, via her husbands employer, verification that the poem was her original work.
Kumin, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was part of a groundbreaking generation of women writers who came of age during the midcentury feminist movement. By challenging the status quo and ultimately finding success for themselves, they paved the way for future generations of writers. In A Story Larger than My Own, Janet Burroway brings together Kumin, Julia Alvarez, Jane Smiley, Erica Jong, and fifteen other accomplished women of this generation to reflect on their writing lives.
The essays and poems featured in this collection illustrate that even writers who achieve critical and commercial success experience a familiar pattern of highs and lows over the course of their careers. Along with success comes the pressure to sustain it, as well as a constant search for subject matter, all too frequent crises of confidence, the challenges of a changing publishing scene, and the difficulty of combining writing with the ordinary stuff of lifefamily, marriage, jobs. The contributors, all now over the age of sixty, also confront the effects of aging, with its paradoxical duality of new limitations and newfound freedom.
Taken together, these stories offer advice from experience to writers at all stages of their careers and serve as a collective memoir of a truly remarkable generation of women.
Review
"A Story Larger than My Own is an essential book, for women writers, for all writers, for readers, for people with mothers, for people who remember their mothers." Cris Mazza, author of Something Wrong with Her
Review
"Janet Burroway was my first writing teacher and when I read her work, I always hear her voice, warm and wise, giving me the courage to write. But in a very real sense, everyone in this collection is my teacher, my mentor, and to read what they have to say about writing and their writing lives, speaks directly to me. This is more than a must-read book, this is a book of psalms, of truths—a book every writer, or reader, should own." Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of My Life as a Silent Movie and Space: A Memoir
Review
“In A Story Larger than My Own, Janet Burroway has cannily compiled a glittering collage of narratives that dramatizes the achievements, perspectives, and problems of older women writers. From Margaret Atwood to Alicia Ostriker, Toi Derricote to Hilma Wolitaer, a range of accomplished artists review careers from which all readers have much to learn.” Publishers Weekly
Review
"The variety of voices and styles adds up to a mesmerizing tapestry of a generation, made up of both individual experiences and the commonalities between them. Readers of all walks of life will find much to savor here." Starred Review
Synopsis
As MFA programs and online venues for publication proliferate, so do the ranks of would-be writers, many of them pursuing writing later in life or as a secondary career. But even those who make a name for themselves early soon discover the difficulty of sustaining that success, of making transitions to new genres and publishing environments, of combining writing with the ordinary stuff of life—family, marriage, aging. This book offers reflections on the long course of a writing life from twenty women over the age of sixty who have achieved critical and often commercial success yet have struggled along the way with questions of literary productivity and subject matter, crises of confidence and reception, episodes of gender discrimination and familial interference, and eventually the effects of physical and cognitive decline. Though their individual stories and life lessons differ, most find solace in their role within the longer storytelling tradition and pleasure in the work of writing itself.
About the Author
Janet Burroway�is the author of eight novels, including�The Buzzards�and�Raw Silk; two best-selling textbooks,�Writing Fiction�and�Imaginative Writing; and the forthcoming memoir�Losing Tim. She is also the author of numerous plays, short stories, poetry collections, and children's books. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University and divides her time between Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Chicago.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Janet Burroway
Julia Alvarez
The Older Writer in the Underworld
Margaret Atwood
On Craft
Madeleine Blais
The Ratio Is Narrowing
Rosellen Brown
Parsing Ambition
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Mothers and Daughters
Toi Derricotte
The Offices of My Heart
Gail Godwin
Working on the Ending
Patricia Henley
The Potholder Model of Literary Ambition
Erica Jong
Breaking the Final Taboo
Marilyn Krysl
Passing It On
Maxine Kumin
Metamorphosis: From Light Verse to the Poetry of Witness
Honor Moore
On Certainty
Alicia Ostriker
Splitting Open: Some Poems on Aging
Linda Pastan
Old Woman, or Nearly So Myself: An Essay in Poems
Edith Pearlman
Public Appearances
Hilda Raz
Say Yes
Jane Smiley
Boys and Girls
Laura Tohe
The Stories from Which I Come
Hilma Wolitzer
What I Know
Acknowledgments
Contributors