Yolanda King and Attallah Shabazz: Passing on the Torch

The daughters of two very different civil rights warriors, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, have recently paired up to represent the next generation of activism. Although Yolanda King and Attallah (Arabic for gift of god) Shabazz were raised in different faiths and from different philosophical points of view, the commonalities override the dissimilarities. Both lost their fathers to assassins as children under the public eye, and both desired to escape the attention and live their own lives. Yolanda and Attallah grew into two creative spirits for whom the arts provide release, solace, and strength. They were wary of each other upon meeting in New York City where they were both trying to start acting careers. It wasn’t long, however, before a bond was forged and they started working on a play together, “Stepping into Tomorrow,” a musical dramedy with a powerful message of empowerment for youth. The play began a career of collaboration and activism in which both Yolanda and Attallah travel extensively lecturing on civil rights, the importance of the arts, and the legacy of their fathers. In Yolanda King’s words, “I see these responsibilities not as a burden, but as an extension of who I am.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

ANNE SEXTON sonnets of singular struggle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sexton

Born in 1928, Anne Sexton was raised in Weston, Massachusetts. Her father was a successful businessman, and her childhood was materially comfortable. However, her relationship with her parents was problematic, perhaps even abusive. After attending a boarding school, she went to Garland Junior College, a “finishing school,” for a year. At age nineteen, she married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II. While he was serving in Korea, she became a fashion model. At age twenty-five, after the birth of her first daughter, Anne suffered from post- partum depression, which led to her first breakdown, and she was admitted to a neuropsychiatric institution. Other hospitalizations followed. She continued to struggle with depression all her life before committing suicide at age forty-six.

During her treatment, however, her therapist encouraged her to write about what she was feeling, thinking, and dreaming. The therapist was impressed with her work and encouraged her to pursue this creative avenue. In 1957, Sexton began to participate in writing groups in Boston; these eventually led to forming friendships and other close relationships with the poets Robert Lowell, Maxine Kumin, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. Her poems about her psychiatric struggles were published in her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960); James Dickey wrote that they described the experiences “of madness and near-madness, of the pathetic, well-meaning, necessarily tentative and perilous attempts at cure, and of the patient’s slow coming back into the human associations and responsibilities which the old previous self still demands.”

Sexton’s work is generally categorized as confessional, together with that of poets like Plath, Lowell, John Berryman, and W. D. Snodgrass. In an interview with Patricia Marx, Sexton revealed, “…[E]veryone said, ‘You can’t write
this way. It’s too personal; it’s confessional; you can’t write this, Anne,’ and everyone was discouraging me. But then I saw Snodgrass doing what I was doing, and it kind of gave me permission.” Subsequent books included All
My Pretty Ones (1962), the Pulitzer Prize winner Live or Die (1966), Love
Poems (1969), and the 1969 play Mercy Street. Her least confessional and
most feminist volume was Transformations (1972), in which she retold several Grimm’s fairy tales. In an ironic twist, the last collection of her work published during her lifetime was entitled The Death Notebooks (1974). Posthumous volumes include The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976), and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978).

Sexton’s writings were extremely popular during her lifetime, and she received many accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Ford Foundation, and honorary degrees; she also held professorships at Boston University and Colgate University. Despite this literary recognition, critiques of her work usually focused on its autobiographical aspects. For instance, Dickey wrote of her poetry, “Miss Sexton’s work seems to me very little more than a kind of terribly serious and determinedly outspoken soap-opera.” In contrast, Beverly Fields contended that Sexton’s poetry is not as autobiographical as it seems; they are poems, not memoirs. Fields analyzed many of Sexton’s poems, pointing out the recurrent symbolic themes and the poetic techniques that in her view made these works so impressive.

Erica Jong, one of Sexton’s earliest champions, contended in her review of The Death Notebooks that Sexton’s artistic impact as a poet had been seriously underestimated: “She is an important poet not only because of her courage
in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. Of what does [her] artistry consist? Not just of her skill in writing traditional poems…. But by artistry, I mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. I mean the artist’s sense of where her inspiration lies….There are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere….They write poems which any number of people might have written. When Anne Sexton is at the top of her form, she writes a poem which no one else could have written.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

CAMILLE CLAUDEL: THE FEELER

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Claudel

Camille Claudel, born in France in 1864, is beginning to be accorded more respect for her sculpture, after being hidden in the looming shadow of August Rodin, best known for “The Thinker.” Part of a creative clique in France that included Camille’s brother Paul, who was a Catholic poet and playwright of note in the late nineteenth century, Camille was an artist of considerable talent. She studied with Rodin, becoming his model and mistress. Their relationship was stormy; the two artists’ tempers would burn brightly and they were constantly breaking up and making up, but the relationship endured until 1898. When her brother Paul abandoned her, she committed an auto-de-fe. As was typical in that era, Camille was institutionalized for depression and hysteria starting in 1913, eroding her ability to continue forceful sculpting until her death in 1943. Anne Delbee’s 1982 play “Une Femme: Camille Claudel” was the beginning of a revival of interest in Claudel. Controversially, the play posits the theory that Camille was more than a muse; indeed, she was the true artist of the two, infusing Rodin with creativity and ideas. In 1989, Isabella Adjani and Gerard Depardieu did a wonderful job of bringing the creative couple to the big screen. Despite the difficulties of her last years, Camille Claudel has become a French national sheroine and cause celebre.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

BONNIE RAITT: BORN TO SING THE BLUES

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Raitt

Born in 1949 in Burbank to a show biz family, Bonnie Raitt plays the slide guitar like she was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her first exposure to the music scene was classical piano (her mother’s forte), her father’s Broadway show tunes, and the Beach Boy harmonies she grew up with. A Christmas gift changed Bonnie’s life—at age eight, she received a guitar and worked diligently at getting good at playing it. The first time she heard Joan Baez, Bonnie went the way of folk and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be a part of the folkie coffeehouse scene. Unfortunately for her, folk music was on its last legs. Instead she hooked up with Dick Waterman, a beau who just happened to manage the careers of Bonnie’s musical icons: Son House, Fred McDowell, Sippie Wallace, and Muddy Waters. By the age of twenty, she was playing with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells—opening for the Rolling Stones with two blue greats.

Bonnie’s road to fame, however, was very long and winding. It had to come on her terms. Always more interested in artistic integrity than commercial
success, she had exacting standards and tastes. She demanded authenticity in playing the blues she loved and reinterpreting those riffs through the influences of country and rock. She didn’t play the game and, a musician’s musician, she rarely got radio air play. Thus she made her living traveling the country, performing in small clubs. Bonnie was also very outspoken on political causes. Raised as a Quaker, she has always been involved in political causes, doing many benefit concerts; in 1979, she cofounded Musicians United for Safe Energy.

The stress of the road, and of being a novelty in the music industry—a female blues guitarist—eventually took its toll, and Bonnie drowned her sorrows for a time in drugs and booze. In the mid-eighties, when her record label dumped her, she bottomed out, became clean and sober, and made the climb back up. In 1989, her smash album “Nick of Time” won her a Grammy and garnered sales in excess of four million.

Since then, she hasn’t stopped making her great earthy blend of blues, folk, pop, and R&B, or working on behalf of the causes that are meaningful to her. Bonnie Raitt is a consummate musician who loves to perform live, loves to pay homage to the blues greats, and continues to speak her mind. In an interview in Rolling Stone, she laid it on the line about the current looks-dominated music industry: “In the 70s, all these earthy women were getting record deals—you didn’t have to be some gorgeous babe. There’s been some backsliding since.”

“Any guy who has a problem with feminists is signaling a shortage in his pants. If I had to be a woman before men and women were more equal, I would’ve shot somebody and been in jail.”

— Bonnie Raitt

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

NISI SHAWL teaching diversity through her artistry

http://www.aqueductpress.com/authors/NisiShawl.php

Nisi Shawl is an African American journalist and editor who is best known as the author of several dozen science fiction and fantasy short stories. Both in her own writing and as a creative writing teacher, she communicates how speculative fiction can better mirror real-world diversity of not only gender, race, age, and sexual orientation, but also differing levels of physical ability and other socioeconomic variables. With Cynthia Ward, she coauthored the creative writing handbook Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction, a follow-up to the workshops of the same name, which Shawl has taught for the last decade. Strange Horizons reviewer Genevieve Williams said of the handbook, “Much of what Shawl and Ward advocate is, quite simply, good practice: the avoidance of clichés, flat characters, unintended effects, and other hallmarks of lazy writing.”

Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1955, as a small child, young Nisi told fantastical stories of her own invention to her sister. Precociously intelligent, she started college at the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in Ann Arbor at only sixteen, but feeling alienated, she dropped out two weeks before finals. She moved into Cosmic Plateau, an affordable shared household where her rent was only sixty-five dollars per month, and worked part-time at all sorts of jobs while honing her craft as a writer; she even played in a band for a time as well as doing spoken-word performances of her written works at cafes, parks, and museums.

Her first professional short story sale came in 1989; “I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer” was published in the literary journal Semiotext(e), alongside works by such authors as Burroughs, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, and Bruce Sterling. In 1992, in a fateful twist, Shawl went to a cyberpunk symposium in Detroit; because of her story having been published in Semiotext(e), which pioneering cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling thought none of the attendees would have even encountered, she made networking connections with cyberpunk authors Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and John Shirley. Shirley offered to read Shawl’s short fiction; he thought that she possessed talent as a writer and advised her to participate in the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, where he and Cadigan were teaching that year. Nisi Shawl later said of the experience, “At Clarion West, I learned in six weeks what six years at the University could never have taught me.” Discussions with other workshop participants eventually led her to create a Writing the Other essay and class, from which she and Cynthia Ward, whom she met at Clarion West, cocreated the handbook. This, along with positive experiences at another writing program in the Puget Sound area, Cottages at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, provided the impetus for Shawl to relocate to Seattle following a divorce. She is now a member of Clarion West’s board of directors. She has written dozens of reviews for the Seattle Times and Ms. magazine and has lectured at Stanford and Duke universities.

Her short story collection Filter House was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of their best books of 2008, and won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for science fiction and fantasy “which expands or explores our understanding of gender,” sharing the latter prize for 2008 with Patrick Ness. Shawl has also edited a number of speculative fiction collections; her work as an anthologist has encompassed feminist, Afrofuturist, and LGBT speculative fiction, including twice coediting homages to lesbian and gay novelists of color: Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, both published in 2015. Shawl herself has stated that she identifies as bisexual. Since then, she has coedited the 2018 collection Exploring Dark Short Fiction 3 as well as editing People of Color Take Over Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (2017) and New Suns (2019).

Her 2016 novel Everfair broke new ground as well; rather than waxing nostalgic about the colonialist aspects of the Victorian era as many steampunk novels do, it took these issues on, creating an alternate history in which the British Fabian Society decides to create an African sanctuary for those fleeing the tyranny of Belgian King Leopold II, who in the actual nineteenth century brutally enslaved the indigenous people of the Congo in order to profit from the local resource of natural rubber. The new and eponymously named nation of Everfair, like the fictional country of Wakanda, works to develop the technology to protect themselves from rapacious European interests; the novel went on to be nominated for both Hugo and Campbell awards.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.