Margaret Atwood and Virginia Woolf during a Tough Week, Healing and the Last Fall Flowers, and Poems of Resistance

Last Flower field of September

Getting a Fix of Margaret Atwood and Virginia Woolf During a Very Tough Week

If you’re a woman, or a rape survivor, you probably had, like me, a very tough week. It’s hard to watch rape victims who bravely come forward against powerful (and terrible) men be jeered, or things being said like “it’s no big deal” and “boys will be boys.” Infuriating to those who have had that happen to us.
That was on top of the fact that I’m still recovering from a month of MS illness, still getting my legs literally back under me again, starting to eat solid food, coaching myself in swallowing, in catching a ball, in using a cane.

So to keep my sanity, as I was recovering, I decided to read A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf and signed up for a Masterclass on writing with Margaret Atwood, and started watching Netflix’s Alias Grace at the same time. Woolf is tough and unemotional in her journals – quite a departure from my last journal/letters of Sylvia Plath – she mainly gives an account of her walks, what she’s reading and what she thinks of it (she can be quite a snippy critic), some thoughts on feminism and literary notes about what she’s writing, stress about deadlines and money. The last bit – right before her suicide – she mostly talks about the bombings on London in a remarkable chipper tone (I want to live! she says over and over in these pages) even after one of her houses is destroyed by a bomb, while the countryside around her is showing signs of destruction, while Germany is threatening in invade. She talked about wanting to live, but then a few days later, she’s dead. Woolf was a driven writer, ambitious and sharp, an intellectual aiming to change the culture. Like Plath, deeply flawed, and though she was much older than Plath when she took her life, it’s almost incomprehensible, even when you know it’s coming.

On the other hand, the bracing wisdoms of Margaret Atwood – also intellectual and very sharp – in her Masterclass (about $90, a bargain I think, which includes teaching video modules, pdf worksheets, and outside resources like Lorrie Moore’s book review of one of Margaret’s books and an hour long panel on speculative writing) gave me inspiration, homework, real insight into her own rewriting of her books and her own journey to becoming a writer, feminism, speculative writing – I’m not done with all the modules yet and I’ve already written a short story (very rare for me) and two poems as part of my homework. If anyone could be an antidote to this week’s terrible misogyny by men in power, it’s Margaret.  I’ve read all her books, but her descriptions of rewriting Alias Grace inspired me to watch Netflix’s version of the story, which I’ve found more subtle and also, more hopeful than Handmaid’s Tale.

Healing in late September and Finding Moments of Joy

One tactic I’ve taken to inspiring me to recover my walking muscles has been taking short trips around to some of our beautiful Woodinville locals and a visit to Seattle’s Japanese Gardens to see if any leaves were changing yet. I can still get exhausted even with short walks so I have to plan just a little bit every day.

There’s something so moving about the last flowers blooming in September, and the turning golden sunlight of this fall month, that makes September my second favorite month after April. The sunflowers and dahlias, the brave front of the last fuchsias full of hummingbirds and frantic bees. I think it’s important to fill your eyes with something beautiful, and give your body some inspiring surroundings while they are repairing. I can’t prove this does anything, but it seems better than most medicines.

Speaking of Resistance…Some Poems

I was also thinking about ways to change our culture, a culture that doesn’t trust or believe women or treat their bodies as worth protecting, that privileges the words of men over women even when the woman is more qualified, more educated, and more honest. A culture that tells women that rape is normal and no big deal. A culture where the highest places in government (Supreme Court, Congress, Presidency) can be occupied by unapologetic sexual predators and lots of people are okay with that, or can’t be bothered to vote them out.

I am a writer, so most of what I can do involved, well, writing. Here is a poem I started writing almost 20 years ago, “Remembering Philomel,” when I was 26. It can be found in my first book, Becoming the Villainess. It’s about not only the horrible attitudes towards women who tell their stories (Ovid, an unnamed creative writing professor) but also how my rape at six changed my life, and how the story of Philomel and Procne is a story that is just as familiar today as it ever was.

And two more poems that I hope help you. One is from the same book, “Okay Ophelia.” I encourage you all to take positive action in the face of hate and misogyny and injustice. Buy a book or painting by a woman, donate to a women’s charity, decide to vote for a woman in November, listen to a woman and believe her. Promote a woman. Hire a woman. The only way our culture changes is if we change it.

“Okay, Ophelia” from Becoming the Villainess

The other is a newer poem called “Resistance.”