Women & Writers

Presenting Evidence that God Still Loves Women and Writers

Thoughts on Serena Williams and Reproductive Work

September 5, 2022
by admin

On August 9, 2022, Serena Williams announced her plan to retire in Vogue. I have followed her and her sister’s storied career since they were kids. Like the way I felt about Mike Tyson and before him Muhammad Ali, I loved Venus and Serena for being outstanding in their sport. Richard Williams, their father, coached his daughters, bringing them to the attention of the nation. I remember when Richard Williams interrupted Venus’s 1994 interview to challenge the reporter for refusing to accept her confident response to his questions. I sat near my own father watching them. I remember him talking back to the tv in defense of Richard Williams. Understanding Richard Williams and some of what he was up against as a Black Father.

The ghetto fabulousness of the Williams sisters affirmed for me the Blackness of blackness. I loved these girls for being dark and familiar. Their beaded cornrows signaled their girlhood and the presence of a Black mother, between whose legs they must have sat on the floor while her hands parted their damp hair, greased their scalps, and braided their dark tresses. Black girls and cornrows go together—the beads were extra. I knew that. My girlfriends knew that. My Black family knew.

As Richard Williams predicted, Serena outpaced her sister’s remarkable career. Serena says she benefitted from growing up in her sister’s shadow. Rising to number 1 in both singles and doubles, Venus won 7 grand slams. Serena has won 23 grand slam titles, the most of any player in the Open Era and the second most ever.

In her announcement, Serena Williams lamented the fact that her desire to grow her family comes at the expense of competing as a professional tennis player. She says:

Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family. Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity. Don’t get me wrong: I love being a woman, and I loved every second of being pregnant with Olympia. I was one of those annoying women who adored being pregnant and was working until the day I had to report to the hospital—although things got super complicated on the other side. And I almost did do the impossible. A lot of people don’t realize that I was two months pregnant when I won the Australian Open in 2017. But I’m turning 41 this month, and something’s got to give.

Serena alludes to male counterparts as evidence that men are spared the choices confronting her as a woman. In fact, her perspective appears typical since birth rates decline as women become more accomplished in their professions. This is also true with men, however, according to the New York Times, our society tends to view children as a bonus for men in the workplace, as opposed to being perceived as an obstacle for women.

Moreover, professional women are lauded for their contributions to their fields. Women are not similarly recognized for their work as mothers. There are no award shows. No matches. No cups or trophies. No telecasts. No audience. Women’s waistlines and hips expand in a world that despises wide female bodies. Their breasts sag. Mother’s Day is no match for the affirmation of celebrity and fortune.

I confess that I scoffed a bit when reading Serena say that it’s unfair for her to have to choose between tennis and family. In this context, the idea of fairness sounds like a feminist trope, particularly when one considers the wealth Serena has at her disposal. No one objects, though, because evoking the notion of fairness suggests that Serena is like the overwhelming majority of mothers having to make tough decisions about work and life. The reality, as evidenced by the photo of Venus pushing Serena around a tennis court as a toddler, is that the decisions made for her and by her have been entirely different than those made by the rest of us. Those decisions shaped her life. Fairness has had little to do with any of it.

Besides, there are other ways to look at the circumstances. It is sad that this society relies so heavily on reproductive work but allots it so little value. While every day, despite our ability to kill, to hate, to destroy, to make war, to make bombs, to slide toward nuclear annihilation, women continue to bring forth babies. Babies, most of whom laugh and cuddle and crawl before walking, and grow up, and repeat the cycle.

Men may father any number of children, but they must ejaculate. Their work is external. They will never carry within their dark bellies the miracle of blood, bone, and spirit that has been and continues to be the sole means by which we have all become human. The bleeding womb signals the potentiality of women to reach beyond a profession and aspires for immortality. The ego of motherhood is the insistent influence of personality and persistence of genes. And then too who knows the myriad ways a lactating mother nurses her baby? Beyond which the imprinting that happens throughout child rearing leaves an enduring mark. Motherhood is extraordinary in its ordinariness, the Divine within us.

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Fifth annual Celebrate Life day

April 1, 2024April 30, 2024
by admin

Women & Writers explores beauty, truth, and justice. And in that spirit we celebrate life!

Women & Writers invites you to join us at sunrise on the first Saturday in June at the water’s edge. We will take a few minutes to reflect on the wondrous marvel of our own lives and honor the lives of those who are sharing this life with us.

If you cannot join us in person, raise a glass of water at sunrise where you are, and toast this life that we are so blessed to be living. And give someone a yellow flower in honor of their living.

Location: Annapolis City Dock, Annapolis, MD

Time: 5:43 am

Attire: yellow

Bring: water for toasting

work

Exhibit P: I can still paint walls

February 3, 2024
by vefuaprince

I have painted every wall in my house at least once. I have repainted most of them since the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic. It began with the kitchen, which got a necessary remodeling in 2020 because the cabinets were made from a composite material that had reached the end of its days. If I bent to retrieve a spray bottle from under the sink, the left cabinet door would collapse like a woman overcome. While nearby, another door looked on drowsily, like a drunken sailor balancing against his mate. Above the cabinets, an empty bulkhead laid claim to turf it had no intention of putting to good use. Instead, it forced the cabinets to prostrate, while it impotently stood its ground. The dishwasher leaked. The refrigerator was marred. The microwave tripped the breaker if I opened the door while it was still running. The kitchen needed a lot of work.

All of it felt suddenly unbearably urgent, being at home as we were at that time. While the pandemic lurked outside my door, my house became more orderly, more beautiful. And only the pace at which the transformation occurred, revealed the frantic workings of my mind. I measured. I sketched. I identified suppliers. I designed the look and feel and function of the kitchen I wanted my kitchen to be. I had learned so much from my father while growing up. In the past, I would work with my husband to tackle such projects. But after 27 years, he had “moved on”— that’s what he told me—and I no longer felt confident enough to try a project as ambitious as a kitchen remodel alone. So, I hired a contractor to do the majority of the work. But I decided that I could still paint the walls.

Painting a wall satisfied my need to see some tangible outcome from my efforts. Much of the work that I do feels abstract. If you ask me what I do, I’ll never mention the work I do at home. I’ll say that I am a professor of literature and culture, which means that I get paid to engage often brilliant young minds as we read, write, and grapple with a range of ideas. At the end of a semester, I feel spent. Nevertheless, I usually have only a hazy notion of what has come of my efforts. Sometimes it is years before even one student out of the hundreds who take my classes returns to drop an email or to send a handwritten note of thanks or reflection.

My dentist, it turns out, happens to be the father of one my earliest students. He called her when we discovered the connection. He put her on speaker-phone and the way she said my name reflected the rough edges of my eager early years of teaching. Then her tone softened as she began to recount the lessons she took away from my classroom. She credited my spirited demands with her ability to publish several books over the years.

I won’t even mention that time I encountered another student, who had become a nurse and remembered me fondly, as I attempted to keep my hinder regions covered by a thin hospital gown. Happenstances I have had over the years.

Generally, despite the university’s insistence on measurable outcomes, my work as a professor does not yield immediate, obvious results. When I paint a wall, even if I hate the way things turn out (as was the case with a couple of dubious color and style choices during my recent remodeling), the physicality of the work presents itself clearly as evidence of what has been done. The wall was one color; now it is another color. I remember the pride with which my oldest son beat his chest when I discovered crayon drawings on a wall. He declared, “I did that!” When I paint a wall, that is how I feel. Painting a wall satiates that 3 year old child inside of me who still seeks affirmation.

CrazyAsHell

Committed: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Justice

January 31, 2024January 31, 2024
by admin

Civil rights were first constitutionalized in the 13th Amendment. However, the fact of civil rights as a false category is immediately revealed by the caveat written into the amendment for the terms of continued enslavement. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” [emphasis added]. In the wake of the Civil War, the country failed to redress slavery as a crime against humanity; instead, it sought to preserve the union by issuing civil rights. And because slavery was both reprehensible and legal, the nation is clear on its moral culpability, hence it has willfully refused to construct a legal system that would require a cost it imagines as too painful to endure. But justice requires punishment. In fact, the language of punishment appears in the amendment. However, in a kind of legislative slight of hand, the 13th Amendment displaces punishment of those agents enacting the transgression of slavery onto those who would be convicted as outlaws. This transferal resists the constitutional gains of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as the 1965 Voter Registration Act, which some mark as the end of the Civil Rights Era, allowing for the continuing disenfranchisement of segments of the society well into the twenty first century.

During the mid twentieth century, “Civil Rights Movement” began to circulate as an overarching term for the struggle for civil liberty; however, the aims at the grass roots of the movement were always broader than the limits of the law. Rather than reject the term “civil rights” as a misnomer, the literature produced during the 1960s reveals how the notion of civil rights complicates and to some degree frustrates those seeking human dignity. Rather than foregrounding the law, which is inherent in a term like “civil rights,” the literature focuses on the experiences of a people. And the effort to represent those experiences using a lexicon that has proven inadequate to achieve its larger aims has often been depicted as a maddening descent.

Laundry

Laundry Room Make Over: part 2

September 10, 2023
by admin

In the 1950s when my house was built, the people designing the living spaces likely never washed clothes. Sure, they probably used the utility sink, in the room where they also placed the washing machine and dryer, to clean paint brushes or wash the dog. But really, how often do you actually clean paint brushes or wash the dog for that matter? Those tasks happen infrequently. Whereas laundry is one of those never-ending chores, like washing dishes and cooking. Laundry happens all the time.

All the damn time! Someone gathers the piles of dirty clothes, which rarely make it into a hamper. Someone picks up pants, holds them up and shakes out the underwear from where a kid has hastily removed them together before jumping into the shower. Someone turns the pant legs right side out. Someone gets socks from scattered and sundry places and unballs them. Someone sorts the soiled laundry into appropriate piles, usually on the floor near the washing machine. Out of sight.

Despite the fact that someone is always doing laundry, it is the kind of work that no one is supposed to be seen doing. Even in my childhood home, which was built in the late 1970s, our washer and dryer was in an unfinshed part of our basement, behind a louvered door, where someone had to disappear into a cramped dark room with a basket of dirty clothes and deal with them. (note the deliberate use of indefinite pronouns)

But now, my 1950s laundry room has been brought into the 21^st century. The first thing I did to enable this transformation was purchase a designer set of matching stackable front loading washer and dryer machines, the kind they began manufacturing near the end of the twentieth century. Whirlpool and other manufactures figured out that design could be an innovation, and dramatically boosted sales when they started making their machines pretty.

No one spends that much money on something that pretty to put behind the steps, so I didn’t just remove the door to my old laundry room, I had them take out the whole wall. I unified the space with flooring, laid longwise to pull the eye toward the further end of the room. I put in a clean new awning window. I purchased DIY cabinets that fit neatly into a narrow space beside the machines. I found some ceramic and stone tile remnants at the Re-store to use as backsplash. And I spent extra to get a drawer, rather than a cabinet, in the base for the utility sink. Stuff put in cabinets beneath utility sinks disappear and never get used because you can’t see or access it easily. Drawers are better than cabinets. Just a few details remain unfinished. Now, my laundry is open, spilling into the more visible outer space at the base of the stairs.

Laundry work should be treated more like we have come to treat cooking, as an essential part of clean, healthy living. It’s not an after thought, but a deliberate, necessary part of the way we design and arrange our lives.

Laundry

Laundry Room Make Over: part 1

September 6, 2023
by admin

My laundry room is stuck in the 1950s. It’s clear that the architects who designed my house had not imagined that a laundry room would ever be anything but utilitarian. It’s uninsulated. The drain pipe from the tub in the bathroom upstairs runs from wall to wall about 10 inches below the ceiling. Copper pipes that bring hot water from the basement water heater cross just a few feet away. The under workings of the commode are above the utility sink. The single pane window has a metal frame with a handle that, when unlatched allows the top to drop inward. Nearly every wall is unfinished. A bare bulb sits in the center, mounted on a beam, with a pull chain that doesn’t always work to turn the light on.

Back in the early 1980s, the previous owners moved one of the original kitchen cabinets into the laundry room for storage. I keep my iron, spray starch, screw gun, and a bag full of screws, outlet covers, allen wrenches, and various other things that came off or out of something but seemed too significant to toss. They screwed two metal strips that allow you to put adjustable shelf brackets on the wall near the door. The shelves are handy. I keep extra rolls of toilet paper and paper towels there.

The room is cramped. It would have been about six by nine feet, were it not for the chimney and duct work to the right just as you come in the door. The dryer is beside that and the utility sink in the corner on the other side of the dryer. The washing machine sits diagonally off the left corner of the dryer, so that you have to open the dryer door before unloading the wet clothes from the washing machine. Otherwise, you have no space for the door to swing with you standing there in front of both machines like a king in check mate. I don’t think a king ever washed clothes.

I have owned this house for years without turning my focus on the laundry room, despite the fact that I rather enjoy doing laundry. And I love beautiful spaces. Making a laundry room over seems decadent—a luxury I can ill-afford. But look at it…

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Sweet Potato Pie

February 10, 2023
by admin

At the red light, a young man, maybe 30, probably younger, held a cardboard sign with words I didn’t bother to read. Living on the streets added an aged veneer. Yet, his complexion was pure. Crisp. Sharp. Onyx, topped with hair that might have been as saturated if he could have washed it more often. He wore a coat, appropriate to the Detroit wind, which was blowing mercilessly despite the mild February temperatures. I had seen signs of this sort before. Besides, I was heading somewhere, going to see about a couple. Mr. Horne had called an hour and a half ago to tell me that he had come across pictures of my beautiful family. He asked after my “famous husband.” I reminded him, not for the first time, that my husband had fallen in love with someone else and left us. He seemed hurt. Not by the news, but by the failure of his memory, which let him down so frequently these days. He had been a formidable man in his day. Tall. Sharp witted. Onyx skinned like the man beside my car holding the sign.

I was bringing them something sweet. I asked for a pie, but the restaurant did not have a whole pie. So they had given me six slices. The wedges were placed into cardboard take away containers and two were put into a paper bag. Three bags were inside a plastic grocery bag so that I could carry them more easily. I had just taken one container out and set it in the passenger seat for myself. That left five, an odd number. How would that work among the couple I was going to visit? I had only just wondered when I was stopped at the traffic light where the onyx skinned man seeking handouts. He appeared as an answer.

He came over in response to the window rolling down and peered sheepishly at me as he accepted my offering. He wanted money but he would take this small paper bag. “Sweet potato pie,” I told him in response to his unasked question. He wanted to know but had become accustomed to not asking questions, particularly of people who were willing to offer him things. He could discard the bag later if he chose, but for now, he humbly reached to receive the bag.

But the words “sweet potato pie” were unexpected, like a sudden, brisk wind, blowing open a curtain. A gust of recognition swept a memory to a place just behind his eyes. And I felt air escaped from that crack in his eyes. He adjusted the tilt of his head ever so slightly and he was exposed. I turned away quickly, feeling him to be vulnerable, like I might have felt upon noticing that his fly had come open. The air felt of joy too out of reach to be longed for—just as much hurt as relief. Gratitude was in there too.

I didn’t intend to pull the drapery from his eyes, but that is what I had done, so I averted my own eyes in an effort to offer him privacy. But now I was drawn to him. I wanted to see him, which is odd. I must have passed a thousand homeless people and never felt a desire to really see a single one. Even when I handed them money or food.

It was the pie, though. I liked sweet potato pie. My own mother’s being my favorite. Few make a pie as smooth and tasty as my mother’s. Gus’s came close, which is why I wanted to bring one to the elderly couple I was heading to see. I wanted them to have sweet potato pie, which reminds me of so many Thanksgivings. And, I could see now, that like me, this onyx skinned man had eaten sweet potato pie inside a warm kitchen, in the company of his family. This moment held recognition and disbelief suspended by the brown paper bag in his hand.

I turned my eyes and watched him through a mirror as he took the container from the bag to get at the slice of pie. He had it upside down. No matter. He lifted it to his lips. They were weathered and gray. The bite he took was too much. The light was green now. I was driving away.

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A Bundle of Letters

December 27, 2022December 27, 2022
by admin

I binge watched Christmas movies from Thanksgiving to Christmas. I could have watched anything–action, adventure, comedy. I chose romantic Christmas movies. I wasn’t in the holiday spirit so much as I wanted something to pull a tear from my now chronically dry eyes. Christmas movies make it seem like life is full of happy endings. Watching them distracted me from the reality of our fragile democracy, the thinning generation of my elders, inflation, the impact of climate change, and increasing threat of gun violence.

I watched the one where Brooke Shields played a writer who wins over the affections of the man who was forced to sell her his family’s estate. And the one with Jack Black who falls for the woman who exchanges houses for the season with a woman who falls for the brother of the woman who owns the English cottage. I watched another about two independently minded Indian-Americans whose more traditional parents are pressuring them to get married. (Wait, that might not have been a Christmas movie.) I watched Notting Hill (1999) with Julie Roberts and Hugh Grant, again. I watched far too many to recall much less name. The particular films didn’t matter to me. I was only watching romances this year because I knew before I began how the movie would go.

I was happily watching The Noel Diary (2022) (it stars that actor from that tv show we all loved with the triplets) when the bliss of my cinematic retreat was disrupted by a bundle of letters. It’s a familiar trope, a stack of old letters mailed over a period of years collected rather neatly despite their varied sizes and colors but united by the common script denoting the name of the intended receiver. Sometimes the letters are bound by scraps of twine. Sometimes they are tucked into a cardboard or wooden box. Always they have been collected by someone who has been entrusted with the responsibility of distributing such letters to those who live at that address. But they haven’t in fact reached their intended reader until this moment of discovery. We feel the sense of betrayal and loss.

What does not come into the story, perhaps because it seems terribly difficult to depict, is just how intrusive a letter can be. By definition that letter is coming from someone who isn’t there. Someone who has not been present to make the receipt of a letter even possible. The movies don’t encourage us to think of that. That part is not romantic—it’s house work in its myriad forms. I’m not talking about that Martha Steward brand of perfect table settings and tidy living rooms, better homes & gardens shit. Just maintaining an address requires work. Ask anyone who actually does the work that goes into building and sustaining a home. Or anyone experiencing homelessness or living in a shelter. A letter writer takes that work for granted.

Housework and the accompanying work of building and maintaining a family is not the stuff of Christmas stories. Christmas stories are about love, choices, loss, and recovery. Even when it involves tension and intrigue, the work of house and home is too messy to be piled so neatly and held together by string. It consists of the daily grind that Robert Hayden captures in “Those Winter Sundays.” A poet can say what the filmmakers cannot. If they could say it, we might see that very often house work is the push behind the pull that carried the letter writer off into the world. Those Winter Sundays

The person who hid the letters away never goes out into the world. That person has been in the same place for all the years it took to commandeer each letter. The movies would have us believe that there’s something destabilizing and oppressive about the one who withholds the correspondence. That they are fearful of the possibilities the letters represent. These characters are depicted as obstacles, as part of the conflict the protagonist must overcome. Perhaps.

Admittedly, I would not have even read the letters the way that I am now if two days before Christmas I had not opened a large envelope addressed to me to discover three more envelopes inside. Two addressed to my adult children and a third addressed to me, with my teenager’s name penned neatly at the bottom. I passed the letters on to their intended receivers but for the first time I understood why the trope of the hidden letters was a thing. My peace is a premium now. And these letters–addressed to me but intending only to make me witness–demanded something of me that I could hardly spare. No! Enough! I am doing all I can already to make this home and keep this home safe.

Teenagers are not as easily transported to stable adulthood as two hour made-for-tv-movie often makes them out to be. And parents are not omniscient. The best shot a kid has at getting to the relatively safe haven of a mature, functioning adulthood is a parent, who is present, who willingly prioritizes the child’s needs. When someone who has absented themselves from the family decides to appear in the form of a letter, the letter reminds the kid that they are remembered by the letter writer, which is great. But it does not account for the work that goes into bringing a home back into order that inevitably follows its unexpected appearance.

Maybe one day, a woman of a certain age too will write a Christmas story. Maybe despite her having spent half a lifetime doing housework and homemaking, she will be presented with an opportunity to make that story into a tv movie. And perhaps that movie will show the work of keeping the house where that kid will be fed, the work that goes into their being able to sleep at night. And maybe, I will tear-up while watching it.

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Period. a play in one act

October 26, 2022
by admin

Excited to see my second play titled, Period., published in Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor. Let me know what you think!

NEFERTITI:

. . .
I saw that outfit in a Spiegel catalog on a model and thought it would
look good on me.
. . .
I was a young woman with room to grow into myself.
. . .

AMAZON:

Back then could you imagine 50?

ISIS:

50? Hell no! We were immortal.

AMAZON:

Goddesses.

(Music starts. The women begin to dance the
dance of goddesses in honor of their youthful
selves. Following the dance, they collapse
onto a sofa laughing.)

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And what of forgiveness?

September 9, 2022
by admin

The drive to move on is forgetful. The failure to remember holds within it the comfort and ease of not having to recall often painful incidents, as well as the threat of repeating cyclical patterns. Breaking a cycle is hard.

When I was a kid, all the neighborhood parks had a merry-go-round. Not the elaborate kind with flower clad horses and music and electricity, requiring an adult operator. I am talking about the ones made out of basic steel. They were disks, with “n” shaped wedges welded atop for kids to hang onto while one of the kids spun it by grabbing hold and running. We didn’t learn about centrifugal force in science class. We learned about it in the park holding on for dear life, trying not to fly off the merry-go-round. Life is a lot like that merry-go-round. We grab hold as hard as we can so that life doesn’t toss us out on our ass and keep spinning without us. That merry-go-round fiasco reminds me of forgiveness.

The concept of forgiveness circulates in our society as a kind of panacea for what ails the wounded heart. Forgiveness is like a pass that grants us permission to stay on the ride. It doesn’t matter if the last go round you got thrown off and hit our head and you’ve probably got a concussion, no one noticed nor cares. Now the other kids are leaning with their hands held out for you to smack as they spin by. You don’t want to be the one standing off to the side smacking fives while the other kids have a go at it. All you want is to get back on for the next go round. So you get back on, and maybe the next time, some other kid hits her head when she flies off.

Forgiveness, we are told, mends the injured from the continuing violation of past wrongs. An old hurt lives into the present moment because we remember it, while forgiving and forgetting locks the hurt into a finite time frame. Then we are able to move on with our lives, leaving the wrong in the past. Because the work is internal, forgiveness benefits the one doing the forgiving more than the one who has been offered grace.

See, I get the concept of forgiveness. But I don’t buy it. Forgiveness forsakes the psychic and social value of accountability. Accountability is the way that an individual is held to collective standards. Unlike forgiveness, accountability demands remembrance. The community—WE—remember what was done, in order to determine what must not be done. And doing so, helps the individual psyche while working in favor of the common good. Without accountability there is no social justice. And without justice, civil society erodes.

Life has, indeed, moved on following all kinds of traumas. Empires rise and fall. The world has continued to spin around its axis, and spiral through space within the galaxy. Life has been happening with and without us for millennia. But if life is a great experiment in creating meaningful order, that order begins, not with forgiveness, but in equitable systems of accountability. Let’s start at home.