By Clarissa Villasin-Militante
It took me a long time to adjust to a writing life. Though I quit a regular job in 2001 and decided to go free lance [sometimes as writer, sometimes as editor and sometimes as researcher, and with two brief intervals doing and quitting full-time jobs], realizing and accepting what it means to live a life devoted to my personal writing—my fiction, essays and blogs—happened only seven years after. But as in other discoveries and epiphanies, it took only an instant of a mind shift to realize that it is happening and that I accept it. Even writers sometimes take a while to name ideas and emotions, to articulate what they are going through, especially if the time to release these ideas and feelings has not arrived. But that instant was waiting to happen, because the preparation for it was already taking place in those past years.
A phrase from Anna Quindlen’s book “Living Out Loud” named “it” for me. [In fact, I was already re-reading some of her essays and was sure I’ve read this line before, but only now did it affect me] Talking about her life and her writing, former journalist and now columnist/author Quindlen said “…my work became a reflection of my life.” Realizing that this was what she wanted, her being a writer, being a woman, wife, mother, friend and everything else she did outside of writing fell into place.
That’s what I want to do—for my work to reflect my life. In fact, that’s what I’ve been trying to do all these years, but there was guilt, fear and apprehension in accepting that, because it’s very personal; very individualized. Other women have careers; other women go to office. Others are involved in politics or are doing social development work or are in media. Others are homemakers. But I choose to write—to put my writing in equal terms with being a woman, being a wife, being a friend, being an activist, being whatever aspect of life a woman wants and needs to be.
Women who write is about defining these other aspects of life through writing so that all things fall into the right place, because of this writing life—whether it be writing in a personal journal, or writing a blog, an essay, fiction or poetry or music, or whether it gets published or uploaded into the internet, whether it is only read to a group of friends or the writing becomes a career or not. There is no writing on the sideline or when there is “free” time or writing that happens after laboring first on more supposedly deserving endeavors, like an income-earning work or home-related chores, or after being a wife and mother and friend and mentor and other things and roles that women live.
There is no condition in which this writing should happen.
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola in Women Who Run with the Wolves wrote “It is right and proper for women to eke out, liberate, take, make, connive to get, assert their right to go home. Home is a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily maintained in the mundane world…home is the pristine instinctual life…where all is as it should be, where all the noises sound right, and the light is good and the smell makes us feel calm rather than alarmed…for some, home is taking up an endeavor of some sort. Women sing again after years of finding reason not to. They commit themselves to learn something they’ve been heartfelt about for a long time. They seek out lost people and things in their lives. They take out back their voices and write. They rest. They make some corner of the world their own…and do something that leaves foot prints.”
What I hope in beginning Women who write is to make it a means to share stories and express ourselves and find our voice in whatever form of creative writing, and in so doing help us find, journey back to, sustain or create this home—whether it’s just for ourselves, with friends or with family. Women who write does not intend to be a monologue.
