Women Writing for a Change Book

The perpetual problem with this particular work, for me, is its sometimes (actually often) thickly academic feminist language. Especially in the beginning chapters of the book, the text draws too much on the masculine: the labels and the acronyms of those labels grasped and worn fiercely like sword and shield. I found the approach too aggressive and forceful, diminishing the yin/divine feminine instead of heightening it. If the intention was to blend masculine with feminine, the didactic with the poetic, it didn't work for me.

Mary Pierce Brosmer teaches far more effectively when she is leaning more toward her feminine/yin side: her poems--some of them quite extraordinary--kept me reading the book even when I encountered off-putting abstractions and awkward, almost "elitist" grammatical/vocabulary constructions. Her sensitivity and vision shine through when she is being simply observant, not trying to assert herself as "the teacher" or interpreter of experience.

I found some of the writing prompts later in the book somewhat valuable for my purposes (to observe and think more deeply about my world), but the exercise kicking off the book ("'Survey the landscape' of an entity or system which you have participated in creating.... You will be invited to continue writing about and around this choice for several chapters, so choose something you really want to understand and attend to in some depth") so smacked of a corporate employment manual that I was not at all drawn to still myself and begin.

I suspect those who would be coming into this book from the level of education required to even understand it have already done the work to liberate their suppressed voices. Maybe I'm wrong. And maybe I'm not drawn to this method because I just have never identified strongly with gender (mine or anyone else's) and have been in too many writing workshops where it's all just too self-conscious, too precious, too important.

What brings my creative voice and spirit most to the surface is nature uncontained by any artifice of woman or man: my idea of place is where I can quietly observe and learn how to participate in the infinitely mysterious ecosystems that enfold me. But for those who would like a pretext to come together to bond and explore their voices in a communally created "container," this book could prove useful.

To be fair, I have to say that it's really impossible to review this book without working through it within a dedicated group over time. But you have to be drawn to work with it before you can do that. Maybe Mary Pierce Brosmer's WWf(a)C method will appeal to you more than it did to me.