An Essay?

Lately, I've been thinking about the estrangement of women – estrangement experienced from her artist self, her body and sexuality, and from male counterparts in the writing world.

To function as a poet or writer, many times women experience a sense of isolation between the social self and her creative being. I am beginning to bring into awareness the tension I have within myself between my outer and inner writing life.

Some times a self-crippling mold exists that women force themselves into by censoring, altering pronouns in writing, and projecting some kind of compulsive niceness. An isolation occurs when we do this. When women do not force themselves into these confines, like Sylvia Plath, they are labeled “crazy” women.

Men and male writers experience isolation too. However, it seems theirs is typically expressed as an existential condition, a faith issue, or a result of their past. Women, I think, experience isolation as a condition of gender and how our gender is received, treated and considered in our society.

I also consider how many (or few) of our life-myths or creation stories are actually created by women. Most prominent myths disregard our life experience and leave us with no reflective promise, at best. At worst, they remain stories wherein women exist primarily as sexual vessels for men or predatory witches coming to get them. Some woman are rewriting and reinterpreting these myths and thereby helping to close the gap for many women between inner and outer self. I wonder what women will convey, write about, or look like when the myths we choose are the myths we create.

I am thinking about my own poetry and writing. In poetry, I tend to zoom in on the natural world and maybe, if all conditions are right, attach personal revelations. But even then, these depths may be coded or layered or wrapped in distance. There is a sense that I must control this aspect of conveyance, just like I must control my outward self in my society. Sometimes my physical self squares off with my spiritual self.

Maybe for me there is an invulnerability to the self when writing of nature. It's safe and easy. When I think about writing about sexuality or body issues, and all the baggage that tends to go with that, I freak out. More specifically, perhaps I avoid it all together.

As I explore and unpack some of these themes, I am able to open another level of gratitude for those women who have faced and worked through all of this. They exist and their light is piercing that which threatens to remain dense and dark to me.