MEMOIR AND MIDWIVES
QUOTE: “What you bring back with you in the end (of a journey) might not be what you started out in search of to begin with.” Taken from The Firebird by Susanna Kearsley.
Women are under attack in 2025 like never before. Under the guise of words like DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), women’s names, accomplishments, and they, themselves are being removed from jobs in civil service, academics, and the military. Books are being banned as well. History is being rewritten.
In the churning midst of chaos in our government since the inauguration in January, possibly aimed at ending our life as a democracy and Republic after nearly 250 years, I am returning to pull together pieces of a book I call WHO’S SAFE: WOMEN AND VIOLENCE.
Since Anita Hill testified in Congress at the hearings of Clarence Thomas to become a Supreme Court Justice in 1991, I have been collecting and reading books and articles for this book. In thirty years, I have filled a large blue plastic storage bin and there is little sign that my collection of incidents of misogyny will end before I do. When Donald J. Trump became President in 2016, I had no idea what that word (misogyny) even meant.
In 1988, I ended a twenty-year marriage to an alcoholic who turned to violence when drinking. For six years, I tried to divorce my first husband but kept returning to the marriage certain of my love for him, convinced things would work out if only I could find the magic solution. On my third and final try for divorce the lawyer who had continued to support me, said, “For God’s sake, Susan, this time go through with it!” I did. I was boosted by support from Al-Anon and another program for alcoholic families in a local hospital. Among my new friends was the man who would become my second husband. Watching the Hill/Thomas trial on television from my home now in Rochester, New York, I was amazed by the quiet courage of Anita Hill as she testified about sexual assault incidents when she worked for Thomas as a government employee. That is when I began to contemplate whether any woman is safe in America. Today, in 2025, I would tell you my conclusion is that no woman in America is safe, not in her marriage or her country, not if she lives alone or is wealthy or poor. My conclusion is that women are not safe in America, any place, anytime, anywhere.
This time, when I returned to work on my book about women and their chances for safety, my studies and research revealed new findings hidden among the books and articles. These shone like blazing meteors among the collection of words.
FIRST, I NOTED HOW WOMEN HAD CONTRIBUTED TO THE GENRE OF MEMOIR as it emerged in the early 2000s. This idea seemed to come to me personally, but I found support in books by other authors.
The first of these is Judith Barrington who recently published a new book Virginia’s Apple. Anyone who ever studied memoir with me will recognize the Barrington name since I made certain every student in my memoir class had a copy of her book, Writing the Memoir. I swore this to be the best and most essential guide to use for this topic. My daughter Mindy Hardwick lives in Portland, Oregon, and has written ten books. She ran into Ms. Barrington at a book fair and gave me the signed copy of her new book at Christmas. The book reveals the tragedy of the death of both of her parents who died on a cruise ship, how she was reared and grew up in London and Great Britain, participated with women’s groups and came out there as a lesbian. She eventually found her way to Oregon where she began to publish her books and met Adrienne Rich, one of those poets and essayists who led us all into memoir, along with many others, including Barrington herself.
She writes, “Caught up in what was known as the Women in Print Movement,” Ruth (her partner) started a feminist press, The Eighth Mountain—which eventually published Barrington’s early books. Ruth and Judith were both avid readers of women writing at that time. When Reed College called Barrington to teach a class on Adrienne Rich, she and Ruth found themselves hosting her in their home. Some of the other poets Barrington knew at this time were lesbian, but many others were not. She knew Ursula Le Guin, another resident of Portland. She speaks of Amy Clampitt and Maxine Kumin, and many others. During the early 1990s I was studying at SUNY Brockport with Judith Kitchen, who became well-known for narrative fiction, an early type of memoir, and I met poet Naomi Shibab Nye, of St. Louis, also a poet pioneer for women who were writing their truth.
Barrington writes: “In the seventies and early eighties, poetry was at the heart of the woman’s movement, haunted by Muriel Rukeyser’s spurious lines--What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’”
She continues, “We looked to our poets for inspiration, vision, and the courage to persist. Women who had never read a poem that wasn’t a school assignment devoured the work of poets like Judy Grahm, Audre Lorde, Susan Griffin and Adrienne Rich.”
After I moved to Seattle, I taught Julia Cameron’s classes in creativity (The Artist’s Way). In these classes I saw women “catch fire” as they re-discovered their own creativity in artistic works like quilting, photography, painting, or writing their own stories. Again, this was a few years before the genre of memoir exploded.
Another woman leading us to memoir was Carolyn G. Heilbrun author of Writing A Woman’s Life, (published 1988 and 2008). She was teaching English on the East Coast as Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She taught with the tools of biography and autobiography. She claims 1973 as a turning point for what she calls “modern women’s autobiography” and offers May Sarton’s book Plant Dreaming Deep as a transformation. Sarton writes of buying a house and lives alone but later realizes she has minimized her emotions and not told the truth of her anger, despair and struggles whereupon she wrote Journal of Solitude.
Heilbrun writes “Only in the last third of the twentieth century have women broken through to a realization of the narratives that have been controlling their lives. . .The constraints on women’s writing the truth about their lives were lifted first by women poets, sometimes in poetry or essays, books or interviews…They found a way to recognize and express their anger; harder still, they managed to bear, for a time at least, the anger in men that their work aroused.”
SECOND, at the same time I discovered the 20th century women who led us into memoir, I also have been reading about women dating back to the American Revolution who were midwives or healers. They collected and documented women’s stories through their work.
Here is a list of books I recommend on this topic:
Philippa Gregory, author of Tidelands first in a three-part series, Simon and Schuster 2019
Sally Hepworth, The Secrets of Midwives St. Martin’s Press, 2015
Ariel Lawhorn, The Frozen River Vintage Books, Penguin Random House, 2023
Sarah Penner The Lost Apothecary Park Row Books, Ontario, Canada, 2021
Lisa See Lady Tan’s Circle of Women Scribner, 2023
Jennifer Wright Madame Restell Hachette Books, 2023
I would also like to add Jodi Picoult’s book, By Any Other Name, 2024
I taught memoir from the late 1990s until about 2020 in the Seattle area. I found that teaching at a community college in my area would not be productive financially so as people would express a desire to write their own stories, I organized a class. I taught at schools, churches, at a home for nuns, Dominican Reflection Center in Woodway, WA, at an art gallery in Tenino, WA and at people’s homes in Olympia and in Edmonds, Shoreline, Lake Stevens, Everett, and also with the Orcas Island Library and at our home there. I also taught online, including to a woman in Great Britain. Eventually, I wrote my book Parsing the Dragon: A Memoir.
When I first started teaching Memoir there were few available, most written by men. I began collecting these books to share with my students. Today my collection fills an entire bookcase, and I can no longer keep up with all the new ones published.
MY WRITING LIFE
Looking back on my life of 79 years, I know that I wrote early poems while in grade school, even before kindergarten. Poems were like songs to me as their syllables and rhymes formed and sang in my thoughts. I always longed to be a writer and have fallen short of my original goals. I find that I became a caregiver to so many family members. I met my first husband in Journalism School at the University of Missouri, Columbia. We graduated in 1966 and 1967 and I worked in that field for twenty years as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, as copy editor of assorted books from catalogs at Wichita State University, Kansas, to books on agricultural economics by a Professor at the University of Illinois. Then I spent ten years working for St. Louis hospitals in fundraising and public relations. While in graduate school I also learned to put together oral histories as an archivist at Rochester General Hospital. As a wife and mother, married to a fellow journalist serving in the military during the Vietnam War, I needed to work to help support us.
My favorite job was serving as public relations director at Missouri Baptist Hospital in St. Louis where I was tasked with developing the public relations department in the late 1970s. I was impressed with my job and so devastated to find myself pregnant with a (surprise) child and all of that led to a long divorce while I juggled various jobs including fundraising for another hospital. After I married Rich, I moved to Rochester, NY in 1989, and published some articles about a woman married to a famous banker until someone suggested I go to graduate school, which I did, at SUNY Brockport. I earned a master’s degree in creative writing (pre-MFA) in 1993. Between us, my new husband and I had seven children. Only a few lived with us but someone always seemed to need something from me. My husband lost several jobs and since he’d had a recent heart attack, essentially elected to retire and devote his time to his new sailboat. Fortunately, I came into an inheritance, but I needed to learn how to handle this effectively.
Although I dreamed of having time to write, my husband’s family continued to expand, I still had a younger child at home and felt someone still always needed something from me. I found myself in a struggle to scratch and claw for every word I put on paper. In the early 2000s, we decided to learn to become sovereign and self-sufficient and moved South near Olympia on what became a 33-acre farm, but growing, cooking, canning vegetables, took a toll on my writing. Each time I’d get a foothold in the writing career, I’d get blindsided. When my parents reached their 90s, I spent eight years flying back and forth from Seattle to Decatur, Illinois, (2008 to 2015) to help my brother and sister-in-law care for them. After they died, I had a few years to breathe but by then Rich’s family had grown to 24 people. Someone needed a new garage door opener, someone else needed money to move or money for a restaurant, or money for a furnace. The demands never seemed to end.
Now, in 2025, I have entered the fourth year of being Rich’s full-time caregiver, one of the most difficult jobs I have ever done. Caregiving for someone I live with 24 hours a day has taken an immense toll on my physical health. I have found help through Alzheimer groups, and counseling. As I write this, Rich is facing heart surgery.
I keep gratitude journals and am very grateful for two major gifts my marriage to Rich has given me. Love is the first. I grew up with a mother who did not seem to like me, and my first husband abused me physically, so Rich’s obvious and never-failing love for me has been an immense gift. Rich also makes me feel safe! Even at 90, I still believe he would protect me. Thanks Rich!
I am also honored to belong to the Union Poets, led by Sterling Warner, an outstanding poet who moved to Union several years ago. The group meets monthly on Zoom and is joined by poets from all over the world. This challenges me to write at least three poems each month.
My journey is not ending as I’d planned, but my life has been filled with many unexpected adventures and people.
If you have thoughts or something to add to my BLOG this time, please contact me at parsingwithsusan@gmail.com
