Judith Arcana

By the time I was thirteen, in 1956, I wanted to write. I wanted to write stories. But I never said so when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had already learned that I ought not be, could not be, a writer. My conscious and spoken goal in girlhood was to be a teacher (“something to fall back on”), and certainly a wife, a mother. Along the way to taking up those three occupations, I wrote papers that were praised by teachers; I published a parody of Dostoevsky (“Chicken Little” in the manner of ) – it took second prize in the campus litmag in my freshman year of college.

In my twenties, I became a conscious human being, my consciousness fostered by the thrilling education offered by the politics of contemporary liberation movements. After twenty years of voraciously reading fiction and poetry, I began to read nonfiction in great gulps, book after book; pamphlets and leaflets and flyers and underground newspapers. In those years I also wrote my first poems, which I did not seek to publish. I have some of them still.

Though I wrote only a few more poems and very little fiction in the next two decades, I published three nonfiction books. Two of those books are research-based feminist studies of motherhood (one of mothers & daughters, one of mothers & sons); the third book, a literary biography of Grace Paley, turned out to be a bridge. Studying Grace, I built a bridge and crossed over on it, heading for the side where fiction and poetry were also under construction. I was nearly fifty, a university administrator and a woman who'd come to know her own desire, before I discovered writing workshops run by women who believed that there were other women waiting to read what we wrote there.

When I took my workshop notebooks home, I could write in short bursts of energy and time packed around the edges of my paid job or on breaks: residencies in Montana, Key West, New Mexico, the coast range of Oregon. Then, in my late fifties, when dozens of my poems, as well as a few stories and essays, had been published, the material conditions of my life changed. I got lucky: by chance and generosity, I got just enough money to allow me to live as a writer, not a teacher-who-writes-when-she-can.

This happened in the years I was writing What if your mother; I began to move my writing into the center of my life. I began to create an image of myself as an old woman, writing. Now I’m burnishing that image, working and dreaming myself into this coming of age, time among the witches and spinners, the magic queens and wise crones. I’m imagining myself into an old woman, a generative old woman who makes art with words, makes words out of years, makes years of words into poems and stories.


© 2005 Judith Arcana

Multigravida
You Don’t Know
Women’s Liberation

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