A to Z: Letters to Dead Writers: Anaïs Nin

This month I'm writing one post for each letter of the alphabet, all on the theme of "Letters to Dead Writers." You can see my theme reveal post here and learn more about the blogging challenge here.

Today's writer is Anaïs Nin
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Dear Ms. Nin,

I found your work in college, as many young women do.

Newly freed from my parents supervision and the censorship of high school libraries, where work of a sexual nature was banned if it ever even found a way onto the shelves at all, I was instantly fascinated by your frank and explicit writing about eroticism.

I read your Delta of Venus alongside Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn. The movie Henry and June came out during my college years, and cemented my interest in you, your life, and your work. You me a vocabulary for feelings that were new to me, and a glimpse into a bohemian experimenting sort of life I would not have the courage to live myself.

You were so sexy and so smart at the same time, and it was important for me to learn that a woman could be both of those things at once.

It wasn't all just about sex, though. You had such beautiful language, and in the midst of your stories, there were such gems of philosophy and psychology, such deep understandings of the motivations of human beings. Your journals were fascinating for their insights as well as for the life they shared.

Thank you for sharing your life with me. I'm so sorry it ended in pain. F*ck cancer.
-Samantha

A to Z: Letters to Dead Writers: Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley

This month I'm writing one post for each letter of the alphabet, all on the theme of "Letters to Dead Writers." You can see my theme reveal post here and learn more about the blogging challenge here.

Today's writer is Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley
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Dear Ms. Shelley,

Your biography is a full and varied one full of adventure. You traveled so much, and held your own with some of the biggest name writers of your era. But the part that amazes me is that you did it all when you were still so young! You were just 21 when Frankenstein was published.

Given the impressive nature of your family, it shouldn't be a surprise that you were brilliant. You had better access to education than was usual for a woman of your era, and the variety of your reading fed your mind and allowed you to create one of the most memorable stories of all time. Frankenstein is so instilled in our cultural memory at this point, that we all know the story, even those who have never read it.

I have read it. Several times now. And each time I am horrified not by the creature or the experiment, but by the inhumanity of his treatment by his creator. This intelligent and sensitive side of your creature was lost in early interpretations of your book for stage and screen, but has made it into the mainstream in recent years.

You lived a full and daring life, loving and living as you wished, even if it meant you life was more difficult and you struggled for money and position. I wonder what you might have been if you had lived in another era, one less constrained by limited views of women's virtue and freedoms.

You are definitely one of my literary heroes, one I'd love to walk with, listening to your theories and ideas. You amaze me across centuries.

-Samantha

A to Z: Letters to Dead Writers: Madeleine L'Engle

This month I'm writing one post for each letter of the alphabet, all on the theme of "Letters to Dead Writers." You can see my theme reveal post here and learn more about the blogging challenge here.

Today's writer is Madeleine L'Engle
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Dear Ms. L'Engle,

I often hear that readers, especially young ones, need both "mirrors" and "windows" in the books they read. They need to see themselves in the stories, and they need a peek into other worlds, a chance to see what's possible outside the boxes they've been raised in. Your books were both of those for me, at the same time.  

A Wrinkle in Time,  A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and A Wind in the Door were among the first fantasy books I ever read. Images from these stories have stayed with me my entire life. Who could forget the three wise women Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit? Not to mention Aunt Beast and The Black Thing?

More important to me than the story itself though, was Meg Murry, the main character. At this point in my life, I had never encountered a heroine in book like Meg. She wasn't hero material. She wasn't the bravest, or smartest, or most beautiful. Unlike Nancy Drew, another favorite of mine at the time, it wasn't clear that she would overcome every obstacle from the outset. Meg struggled.

So far as she (and we the readers) knew, she was just a girl, and an awkward one at that, one who didn't have a lot of friends and struggled to control her anger sometimes. No one special. Not a chosen one. Just a girl.

So many of us grow up feeling like Meg: lonely, ostracized, judged. Sometimes that just adolescence taking potshots at our self confidence, but it doesn't matter if the situation is the objective truth. It's how it feels. And you knew how it felt to be that girl.

Thanks for making me feel seen just when I was feeling very invisible.

Love,
Samantha

A to Z: Letters to Dead Writers: Helen Keller

This month I'm writing one post for each letter of the alphabet, all on the theme of "Letters to Dead Writers." You can see my theme reveal post here and learn more about the blogging challenge here.

Today's writer is Helen Keller
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Dear Ms. Keller,

I first heard of you when I was in second grade. We were learning about biography, and yours was one of the names on a list of people we could pick to write a research project about.

When I took the list home and asked my mom and dad about the people on it, I learned that you were deaf and blind, but you had become world famous as a writer and speaker. It was clear that my parents thought you were amazing, so I chose you for my project.

I wasn't really ready to read your autobiography yet, since I was only seven, so I read some children's books about you and watched the movie The Miracle Worker with my mom. The part of your story that struck me at the time was the part about the power of language. You'd always been a bright person full of ideas, but because illness had robbed you of language, you couldn't communicate. Once you learned how, the transformation was as good as any enchantment in a fairy tale.

Around this same time was when I decided for sure that I would be a teacher (and I'm a teacher today, so obviously the idea stuck!). I wanted to be that person who made that connection and difference for someone. Anne Sullivan is certainly an inspiration for the difference one person can make in the life of another.

Sometime, when I was older, I read your autobiographies, The Story of My Life and The World I Live In, as well as Teacher and some of your Journals. I came to admire you all the more for your deep thoughtfulness and your advocacy for the rights of others: women, workers, people with disabilities. You had such a way with words, and such strong opinions.

I admire you still today, for the courage of your convictions and your use of your fame to try and make a difference in the world. I hope someday the world rises to your vision of what it could be.

Love,
Samantha

A to Z: Letters to Dead Writers: Jane Austen

This month I'm writing one post for each letter of the alphabet, all on the theme of "Letters to Dead Writers." You can see my theme reveal post here and learn more about the blogging challenge here.

Today's writer is Jane Austen
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Dear Ms. Austen,

Like so many of your fans, I started with Pride and Prejudice, and it's definitely a classic. Lizzie is so sharp and witty and self-assured, and I loved the kind of comeuppance you gave her. I've been that girl, who was overconfident in her information and had to eat crow later.

But my favorite of your novels is Sense and Sensibility. That sibling dynamic really spoke to me. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are such opposites and yet are so much alike, both running with such deep passions, but in complete disagreement about how that ought to be expressed. Much like me and my own sister have been at different points in our lives.

Readers who don't understand your work talk about it being too polished, and dismiss it was drawing-room-drama. But what has always pulled me in is the universality of the experience of the women in your books. Even though they are set in a year and a place distant from my own, I feel I know these women, recognize myself and other women I know in the pages of your books. Smart women constrained by circumstance, trying to balance responsibility and love.

As someone who spent childhood in the contemporary equivalent of the genteel poverty many of your characters face, I appreciate the recognition of the stress that comes from knowing you and your family are one financial disaster away from ruin. Money is such a factor in all their lives, and that is part of why your books still speak to us here in the 21st century.

When I visited Bath during  graduate school, I didn't get to do the full "Jane Austen tour" (I know you'd be amused that you are a cottage industry of that town now), but I still loved walking around and picturing all the characters from your novels in the various settings. The place hasn't changed much since your day--you'd probably still recognize the place. I felt out of my place in my very American sneakers and shorts.

I just read Northanger Abbey earlier this year. I had put off reading it for a while because it was the last of your books I hadn't yet read. Your acerbic wit and affectionate satire of young heroines in gothic novels were a delight, and it fun to see your work at an earlier stage of development.

I like to think that if we were to meet for tea at the Pump Room that we'd be great friends.We could sit together and laugh at the pomp and circumstance of it all.

Thanks for all the literary friends,
Another strong-willed woman,
-Samantha

A to Z: Letters to Dead Writers: Laura Ingalls Wilder

This month I'm writing one post for each letter of the alphabet, all on the theme of "Letters to Dead Writers." You can see my theme reveal post here and learn more about the blogging challenge here.

Today's writer is Laura Ingalls Wilder
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Dear Ms. Wilder,

History can be a hard sell, especially when you're trying to talk to the young. Though I've always loved story, I had a tepid interest in history, thanks to years of lackluster presentation. Elementary school textbooks in the seventies definitely left out anything I might have found interesting.

But somewhere along the way, I discovered historical fiction and you were one of my first loves in that regard.  I read all the Little House books when I was a kid, imagining myself out on the prairie alongside you. When the television show based on your books came out, my fascination only grew because the actress who portrayed you looked like me. After all, I was a slip of a girl with freckles and braids, too.

I know there's been a bit of controversy about your books here of late, in particular the portrayal of Native American characters. Since I read them as a white child in the 1970s, I didn't notice that at the time. Given the time you wrote about and the time you wrote in, it's not that surprising that contemporary readers would feel differently about some things now.

I've only re-read the first book as an adult, sharing it with my own daughter. She, like me, was fascinated with the level of detail. I remember us stopping after reading a part about smoking meat. The sheer amount of labor it took astonished us both and made us feel very spoiled and lazy in our contemporary lives, where you just go to the store and buy whatever kind of meat you want, cleaned, measured, and packaged for you. 

Your books will always be important for that: for showing children what your childhood was like, in a time and place very different than any of us live in now.

Thanks for helping me learn that history isn't boring if it's told right.

Love,
A fellow pig-tailed girl,
Samantha

A to Z: Letters to Dead Writers: H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

This month I'm writing one post for each letter of the alphabet, all on the theme of "Letters to Dead Writers." You can see my theme reveal post here and learn more about the blogging challenge here.

Today's writer is H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
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Dear H.D.,

It's hard, being a woman ahead of your time. Your life reflected that. A woman loving another woman and, at the same time, a man still has the power to evoke shock in the populace an entire century later, so I can only imagine how it must have been for you in the early 1900s.

Yet your poetry sang with exuberance. Everything you felt, your poetry seems to tell me, you felt fully, strongly. There were no half-ways and maybes with you. I think it was that passion that spoke to me.

Like Oread. You give yourself over so much to the power of nature, asking to be overtaken, overwhelmed. I've felt that, too.

You wrote it all, from tiny poems that pack so much into so few words, to wide sweeping poems that lay it out long-form. Your work captures so much of the era you lived in, fragmented, wounded, broken, and beautiful.

The more I read of you, the more of you I want to read. You had so much to say about gender, societal roles, and deep-rooted assumptions in our society. I wish I could have talked with you. I'm sure you would have opened my eyes to things I don't even know I'm still blind about.

Love,
Samantha