Excerpts from "Dreaming In Women" (by Lidia Yuknavitch)
"Make quiet for Emily Dickinson. Sing gently a hymn in between the heaves of storm. Let the top of your head lift. See? There are spaces between things. What you thought was nothing-ness carries the life of it."
"With Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing you will learn to stiffen your spine, when to laugh and throw the drink back, when to weep and with whom, when to pick up a rifle.
Jeanette Winterson will make a small thing enormous as the cosmos.
Toni Morrison will let you cry home the passage.
Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything."
"With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night."
"With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless."
Still making friends with non-fiction. Finishing up The Chronology of Water. Filing this chapter, under "Things I Want to Remember."
More soon. xx
