SATURDAYFARMSHARE
BOOKGARDAN: SEED SAVERS By Kate Moses “I am interested in writing away the invisibility of women’s lives, looking at writing as an act of redemption. In order to do this, I need the companionship, the example, of other women who are writing.” —Canadian novelist Carol Shields
could join whenever they could snatch the time – in the middle of the night, during naptime, while pumping milk at their desk during lunch break at work. Buried deep in the soil of Bookgardan, Craigardan’s flagship writing program, is the very real impact of one of the first virtual communities of women writers and readers. The collaborative creativity, sisterhood, and antidote to isolation that distinguished Mothers Who Think are now hallmarks of Bookgardan, as are the mentorship and “believing eyes” that I similarly benefitted from during the writing of my first novel, thanks to the friendship and wisdom of legendary biographer Diane Middlebrook. As I wrote my novel about poet Sylvia Plath and Diane wrote a biography of Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, we traded archival material gleaned from library research trips around the US and England, thereby gaining a mutual, unmatchable understanding of each other’s works-in-progress. To whom else but me, her obsessed confederate, could Diane send this unintentionally amusing late-night email: “Where or where have I put SP’s diaphragm? Perhaps you have it?”
“We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in between the domestic chores and obligations. I’m not sure we deserve such a big A-plus for that.” — Toni Morrison Twenty-five years ago, two women writers with uninspiring freelance gigs, four small children, one shared babysitter, and never enough time to write what they wanted to write -- let alone talk to anyone about it -- got an idea during a trip to the zoo with their kids: What if they used this mysterious new thing called the World Wide Web to send stories into the ether about their lives, and the lives of other women like them? “Like them” meaning women who were also struggling to balance the needs of others against their own pressing needs, especially the need to seize their narratives and write them. Would anyone care? And how would we know—waiting in the carpool line at the elementary school or sitting at the dining room table typing with one hand and jiggling a fussy baby with the other?
So gratifying was our literary alliance that when our books were finished and on their way to publication, Diane suggested we start a salon for women writers to talk about their writing, their process, and the challenges they faced, creating a latticework of support for the intertwining of shared knowledge and reciprocal interest in one another’s success. Hundreds of women writers took part in the salon, which originated in our hometown of San Francisco and spread to branches in London and New York; before her untimely death, Diane asked me to keep the San Francisco salon going. Amy Tan, Camille Dungy, Sylvia Brownrigg, Anchee Min, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Lyndall Gordon and Elif
This was back in the Wild West of the internet, back before wifi if you can believe it – when we were still scratching our heads about “e-mail,” whatever that was, and you could count the number of websites floating in cyberspace on one hand. But somehow this experiment in reaching out to other women writers and readers worked: electronic communication opened a dialogue about women’s lives, both outer and inner, that reached across time zones and international borders, starting an ongoing conversation women
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