It Is A Long Baptism Into The

The Fact That Human Beings Do Not Put Up Forever With Misery, Humiliation, Degradation, Actual Physical Deprivation But Act Is A Fact Which Every Human Being Should Know About. We Are A Species That Makes Changes.

Think About All That We've Lost That Has Been Said Orally Because Nobody Was Taking It Down. I Feel Very Fortunate To Live In A Time Where We Have So Many Different Voices. We Have A Much Richer Literature Than We've Ever Had, And We Can Know America So Much Better.

The Habits Of A Lifetime When Everything Else Had To Come Before Writing Are Not Easily Broken, Even When Circumstances Now Often Make It Possible For Writing To Be First; Habits Of Years - Responses To Others, Distractibility, Responsibility For Daily Matters - Stay With You, Mark You, Become You. The Cost Of Discontinuity (that Pattern Still Imposed On Women) Is Such A Weight Of Things Unsaid, An Accumulation Of Material So Great, That Everything Starts Up Something Else In Me; What Should Take Weeks Take Me Sometimes Months To Write; What Should Take Months, Takes Years.

And When Is There Time To Remember, To Sift, To Weigh, To Estimate, To Total?

Literary History And The Present Are Dark With Silences . . . I Have Had Special Need To Learn All I Could Of This Over The Years, Myself So Nearly Remaining Mute And Having To Let Writing Die Over And Over Again In Me. These Are Not Natural Silences--what Keats Called Agonie Ennuyeuse (the Tedious Agony)--that Necessary Time For Renewal, Lying Fallow, Gestation, In The Natural Cycle Of Creation. The Silences I Speak Of Here Are Unnatural: The Unnatural Thwarting Of What Struggles To Come Into Being, But Cannot.