Dear Virginia,

First, I’d like to start by saying that you are still such a rock star. It’s 2016, and we’ve made only the merest amount of progress in recognizing the value and rights of women, even if the Democratic party is backing a woman for president. (You should see the shape our entire party system is in. Oof.) Still, your words ring so true, and the bravery it took to put them forward has never been more striking.

Given all this, I find I’ve been thinking of you almost constantly for the past week or so. It seems we’ve made almost no advancement in supporting the work of women writers, despite your excellent counsel. Of course, there are many women writers who have reached untold levels of success, but we usually get behind them after they’ve won the race. Isn’t that strange? Especially when you consider how winners of races are, by default, a minority in a group.

So I’m writing to you to ask if you might be OK if some of us tinkered a bit with your advice. Space is at a premium in our modern world, and women with money usually do not find themselves so situated because they are writers of fiction (or any other sort of writers, I’d venture to say). Your idea of women needing money and rooms of their own, I might further and delicately venture to say, is lovely, but I’d like to gently object to the idea that it is a necessity. Perhaps we can expand that view a bit to reflect other, similar circumstances that can work just as well, even if they don’t look nearly quite as nice.

There’s this great woman writer who became successful despite all the odds. You’d just love her. Her name is Joanne, and she started her books on a train and finished them while living as a single mom in squalor. She, and so many others like her, make me think that maybe it isn’t so much a room and money that we need. It’s the courage to make mental space for ourselves, to know ourselves well enough to recognize that we are better when we write and that is sufficient reason to fight for our writing as doggedly as we fight for anything else.

As for the logistics of all that, I find that even a desk of my own can work, or a corner of a couch, provided it is a space that becomes quiet at some point when I’m awake, and I can crawl into it with my writing instruments and disappear. Libraries can work, provided they don’t serve too much coffee and you don’t have to leave your computer behind to use the bathroom after two hours (but even then, there’s usually someone not so scary nearby to watch over it for you). Pathways can work, through and over streams or city blocks, provided they get your mind thinking and you can leave your phone behind (I won’t begin to try to explain that to you.) so you can look out and into the world. There are so many unlikely spaces in which a woman can find herself thinking her deepest and truest thoughts, and although many require her to practice tuning the world to find out what she’s thinking, that is an act of courage of its own.

The bottom line is that I fear your excellent advice has been turned around on you to become yet another obstacle between women and their words. But most women with something worth saying, even if it’s just to themselves, will probably never have the space and money you describe. I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out, but now that it’s the 21st century, maybe it’s time for Virginia 2.0 to go a little viral. Maybe at this moment when we have never been more advanced as inventors and thinkers and never more inexplicably behind in human rights is a good one for just such a thing to happen. Somehow, I feel sure you’d approve.

Yours in literary arms,

EP