Over the last few months, I reopened a writing project I started over ten years ago. It’s a five-volume series called “The Womun Who Forgot Who She Was”. With new fresh eyes on the project, I knew what I had to do with it…write it in WEnglish! WEnglish is writing in a more gender-balanced English language. My full explanation of WEnglish can be found here, however, I wanted to explain where it all started. I looked back in my journals, and found these entries:

March 16, 2008 My work with English began with one word: Helium. A character in one of my (yet unpublished) novels was rewriting our Periodic Table and I was trying to understand why. As I reviewed a standard periodic table, ‘He’, our symbol for Helium, jumped out at me. My mind immediately went to work on ‘he’ words. “Helium, Heat, Health, Heathen, Hymn, A-men, I wrote in my journal that day–English words that emphasize masculine qualities. I didn’t know it, but I was on my way to creating “WEnglish” because I needed a way to make English work for ‘that which is not male’ as well for men. I wanted to see if I could write well, even better with non-gender words (except as I was writing about a specific gender).
March 22, 2008 I discovered what I now call ‘word twists’ by twisting our word, ‘A-men’ into other words. NEMA, ENAM, NAME, MEAN, NEAM, EMAN, and MAEN. Holy crap, I thought. Look at these words we use that spell ‘man’ words*.
March 26, 2008 My older sister, Cheryl, died after a two-year battle with ALS.
April 7, 2008 I had a dream that Cheryl and I were in a library, looking at an ancient book written in invisible ink. I asked tha* (not a typo) librarian for whatever liquid would reveal its mysterious words. Her facial expression and secretive, reluctant way of giving it to me, told me that something BIG was occurring. I received a small brown glass bottle, sealed with an eyedropper lid and filled with a black substance that I took back to where Cheryl was waiting by tha strange book. My journal tells me that “We were suddenly surrounded as if others were intent on taking tha paper from us.” Ever since that day I felt like my stories were being hounded-or perhaps protected-to prevent their being published. Now I think I know why and it has everything to do with ‘WEnglish’.
April 14, 2008 I was still doing book research and went to tha University of Chicago Library, their ‘Special Collections’ room to read from an old 16th century book by John Napier, titled “A Plaine Discovery of St. John” published in 1593. Napier had come up in my research for that same (yet unpublished) story.

How had all these events synchronized so incredibly together? Was there a purpose? Was my deceased sister orchestrating events from higher realms?

Over 11 years later I realize that ‘WEnglish’ had come to life back then. It has become a perfect way for me to allow dignity and honor to come to ‘wimin**’, as well as to respect men through my speaking and writing.  I hope you will join me on this journey with WEnglish as well as with my new book. More to come!

The greatest tragedy is to lose what you never knew you had until you lost it.

Vivian!

*THE is our most common English word. WEnglish acknowledges that we most often pronounce it ‘Tha’ and therefore uses both spellings based on pronunciation, just like we do with ‘a’ and ‘an’.

**A WEnglish spelling based on how we pronounce ‘women’

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