A Story Larger than My Own: Women Writers Look Back on Their Lives and Careers

by Janet Burroway (Editor)

In 1955, Maxine Kumin submitted a poem to the Saturday Evening Post. “ Lines on a Half-Painted House ” made it into the magazine―but not before Kumin was asked to produce, via her husband’s employer, verification that the poem was her original work.

Kumin, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was part of a groundbreaking generation of women writers who came of age during the midcentury feminist movement. By challenging the status quo and ultimately finding success for themselves, they paved the way for future generations of writers. In A Story Larger than My Own , Janet Burroway brings together Kumin, Julia Alvarez, Jane Smiley, Erica Jong, and fifteen other accomplished women of this generation to reflect on their writing lives.

The essays and poems featured in this collection illustrate that even writers who achieve critical and commercial success experience a familiar pattern of highs and lows over the course of their careers. Along with success comes the pressure to sustain it, as well as a constant search for subject matter, all too frequent crises of confidence, the challenges of a changing publishing scene, and the difficulty of combining writing with the ordinary stuff of life―family, marriage, jobs. The contributors, all now over the age of sixty, also confront the effects of aging, with its paradoxical duality of new limitations and newfound freedom.

Taken together, these stories offer advice from experience to writers at all stages of their careers and serve as a collective memoir of a truly remarkable generation of women.

Genres: Writing, Anthologies, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 2013

About the author

Janet Burroway is the author of seven novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk (runner up for the national Book award), Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone; a volume of poetry, Material Goods; a collection of essays, Embalming Mom; and two children's books, The Truck on the Track and The Giant Jam Sandwich. Her most recent plays, Medea With Child, Sweepstakes, Division of Property, and Parts of Speech, have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, and various regional theatres. Her Writing Fiction is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and a multi-genre textbook, Imaginative Writing, appeared in 2002. A B.A. from Barnard College and M.A. from Cambridge University, England, she was Yale School of Drama RCA-NBC Fellow 1960-61, and is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Reviews

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

On studying personal essays of women, I found most of the stories engaging. It's not a fast book to read, at least not for me, since there's a lot of introspection, but it does let the reader get to know the authors better in this collection.

[Lyn Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always interesting to read about the lives of writers, and even more so, when you realise they are just like us, facing the same hurdles and challenges, especially as we age. Great read, which I did only in chapters here and there so I could fully absorb and understand each writer.

[Alison Hedlund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nineteen distinguished poets and prose writers (with some of these being cross-over writers) discuss their lives, careers and experiences as writers, amid making their way through the white male-dominated arenas of publishing and academia. All look back from their sixth decade. I found their stories and advice compelling, and both dismaying and inspiring. Now these women face yet another prejudice--agism.

Writers include Janet Burroway, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Madeleine Blais, Rosellen Brown, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Toi Derricotte, Gail Godwin, Patricia Henley, Erica Jong, Marilyn Krysl, Maxine Kumin, Honor Moore, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan, Edith Pearlman, Hilda Raz, Jane Smiley, Laura Tohe, and Hilma Wolitzer.

"I have always felt so lucky to be a poet--once I accepted this as my identity--because no matter how grim an experience may be, I can make something beautiful out of it. Particularly when a subject is taboo, breaking the taboo is a powerful and pleasurable challenge. "Write what you are afraid to write," I always tell my students. "Kill the censor." I like to quote Shastakovich's remark... "Art destroys silence." --Alicia Ostriker

I give this book five stars, as I could hardly put it down, and definitely will be re-reading it.

[Bonnye Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me a new lease on life. Every author had something to share that helped me with my own doubts and fears as I face retirement. I would suggest this book as mandatory reading for every woman looking at a life style change. All of these brave women have smoothed the way for those of us following them into that other world.

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jane Smiley and Laura Tohe had stories that resonated within me. Cofer links her ability to tell tales as thinking back through her mothers - and ahead to her daughters. Smiley attributes the music of the 60's as the force that shaped her life philosophies. Tohe touched me with her driving need to get beyond her small community upbringing, and her ability to go back there and recognize the stories that are important.

Thank you. ladies, for again making our lot in life better understood, and thus more acceptable to our ever critical inner voices.

[miteypen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and important book about being a woman writer "of a certain age." It can actually be read on many levels: for its insights about writing, both as a career and as an avocation; as a look back into what it meant to break into the writing world as a woman; the stages you go through when you have a long career; and what it means to be in the end stages of that career.

There are 19 essays and an introduction by the editor, Janet Borroway, making it easy to pick up and read here and there, and I would even recommend that it be read that way so each essay can be savored on its own.

I especially enjoyed the poems in Linda Pastan's essay--and poetry is not my literature of choice, so that's saying something. But all the essays were good and although some were poignant, they all gave me hope that I might age as well as these authors have.

[Sally Ember · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting, inspiring, brief but pithy essays (some from public talks) by women writers old enough to know what a writing life and career are like (the youngest is in her 60s). Funny, poignant, personal anecdotes, herstories and information relevant to all writers, not just women, today.

Highly recommend if you are a writer, now, or want to be, or have ever been.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable mix of perspectives; since I was not familiar with many of the writers, the bonus was eight books added to my 'to read' list

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicious.