The HerStories Project

Tomorrow is the third day of events for HerStories! Andrea King Collier gives a reading at 1:00pm from her award-winning memoir Still with Me: A Daughter’s Journey of Love and Loss (Michigan Notable Book 2004, American Society of Journalists and Authors honorable mention 2004) followed by workshops with emeritus MSU professor Marilyn Mayer Culpepper at 2:30pm and writer-publisher Virginia Law Burns at 3:45pm.

Tomorrow’s guests are sure to transport us with stories about women as did last week’s. Here’s a summary of March 13 including photos from the day:

* Ena Baker (Lansing Storytellers) introduced herself as someone whose name is forgotten for what she accomplished: Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive a trip over the Niagra Falls. Speaking as Annie, Ms. Baker took us along this adventurer’s cross-country travels as a dance teacher to the plunge that brought her short-lived fame.

* Charles Thornton passed out golden haloes to ready listeners for stories about children’s “right to be bad”. Woven throughout his childhood adventures, like the tricycle getaway, was Mr. Thornton’s clear and shining admiration for his mother Fanny May.

* Mary Catherine Harper (Defiance College) sparked our imaginations with poetic prompts linking the spiritual and sensual, as workshoppers examined objects with hands rather than eyes and took surprising turns across the page.

* Dawn Comer (Defiance College) guided an exploration into character development with photographs of women unknown to us by face though familiar to our experiences, and the writing led us to China, Vietnam, England, and emotional depths.

In anticipation of  tomorrow’s program, here are insightful words shared by Dawn Comer from Virigina Woolf’s “Professions for Women”, which inspired Ms. Comer’s workshop title “On Becoming a Fish”:

I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of–what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers–they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.