A Matter of Form
December 29, 2019

          Virginia Woolf suggests in A Room of One‛s Own that there are (or will be) ‟feminine forms‟ of literature – and that whatever those forms may be, they will likely be shorter, more condensed units than "masculine forms" of literature.  Writing in the late 1920s, Woolf‛s basic notion was that the typical woman's experience – or at least that of her imagined future cohorts of female writers – would be characterized by fewer stretches of uninterrupted time to write than those through which male writers ply their craft. Children and any number of exigencies of a woman‛s life, she posits in the book, call for new forms of literature by which women can bring forth their gifts – forms shaped by women‛s lived experiences.

     Woolf may or may not have been right – although I think she was really on to something.  But in any case, I, for one, am certainly interested in exploring forms that work for me, as a woman who has the audacity to think I have something meaningful to say in the world, but whose current circumstances (as mother, lawyer, homesteader, and community advocate) admit of only tiny nuggets of time in which to try to say anything.

     Here goes.