![A complex mind map connecting various names and creative works of nine people, mostly female writers.
The following themes are positioned throughout the page like nodes:
[See Me / Don’t See Me]
[Gardening]
[Queer Relationships]
[Utopia]
[Solitude]
[Fluidity]
[Rhythm]
Ursula K. (Kroeber) Le Guin 1929 - 2018
“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" 1988 in Women of Vision
2010: Began [Age 81] Blogging
No Time to Spare (pub. 2017, HMH)
A left-handed Commencement Address, 1983 Mills College
The Wave in The Mind (pub. 2004, Shambhala)
Epigraph: “As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it, and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.” (Woolf to Sackville-West, 1926).
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
1931 Professions For Women
“It is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories."
"The Angel in the house"
Orlando
The Waves
1929 Room of One’s Own
Met Sackville-West in 1922
Gail Godwin (b. 1937)
1977 (NYT) The Watcher at the Gates
12 Short Stories and Their Making (2005, Persea)
Appeared with Le Guin in same publication
“A story larger than my own” Working On An Ending, 2014
"Now I do a lot of lying around. I finally I have accepted that my supine dithering is fertile and far from a waste of time"
Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) <-> Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)
Nigel Nicolson (1917-2004)
Portrait Of A Marriage (1973)
Not to be confused with
Nigel Nicholson -> [Classics] [Reed College]
"The Bright Chimera" R. Rawdon Wilson
Olivia Laing (1977-)
Married Ian Patterson (1948) in 2018 [29 years apart!]
May Sarton (1912-1995)
(At Yaddo) "I hated all the shop talk. I'd rather see people who are carpenters, who are sailors or who work in healthy departments, because then I feel I am learning something about life."
“There is much less anguish and self-doubt. You are much more able to function freely, spontaneously, as yourself."
met Woolf in 1937](https://lucybellwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_5457-scaled.jpeg)
Tag: the watcher at the gate
On April 16th, 2018, a friend of mine began a 100 Day Project—a collection of self portraits in ink, framed as a meditation on gender.
The tiny illustrations began to pile up: two weeks, 100 days, a year.
They kept drawing.
At 862, they stopped sharing to Instagram, but said they would probably keep going in private. (We love to see it.)
And then, a couple days ago, a text:
I asked how they were feeling about the milestone.
And now I’m laughing thinking about Benoit Blanc and donuts, because this is how I feel at moments like this—screenshotting a perfectly normal text conversation because something about it makes me think “HANG ON”.
Not the art, but the behavior around the art.
A donut! One central piece, and if it reveals itself the fog would lift, the arc would resolve, the slinky become unkinked…
It feels right, at least in relation to my own practice, which is often very much predicated on rules and rituals. (30 Days of Portraits. 100 Demon Dialogues. 1000 words a day.)
These are all projects where the structure of the undertaking supersedes the content. Fixating on the satisfaction of completing another link in the chain allows my less-than-perfect artistic skill to slip past the Watcher at the Gate undetected. Success is defined as adherence to the practice, not excellence in the craft.
The joke, of course, is that they’re one and the same.