Movers and Shakers (Historical Inspiration for Contemporary Women)

This is perhaps only tangentially related to the book, but I thought I'd share it anyhow.  Last night I happened to catch the Ken Burns and Paul Barnes documentary "Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony" on my local PBS station, and I really enjoyed it.  The film details both women's biographies, but the focus is on the suffrage movement in which both Stanton and Anthony were central figures.  I was struck by the way the women's political passion and resolve were fueled by their (apparently) sometimes tense, but always respectful, relationship with each other.  These women seem to me to be wonderful examples of the kind of creativity, motivation, and change that women can affect in the world when we look to one another for strength, inspiration, and support.

If you get a chance to see this documentary, I highly recommend it.

KSL

Table of Contents

As promised, here's a listing of the writers and stories included in the book.  From the start, we wanted the anthology to function as a dialogue between contemporary women fiction writers and the women writers who have inspired and influenced them.  We wanted the dialogue to include voices diverse in style and background, and to encompass both established and emerging women writers.  As the list below demonstrates, we ended up with a body of contributors and stories that surpassed our hopes.  

And, again, the task we gave these writers was to write a piece that in some way responded to the work of a female forerunner in fiction.  The name of each writer's chosen forerunner appears in parentheses here.

KSL

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The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Women Writers on Forerunners in Fiction

Jodi Angel * "catch the grey dog" (Shirley Jackson)

Kim Barnes * excerpt from the novel A Country Called Home (Toni Morrison)

Mary Clearman Blew * "The Reining Pattern" (Katherine Anne Porter)

Kelly Cherry * "What I Don't Tell People" (Grace Paley)

Lucy Corin * "Some Machines" (Lydia Davis)

Claire Davis * "Electric" (Flannery O'Connor)

Amina Gautier * "What Matters Most" (Katharine Mansfield)

Ranjini George * excerpt from the novel-in-progress Blue Flowers (Jane Austen, George Eliot)

Elizabeth Graver * excerpt from the novel Unravelling (George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte)

Ann Harleman * "Salvage" (Alice Walker)

Pam Houston * "How to Talk to a Hunter" (Lorrie Moore)

Lindsay Hutton * "The Death of Cherry Gibbons" (Margot Singer)

Beena Kamlani * "Goat" (Jane Austen)

Jacqueline Kolosov * "Solstice in the Jardin du Luxembourg" (Virginia Woolf)

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum * "The Nursery" (Alice Munro)

Jill McCorkle * "Surrender" (Eudora Welty)

Kyoko Mori * "Starlines" (Edith Wharton)

Alix Ohlin * "The Stepmother's Story" (Daphne DuMaurier)

Marjorie Sandor * "Elegy for Miss Beagle" (Eudora Welty)

Margot Singer * "Lila's Story" (Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Carson, Carole Maso)

Julia Ridley Smith * "Tooth" (Flannery O'Connor)

Maura Stanton * "Ocean Blues" (Eudora Welty)

Elizabeth Tallent * "Bitter Greens" (Tatyana Tolstaya)

Katherine Taylor * "Crying and Smoking" (Joan Didion)

The Book Is Out!

After months of waiting anxiously by my mailbox, my editor's copies of The Sincerest Form of Flattery arrived last week--and, yes, the book was worth the wait!  

At the root of the anthology is a conversation Jacqueline Kolosov and I had in 2005.  Both writers and avid readers, we began comparing notes on our literary heroines. "Willa Cather," I said.  "Elizabeth Bishop and Alice Munro."  These three are my trinity, the women whose books I read and re-read, each time swooning again, falling a little deeper.  Jacqueline's literary luminaries: Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and--like me--Alice Munro.  

Although, of course, we could both also list a long roll of male writers whose work we admire, our feelings for these women and their work were something more than admiration.  We recognized these women as our literary mothers--women whose work and lives have shaped our own.  As we continued to discuss the the role of influence on our own work, the idea for this anthology was born.  We'd organize a book, we decided, in which contemporary women writers honor their debts to their literary heroines.  And so The Sincerest Form of Flattery was born.

The contributors to this book (a full list of contributors will be included in a future post) have entered this dialogue with their stories--fictions which engage and respond to the work of other women writers.  And we invite you to both check out the book (available here) and to join in the conversation yourselves now--in the space this blog offers.  

We want to know: Who are you reading? Which books have shaken you, defined you, shaped your writing?  Who are your literary mothers?