The feminine voice in print embarrasses me. Therefore, I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm reading a book with a distinctly feminine voice. It is not an academic book. As a matter of fact, it verges on a self-help book. It is a book about recovering creativity. (Pause while I check the thermostat. If my nose and fingers aren't freezing, something's wrong.) All of these aspects of Julia Cameron's work make me distinctly uncomfortable--like someone important just saw me reading Sweet Valley High, or Thirteen is Too Young to Die. Despite these, my hangups, I am intrigued by this paragraph:
"Although we often speak of having a 'body of work,' we do not often look at the place that 'body' occupies relative to our work. We tend to think of creativity as an intellectual construct, something rather disembodied and vaguely spiritual. this notion is nonsense. creativity is not something ethereal. I is something very real, an energy that best serves us when it is grounded, and we ground our creativity through our bodies, most easily and most sensibly through walking."
Creativity is housed in a form, a shape, a body. Hmm. Enough thinking and enough feminine voice. I'm off to Brandy Sidecar No. 2 of the evening, and class reading No. 1 of the semester.
2 comments:
Is the female voice in print inherently inferior, or in the case of the Sweet Valley High and Girlfriend, Chic-Lit, (some) Self-Help books, etc., vacuous or silly? Or are we schooled to think that women cannot be serious contributors of ideas? Do female authors (or scholars or journalists or whomever) feel compelled to coat their words in less serious language? Or why do we take pleasure in the Sweet Valley Highs out there anyway? (I have never read a Sweet Valley High book, but I have read many, many like it in my time.)
Funny. Ironic. I've been hunting for books of the same topic for the last three weeks. Per your recommendation I'll check it out; though I share your embarrassment about the female voice -- mine included. (Incidentally, one quote that's stuck with me re: creativity is in Andy Crouch's book. He says that a theme park is a difficult place to get creative. In worlds where everything is already sculpted for you, there isn't anything to change for the better. We need some wildness, some unprocessed ingredients, in our environment in order to Create.)
Rosebud, I don't know if the embarrassment stems from social training, or if the female voice is inherently inferior (though I doubt the latter). I do know that I prefer male hymn-writing to female. Female-written hymns tend toward emotionalism and weaker quality of writing -- using simpler rhyme schemes, overused rhymes, common meter, as well as talking about how I feel about Jesus instead of objectively measuring the character of God. I didn't set out to hate Fanny Crosby, but that's the pattern I've seen.
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