I wanted to write about Maya Angelou today before I read this beautiful post on my friend and colleague Aya de Leon’s blog. Aya says it much better and more intimately than I could, and I hope you’ll pop over there and read “Rest in Power, Maya Angelou.”
And I’ll post this Ben Harper song, “I’ll Rise,” from his album Welcome to the Cruel World. It uses Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” as inspiration for the lyrics, and it was going through my head all day yesterday.
If any of you listen to NPR as assiduously as I do you woke to the news that Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for literature. I felt so tickled when I heard this! I think that’s because Alice Munro is one of those frequently anthologized masters whom I’ve always admired, read around the margins, felt was necessary?even though I can’t say I’ve read a whole book of her stories (I will now, methinks). Her subject matter is domestic in the most quietly terrifying of ways, and she has a very distinctive voice.
On NPR I learned also that she’s only the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature and that she recently decided to stop writing (wow: how does one do that?). And, more interestingly, that she started writing short stories thinking that novels would follow, but they never did. Her win, I think, is good news for short-story writers everywhere, who need to be brave in the face of people who wonder when they’re going to grow up and start writing novels.
I thought this article from Slate, “I Once Thought I Didn’t Like Alice Munro,” was perfect. Give it a read.
Susie
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Also…
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 