Woman At Work

Hello, dear readers. I am back from a long and lovely stay in Seattle, where I spoke to so many different groups that I nearly lost my voice. I didn’t take my laptop with me, and instead spent my free time resting and reading. I enjoyed Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s debut novel, Wench, which is set in a resort that catered to Southern gentlemen and their slave mistresses in 1850s Ohio. It’s beautifully written and it kept me up at night. I also loved Toni Morrison’s A Mercy; I don’t know why it took me so long to get to this one, but I’m glad I did. It’s a fascinating little book, challenging at times, and it has the curious effect of making you want to immediately start reading it again the minute you reach the end. Since getting back, I’ve been working around the clock on my new novel and so I haven’t had any time at all to read blogs or to write on mine. My silence here is, I hope, the good kind of silence, the silence of work, designed to prevent the more dangerous kind of silence(s) that Tillie Olsen once wrote about.