I didn't know there was more to learn about Sylvia Plath until I began reading Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Life of Sylvia Plath. In more than a thousand pages, biographer Heather Clark gives us a compelling picture of a gifted young woman's struggle to write during the 1950s and early 1960s.

 

Among much else, we see the way a poet and novelist creates art from life, erasing the line between fiction and non-fiction. Her poetry evolved from formal to fierce during her twenties, when she expressed brutal truths. Did she have the right to do it?

It's a question many writers grapple with. When I write in the first person, my desire to be kind or honest often conflicts.  I either censor myself or express criticism, but usually one feels too cowardly and the other too cruel before I find the right combination of words to express myself in a genuine way.

 

A month after the publication of Plath's novel, The Bell Jar, which had a satirical portrayal of her devoted mother, the author committed suicide at the age of thirty. Many stresses drove her over the edge, when she was estranged from her husband, Ted Hughes, and living alone with her small children. It was a few weeks before The Feminine Mystique was published. If she had lived a little longer, it might have saved her.

 

With warm wishes,
Laurie 

 

~~~~~~~

 

News About My Books 

 

July 21st: Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island, online talk about Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe to the museum's book group in conjunction with an O'Keeffe exhibition there.

 

August 1st: A wide-ranging interview about my writing life will be aired in a podcast by Main Street Moxie. I talk about the nerve it took to write Portrait of an Artist. 

 

August 5th: 5:30 to 7:30 pm: I'll be signing copies of Word for Word: A Writer's Life at the Sharon Summer Book Signing. The gala event held under tents will be behind the Sharon Historical Society next to the library on Upper Main Street in Sharon, Connecticut.

This month of May marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of Word for Word: A Writer's Life, so it's a moment to reflect on the transformative experience of writing a memoir.

As I worked on the book, I felt many emotions--from sadness to gratitude--while deepening my understanding of the past. Looking back made me glad about taking big risks and regretful about avoiding some of them. I felt sorry about not joining the Peace Corps but pleased about writing a biography of Georgia O'Keeffe.

 

Reliving the past made me sad about staying in difficult relationships too long, but enormously grateful about meeting my husband, Robert Kipniss, on another May day thirty years ago.

 

Publishing a revealing memoir last year was among my biggest gambles. I had to be ready to ignore any negative reactions to how I lived and how I wrote about it. The risk turned out to be well worth it thanks to your and others' gratifying reactions. Many thanks!

 

With warm wishes,
Laurie                                                 

Now that April is here and the ground has thawed, growth is beginning in the garden again. As always, I'm racing to keep up by raking brown leaves off borders and exposing green sprouts. 

 

This spring my essay, "Gardening as Play," about the time I asked myself whether to give up writing for gardening, is in the wonderful literary magazine, Reinventing Home. In it, I ask how to weigh the easy pleasure of gardening against the more elusive satisfaction of writing, and how to compare the private playfulness of growing plants with the public experience of being published.

 

Only after recoiling at the prospect of tending a famous neighbor's garden did I give up the idea of abandoning writing and gardening for pay. By then I had discovered that writing as work and gardening as play beautifully balanced each other. Each has made it possible to keep doing the other for almost four decades.

 

With warm wishes,
Laurie 

~~~

 

News About Four Tenths of an Acre: Reflections on a Gardening Life

 

My gardening memoir was first published by Random House in 2005. Every spring since then it has found new readers. It is "an elegantly written yet also edgily realistic account of small town, small garden life," according to Kirkus Reviews.

 

Signed first-edition hardcover editions are currently for sale at The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington, Connecticut, at Oblong Books in Millerton, New York, and at Johnnycake Books, in Salisbury, Connecticut.

 

 

News About Word for Word: A Writer's Life

 

I was recently spotted also signing copies of Word for Word at the Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington, Connecticut (above).

 

A foreign rights agency, DropCap, is representing Word for Word this month at the London Book Fair: Book Exhibition 2022.

 

Now that Word for Word has left my hands and is on its own, your stars and reviews on Amazon and Goodreads help keep it aloft. Thanks!

I'd like to announce that a chapter from my book, Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness, will be published in an anthology next month by Rutgers University Press. 

The anthology, Childfree Across the Disciplines, includes what its New Zealand editor, Professor Davinia Thornley, calls "foundational pieces from established experts," as well as activist manifestoes and original scholarly work. It "unequivocally takes a stance supporting the subversive potential of the childfree choice, allowing readers to understand childfreedom as a sense of continuing potential in who—or what—a person can become." 

My contribution, "Recognizing Our Womanhood, Redefining Femininity," notes among much else that "whatever the many ways we use our bodies, it is important for those of us who have never given birth to experience them as womanly, sensual, strong, energetic, and even eloquent."

I'm gratified that Thornley writes that "Laurie Lisle's book was a lifeline for me when I first picked it up in the early 2000s and has remained so over the past two decades. (My copy of her book bristles with no fewer than twenty sticky notes!). I have frequently found myself reaching for her work when I needed to orient myself over the often-rocky terrain of pronatalism."

With warm wishes,
Laurie 

~~~

 

News About Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness

 

Click here to enter a Goodreads Giveaway next week, from March 23-31, 2022, for a free signed, first edition, hardcover edition!

 

Without Child, which was originally published in 1996 by Ballantine Books, has been translated into Chinese and acquired by more than three hundred American libraries.

 

 This is an image of the original hardcover edition.

The book is also available as an e-book and as a paperback from booksellers.

 

~~~

 

 

It's a wintertime undertaking: getting rid of papers and other possessions while snow is on the ground and the garden is dormant. Lacking the instincts of a collector, I like to pare down and give away things to those who might use or enjoy them.

 

When it comes to papers, I've given research materials about Georgia O'Keeffe and Louise Nevelson to the Archives of American Art after writing their biographies. Now I'm thinking about donating some of my papers--early feminist materials and maybe my journals--to an archive interested in American women's lives.

 

 The most difficult things to give away are letters written to me. They were invaluable when writing my memoir, but now I want to return them to those who wrote them, but it is not always easy.

 

Writer friends like their letters back, but artists are more indifferent. When I told a long-ago boyfriend that I still had his letters, he turned ashen with shock. I guess I'll throw his away.

 

Giving away letters and throwing out papers is a little like eliminating extra words and paragraphs in a piece of writing. It also feels like a way to make space for new possibilities.

 

With warm wishes,
Laurie

 

News About Word for Word

 

   

I'm pleased to announce that Word for Word: A Writer's Life has been named a finalist for the 2021 Story Circle Network women's book award for memoir. Called the Sarton Award in recognition of memoirist, novelist, and poet May Sarton, the award is given to books that are "distinguished by the compelling ways they honor the lives of women." The winner will be announced in early April. Keep your fingers crossed.