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A New, Bigger Room of Our Own

© Kay Day

Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring,
I set out in the pursuit of truth.
- Virginia Woolf*

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that women, in the long scheme of history, are fairly new major players in the field of literature. The statement may seem preposterous, what with a woman having won the National Book Award for Fiction this past year. But I'm talking history here, the regression of years to a time when we women basically filled the role of offspring producers and food preparers.

An editor once assigned me the task of cataloging women writers to the year 800 AD. That is how I met Ono no Komachi, and how I came to read The Sorrows of Yamba. The project was a lonely one full of tedium alternating with excitement. There weren't that many, but as I discovered Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Aphra Behn, Phillis Wheatley, and others, I realized how very brave and daring these women were. Consider the march of male writers. Virginia Woolf points to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti,and Swinburne as but a few of the "great poetical names of the last one hundred years or so." My task would have been far more time-consuming had I been asked to catalog male writers. I wish Ms. Woolf were here now, because I would say to her, "All that is changed."

A primary force propelling that change is the Net. I have said it before, and now I put it to all female writers as a sort of gauntlet. Here you will find opportunity, unprecedented equality, a level playing field. As proof of this, I offer two zines that devote their February issues to women writers, Perihelion and Conspire. Now should those among you not familiar with these titles think they are just a couple of those homespun little publications that folks like to throw up in cyberspace, take a closer look. Both of these magazines rest on laurels and talent equivalent to any print media publication I can name.

The issues cited offer an incredible array of poetry, theory, and links guaranteed to stimulate a mind of any gender.

Perihelion is in fact edited by a well-known and talented poet, Jennifer Ley, who also happens to be a 1998 Pushcart nominee. Ms. Ley has been published in many places, among them, Octavio, Tintern Abbey, Poetry Magazine.com, and Lynx. Her work is anthologized on the Net at Poetry Café, and appears in several print anthologies. Barbara Fletcher, contributing editor and published poet, assists Ley. Before I go any further, I must be honest. Some of my own poetry is in this issue, so perhaps I'm not as objective as some might be. I promise not to talk about my own work. Fact is, I felt a little timid as I read the words of my fellow sister writers. I was humbled.

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