Writing Again

I haven't done this in a while. But I've decided to reclaim this blog and start writing again. Actually, I've been doing a lot of writing. Fiction, if you can believe it. I hardly can. I feel rather guilty about it. But I can't seem to convince myself anymore that I am a scholar, someone who studies literature but never creates it. Seems I have reached this saturation point with all of the stories I have read, taught, and written about. It's time to write my own. In fact, I'm starting to see the writing I am doing as coming right out of all of those 19th-century women's stories. I have been teaching The Awakening fairly regularly since the storm, and my female students get all worked up by it, as do I. It is one of those books that we can't seem to let go of, which is probably why we all teach it and read it over and over again. It has become one of those ubiquitous books. Many of my students say they have read it two or three times already in other classes. Invariably, though, a student (usually an older one, and always female) says that the book still resonates today. Women are still struggling with the issues it raises. When I first read it as an undergrad, I couldn't exaclty relate to Edna, but I had this sense of foreshadowing, like this is what being a mom could be like. But it all seemed so remote, like this was how women in 1899 suffered. Surely women today suffered, but probably in different ways. Turns out, I have realized, not so different. So when I read the book again a year or so ago, I read it with new eyes. Edna made sense. And lately, she has really made sense. Of course, if she had had therapy and maybe antidepressants, she probably wouldn't have had to commit suicide. She also could have been spared that fate by the chance to get an education, to develop her talents, etc. Yet, the underlying problem, the fact that having children changes your life and opportunities forever, if you are a woman, has not changed. And this is what I find myself exploring in my writing these days.