VIDA has yet to embark on an official count of the number of women playwrights whose work is staged in American theatres, but every few months a new study on gender parity reveals that approximately 17% of plays produced in the United States are written by women.  Although this percentage has increased from roughly 7% in the 1970s, the numbers have not changed much in recent years.

Last week’s announcement of the Guthrie Theatre’s 2012-13 season, a line-up written and directed almost entirely by white men (Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre, is a leading influence in the American regional theatre movement and one of the largest and most well-funded regional theatres in the country) led to an outcry in the local and national press and social media. Leah Cooper, a member of the Minnesota Theatre Alliance, in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), calls the season “insulting and degrading” to women and people of color. MPR’s Marianne Combs notes that of the 12 productions slated for the Guthrie main stages next year not one was written by a woman, and refers to American playwright Marsha Norman’s count for Theatre Communications Group in 2009, which showed that “women buy 70% of theatre tickets sold.” We at VIDA wonder what would happen if women started to wield our buying power in the direction of 70% rather than toward the 17% margins to which we are sequestered by the theatre industry.

One of the most personal responses to the Guthrie season announcement comes from a member of the theater community who has worked in new play development for decades, the brilliant Polly Carl, former producing artistic director of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis and now the editor of the journal HowlRound and Director of the Center for the Theater Commons at Emerson College in Boston. Carl’s essay—reprinted here— brings home, with tenderness and passion, the void this lack of diversity creates on the American stage. She speaks of the need for each of us to see and experience our own stories in dramatic form, and how the absence of this diversity alienates audiences from the American theatre.

 Lisa Schlesinger and Ruth Margraff,

VIDA Playwriting Genre Action Committee

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

A BOY IN A MAN’S THEATER

I’ve always said that the American musical hasn’t meant much to me. I don’t really connect to most of those stories told through singing and dancing with some notable exceptions. Then I saw a workshop performance of the Lisa Kron/Jeanine Tesori musical Fun Home, adapted from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel. There I was on stage. I’ve seen a few other plays featuring gay women, and often those women have been beaten senseless (Stop Kiss) or found dead by hanging (The Children’s Hour). But here was a full-blown musical about a boyish girl, growing up with a closeted gay father, discovering her creative potential—and well, it happened. I understood the power of the musical. I memorized every song. I sang them over and over and over. I wept during every rehearsal—there was an actor on stage who looked like me (well, like me in a younger and cuter kind of way). And though it wasn’t my exact story, it was my story. And I know when this musical is finally produced, I will see it a hundred times and never be tired of it.

Clothes Make the Men

In 1987, a few days after having worn an ankle-length knit skirt, a long cream colored knit sweater, off-white hose, and black flats to a dressy dinner for Junior Parents Weekend, I went into my dorm room closet and tossed out all my girl clothes. I realized I had reached a pivotal moment. I was a year from graduating from college, and heading into adulthood. For someone of my gender, it meant I would have to embrace womanhood, and somehow after that night, I knew I wasn’t ready—that I’d never be ready.

In about 2002, my partner Lynette drove me blindfolded to a local tailor in Minneapolis for a birthday surprise and had three men’s shirts made to fit me. That moment transformed my entire universe and depended entirely on the fact that we both were working full-time and could afford such crazy excess. But between 1991 and 2002, I wandered uncomfortably through men’s clothing stores, a boy covered by too much fabric in a man’s world that I aspired to some day call my own. The problem was I was just too small. Nothing fit right. My neck was too narrow and my legs too short to ever fit in real men’s clothes. And the pain of it wasn’t just about size, but the humiliation of the search for the right outfit was more than I could bear. Once in awhile some kind gay sales clerk in Nordstrom would take pity on me and try to help me find a shirt in the smallest neck size, but often, I was ignored, refused service, or told I couldn’t try on clothes in the men’s dressing room. Women who sold men’s clothes were the worst, one refused to pull out a man’s shirt from a display case I wanted to try on saying simply, “that’s for a man.”

And I realize now, that in some ways, I’ve never grown up, because I had no choices to grow into that suited me. I don’t feel at all like a woman, and well, when someone calls me lady, I don’t know who they’re referring to. Many of my tomboy friends have taken the plunge and transitioned to manhood and I think they are brave and amazing, but I don’t feel like a man either. I’m a boy as best I can figure. I like to play video games, basketball, read graphic novels, ride my bike, and watch baseball. How can I be seen as an adult in the world if I’m not seen? I feel certain though, that I could have grown up if I simply had a gender available to grow into.

As we make our way into a very ugly and gendered political season, and as I look at the seasons of many of our regional theater stages, the most egregious being the one just announced by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, well, I am compelled to talk some truth about finding yourself “other” in a white man’s world—about the importance of insisting on being seen. I didn’t want to be the one to take this on, but as I’ve been searching for other voices to jump into this discussion, I realize I’m asking them to perhaps risk their own livelihoods down the line—I’m asking them to risk what I haven’t wanted to risk myself.

Seeing Yourself on Stage

In my career in the theater I have mostly decided not to think about this problem of my gender dysphoria. I’ve always survived my otherness through stories, through imagining I could be anyone and anything—it was Spiderman for a long time. I’ve been so lucky to work in the theater and submerge myself into the stories of others, constantly lost in the possibilities of what I could imagine versus staying stuck in the limitations of the present moment. In other words, I didn’t want to focus on some of the painful realities of my own story, but have preferred instead to dramaturg and produce many other very compelling stories.

I’ve been supportive of, but not super involved in, all the talk of women’s discrimination in the theater. I didn’t feel I was quite the right choice to be a spokeswoman for the cause, though the lack of women’s voices on our stages enrages me. I’ve kept quiet about that subject because in accentuating my otherness, I feared exacerbating it. And honestly, I didn’t want to ever be dismissed as someone with a chip on my shoulder, a victim of my own circumstances. I want to be taken seriously in this business, fit in to the degree that I can, and make good stories for the stage.

So, I’ve made my way as a boy in a man’s theater—in a theater dominated by men’s voices, predominantly white, both straight and gay. And I like men, I identify with them. They are my best friends and I like making theater with them. And had god forced me to choose, I’m certain I’d have compared wardrobe choices and decided to be a man.

But that said, I believe the transformative power of art rests in undiscovered stories, and if large not-for-profit theaters don’t lead the way in developing and producing those stories, then who will? And if we give the leaders of those theaters a pass because it might cost us something later, then we’re not being nearly imaginative enough about the possibilities for a new future for ourselves and our field.

If a young girl/boy playwright came to me for advice about how to make it in this business, I would likely suggest they run like the wind from this crazy thing we call the American theater. I’ve been wildly lucky to have found a place here, and I’ve been treated relatively well as a short, tattooed boy/girl in boy’s clothes, and I’m grateful for the artists I’ve met along the way whose imaginations and stories saved me from feeling unseen. I’ll never forget supporting Madeleine George’s workshop of The Zero Hour several years ago, and thank god Bonnie Metzger had the courage to produce both Sylvan Oswald’s Pony and Sarah Gubbins’s The Kid Thing, and rock on Basil Kreimendahl as you develop Orange Julius at the O’Neill this summer. And a quick tip of the hat to those who blazed some trail through this gender isolation—thank you Peggy Shaw, Paula Vogel, Susan Miller, Holly Hughes and others I’m sure I’ve missed.

But I decided to pass, to pass as an arts administrator who could make myself relevant by fundraising, supervising, marketing—in clothes that could be either overlooked or admired as creatively quirky. But you, my tomboy playwrights, are attempting to tell stories that could subvert the reality of our donors and subscribers—and from what I hear from many of our artistic leaders, these are stories that will never resonate with our current audiences. If women playwrights, those who are representing the stories of half of the population, and as Lauren Gunderson points out in her recent article, buying 70 percent of the seats, can’t find a place on our stages, it doesn’t bode well for those playwrights unable to comfortably embrace a single gender.

Narcissism or Art

Joe Dowling, in defending the almost entirely white male season at the Guthrie, said in a public television program that complaints about his manly white season are “self-serving.” And I couldn’t agree with him more. For those of us passing in a man’s world, we’re exhausted from serving the man. I am anyway. Everyday I serve the worldviews of others. I am forced to file my taxes as a single person although Lynette and I have been together almost fourteen years. And damn if I don’t have to serve the two-gendered party system on every form that requires me to choose a gender—that’s every form, by the way. So I’m putting myself out there in the most self-serving way. Please call me narcissistic. I want more diversity on our stages and more short, tattooed folks running our theaters because I’m selfish enough to want many more moments like I had at that Fun Home workshop in December.

Art rises from the unknown and the undiscovered. Sometimes different is better if only because it makes us stop and consider languages and cultures and ideas not our own. It forces us to engage the act of translation in the encounter with unfamiliar stories. I don’t think we shell out big money to see plays only to be comforted by stories we already know—I’ve met very few audiences who would articulate this as their reason for attending theater. If it’s self-serving to crave surprise, if it’s selfish to seek the new and the undiscovered, then I embrace my self-serving nature for the sake of the future relevance of the theater.

2. To imagine a time of silence

or few words

a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks

traced by my hand

or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue            this slab of limestone

or reinforced concrete

…

I’d like to open my paean to Adrienne Rich with a quote from Rich’s sister-in-arms (words and limbs) Audre Lorde. “Your silence won’t protect you.” It’s a quote that haunts me in the days of not-writing, daze of mourning. A quote that speaks both to and from a certain dialogic understanding of what it is to be a woman and a writer, of what it is to be alive. An unsentimental sentiment that calls out the tepid, the cautiously quiet. Through implication, Lorde describes the call and response that is the work of art. It seems right to begin here for three reasons—1. Adrienne Rich’s work stands as testament to a profoundly engaged refusal to sit quietly; 2. Rich engaged in unremitting dialogues with the words, works, and issues of her predecessors and contemporaries; and 3. Rich’s own insistence on being read and understood in a complex of contexts. She suggests and enacts (yes, still) the kinds of conversations and permutations of community that may indeed save our varied asses.

What troubles me are the silences in my own memory. I don’t remember when I first read Rich’s poetry or essays. No light-bulb moments here. It may have been in a high school or college creative writing class. I know that at some point I turned to her for her reading of Elizabeth Bishop. At some point, I turned to her essays in Blood, Bread and Poetry, and What Is Found There. At some point there was a close reading of poems in The Fact of a Doorframe, The Dream of a Common Language, and Diving Into the Wreck. The careful pencil marks give me away. But memory fails to narrate contexts or circumstances.

What is found instead of memory? As I look back over her work, I’m surprised. Surprised because it feels as if I’m reading her for the first time AND as if I’m returning to something familiar, something more integral and basic than memory. I re-discover in Rich challenges to the idea that “[t]he song is higher than the struggle, and the artist must choose between politics…and art…” I find a remarkable public grappling with the efficacy of language to defend or diffuse—“knowledge of the oppressor/this is the oppressor’s language/ yet I need it to talk to you”. Aware of the brutality and love that language can enact and bear witness to, and of our utter dependency on the forms of life that language engenders, Rich’s work holds a space for the kinds of difficult conversations, the difficult maps that mark each existence.

After that night, I found myself rereading What Is Found There and looking for more.  When I read Arts of the Possible, she had me thinking about poetry in deep and inclusive manner that I had never been able to articulate.  What could reading lists look like? When I met C.S. Giscombe a couple of years later, I gleefully shouted that I had read about him and a diverse cross-section of what were then new writers to me in Arts of the Possible.  In these essays, she showed me what intersectionality looked like, how it could behave in literary thought.  She also represented by example a commitment to thinking larger than herself, very much like other women writers using the essay to expand progressive thought, like Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker.

I have always been shaken by “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” and lately have found myself writing out lines from The Dream of a Common Language, but I can always say that Rich wrote with an eye to the future for those she called kin and the larger world which must reconcile that we need each other to fully grow and become better people.  This is the work that makes writers like Rich indispensable, and almost immortal.  I will carry her words like shield and bread, that which protects, but also sustains.

She predicted that most of us would have to revise our perception of power in order to see the world clearly.  She implored us to stop regarding our injuries with disappointment and bless them out of respect for our endurance.

She practiced associative thinking with such dexterity that she made us take for granted how hard it is to employ metaphor without simplifying a subject.  How she maintained a sense of romance while writing a subjective, political poetry remains a mystery.

Many of her poems and essays were provocations.  She goaded us with her convictions.  She asserted that in order to learn how to live, everyone must be compelled to action at some point in their lives.

When she changed her mind about a key aesthetic or political idea and documented how she had come to think differently, she demonstrated that taking note of discontinuity is way of choosing power.

Rich’s work promised that when we truly become ourselves, we will be ourselves alone.  Because everyone shares this fate, it is not unnatural to pursue connections with others.  Relationships alter us like visions, and moments of intimacy can make us change course.  This is why we need each other to get where we are going.

 Like so many others, reading her poem “Diving into the Wreck” radically changed my relationship to poetry. It was in a college course on the literature of 1960s, and my former-hippy professor walked us line by line through the poem. As I read of the speaker’s descent into the ocean and transformation, I felt my body vibrate in resonance. “The sea is not a question of power.” The next day, I checked out all of her books of poetry from the library. Her words gave me the courage to enter the realm of poetry in a way that no other poet I had encountered previously had.

In “The Spirit of Place,” she asks twice: with whom do you believe your lot is cast? As a young poet seeking to make sense of my own position as a mixed race queer person, I appreciated her willingness to interrogate herself and others, particularly her willingness struggle with race. Taking her cue, I sought to answer that question again and again: with whom do you believe your lot is cast? I came to understand the power structures of society and saw how I was complicit in, as well as harmed by, those structures. I also learned that to take a stand is to take sides.

Rich made space to call myself poet, to call myself feminist, to write what pulsed deepest in me, what was most valuable and vulnerable. She made woman steelstrong and opened the book of myths to record our own, resounding names.

And she closed the space off too. She could see far and with complexity, but she had her own blinders. She is quoted in Janice Raymond’s 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire, which is filled with hateful, transphobic sentiments about transgender women. Rich never repudiated her inclusion in this book, never said she reconsidered her stance. It pains me to think she would not see all women – no matter form their bodies took – as part of the sisterhood. It angers me to think she would refuse to cast her lot with them – and with us, allies of transwomen.

I once wrote a poem, in dialogue with Rich’s “the Images,” My poem complicates Rich’s image of “two women sleeping together” by turning that lesbian couple into a transgender woman and a cisgender woman sleeping together. The lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom (which Rich edited years ago with her partner Michelle Cliff), published it, paired with “The Images.” I often wondered if Rich read it, what she thought of it, and whether her views on transgender women had changed over the past thirty years. I hoped, one day, I’d be able to have a conversation with her about it.

Now, that conversation is no longer possible. In “North American Time” she acknowledged,

“We move but our words stand

become responsible


and this is verbal privilege”

 She has gone, leaving a trove of words behind that will continue to be responsible for inspiring and emboldening so many – women, poets, feminists. But she has also left behind words that must be critically questioned. This is the complexity of poetry, the complexity of living a politically charged life. In the end, I remain grateful that her work gave me to the courage enter into this complex and difficult space. My (and others’) mourning of Rich is complicated, and I’d like to think she would want nothing less. 

I continued to read Rich’s poems all though high school and college, although she was not assigned in any of my “serious” literature or poetry classes. I brought all her books with me to Iowa City and read them often, although I don’t remember anyone talking seriously about Rich at the Writer’s Workshop. By then I had learned to appreciate and admire Elizabeth Bishop and so many other powerful women writers. It was not that I no longer loved Rich, but I noticed that many women like me rarely spoke of our formative passion for Plath, Olds and Rich. It seemed better, somehow, to keep these loves private.

After graduate school I met Arielle Greenberg who became a sister to me, creatively and emotionally. Together we decided to edit a book of essays by younger women poets about a living woman poet who influenced or inspired them. Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections came out of our desire “to document and celebrate the clamor and community of contemporary women’s poetry and, in particular, the relationships between two generations.” We allowed our contributors to choose their own subjects. The writer who wrote about Rich took a sort of airy, lighthearted approach to the topic and ultimately we decided not to include that essay. I felt, somehow, that a lighthearted approach to such a serious poet felt inappropriate. Rich, in my mind, was the mother of us all and had to be approached with greater reverence. In retrospect, I do regret that decision; it seems wrong for the book not to include an essay about Rich even if our introduction quoted from On Lies, Secrets and Silence and she is mentioned or alluded to many times in other essays.

Every time I published a book I sent it to Adrienne Rich. I never heard back from her, but it was important to me to know that she might read my work, that I was writing into a world in which she was alive. I continue to read and re-read Rich, particularly her prose. The poems and prose lead me to tears and laughter—it’s almost too much for me to read of her feelings about her three sons and her ambition and her claustrophobia in Of Woman Born. When I read Rich, now, twenty -five years later, I have a deeply intimate, uncomfortable feeling of recognition. I’m unnerved (and nerved) to see lines like “Marriage is lonelier than solitude” or “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?” underlined in my high school copy of The Dream of a Common Language. It’s so close to me, so precious to me, so bright I almost can’t stand to look at her for very long. The recognition reminds me of the moments I see my husband’s likeness in my sons (both from his genes and fathering). Adrienne Rich never knew me but she is like a sperm donor or egg donor to so many of my poems and to so much of my experience, and I have turned to her prose the way one turns to a mother, for guidance, comfort, power, and commiseration.

I have not written poems about the birth of my third child, Judah. The birth was painful and intense but—because I was supported and felt safe and powerful—it was also as uncomplicated as a birth can be. For the past two years I’ve been working on a poetic memoir about my mother and my poetic influences. Rich is mentioned, but considering how important she is to me, gets very little attention. I think I have not needed to write about Rich or about my third son’s birth because my experience of both are painful, transformative, and life-changing but also safe, normal, real, non-neurotic, serious, and, on some level, simple.

It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes

into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known

from the first… It was simple to touch you

against the hacked background, the grain of what we

had been, the choices, years… It was even simple

to take each other’s lives in our hands, as bodies.

What was not simple: to wake from drowning

from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth

into this common, acute particularity

these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching—

from “Origins and History of Consciousness” The Dream of the Common Language

I remember carrying my armfuls of her books – poetry and prose – to the small table where she was signing books. I’d waited for over an hour in line and felt embarrassed that I’d dragged so many books there with me. So selfish, I remembered, with so many people also waiting. I was a graduate student in the fiction program at Sarah Lawrence College but already secretly knew I was also a poet. I remember, the photographer within me squinting, staring at her hands and how her eyes, candidly brown, gazed at me. “What are you writing?” she asked quietly. She seemed tired. I don’t know how she even knew I was a writer, a dreamer. “Stories, I think. Maybe poems. Maybe,” I said, mixing all the words up. The more honest answer would have been to say, Nothing, which is what I felt after thanking her, nearly crying in joy, and gathering up her pages, the spines of her books and her syllables, into my shy arms and leaving the small hallway changed. Uncertain what I would do with this clarity, brief and nearly inaudible, I carried like a flare back to my life.

I did attend other events later where Adrienne read and spoke about her poetry and her unapologetic political voice. But it was that first encounter with her that mattered most to me. To witness the body in which such a force had changed the perceptions and possibilities of language and power for so many of us.  It made me ask that question, what are you writing, whenever I perched on the abyss with my pencil. Or camera. It appears each moment now, fused to my blood. Thank you so much, Adrienne.

In “Telephone Ringing In The Labryinth”, there is a sequence towards the end of the collection in section V.  It’s the first part of “Draft #2006” and Rich writes, “Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions.” And when I read this long poem and consider “the border of poetry” (which is where I mostly live), I remember Adrienne’s eyes and her hands and how, in a glimpse, she saw far ahead of me what I am only glimpsing now. She seemed, more than so many contemporary poets, to sustain the immediacy of our time and how it must unavoidably align with our tomorrow.

I pulled two shelves’ worth of books down when I heard the announcement of Adrienne’s passing. I blasted her voice, thick as paint, in my artists’ studio. She will never be a ghost. She asked questions we have yet to hear in our most empty places and the rage we do not use to live. The answer is the least of such a gesture. A world, a body, a courage, an inimitable and political witness surged before and within us, stripped from fear and privilege and silence, in a humanness that is nearly endangered in our time.

The same section of that poem interrogates humanity as only Adrienne did,

“(What were you there for? Why did you walk out? What/

would have made you stay? Why wouldn’t you listen?)

-Couldn’t you show us what you meant, can’t we get it right/

this time? Can’t you put it another way? –

I cannot write an elegy for Adrienne Rich in the tradition that elegies are usually conceived in the mausoleums of poetry.  When I think of my identity I’m listening now in a way I can never compromise. Rich closes the section of that poem, “(You were looking for openings where they’d been walled up –)”.

What I want to say about her work – her presence belongs to syllables and bones, too broad and human and fearless to shroud.

She was one of many women poets:  June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Jan Clausen, Sharon Olds, Charlotte Carter, Marilyn Hacker, Cynthia Kraman, Maureen Owen, Thulani Davis, Cyn Zarco, and Jessica Hagedorn who were older or closer or my age who made New York City a wonderful place to grow as a woman poet.  Readings series were set up. Books published. Anthologies created out of late night talk and desire. The city was cheap and poor and wide open.  The city needed to hear our voices.  And we needed the city to push us forward.

 Rich supported our work on Ordinary Women: An Anthology of Poetry by New York City Women (OW, 1978), offering advice, money for the printing, reading the poems and introducing the book.  She started her introduction with these words:  “It’s the women who cope.” And she ends it with the following after quoting from a range of poems from the anthology:  “As more and more women of every tongue and color affirm those connections, hope also grows for the strength and wisdom to move, embrace difference as identity as key  break loose and transform cities.” Later she chastised us for not including lesbians, of course there were lesbians published in the anthology, but that was not our focus. That was hers.  Sara Miles, Sandra Maria Esteves, Fay Chiang and I remain proud creating a model multi-cultural, multi-racial women’s poetry anthology.  And we remain grateful for her encouragement and her example.

While I’ve read several of Adrienne’s poetry volumes, her critical prose and the still wise, Of Woman Born, my  favorite Rich works are the poems in the great  sequence from The Dream of a Common Language. She asks the questions that I think all writers ask.

From VII:
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?

And I can think of no better way to talk about mature women loving each other and loving life than

From XVIII
Rain on the West Side Highway
red light at Riverside:
the more I love the more I think
two people together is a miracle.
You’re telling the story of your life
for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words.
The story of our lives becomes our lives.

Adrienne Rich had a brilliant literary career; she demanded change and acted on her on politics.  She was angry and smart and funny and sexy and generous and desperately misunderstood by the Establishment of which she (ironically) was part.  The commentary in the New York Times tries so hard to deny her rage.  Others only see that rage.  But all careful readers know that a raging heart is a loving one and Adrienne Rich had a great and loving heart.  When she passed I kept thinking of the phrase “the Mother of us all” and somehow that fits.

Looking back, I see that I returned to Rich again and again in part to better understand my mother, to translate the (to me bewildering) intensity of her personal and political commitments into a vocabulary I could feel ‘on the pulse.’ And my mother, in turn, must have discovered in Rich’s poems a “common language” that illuminated the urgent, often painful collective struggles of their time. When Rich died this past week, my first thought was of this shared inheritance, how her poems were necessary reading for two generations of women.

Yet my most important lessons from reading Rich were lessons about poetry as praxis and craft. Lessons about the visionary possibility and expansive social responsibility of a poem. Lessons about silence, metaphor as “loaded guns.” Lessons about poetry as a dialogical space, a site of ongoing inquiry. “No place for the little lyric,” she wrote in a recent poem about the Iraq War.

For many years I stopped reading her work entirely, as many poets of my era have done. Too ardent, too strident, not playful or arch, not sufficiently experimental. Yet she remains our towering example, even in (and perhaps because of) her unfashionable urgency. She is our essential poet of Shelleyan fire and Wollstonecraftian intelligence.

When my mother died, I reread her yellowed copies of Rich’s books, returning to the last lines of “Turning the Wheel,” with its promise of a conversation that persists across distance and loss:

too alone

and too filled with you            with whom I talked for hours

driving up from the desert            though you were far away

as I talk to you all day                        whatever day

This week I read these lines to a class of undergraduates, many of whom had never heard of Rich. Today, an exceptionally talented young woman from the class wrote me an email. The p.s. reads: “I have become an Adrienne Rich junkie—thank you for that.”

Please donate anything you can to help her get through this intensely difficult time. Your donation will go towards rehabilitation and medical costs.

Her GiveForward page is here. [http://www.giveforward.com/donationsfordianediprima]

For more questions or information, please contact Amber Tamblyn at: amtam.amber@gmail.com