International WOMEN'S DAY

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Slowly it comes out from them their beginning to their ending, slowly you can see it in them the nature and the mixtures in them, slowly everything comes out from each one in the kind of repeating each cre does in the different parts and kinds of living they have in them, slowly then the history of them conies ou, from them, slowly then any one who looks well at any one will have the history of the whole of that one Slowly the history of each one comes out of each one.

Gertrude Stein Lectures in America

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INTERVIEW WITH THE MUSE:

Remarkable Women Speak on Creativity and Power

Nina Winter

Moon Books, '207 pp.

Paper $5.95

Interview With the Muse is an inspirational book---one to savor slowly. Its visual presentation-photographs that captivate, balanced in a flexible, eye-soothing spaciousness-is as stimulating as its content of psychological and personal revelations and social and political ideas.

There is a two-page introduction to each of the seventeen women interviewed and a fourto ten-page narrative distilled from each woman's responses about their view of themselves, their successes and failures, their creativity and power, and their vision of how they connect with other women, humanity, and the world.

The seventeen women, their backgrounds, interests, work, and present location on this earth vary. Included are:

Glenda Jackson, actress, London

La Chunga (Flores Amaya), Fiamenco dancer, Madrid

Fay Weldon, novelist, playwright, Somerset, England

Leonor Fini, painter, Paris Magdalene Proskauer, breath therapist, San Francisco

Audre Lorde, poet, New York

Malvina Reynolds, songwriter, Berkeley Hephzibah Menuhin, concert pianist, social worker, London

Page 6/What She Wants/March, 1979

Anica Vesel Mander, feminist writer, San Francisco

Gwen Moffat, mountaineer, crime novelist, Wales

Mary Lou Williams, jazz pianist, New York Anne Kent Rush, writer, publisher, Berkeley Gerda Boyesen, Reichian analyst, London Lorraine Gill, painter, London

Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo, Duchess of Medina Sidonia, journalist, writer, Seville Lina Wertmulier, filmmaker, Rome Benoite Groult, feminist writer, Paris

In Nina Winter's excellent introduction, Beginning, she says, "The people interviewed...represent a trend among women to be self-actualizing, to be whole, to be more of who they were in the first place." Most of these women have lived long enough to chart externally inflicted changes and set-backs. As they review their lives we learn how they have taken risks, survived, grown personally and succeeded. They have lived through marriage(s), motherhood and independence while refining and developing their art, careers, and personal and political ideas and philosophies. Yet, most are still able to reach back in time to re-experience and re-examine their earliest childhood feelings. They are able to recapture and articulate their "child's" sense of who they were, what they felt, and how it expanded outward to the rest of the world. The tools of words, materials, music, movement, nature, people, human nature, noticed injustices-each to her own--served

anks for them to express to the outside world what was surring inside.

For some, the process of creativity has been steady and constant. For others, societal suppression of their creativity which they experienced for being women had to be overcome. They speak of the necessity of a strong inner core, an acute sense of how and what they feel, and the ability to assess themselves in order to move outward. They have learned to synthesize from themselves and what they receive from the world into a power —a force that can effect change. They strive for change-either by adding something of value to the world through art, music, dance, or by remaking their surroundings through healing, therapy, writing, ideas. With their power they remake the world to become harmonious with what they feel inside of themselves to be beautiful, natural, right, just.

Winter notes, "All spole of a similar devotion to their work, emphasizing the creative experience rather than the end product as the ultimate reward. No matter how publicly successful, they all experienced great struggle in their lives and careers and saw their hardships, failures and mistakes as equally important as their successes." In the same sense of openness and communication, Nina Winter shares with her readers her own process of creating (3 years of work) within her finished product, Interview With the Muse. This emphasis on the process of creativity, or on the doing, rather than on the success of an end product, is part of what makes this book inspirational to me. The fact that they do succeed makes them remarkable women.

-Gail Powers