https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessamyn_West_(writer)
*Author Jessamyn West is who – she died in 1984 – after a long career as a writer of both short stories and novels. She is one of several writers working mostly before ‘my time’ whose books I remember seeing on my mother’s shelf as a child, but who I have never read. A film made from of one of her works, Friendly Persuasion, I tried to watch once, but everyone was ‘thee-ing’ and ‘thou-ing’ (West was a Quaker) and my younger self couldn’t take it, especially from one of my favorite classic movie hunks, Gary Cooper. She was also a second cousin of Tricky Dick Nixon. All that said, she was a Doctor of Letters, a survivor of TB, and given the year of her birth, 1902, a trailblazer in her own way for women in academia, and for women authors.
A few of her good words, for writers:
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. She must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if she is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.
Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.
One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love.
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
*There’s another groovy Jessamyn West, no relation, who is both a librarian and activist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessamyn_West_(librarian) Is there magic in names? Could be!
