The posts that follow will be my reactions and responses to creative persons and their expressions in a variety of forms or genres. Creativity, to my mind, is utmost aspiration; important to every aspect of life, what is often called “thinking outside the box” is simply creativity. Like the slogan on a t-shirt I often wear: Art is the only thing left worth doing. My heroes aren’t necessarily stars or speechmakers (though they can be) or like the superheroes of the Marvel Universe. They are creatives who must create to exist.

September 2, 2023

I am a reader. Fully retired since the end of 2022, I am now in two book clubs, have participated in an online course on Pride and Prejudice, took a class reading Joyce’s Ulysses, and another class on Emily Dickinson. It was as if I had a full Spring Semester as the English major I was in college more than forty years ago. The best part about it – I don’t have to write papers! 

This week I watched the PBS Masterpiece three-part series of Little Women. This book started me on my journey as an avid reader when I was just around nine or ten years old. Of course, I wanted to be a writer like Jo, imagining myself in a garret scribbling. Even though Little Women wasn’t required reading in my elementary school, it was my choice for a book report I remember reading in front of the classroom. I was more like Beth and somewhat shy then. I was also chubby and wore glasses. But, I was proud of that book report and the A+ grade. 

My first reading of Little Women, was a “Golden Book” likely published in the fifties that I’d received as a birthday present when I was around five or six. I’d been given two of those Golden Books – the other was Black Beauty, which apparently didn’t make as much of an impression on me. I’ve never read it, nor have I ever seen the film. I loved the passionate, wildly imaginative Jo, the extrovert impatient romance, hungry for travel, and quick-tempered. Somehow, I did incorporate those qualities I admired into my own identity, once I got through adolescence. 

Now, whenever I read a book by a new author, I dig into that author’s life, other writings, and works. Of course, there was no internet in the 1960’s when I was reading Little Women. I realized after watching the TV version that I actually knew very little about Louisa May Alcott. I had heard that she wrote relatively lurid, Gothic style stories. Somehow, I never came across those stories in my reading pursuits. So, to the internet. 

The Masterpiece site on PBS.org features “7 Surprising Facts” about Alcott. She did, in fact, base much of Little Women on her family life, but didn’t want to write a book for girls. She wrote it in less than three months and only after her publisher pressured her. I also learned from PBS that, not surprisingly, she was an abolitionist, an early feminist, and the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts. Her family harbored a fugitive slave for a month. Like Walt Whitman, she worked as a nurse during the Civil War. She was at the same hospital as Whitman, in fact. However, she served for only a month at the Seminary Hospital in Washington D.C. because she contracted typhoid fever. A digital version of Hospital Sketches, which she published in 1863, is available from the University of Pennsylvania. The opening of this fictionalized version of her experience gives a hint of her personality, surely surprising for a woman of her time.

“I WANT something to do.”
This remark being addressed to the world in general, no one in particular felt it their duty to reply; so I repeated it to the smaller world about me, received the following suggestions, and settled the matter by answering my own inquiry, as people are apt to do when very much in earnest.
“Write a book,” quoth the author of my being.
“Don’t know enough, sir. First live, then write.”
“Try teaching again,” suggested my mother.
“No thank you, ma’am, ten years of that is enough.”
“Take a husband like my Darby, and fulfill your mission,” said sister Joan, home on a visit.
“Can’t afford expensive luxuries, Mrs. Coobiddy.”
“Turn actress, and immortalize your name,” said sister Vashti, striking an attitude.
“I won’t.”
“Go nurse the soldiers,” said my young brother, Tom, panting for “the tented field.”
“I will!”

“First live, then write.” Good advice! However, her earliest writing wasn’t based on any real-life events, at least not directly. Flower Fables, originally written in 1842 for Emerson’s daughter Ellen, would be her first published work in 1849. By 1860, “Love and Self-Love” was published in the Atlantic. Set in Scotland, it is the story of sixteen-year-old Effie, an orphan, who has been abandoned and left impoverished by her wealthy grandfather. The first page could be the opening of a novel by Charles Dickens, but I am sure that Alcott’s heroines are nothing like the relatively flat, weak-willed victims in Dickens. Love and Self-Love will be added to my reading list, which gets longer every day. Biblio.com has a good brief summary of Louisa May Alcott and links to her works. Gutenberg.org, one of my favorite sites for classic and ancient texts, has many more digital versions of Alcott’s works. I cannot wait to dig in!