Silences Read Online Free Page A

career (Fishkin 1994).]
    Bonnie Zimmerman, Rosario Ferré, Linda Wagner-Martin, Margaret Randall, Hortense Spillers, and many others also cite Olsen’sideas about silencing and silence as having been central totheir ability to frame empowering critical paradigms, whether those paradigms focus on exclusion or erasure based on sexual preference, gender, race, class, political views, or all of the above (Zimmerman 1988; Ferré 1988; Wagner-Martin 1988; Olsen 1988; Spillers 1988). 12 As Linda Wagner-Martin commented, “it would be hard to find a feministcritic [of our generation] who was not influenced in keys ways by Silences .”
    In addition, Olsen’s exploration of the theme of silence has helped shape critical writing and research agendas in fields outside of literature. Legal theorist Robin West, for example, draws heavily on Silences in her examination of the voices that were left out of legal history and the law (West 1988); and the bookwas also the background for Susan Griffin’s interpretation of pornography as “a desire to silence eros” in her book Pornography and Silence (Griffin 1981, vii, 1).
    In addition to stimulating critical writing, Silences has helped inspire new creative writing—poetry, drama and fiction. It encouraged the Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes to draw, from her own culture, luminous, moving shortstories (Viramontes 1985; 1988), and helped move Asian American playwright Genny Lim to put on stage the drama that inhered in the culture she knew well (Lim 1988). 13 Gloria Naylor has said that “ Silences helped me keep my sanity many a day” (Naylor to Olsen, 29 July 1988). Sandra Cisneros refers to Silences as ‘“the Bible.’ I constantly return to it” (Cisneros 1988). Margaret Atwood has observedthat what Olsen has to say in Silences “is of primary importance to those who want to understand how art is generated or subverted and to those trying to create it themselves” (Atwood 1982). And Mary Stewart, referring to a collection of her poetry, wrote that “it was Silences that gave me this poem, which in turn gave me all the poems that have followed . . .” (Stewart to Olsen, 28 September1985). Silences was similarly inspiring for Alice Walker: “As much as I learned from Tell Me a Riddle, I learned even more from Tillie’s landmark classic and original essay ‘Silences: When Writers Don’t Write,’ which I read while living in Cambridge in the early ’70s, raising a small daughter alone and struggling to write myself” (Walker, n.d.). And Walker has also noted, “There are a few writerswho manage in their work and in the sharing of their understanding to actually help us to live, to work, to create,day by day. Tillie Olsen is one of those writers for me” (Walker 1982). Silences has helped inspire other creative talents, including those of Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula Le Guin, Alix Kates Shulman, Caryl Churchill, Margaret Randall, Margaret Laurence, Joyce Johnson, and Anne Sexton(Kingston 1982; Le Guin 1987; Shulman 1979; Churchill 1987, p. 77; Olsen 1988; Magnuson 1988; Middlebrook 1991).
    Silences also played an empowering role for older writers. As Susan Gubar has observed, “no one else has recorded [as] faithfully [as Tillie Olsen has] the tribulations and triumphs of speech after long silence” (Gubar 1988). Teaching the importance of being aware of but not defeatedby what Olsen called “foreground silences” (when many years of silence precede the first creative effort), Olsen’s book also inspired A Wider Giving: Women Writing after Long Silence (1988), an “anthology of poetry, prose and autobiographical narrative by contemporary women writers who made their major commitment to creative writing after the age of forty-five,” 14 and other first books of fictionby older women such as The Calling, by Mary Gray Hughes (Marcus 1988).
    Olsen’s book prompted many writers to explore in both fiction and nonfiction themes that had been largely taboo