The CWCW Blog

I picked up my new car today. Quite a milestone, but I couldn’t have been more depressed. Even though I’ve been driving for 52 years, I never bought a car. The day after I got my license, I hit a telephone pole, badly damaging my parents’ Pontiac Tempest and leaving us car-less for several weeks while it was being [...]

The midwife is a classic literary heroine. She is brave. She is compassionate. She stands like a warrior on a battlefield: life on one side; death on the other, the defender of women and newborns.  As a nurse-midwife and author, I read every book I could find about midwives. Since our popularity has grown, there are so many stories that [...]

IT WASN’T AN item on a bucket list, though that’s what I had told people. A bucket list was easier to explain than the countless classes I had registered for, attempted, and subsequently quit after six months or six weeks. Then there were the classes I took “on and off” for years, such as tango. I can’t remember how I got into tango, [...]

WHEN I WAS sixteen years old, I was eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant with a close friend when he asked a humorous but pointed question: “So what you’re choosing to do with your life is essentially this: You are going to move your arms back and forth repeatedly in order to make a strip of metal wiggle, which will then cause air molecules to [...]

My mom gave me plenty of great advice over the course of her lifetime. Don’t “should” on yourself.  (I should do this! I shouldn’t have done that.) Don’t date men you wouldn’t consider marrying.  It’s a waste of your time and theirs. Don’t expect people to be more than they’re capable of being. But my favorite, and one of the hardest ideas to [...]

I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about past friendships as I write this blog. My friendships I made in master ballet teacher’s Finis Jhung’s brilliant ballet classes at the Alvin Ailey Extension led me to reconsider my role as a friend.  Mr. Jhung’s classes led me to meditate on seeing myself and how others see me. It was through his classes and the [...]

A FEW YEARS ago, (five, to be exact), I took a job as the executive director of the Feminist Press. Prior to that, I had written six books about feminism (for houses like FSG, Seal, and Akashic), dozens of features for magazines, made two activist documentaries, and was a regular on the Women’s and Gender Studies lecture circuit. I felt [...]

MEMORY DEVOURED THE SUMMER OF THE ONE-YEAR anniversary of Vinni’s disappearance. I thought about renting the house—the perfect punishment—in Spring Haven, but I knew that wasn’t the answer. John D’Orfini kept his eye on the calendar. In the weeks leading up to the first anniversary, he called and left a voice mail: “Just checking in. [...]

I HAD THE quintessential New York City experience on Easter Sunday. I spent several hours at the Museum of Modern Art, transfixed by the exhibit Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil. I had no idea who Tarsila was, but a recent piece about her that aired on CBS Sunday Morning, really spoke to me. The exhibit features more than 100 [...]

HARD TO BELIEVE, but Conversations With Creative Women is coming up on interview #300! And what a roster of women we’ve had the pleasure to meet and get to know: educators, actors, authors, athletes, filmmakers, musicians, painters/sculptors, museum curators, writers, fashion designers, business women, scientists, explorers, social [...]