"Ways of Being Silent" by Tillie Olsen for Harpers Magazine
(Link to complete article below)


Literary history and the present are dark with silences: the years-long silences of acknowledged greats; the ceasing to publish after one work appears; the hidden silences; the never coming to book form at all.

What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process in those times? What are creation’s needs for full functioning? Without intention of or pretension to literary scholarship, I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having let writing die over and over again in me.

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/05/ways-of-being-silent/

c jj 2021