Episode 96: fierce // Thursday, July 9

Shelter in Place PodcastEpisode 96: FierceSaturday, July 11

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about finding daily sanity in a world that feels increasingly insane. Coming to you from Oakland, California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Kara: Karyn, who's wonderful, came to me and asked if I'd be interested in contributing to this collection. And I thought, yeah, because women, we’re just not part of the major conversations about history. And it gets really exhausting. And so I liked the idea that we could go back and give a little piece of history that most people were going to have no idea about. 

Laura: This week I’ve been sharing my conversations with the writers of FIERCE: Essays by and About Dauntless Women. On today’s Story Saturday, you’ll finally get to hear from all thirteen of them. It’s an extra long episode, but trust me when I say that it’s worth sticking around until the end. 

FIERCE is unlike any other book I’ve encountered, and I’m not the only one who has noticed who special it is. FIERCE won the Book Life Prize and the Nautilus Book Award. Publisher’s Weekly will be featuring the book in a story this month. 

What makes FIERCE unique is that the women who wrote these essays all have personal connections to the historical women they wrote about. When Karyn Kloumann of Nauset Press dreamed up the idea for this book, she realized that this connection would be crucial in helping both the writers and readers understand why these stories matter today. It has also created a community of women who admire, celebrate, and encourage each other. 

What you’re about to hear is each of the thirteen women talking about their own essay--but also about another essay in the collection that inspired them. 

A quick trigger warning that while there’s nothing graphic in this episode, some of these women have been through some hard stuff. There are mentions of self-harm, genocide, and rape. But there’s a lot of good stuff, too.

Here’s Chicava Honeychild to kick us off.

Chicava: Distilling the essence of each essay into a single word: 

ALL: Defiant.

Meera: My name is Meera Nair and I'm a writer and an activist, and I'm the author of a book of short stories called Video, published by Pantheon. And I have also written two children's books, which were published in India. I wrote an essay called “Nangeli: Her Defiant Breasts.” 

Chicava: Karyn, I must say, picked the perfect opener for this whole saga. When it starts with “her defiant breasts,” you know, I'm like, what's going on with that? {laughs} 

Meera: It's about a woman India in Kerala, which is the state that my family, my ancestors, my grandparents are from, who is sort of a revolutionary, even though she's in such a low position in the society of the time. They had what was called a breast tax, in that the lower caste of women in this state were not allowed to cover their breasts. And if they did, a tax would be imposed on them by royal decree. 

Chicava: . . . she is a perpetually sexualized object, her nudity a condition that has been thrust upon her to advance the fantasy of continuous control, to make of her what the upper caste wants her to be—a woman disrobed upon their command. She is an object . . .  

Meera: So she revolted against this tax and basically cut her breasts off in an act of utter defiance, using her own body as a revolutionary instrument. And that so shocked society at that time that it transformed people's minds and they removed the tax. 

Chicava: That she would take her life, not knowing if it was going to make any difference . . . she just did it because it was what she had to do. If she couldn't be respected, it just wasn't going to be a life worth living. She chose not to live at tormented life. 

I don't want to say that that is a choice I like to see people making, but in this instance, it's very, very profound. It is such a tremendous sacrifice. She did it knowing that on some level it was a sacrifice for all women of her caste, and all womankind.

Meera so seamlessly breaks down the caste system and correlates it to racism in America, so that it comes home for anybody, and even deepens their understanding and empathy. Her ability to find all these common threads and really bring it home . . . I find it very moving.

ALL: Anti-war

Betsy: My name is Betsy Andrews. I am a Jewish lesbian poet who lives in Brooklyn with her partner and her gay son and our old dog and old cat, and I work as a journalist primarily in food and drink. And I have two books out. One's called New Jersey, which is an antiwar meditation on the New Jersey turnpike. One is called The Bottom, which is about our problematic relationship with the ocean. And those books are both book-length poems. 

The essay I wrote is called “Baba Yaga Unleashed: The Night Witches.”

Kara: I  had never heard of this story, which is about a group of really highly skilled Russian women bombers during World War II. They were in these planes that were almost junk, like they're just made out of what was around. They were mockingly called “the sewing machines.” “Oh, here comes the sewing machines,” because they were really loud and clunky. But they were really good at what they did.

Betsy: The night witches were a battalion of all-female Soviet night bombers during World War II. They would cut their engines when they flew over their targets, and they would drop their bombs.

The witch hunts in the medieval era were the worst in Germany; they killed over 90,000 people, primarily women. And the Germans, being seeped in mythology around witches, called these women the night witches. The sound of the air rushing through  the gap in the wings of these plywood biplanes sounded to them like a witch's broom rushing through the air.

Kara: All of the essays have a particular word that came to us while we were writing, or that felt important to us. And what was interesting to me about this essay is that the word that Betsy uses is “antiwar.” 

This is about bombing. And yet the theme should be antiwar. 

There's something fascinating about women being given a job that is historically completely male—but there's also something upsetting about that equality leading them to have to create destruction. It's complicated. There are reasons that wars happen; fascism potentially taking over the world—it was a big one. Whether or not that means it's okay to bomb Germans is a whole other thing. 

One of the women that flew the planes said this:

“When we saw the captured Germans, in spite of the fact that they were the enemy and had committed such atrocities in our country, we couldn't look at them without a throbbing of the heart. They were miserable figures in shabby clothes, absolutely starving, thin and weak, and we experienced a kind of pity even for the enemy.”  

Which says to me everything that's wrong and confusing and painful about war. I love that she captured that, at the same time giving these highly skilled bombers their due. They were fighting for Mother Russia and they did a really great job.

It's an uncomfortable legacy. 

Betsy: Being a poet, I would like to think that if I had lived in Soviet Russia during the war, that I might have been waiting, resisting through my writing, that I might have been more like a favorite poet of mine Anna Akhmatova, who suffered in lines at the prison to visit her son who was imprisoned by Stalin.

But I think actually I would probably have been more like the night witches. I probably would have enacted the violence of the state for the sake of my country, but also in order to survive.

Women are complex. We have peace in us. We have violence in us. We have resistance in us. We have capitulation in us. And in order to honor those women that I was writing about, I needed to humanize them. And in order to humanize them, I needed to see all their sides and their complexity. And I needed to explore that within myself. 

ALL: Origins

Taté: It's middle of winter, cold outside. I just wanted out of the house, really. One night after homework, they said we're going to go to a sweat lodge, which wasn't anything I had experienced.

And  it was fantastic. The leader, a medicine man, if you will, started telling us about Ptesanwin. White Buffalo Calf Woman has sort of an element of Jesus Christ to Lakota people. You kind of know about her, sort of this above you person, but it's never really something you can touch. And he really broke down her story in a way that I could connect with. In fact, the thing he pushed in that story was the part that's kind of always glossed over: Ptesanwin kills a man for having impure thoughts about her. 

And being a young person at the time, identifying as a girl, but also having just come out and not really having words to describe something like bisexual, and not even knowing at all what something like Two Spirit would be—that was world-changing . . . to hear of a Native woman, a Lakota woman, not taking something that happened to me many times. That was something I could take with me.

Edissa: I continue to be deeply, deeply moved by “Origins” by Tate Walker. I think she’s {they’re} the only Indigenous woman {person} in the project, and she {they}talks about the deep loss of Indigenous feminist roots in our society. It started with people being displaced, and a narrative about the land and who belongs.

Taté: {Lakota introduction} Wopila tanka, Mitakuyepi. Cantewasteya iyuha napeciyuzapi ksto. Ciscila Tatewin emachiyapi. Wakpa Waste Oyanke ematanhan.

Hello, my friends and relatives. I greet you all with a good heart. My name is Taté, and that means wind in Lakota. I'm an enrolled citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, South Dakota. My pronouns are they/them/mother. I am Mniconjou Lakota. I am a Two Spirit storyteller and an Indigenous rights activist.

As a teenager dealing with depression related to abuse, not being accepted for being queer, this experience with Ptesanwin in that sweat lodge, that story and how it was told, was something that I needed. That was really the point in my life where I can say I saw myself in the future. It was freeing, to realize that my people understood me. My ancestors understood me and gave me these avenues and outlets to work through the pain I was feeling. So that was my first time with Ptesanwin, and she's just been with me ever since. 

Edissa: Her {Their} narrative about feminism is the closest to one I find, palatable. I've always looked at feminism as a white woman's movement that doesn't include me and see me. And when she {they} talks about women as leaders of their family and of their community, and being in harmony with the earth, and growing our own food, and listening to each other, and moving in the world with humility . . . I just feel her {their} truth. And how she {they} talks about what needs to happen for us to be whole again. We owe a lot to the Indigenous community overall.

Taté: I live in Arizona. The Navajo Nation, that straddles Arizona and New Mexico, has seen an infection rate nearly double that of the state of New York. Indian Country is being hit hard by this virus, but few non-Natives know or care to know that their Indigenous neighbors are in this plight. 

Edissa: This passage speaks to the present moment, but also the very foundation of this book. She {They} writes:

“This is my first foray into the casual racism experience, which is to say the American experience—the American way. I've been inundated ever since: post-racial, Midwest nice, Southern hospitality, not seeing color, playing devil's advocate, bootstrap theory, preaching tolerance, and a host of other, similar ideas are euphemisms used to dilute, dismiss, and deny the existence of racism, especially among white liberals. Unlike hood-wearing KKK members, white liberals who engage in racist behavior often go unchallenged despite actively upholding and oppressive status quo. The thought that the United States was somehow a post-racial society after Barack Obama was elected president is almost laughable when you consider how little progress was made on the Black Lives Matter front during his reign, and now with the Donald Trump presidency running full-steam ahead. White liberals like to showcase their diversity street cred without receipts. Like first graders running around with their version of “Sioux” words in their mouths to show cross-cultural understanding and solidarity, white liberals act like the United States is instill committing acts of genocide against Indigenous peoples in the name of economic prosperity and citizen safety.”

She's {They’re} basically forecasting the moment that we are living through as a nation right here. She {They} wrote about this, I imagine, in 2017, and she's {they’re} very insightful about what it means to live in a society where there's violent racism as a systemic structure. How is that even possible? And yet here we are.

As a nation we can't correct any of that until we learn to accept guidance and leadership and make amends for all the things that we've done to Indigenous communities, including taking their lands, their source of livelihood, decimating the buffalo, imprisoning them, murdering their women. Taté Walker speaks to the genocide of the Indigenous people in this land, and gives every reason for why we all need to take responsibility for that and do our parts to heal our nation.

ALL: Revelry

Kara: I'm Kara Lee Corthron. I am a playwright, a novelist and a TV writer. I am African American and black lives matter.

The essay I wrote was called—

Nancy: “Reveling and Rebelling: A Look at the Life of Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith.” 

I'd never heard of Ada “Bricktop” Smith; she struck me as being very determined, but also very contradictory and complex. I was fascinated with her as a woman owning a nightclub in Paris in the twenties, but also as a black woman.

Kara: She had all of these connections to major players in 20th century culture, particularly literature, but she's barely mentioned in books about the Lost Generation.

Nancy: “I've wondered: Could her life be a play? A musical? It's possible, but it would be a challenge. She embraced the joyous, delicious, and often decadent aspects of life, but she was always pragmatic and always worked hard, determined to be the best. Therefore, she didn't fall into the traps that far too many of her contemporaries did. She loved her champagne, as I've said, but she wasn't an alcoholic. Though she suffered from depression, she never struggled with any kind of drug addiction, and she never had any run-ins with the law. Our cultural lust for drama  (and let’s be real: trauma) often neglects the stories of people who live fascinating lives and who ultimately lived WELL. Bricktop lived for a long time, dying at the age of eighty-nine, and she lived very well.” 

Kara: I had to do some digging and it was exciting for me to be a student of Bricktop. 

Nancy: She navigated racism and prejudice by being pragmatic and resilient. When she was going through a period of depression, her doctor told her that she needed to  get out her anger, and the way that manifests for her is she walked the streets of Paris at night, just screaming and cursing. 

There've been moments I've wanted to just imagine myself doing that--you know, just breaking down. And just to imagine another time in place where a Black woman could do that and not be brutalized. I think it's important for us to acknowledge and realize that time and place. 

I have always been interested in Paris in the twenties. And Zabel Yessayen was there during that time. It was the city that she escaped to. So there was a commonality and kinship between our pieces, but also that we were brought into the same imaginative space of the book.

I felt like we're all sort of writing letters to these women, but also almost like we're writing letters to each other.

ALL: Provocateur

Leah: I am Leah Mueller and I have had numerous kinds of jobs and identities over the course of my life: a writer, of course, as well as a parent of two children, astrologer, and tarot card reader.

Debra: The title of the essay is Firebrand: The Radical Life and Times of Annie Besant.

Leah: Annie Besant has always fascinated me due to her dual interest in politics and metaphysics, which pretty much sums up my own obsessions. I wanted to find out what her own belief system was and how that dovetailed with what she did in the external world. She grew up in London, but she's of Indian descent. And so her parents actually grew up in Bangalore.  

Debra: (she had a) very religious upbringing, nothing that would really indicate that she would become this cultural leader and radical. She ended up conventionally marrying having two children, but she divorced within six years, and sort of flew out into the world, and became this great spokesperson and an early champion of birth control. 

And, you know, this was a relatively dangerous pursuit at the time, but she pretty steadfastly wrote essays, founded a newspaper, and championed women's rights to information about birth control. She was able to somehow break out of the cultural confinement of women in the late 19th, early 20th century and become this radical, like out of nowhere.

From there she became interested in workplace conditions, unions, and social justice movements, in this pretty phenomenal way for her time period. 

Leah: The tremendous passion that she had for social justice, as well as understanding life on a very deep level . . . she kind of reconciled that duality of her inner world and her outer world. 

Debra: She became interested in Hinduism as well as theosophy, and went to India to study and then ended up moving there. And even while she was there, she was writing and working on political causes. She had such a moral compass. She saw things so clearly. She saw injustice very, very clearly. 

It's just a line that I picked and it said 

“Often, politics and spirituality seem to emanate from different worlds, but Annie fused them together, seemingly with little effort.” 

It's really true that politics and spirituality don't often go together, and today when someone like Trump decides to wield a Bible or walk into a church, we sense that it's really just for political gain. But Annie really could walk in both worlds. She didn't get consumed by either one. And I guess that's just indicative of what a deep thinker she was.

Leah: You know, Annie Besant was an imperfect person and that was definitely part of the essay. Like all of us. Powerful woman, but she had her flaws and her shortcomings and her blind spots. But we should not at all take away from the impact of what she managed to accomplish in the world— 

Debra: —this really fearless life, fascinating and fearless life. You know, if you're a woman in this society or any society, I guess, you're always looking for role models of women who weren't bound and held back by, cultural convention, societal conventions.

What was it that gave her the courage to take these huge leaps? And also make herself a leader and very, very visible with the writing that she did. That required tremendous courage, and a lot of people just don't have the courage to quite step out there like that. So I will add her to my women role models. 

ALL: Blind

Debra: I'm Debra Brehmer. I'm a writer and an art historian, and I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I run a contemporary art gallery called Portrait Society Gallery, and I also write about art for the New York-based art publication Hyperallergic.

Claudia: I loved  “Victorine and Laure in Manet’s Olympia: Seeing and Not Seeing a Famous Painting.” The essay moves so seamlessly and rather quietly. As soon as I read the first paragraph, I was Googling paintings, and after finishing it, I just stared at Olympia for several minutes. 

Debra: Victorine Morantz  is Manet's favorite model, and the model in his probably most famous painting “Olympia,” and she has haunted me my whole life. That painting was the one painting where I thought there was a woman with power, prowess, and agency in modern painting. Before that, there just wasn't a role model like that. And so she has always stuck with me. 

Claudia: And it really made me think not only about how education informs what we see, (but) how we see the world around us, and the way we absorb history. I think I'm still learning this. 

Debra: There was a book that was written by Eunice Lipton, it's called Alias Olympia, and it was written in 1992. That book really dug into who this model was and what her life was like. And originally, it was written into most texts that after Manet stopped using her as a model, she became a drunk and was stumbling around the streets of Paris and actually died  in a gutter. Like they found her in a gutter. And Eunice Lipton, through many years of research, discovered that, well, no, she was a painter. She was an artist. She ended up moving out of Paris and living with another woman and she died in her eighties. So I was just inspired by that book. It corrected history and it also wove a personal narrative into the historic account.

Claudia: Deborah writes about how precious few female artists were in the Pantheon, making her attachment to Olympia one of necessity. The way she leaves her personal history, her childhood, her relationship to her brother. It all kind of unfolds organically.

Debra: When I was writing about Victorine, I was halfway through the essay, and the person that I am now is different than the person 20 years ago. I really actually wasn't as interested in Manet's painting of a prostitute, because it's a man's conception of a woman, and it's a white woman. 

And then I realized that in the painting there's a very prominent Black woman. It's the maid who's delivering flowers to the prostitute. All those years of thinking about and looking at this painting, I never contemplated the other figure in the painting. And so then I took a postcard and I folded it in half. And I realized that the black maid literally took up 50% of the painting. And so that was this awakening moment: not only about how art history has been taught, but my personal history. Even though I think of myself as very liberal and progressive, there was a blind spot there.

Claudia: She says, 

“But what of Laure, who has no last name? We will most likely never find out much about her life. Yet, nothing can eradicate the fact that she plays a full and important role in this famous painting. Even centuries of blindness and disregard cannot fully erase her.” 

I've never met Deborah, but the vulnerability that she is willing to give us a glimpse of... 

Debra: I didn't know where it was ending up,

Claudia: You know, it's interesting to me, the ending of my essay kind of echos some of what she was saying. 

“One could align the works they love like a family photo album, tracing the contours of personal history and personality along the electrical wires that solder Van Gogh’s stars to Agnes Martin’s devotional lines and grids and to the voluptuous peeled orange at the feet of Victorine Meurent in Manet's Girl with a Parrot.”

That one sentence really connects the personal with history. 

Debra: It really just opened in the writing. 

Claudia: I really connect with that. 

ALL: Audacious

Edissa: My name is  Edissa Nicolas-Huntsman, I'm a 49 year old Black Latina woman, and my essay is called “Audacious Warrior: Ernestine L. Rose.” 

Ernestine Rose was in Galicia in Europe as a child, where Jews were constantly experiencing pogroms and othering and all kinds of oppressions. Ernestine all her life lived on the margins of everything—and mostly by choice, because she didn't want to give up her conviction to live justly, to not oppress others and to advocate for justice for everyone.

Taté: It's sort of a biography of Ernestine, but then it's also interspersed with these italicized autobiographical experiences, and so this is one of those sections.

“The past I carry in my subcutaneous layers out of sight, waiting to erupt. When I finally understand the extent of my brokenness, I begin to repair the elements of myself that are tattered. My flesh marked and ravaged by experience, has little recourse. My mind is as thin as threadbare sheets, allowing unwanted images, memory, and voices to taunt me from within.”

The way Edissa writes that is just so heartbreaking, but also powerful in its simplicity. I mentioned my time in the group home, and one of the moments of that first Inipi  ceremony that has stayed with me. And I tried to be as honest about it as possible, because I think it's easy to get into this mindset of like, “Oh yeah, I can do this and it's great, and I'm powerful and I'm fierce and yada yada.” But the humbling reality was that I only stayed in that ceremony because it felt like punishment that I was giving to myself with razor blades at the time. 

I mean, you're being boiled. It's freezing outside, but you're under this tent of Stygian darkness. And it's this barrage of sage and sweetgrass and cedar just permeating, and body odor, loud drumming and singing in Lakota. And the pain of it is not being able to breathe, especially because I didn't know what to expect. No one told me what was going to happen. I remember trying to tell myself, you know, “Don’t ask to get out, don’t ask to get out.”

But then also realizing too that the burning that was happening, was a different feeling of the punishment I was giving myself, with the cutting. And when it was later described as a sacrifice, it completely changed my life idea of what I was doing to myself.

I think when we talk about mental illness, especially with Indigenous communities and other marginalized communities, we're really looking at it from a colonized white perspective. 

Cutting yourself is bad—I'm not saying it's good—and I should say that I do not cut myself. I haven't since high school. But those ceremonies really brought a full circle element to my mental health. It switched that illness into health.

Edissa: I see myself in Ernestine Rose 

Taté: My ancestors understood me and gave me these avenues and outlets to work through the pain I was feeling...

Edissa: The way that Ernestine Rose moved in the world, she really showed me the path. 

Taté: Years later, therapists, both in Western medicine and also my own medicine people and folks of my tribe, helped me see that there was healing and power in Lakota ceremony, Sundance Inipi.

Edissa: I use Ernestine Rose as a guide to where I want to go.

Taté: Whether it's physical or even the mental scars that we hold and carry, that ceremony was a moment to let those go. I hope for people who suffer mental illness or abuse in their life, (that they) are able to come to a moment like that. 

Edissa: I just embraced those elements of myself that have always been there. 

Taté: I think having those experiences make us who we are today.  

Edissa: I understand that I have this incredible power to advocate for not just myself, but for change.

ALL: Persistent

Caitlin: My name is Caitlin Grace McDonnell. I am a writer and a poet, and I teach writing at CUNY and I'm a single mom of an 11 year old and live in Brooklyn. I wrote “Up from the Rubbish Heap: The Persistence of Julie D’Aubigny.”

Leah: She was such an interesting person, quite passionate, and really quite amazing. I was actually planning on writing that essay myself, but then it was determined that it would be a better idea for Caitlin to write it because her great grandmother was considered to be quite the accomplished swordswoman back in her day.

Caitlin: My great-grandmother was the first female fencer in the vaudeville. She lived alone in a hotel in New York City at a time when that was really unusual. And Julie D’Aubigny was also a fencer and a really fiercely independent, spirited person.

Leah: And she of course did a really great job. It was a really riveting essay. I mean, it's a great story. 

Caitlin: So it wound up being kind of a braided essay about myself, my great grandmother, and Julie D’Aubigny.

Leah: Very little is actually known about Julie. The information about her is somewhat spotty, but the information that does exist, of course, is absolutely riveting. Whatever you might think of her as a person, the crazy things that she did, they were amazing, and especially for a woman of her time. I'm going to go read an excerpt from it. 

“One young woman, whose name is unknown, saw her perform and became quite taken with her. Julie claimed she was tired of men and returned to the girl's affections. The girl's parents disapproved and sent her away to a convent, but unsurprisingly, Julie followed. It seems they were intoxicated by their love for each other against all odds. They became outrageous outlaws together—they stole the body of a deceased nun, put the corpse in the girl's bed as a stand-in, and then burned the convent to the ground. They were sentenced to death by fire to fit the punishment to their crimes, but escaped the law for three months before the girl's parents took her home and left Julia on her own.

I like to imagine those three months, because when a girl loves a girl, she's the most dangerous creature to man knowing through all her bones that she has no use for them. For those months, the women were free and had what they most wanted: each other. They were on the run, hiding in forests, killing game, maybe tricking a man for a drink at a Tavern. They had bodies that fit together like commas to come back to, deep in a cave between the trees. They had everything and nowhere to go. But Julie had a sword and several more stories to live before her end.” 

She was an outlaw and didn’t do what she was told, and anyone who's an outlaw and doesn’t do what they're told immediately intrigues me. I've always felt like I don't fit in with the dominant paradigm. And, you know, because of that, anybody else that seems to fit that description immediately holds my interest. I’ve just done things that are a little bit different from a lot of women that I know, and done a lot of adventuring on my own, taken a lot of long-distance travels, and backpacked around Europe by myself when I was 40.  A lot of people were telling me that they thought it was really brave for me to be doing these things, which was really funny because I didn't think of myself as brave. I was just doing what I wanted to do.

So that's probably one of the ways in which I connected with the story. Not very many people existed during that time or exist today with that kind of moxie. 

Caitlin: My stance on this has been shifting a little. I've sort of taken a step back from the Supergirl narrative. I think that there was a kind of pressure on young girls. The messaging gets pretty confusing. There's all this, like “you are powerful; you're Supergirl; you are fierce!” At the same time, they're looking at the actual world and Trump being president and women's rights going backwards. They're also inundated by the media that commodifies them. So I think it's super confusing. So I've sort of taken a step back from the supergirl narrative and thought more that they need to practice self care.

They need to stay in touch with themselves, and their feelings and look out for themselves and their friends. And actually Chicava is a really amazing role model in terms of prioritizing self care. I think that's the message that I'd want to focus on at this point. 

I'm thinking about the world and the pandemic as a portal: there's an opportunity for us to rewrite a better future.

ALL: Present

Robyn: I am Robyn Kraft. I’m born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. I grew up in a very segregated area, and I've had a lot of unlearning to do. I've got a background in academia, which I moved away from because of our problems with higher education, which I am happy to go into in great detail in length, but I don't think anyone is here to listen to that right now. And I currently work as an editor.

Jessie: I was really inspired by Robyn Kraft's essay, “The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish,” who is an author. And Robin's personal story of being in professional settings and being stopped by gatekeepers—especially a gatekeeper who is a woman—really reminded me of some of my early experiences in the professional world.

And there's one quote in particular from her essay that I really love.  She writes 

“If women want to be in a space only under our own power and initiative, where we don't have to contemplate what we will have to give up or what we are willing to tolerate to be there, and where we are not subject to the arbitrary rules that men have set for us, then we have to create that space for ourselves.”

Robyn: I was first introduced to Cavendish during grad school. And I wasn't completely enthralled with her writing style, but when I read what she wrote about herself and how she was creating this world because nobody was taking her seriously because she was a woman . . .  

Jessie: That's a big part of my own writing, to create a place where you can see yourself reflected and hope that others can find themselves reflected there.

Robyn: . . . I came down to, I don't really like The Blazing World as a novel, but I love her. And then I  found that she was one of the originators of the science fiction genre, which I had grown up reading. So that was very close to my heart. And of course science fiction is going to fall under your umbrella of geekery and I've been a lifelong geek. So finding a woman who had been involved in this genre that I grew up in, but still always felt like an outcast from, was very intriguing to me. So I spent a lot of time reading about her and thinking about her. 

Jessie: Coming from a background as a historian, I really wish people would understand that in order to move forward, we do have to talk about the past. It's what I do every day at work. We really need to know what happened before us and to truly understand our history.

Robyn: I was writing this essay during a very, very difficult period of my life when I was going through a divorce from an abusive husband, and it was extremely difficult. But I was writing so much at the time because I was just miserable, and all I could think about was fantasies and escape.

Jessie: When we think about being fierce in particular, we think about being outspoken and strong. And that’s definitely one way to be fierce. 

But I know there's girls out there who are a lot like me. Who are shy, who are quiet, who are anxious. You are not any less fierce for being afraid or having anxiety. In fact, working through those emotions makes you incredibly strong 

Robyn: You know, I've been writing very, very little since then, which is why I don't introduce myself as a writer, despite the fact that I've been writing my whole life and I've had several books of poetry published. Right now my attention is focused outward  on creating the life I want for myself, which right now involves turning my backyard into a functional vegetable garden so that I can come up with a bunch of extra produce for disadvantaged people in the neighborhood. And just living to be the hero that I always kind of wanted to write myself to be.  

Jessie: I think a big part of being here is that you work through fear. You work through anxiety. And that makes you incredibly fierce.

ALL: Transcendent

Chicava: I'm Chicava Honeychild. I'm an African American woman, a burlesque performer, and actor. And it's so really deeply special that Caitlin told my story. I'm sure you know that we're both from Boulder, Colorado. And we grew up dancing together. If anybody has been there for the entire Chicava . . . I mean, it's Caitlin McDonnell.

Caitlin: I was especially moved by Chicava Honeychild's “Radiant Identity: Chicaba Herstories,” partially because I grew up with Chicava Honeychild, who was called Roslyn when we were growing up in Boulder, Colorado. And as kids we were in a dance troupe together, and her father was the first—so far only—Black mayor of a predominantly white city in Boulder. 

I didn't see her for years and years. And then I sort of rediscovered her through her burlesque here in the city, which is super powerful. I saw her perform at the Brooklyn Museum. And she uses burlesque as this super empowered, embodied way of storytelling. And to learn about the origin of her burlesque name . . . 

Chicava: It's so unique. It just stuck with me. And I decided to become a burlesque performer, and we create names for ourselves. And so I remember Chicava.

Caitlin: . . . and that it was the story of a slave, who was also a nun and a healer.

Chicava: At first I took it like, wow. Okay. Is it okay for me to be a strip teaser that names herself after a nun? And then I learned that because she was an African woman, the only place that would take her was in Santo Domingo, and it was a convent for fallen, lost women—you know, strippers, hookers.

Caitlin: And thinking about how she takes this name and uses it . . . 

Chicava: As legend has it, she was an energy healer. She helped a lot of people.  

Caitlin: . . . to celebrate sovereignty over our bodies and empowerment was really powerful to me. 

Chicava: Yeah. You named yourself after a sister who they’re vying for her sainthood and she tended to your kind—if you want to label burlesque performers and striptease as somewhat of a following woman, which under the inquisition, we definitely would be.

Caitlin: It struck me also how she had to speculate and infer a lot based on limited recorded history of a slave narrative. Some people have written about this person because she was this amazing person who came from royalty, and then was taken in as a slave, and wound up a healer and a spiritual person. But Chicava had to guess a lot about what really happened, because the way that history has been told—as we've been looking at in our country—has been a really racist narrative.

She says, 

“The journey of Chicaba's life restores each of us: I restore her each time her name is spoken in the arenas of joy, sexiness, theater, and women's healing. She restores my ability to generate joy and faith in fulfilling my responsibility to share my gifts and teachings.” 

Chicava: It's  the experience of being at home in your body and in tune with your body.  

Caitlin: And her burlesque is really about connecting your body to your soul, to your mind and staying in touch with your authentic self, and your autonomy, and your sexuality in this way that was super moving and powerful. 

Chicava: And you have to be really in tune with yourself, because everything around you it's going to change. So you're going to be the constant. That's what I wish for people to have a greater understanding about right now, is that you have to become your own center of stability.

Caitlin: She celebrates her femininity in a way that I really think is beautiful.

Chicava: And this gentleness of being connected, deeper and deeper inside ourselves, just giving people grace, and getting real centered and peaceful with yourself, is fundamental to our health and wellbeing 

ALL: Deliverance

Jessie: My name is Jessie Serfilippi. I am a writer and historian. I'm a historical interpreter at an 18th century historic site in Albany, New York. I wrote an essay called “Under the Cover of Breeches and Bayonet: The Story of Deborah Sampson.”

Robyn: I thought it was—oh, it was fantastic. I love stories of women looking at the options presented to them and then saying, “no, I don't like any of these options.”

Jessie: Deborah Samson has fascinated me since I was a really young child. I learned about her on a show called Liberty's Kids. She was a woman who disguised herself as a man to fight in the Revolutionary War, which is an era I've been completely obsessed with since I was a child. She also was the first woman to do a speaking tour of the United States. 

Robyn: And at least according to the source materials that can be found—veracity being what it is at the time, because the stories were all written by men—she  succeeded and she was good at it. 

Jessie: I actually went into it kind of the wrong way. Deborah's story has a lot of ambiguity, and as I researched her, I also learned that there were questions surrounding her sexuality. So I went into this really hoping to find out that she had relationships with other women, because I wanted to see myself reflected in someone of this founding era. Which is really the wrong way to go into researching a historical piece. You're supposed to go in with an open mind. And I went in really wanting to find something, and I think that for this era in particular, it's important to raise that question. But thankfully I didn't let it limit my research. We do not know how she felt. We don't know who she loved or how she loved. There's too many conflicting pieces of evidence and memoir, by her and by her biographer Herman Mann.  

Robyn: There was an injury that she supposedly took in battle, though nobody's quite sure where it was, or if it really happened. And the author is speculating if it matters, or if it was made up, why. The quote says, 

“Is it something undeniable, to which she can point and say, ‘this happened to me?’ If she made it up, I understand. Evidence of a hard-fought battle—not a literal battle, but a cultural one—is rewarding. It's part of the reason why I write: to say, ‘this is proof of my suffering and my ability to overcome it,’ even if only momentarily. Whether in the form of a bullet embedded in the body or stories written late into the night, they serve the same function: tangible proof of deliverance.”

Jessie: When I found that there was no definite answer, I let that be my answer: that we could not put a label on her.

Robyn: We're so programmed to think, okay, these are the limitations of what I can do. And it takes almost a twist of brain to say, okay, but why? And to do something about it. Debra just said, this isn't the life I want. She completely reinvented herself, put on breeches, and joined the army, and said, okay, we're doing this instead. And I just absolutely love that.

ALL: Disappearance

Nancy: I'm Nancy Agabian. I'm a writer, a teacher, and a literary organizer. Much of my work centers around the intersection of being Armenian American and Queer. The other thing you should know about me is that for the past year, I've been a full time caregiver to my elderly parents, who both have dementia. 

The essay I wrote is called “Rose-Poisoning: Beauty, Violence, and the Unknown History of Zabel Yessayen.”

Meera: I love this essay so much. This is an essay by my dear friend, Nancy Agabian, who takes this figure from Armenian history who is an intellectual, and who is part of a group of people who run away from Turkey, and she watches genocide.

Nancy: Zabel Yessayen was a 19th century Armenian feminist writer, and she was a survivor, but her voice disappeared. She was a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915, but then was exiled from her homeland, which was part of Turkey, but then wound up in Soviet Armenia, where she was eventually wiped out by Stalinist purges because of her writing. She was sent to Siberia and never seen from again.

Meera: There are these amazing passages where she talks about watching women kill their own children, having women suffocate their babies—you know, the level of suffering that she undergoes. At the same time, the other side of this amazing person is that she creates beautiful work.

 Nancy: Her writing has been re-emerging with some English translations from Armenian International Women's Association. And this happened within, like, the last few years at the same time that my mother's dementia started to emerge. And I felt there was a connection between my mother's memory disappearing and Yessayen’s work disappearing, but now reemerging. And my mother has a family history that intersects with Yessayen, because her grandparents were from Constantinople, which is what they would have called Istanbul. And they were roughly the same age as Yessayen. And I thought if I could read these newly translated books, I would get a window into some knowing of my mother's family history.

Meera: She excavates her memory, and she creates these beautiful pieces of writing and books and stories that Nancy laments have been lost, that nobody knows who Zabel Yessayen is, and then recovers her through her writing. 

Nancy: My mother is not even really aware she has dementia. And watching the way that she consistently finds beauty, wherever she looks—you know, when she sees a pretty flower, or she hears this bird’s song, or when she creates new words—seeing this playful stage in her life . . . I just wanted to share that. 

This is kind of an appendix to the piece that I wrote: I wanted Promote the idea of my mother as fierce. Maybe to add to that definition. I wanted to just offer that up.

Meera: What Nancy does in this essay is that she takes Zebel's words, and she sort of sandwiches them and embeds them between her own, so that you flow from Nancy to Zabel and out of Zabel's mind into Nancy's mind. And it just becomes this really beautiful excavation of memories and witnessing and bringing all of that so strongly to the surface that you can never forget what you've read.

Nancy: Becoming a caregiver has been this sort of fundamental transition and shift in my life. We're not invisible. Caregivers do a lot of work that goes unseen, but it doesn't mean that we're invisible. We're just as fierce as we always were.

Meera: There's a passage that I would love to read it because it not only points to the subject of the essay, but to who artists are: 

“The people who pause in front of an artist's work cannot imagine that we have to relive a past grief a hundred times, that we have to make our heart bleed a hundred times, in order to be able to communicate to the apathetic, indifferent, multitude passing by. The impression that grief left on us when it was present and real.” 

And that is a quote from Zabel Yessayen’s writing, and that really affected me deeply, because that was what all artists are doing, that I, as a writer, am doing, that Nancy is doing, and every single writer in this book is doing: shouting out our grief, our memory, our past into the world, and hoping someone will stop and take a look at them. And writing  those griefs as beautifully as possible so that they leave some sort of an impression. 

ALL: Lyrical

Claudia: I’m Claudia. I'm a lecturer at the University of Houston Downtown, where I teach composition and creative writing. I have three collections with small indie presses: Future Tense, Rose Metal Press, and Magic Helicopter. I have a website: it's ClaudiaSmithwriter.com. And I live and write in Houston, Texas, where I'm quarantined with my two kids, my parents-in-law, and my husband, who mostly stays in a camper in our driveway.

My husband's from China—that’s not why he's in a camper—but he was a research scientist for years. It was kind of how he moved over here, and he works for Baylor College of Medicine. He was getting exposure in the hospitals and clinics, and my mother-in-law is fragile, and since late March, we financed this camper to, you know, self-isolate. Right now I'm in the camper. And we're in Houston and it's summertime. So there's no way I can be in this without the air conditioning. That's what you hear that sounds like wind.

I wrote the last essay in the book, called “Trek Across a Trackless Land.”

Betsy: There are just so many things about this essay that I really connected with. It's about cars. My father, who looms large in my own essay, was a rusted-truck-in-the-front-yard gearhead. There were always, like, forty cars or so at my house. Her mother was a little bit posher and from Pennsylvania, and her father, I guess, came from a more impoverished background. That is the same sort of breakdown of my family. 

Claudia: I can say the essay would never be if it weren't for Karyn Kloumann. When Karyn contacted me and told me about a concept for the book, I just knew I wanted to be a part of it. And it was Karen who suggested Alice Ramsey. I was thinking about exploration, and the road trip in literature. And also just my understanding of it as I was growing up, moving around a lot. 

Betsy: It's a road trip. You know, I love a road trip, and I've taken many, many, many of them. I wrote a whole book that's a road trip on the New Jersey turnpike. I graduated high school half a year early so I could road trip across the country with friends of mine. You know, I'm a travel writer for a living. Road trip is ingrained in me. 

Alice Ramsey led an all-female road trip in the early 1900s across the country when the road was not paved. And Ramsey is at once sort of heroic, but also racist—you know, expressing racist sentiments, and making racist jokes in her own writing. And to be honest about those things was to really flesh out the entire humanity of someone. 

There's no way for us to go forward if we construct the world as if we are not intersectional, and those intersections can be very complex and very disturbing.  

Claudia: I think it was James Baldwin who said an artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian, and I'm no Baldwin, but I turn to him a lot. His work was so unflinching and searching. So I found this quote:

“I'm not trying to solve anybody's problems, not even my own. I'm just trying to outline what the problems are.”

Betsy: This essay that's about this road trip, and also about this woman, and also about the author’s own road trip, and escaping a very racist family, and escaping some domestic violence, which I connected with—all of that, complex intersectionality really came through in language that I thought was very straight forward and poignant and extremely well crafted. 

Claudia: I wrote an essay a few years ago in LitHub. And it has a lot to do with my family moving around, growing up in different parts of Houston. My parents were young. They didn't have a lot of money. I just felt a deep connection to that story of a woman traveling, and especially traveling through this country, 

Betsy: I'll read a little passage that surprised me, because it just started adding a lot of memoir to the piece that's about, you know, this historical character. And I thought that was very beautiful. 

“I drove a yellow Dodge Dart from Virginia to New York to leave a boyfriend who would later take all the money from our joint account, transferring it into an account only in his name. He was able to convince the teller that he was my fiancé, and therefore did not need my permission. I spent the night in a YMCA, watching movies for my bunk bed and sipping Coke that I bought from a vending machine. I had fifty to my name. I spent several months on friend's couches and a lot of quarters on payphones. 

I drove with a friend from graduate school from Mississippi to North Carolina in a green Neon to deliver my son to his father for summer visitation. I was broke and had not received child support for some time, but I was determined to follow the court order and deliver my son on time. There were many privacy controls on his health insurance, including a withholding of information that meant I couldn't file claims. When he contracted pinkeye, it ended up being a few hundred dollars on my debit card, which only made me sore. After being directed to the parking lot of what appeared to be a nice condominium in an upscale artsy neighborhood, I said goodbye to my kid, got myself some pie, and then drove all night, fueled by bad gas station coffee and a metallic, hollow taste in my mouth. 

I would not cry. I would not cry.”

Claudia: Writing about something and talking about something can be two different things. My relationship to the past, the way I see my childhood, is kind of shifting since I wrote that essay, especially since my mother died in April. 

I just think I'm coming to terms with it now. The anxiety, grief, and isolation and fear just comes in waves. And my husband, he's mostly been in a camper in our driveway since before she died. Her death and the isolation from my husband kind of eclipsed other worries. 

But I will say I feel a kind of tenderness that's really deep and sudden and sweet. It's usually for my children, who are very different ages and personalities. Maybe it’s because I have a daughter, an eight-year-old daughter . . . I have something to learn  or to try to recapture about myself.

I watch her, and she's so sparkly. She’s so empowered, really. You know, I just feel like saying, “look at you walking around all empowered, like you are.” 

You know, probably two years ago, I was tucking her into bed, and she said to me, “Mama, I think it's time we had a woman president. We haven't had a woman president for years and years. 

And I said to her, “Meihua, we have never had a woman president.” 

And without missing a beat, she just said “What??!!” She was shocked, you know? 

By the time I was her age, I was already biting my nails. I was already staring at the floor and feeling a kind of shame that I don't think I really comprehended or fully understood. I just want her to keep her sparkle.

I think about my personal experience, and then I think about hope, and I think about them kind of differently. Because I really believe change is here. You know, I lived in Hattiesburg, Mississippi for a few years, and when I read about them changing the flag, I literally did jump for joy. It's incredible. And I believe the protests are bringing about change. I really believe that. Podcasts like yours, writers like the other writers in this book, my students. You know, many of them finished the semester and took jobs at places like HEB to work full time and study full time to help their families and help protect their parents. A lot of their parents are my age and working jobs that expose them to COVID. You know, just the pulse of this country, the countless people who do care and are working to protect it. 

You know, I think there's a lot to be afraid of right now, but I also see many quietly heroic people. 

Betsy: I just really want to give a shout out to Karyn Kloumann for believing in this project and making it happen. You know, it's really not easy to be an independent publisher, particularly nowadays, and to be an independent, woman publisher and . . . I mean talk about somebody who's fierce! She really is. She brought us all together, made this gorgeous book, believed in it, put it out there for awards and won. Talk about something that gives me hope. 

What would I say to the next generation of girls coming up? I would say, “read the book. Read this gorgeous book.”

Laura: You can learn more about the thirteen women of FIERCE in our show notes and find a link to buy the book. Ukrainian artist Anna Torbina created the illustrations for the book. Thank you to Linda Ganjian for designing our beautiful social media animations for this week’s episodes, which you can see on Instagram @shelterinplacepodcast. Thank you to Karen Kloumann, who has been a fierce champion for this incredible book, and inspired me to champion it, too. And finally, thank you to Meera, Betsy, Taté, Kara, Leah, Debra, Edissa, Caitlin, Robyn, Chicava, Jessie, Nancy, and Claudia. You are indeed fierce, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

{Closing Credits}