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Every time a woman writer speaks plainly about her intellectual life, that almost unacknowledged mental landscape she inhabits as she creates narrative, we all become a little more real in the world. We are chimera you know, we writers. We are magical but scary, legendary but still considered all too trivial by all too many, most of all sometimes by ourselves. The life of the mind is not a phrase that people use generally when talking of us. And our young—young women writers, young lesbians, young poets and fabulists, all step almost unassisted into dark and mysterious territory—the world of fiction, of imagination and creation and the exploration of what is possible in the use of language. "She said" is still not given the weight of "He said."
I collect 'she said' to save my life. When I find a writer whose work stirs me, I go back and snatch everything I can find that writer has written. When I found Nicola Griffith, I shouted out loud and went hunting with high excitement. Not just young, not just female, not just writing science fiction (which I love) but writing with a grace of language and a delicate sense of perception that sympathetically and honestly depicted the emotional life of marginal and disdained people—my people. There is a sense of accomplishment in finding those early stories, commentaries, bad poems and initial sketches—a sense of wonder and discovery even in the fragments. I feel sometimes with my stacks of chapbooks and ragged magazines like a sour old junkshop manager pushed back into a corner of my shop. I finger my treasures like Gollum and protect them like rings of gold.
You have here a ring of gold, a reflection of the mental landscape of an extraordinary writer and an astonishingly brave woman. This is a map of the changing world, the world that changed as Nicola became the writer she is, and the world we all share that has changed as so many women and queers and deeply unique outlaw voices began to speak all the stories not told before. And you didn’t have to get down on your knees in an old bookshop to find it all.
-- Dorothy Allison
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