Hello and Welcome to Audacious Women, Creative Lives!
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Hi! I’m Anne. I left academia and life as an empty-nester to pursue my dream of travel and being an actual, real, full-time writer and writing coach—finally, at the age of 52!
I share inspiring stories of women writers and artists who made bold choices, bucked convention, or simply lived and wrote outside the lines.
I also offer support and guidance to those who want to make a leap, of any distance, into a bolder, more creative life.
What is This Community About?
The premise is simple: women writers and readers thrive in supportive communities. We learn from each other. We grow bolder. We gain the strength to go against what is expected of us.
And we learn from the women who’ve gone before us. “We think back through our mothers, if we are women,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Or as Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her great tribute to the aritst Käthe Kollwitz, “my lifetime / listens to yours.”
Audacious Women, Creative Lives is a place for inspiration, conversation, and exploration.
Every Saturday morning, I send out an email with an essay or a conversation with one of the many audacious women who have inspired me on my journey.
Paid subscribers make this community possible for $45/year. Less than an evening out for two.
I am very grateful to paid subscribers, who help this community grow. Those who sign up can watch the full conversations, including the more personal discussions about the choices we’ve made and the challenges we’ve faced.
Founding Members, who contribute $100, also receive a free coaching session with me on writing, life transition, or any other matter you think I could be helpful with (for far less than my hourly coaching rate).
Free subscribers are also important members of this community. All are welcome! Forwarding this newsletter with others and encouraging them to subscribe is another way to support it!
More About Me and Why This Newsletter Is Important to Me
I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know how. So I became an academic, studying the women who had managed to do it. I read about their successes and failures, their efforts to overcome the taboos against women taking up the pen, their difficulties gaining the attention of the male literary elite.
I wrote three books about women writers, as well as editing four others. It was a fulfilling career as a researcher and teacher. I loved teaching classes with titles like “The Stories of Women’s Lives” and “Scribblers and Mad Geniuses.”
But I wasn’t really living the life that I wanted to live. I was afraid. Of so many things.
Then I got sick (with Meniere’s, an autoimmune disorder). I learned I was carrying decades of stress in my body. My body was telling me that I had to free myself in order to survive. So in 2022, I packed my bags when my daughter went off to college, and I hit the road. I traveled around Europe for a year in search of a new life. (You can read about it in earlier posts, when this letter was called “Letters from Anne.”)
I was inspired by a slew of fabulous women writers and artists who found ways to live outside of convention. I am currently writing a novel about one of them—so stay tuned!
A writing project on its own is tremendously satisfying, but it’s missing one important thing: community. Writing is terribly lonely, if you let it be. I’m excited about growing this community even more!
What Readers Are Saying
“Your latest post really hit a nerve! The pressures of housekeeping! I immediately took myself out to dinner. . . . I have a writing project that I’m struggling with too. Your adventures are inspiring!” – Robin
“I want to support you because I admire what you are doing. I feel like I'm on a path of wanting to live a life for me, a creative one. I finally have the time and resources to do this - I just need to figure out what that looks like for me.”—Lynn
“I am inspired by your writing and courageous life. I feel like I can live vicariously through you. I resonate and knows what you are doing is not hard. I support audacious writing, living, and women who do so... Thank you!”—Prajna
“Your writing in every genre is invariably rich, elegant, and important.”—Sheila
“Today’s email about Sarton and solitude really struck a chord. I’ve been spending this year trying to figure out ‘what’s next’—how I want to structure my life—and this was inspiring and helpful.”—Monica
“You inspire me to think of my life as a journey that is far from complete!”—Etta
“As I read your letters I feel more drawn in. . . . It’s also the freewheeling spirit that appeals to me along with your choices of women writers.”—Elaine
“I’ve really loved reading about your travels and sojourns through writing, solitude, and the significance of women writing.”—Freya
“I love your project of describing the peripatetic woman writer—and how yours intersects with other women’s lives and books and places. Keep at it and keep sharing!”—Victoria
“Such an adventure you are on, Anne. Glad to have a way to feel a part of it. I appreciate your ability to bring a depth of focus to what catches your attention.” –Peggy
