Amongst this area’s proudest claims to fame is bookishness. Particularly, the astounding variety of writers who’ve developed world-changing literature right here.
An excellent chunk of the credit score for that goes to Nancy Nordhoff, who based the Hedgebrook retreat for ladies writers 38 years in the past on Whidbey Island. Nordhoff died Jan. 7, at age 93. However her influence will reverberate so long as individuals learn.
Since Nordhoff opened the retreat in 1988, with a single author for whom she cooked dinner, an array of literary lights — from Dorothy Allison to Jacqueline Woodson, Gloria Steinem to Ursula Ok. LeGuin — have hopped on the ferry at Mukilteo to hunker down in Hedgebrook’s fairy-tale cottages and do their work. Or generally, simply to muse.
That was a part of Nordhoff’s plan, giving ladies the area to mentally meander, to take dangers. She’d bought the 30-acre farm as a house. However wandering its forest, fields and trails, Nordhoff started to marvel if there is perhaps a greater use.
“What actually issues to you?” a good friend had requested, nudging her towards an concept. “Who’re you actually?”
Nordhoff was an adventurer, a pilot and an avid baseball fan — all issues that made her an iconoclast on the planet of privilege she’d been born to. She might have continued with the right, ladies-who-lunch type of philanthropy anticipated of her. However Nordhoff had been formed by attending Mount Holyoke, the ladies’s faculty, and moved by the e-book “Silences,” by Tillie Olsen, which describes the way in which so many ladies discover causes to maintain quiet.
“I might determine with that,” Nordhoff instructed an interviewer, “as a result of I used to be in a sort of: ‘That is what you need to do, Nancy, be woman and do it for 50 years.’ ”
That was by no means going to work for Nordhoff, so in late center age she took a leap. The result’s Hedgebrook, a spot designed solely to assist ladies writers nurture their voices on the web page — freed from cost. As a result of self-sufficiency and independence had been vital to its founder, every cottage would have its personal wooden range; residents who’d by no means lived exterior an condo constructing would be taught to construct fires to maintain themselves heat. The symbolism — patiently tending the flames, rebuilding and attempting once more once they sputtered out — was inescapable.
Hedgebrook welcomed any sort of author — novelists and poets, screenwriters and journalists, ranging in age from 18 to 85. Most had been accustomed to caring for his or her households, shunting artistic work to the aspect. However at Hedgebrook, nothing could be requested of them — no cooking for others, no cleansing or chores — nothing apart from specializing in their very own concepts.
Up to now, Nordhoff’s imaginative and prescient has benefited some 2,000 writers throughout the globe, who’ve generated hundreds of literary works, influencing tens of millions. The world is best for it.
