The Creative Woman: Belles-Lettres -- CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

In anticipation of Women's History Month, this week's Featured Image showcases some of the cool stuff I found in The Creative Woman.

The Spring/Summer 1987 Belles Lettres issue (cover featured above) includes three poems by Janet McCann (pages 40-41). Here's "Diane Arbus: Naked Woman with Harlequin Glasses"

What makes it wrong is of course
the glasses. As in this other one,
the fat middle-aged couple smirks obscenely
because of the TV set, the Sears chairs,
the cheap prints on the walls. These things mean death,
not the flesh, even thickened ankles
and thighs, beneath the leaves,
beside the stream,
not the leaves themselves, the intercourse
of light and shade, the moss,
the green and brown smell of the woods.
So if we go naked, let it be
without clothes.

Take a look at the Photography issue. Evelyn Eisen's three photographs of women on their porches are fascinating (pages 18-19). As she says, "The front porch or yards often tell as much about the women as do their posture, clothing or expression."

Along those lines, the Life Stories issue contains a piece called "An Album of Life Stories in Photography" by Sherry Shapiro (p. 21-31). Photographs of ten anonymous women are each accompanied by a short "life story" in the woman’s own voice. The frankness is astounding. A fourteen-year-old learns how to talk to her parents after a suicide attempt. A woman describes her struggle to love her sister unconditionally after giving her one of her kidneys.

I've barely scratched the surface here. Explore The Creative Woman yourself! And be sure to visit Sarah Wegley's excellent guide for more information about the journal and editor Helen Hughes.

Written by Mary Rose, Metadata Librarian, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville