Women writing about walking

Not that particular woman writing about walking who has been in the news recently. (I haven’t read that book, and now I don’t feel like it, though I enjoyed her two pages in this one.)

Women have been writing about walking for hundreds of years. Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking brings a subjective selection of them together. Kerri Andrews’ first book like this, Wanderers, included just ten writers. Way Makers includes more than fifty, from Dorothy Wordsworth via Virginia Woolf right up to Anita Sethi. Yes, these three women were all born in England, and English landscapes are the most present, here. The other nations and islands around get a look in, and a few step across the pond. But as Andrews says in her introduction, she hopes this anthology will inspire others to make their own.

Most of all, these women’s writing will inspire you to write. I loved the Wordsworth, the woman behind the host of golden daffodils. In her diaries she observes everything in detail, from people to plants, and she writes so well. There’s even an app for her – you can listen to her words from her journals and poems as you walk around the Lake District.

But it’s not all rural vistas – Katherine Mansfield writes about criss-crossing the city of Paris. Katherine May walks out to get away from the suffocating side of motherhood, and leaves her husband to host the other parent on a play date. Don’t tell her I’m walking, she says, you’ll have to say I’m working.

Because then as now, walking is not perceived as proper for women in every situation. It’s too wild, too independent. Not so different from writing, perhaps? Dive in or dip in to this book, head for the hills or pound the pavements, but after that, sit down and write!

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit