As we round the curve into the second half of the month-long Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, I am energized and delighted by the lively beat of events featuring creative women stepping out into the community to share and inspire us.
Coming up this weekend we’ll have a red-carpet film screening hosted by Karen Allen and Deborah Hutchison, featuring Cathryn Michon, the director and star of the new romantic comedy, “Muffin Top: A Love Story,” which has the good grace to recognize that women’s beauty comes in many shapes and sizes!
We’ll also have a folk concert celebrating environmental heroine Rachel Carson and a special edition of Made in the Berkshires, offering performances of electrifying writing by Berkshire women from Catherine Maria Sedgewick to Sheila Weller, spoken with style by an all-star cast including Hilary Somers Deely, Barbara Sims, Kate Maguire, Amber Chand, Karen Allen and Corinna May.
And in between we’ll have several of the smaller, more intimate writing workshops and readings for which the Festival has become known: Robin Catalano sharing her secrets for “thinking like an editor” at the Berkshire Museum; Carol Ascher leading a writing workshop at the Sheffield Library on “writing our lives as fiction and memoir”; Jessica Treat and Jan Conn reading from their Latin American travel writing at No. 6 Depot; and a screening and discussion at the Triplex of the award-winning documentary Breaking Through the Clouds, about pioneering women pilots in the 1920s, with a talkback by the director, Heather Taylor, BIFF Founding Director Kelley Vickery and Deborah Hutchison, founder of the Gutsy Gals Inspire Me Film Awards.
And the beat goes on! Truly the Berkshires has never been so lively in March, and Women’s History Month has never been celebrated with such an outpouring of women’s creative expression!
Now, midway through the month, I want to pause to reflect on last weekend’s remarkable Festival event, “The Cowgirl’s Call: Riding and Writing,” a multimedia event hosted by Barbara Newman with cowgirl-poet Amy Hale-Auker.
The evening at the Unicorn Theater featured poetry and spoken word by Amy and Barbara, along with still images and film footage from the documentary Cowgirls Are Forever, which Barbara is working on with Nancy Novack.
Amy flew in for this event from her home on a 72-square-mile cattle ranch in Arizona, which she described in breathtaking words and images. She and her husband Gail Steiger, also a cowboy poet and singer-songwriter, are not gentlemen farmers. They manage the Spider Ranch (Amy was careful to say that they do not own it themselves), which involves grueling weeklong camping trips on horseback, running the cows from one grazing area to another, dealing with rattlesnakes and drought, days without showering and nights under the stars.
Amy grew up riding, but she didn’t learn to rope a cow until she was well into adulthood, and she movingly described her own journey from a first marriage in which she conformed to the conventional expectation that she would stay in the kitchen making the food for the menfolk, to her soul-partnership with Gail Steiger, who wanted her to run the ranch with him on horseback, not stay in the house cooking and doing the wash.
In the poem “Lots of Gone in her Eyes,” which you can read in full on her website, Amy describes how the violence with which some men treat animals also crosses over into how they treat women. The woman in the poem watches with pain as her husband “breaks” a horse: “She knows all about wham and jam, choke’er while you make’er spin, jerk, job, jab, giver’er a taste of a real man, teach that bitch who’s boss, and she’s a girl with lots of gone in her eyes, plans on her mind, fear of the dark, a hard heart, and sympathy for every horse he rides.”
Barbara, Nancy and Amy have a vision of a world of “cowgirl spirit,” in which women will “stand tall in their saddles” and chart their own strong course in the world. Proclaiming that “you don’t have to own a horse to own the spirit,” they shared eight cowgirl principles that have resonance for all women, not just those who ride.
The principles are:
- Don’t fence me in
- Be a trailblazer
- Never give up
- Rope your dreams
- Buck the rules
- Rein in your fears
- Ride high in the saddle
- Get back on the horse
Every woman, of whatever age and from all walks of life, can take these principles as guideposts, and I look forward to sharing this vision with the young women who attend the writing-intensive Leadership Institute for teen girls I’ll be facilitating this July under the Festival banner.
The truth is that every woman participating in the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers is “standing tall in the saddle,” stepping out and taking the risk of sharing her unique vision in public. What’s so special about our Festival is the big tent it provides, allowing established creative leaders like Jayne Atkinson or Karen Allen to mingle and inspire girls and women who are still on the journey to find their creative voices.
As we co-editors wrote in our introduction to the new Festival Anthology, Writing Fire: An Anthology Celebrating the Power of Women’s Words, “sparks fly when women get together to speak our truths.” At the Festival, the collective creative energy of so many talented women coming together sets off quite a charge.
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The weekly EDGE WISE column is curated by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D., associate professor of comparative literature, gender studies and media studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Women writers interested in publishing in EDGE WISE can find writers’ guidelines on the Festival website, or may submit queries or columns to Jennifer@berkshirewomenwriters.org.
