Tillie Olsen, In Memory, 1912-2007

Writer and activist Tillie Lerner Olsen died on January 1, 2007. She was the author of Tell Me a Riddle, Silences, and the Feminist Press daybook, Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother. Many fine tributes have been written, detailing Olsen's life and achievements. Instead of expounding on these, I would like to recount a memory of her. I am priviledged to live in Santa Cruz, California, where Olsen's daughter lives, and was honored to actually meet Tillie Olsen in 1984. Her writing greatly influenced the direction of my own work as a poet and memoirist.

I became pregnant with my first child at a very young age, 22, and I feel that the tremendous, life-changing journey of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising a precious son enhanced my vision of the world and opened up a deeper vein of poetry for me. I became aware of both my child's vulnerability and the fragility of the earth itself, and felt that there were meanings beyond the everyday surface of things.

There was a great deal happening in my life that I did not have the spiritual or emotional vocabulary to name. My mother was trapped in an abusive relationship, paralyzed by her fear of abandonment; her life had been a series of losses and eddies around the same whirlpool for many years. I did not know how my life would be different from hers; I only knew that poetry, as it has been for decades now, was the cord binding my sanity to this life. That which encroached on my mental, spiritual, and physical lives cannot be named in this public forum, but they were beginning to bud and would one day reach a state of terrible flowering. And in my heart of hearts, I knew what was to come, though I pushed these thoughts away each day.

I used to type on the kitchen floor past midnight, not wanting to wake the father of my baby, hoping the sound would be more muffled than if the typewriter sat on a table. I did not always know what to write about; I had been told in the course of my bachelor's degree that topics such as menstruation, childbirth, and other "women's concerns" were not fit subjects for poetry. Yet this is what I worked towards those long nights as the baby grew in my womb and my heart yearned for the day I would hold him in my arms.

Article Author: Ms. Strega

Ms. Strega is the name-cloak surrounding Joan McMillan. She is the author of a memoir of her Italian-American family, The Strega's Story. She has numerous poems published in such magazines as Poetry, ONTHEBUS, Saranac Review, Chattahoochee Review, Oyez Review, and Quarry West. …

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