#meridel le sueur

[garadinervi]

Meridel Le Sueur, Harvest. Collected Stories, West End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978 [Between the Covers, Gloucester City, NJ]

[philipkindreddickhead]

100 Fiction Books to Read Before You Die

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks

The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Passing by Nella Larson

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion

The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Power by Naomi Alderman

The Street by Ann Petry

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskill

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Small Island by Andrea Levy

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

The Price of Salt/Carol by Patricia Highsmith

Room by Emma Donoghue

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Wise Blood by Flannery O Conner

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsey

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

House of Incest by Anaïs Nin

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Corregidora by Gayl Jones

Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Democracy by Joan Didion

Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates

The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O Connor

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I Must Betray You be Ruta Sepetys

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

City of Beasts by Isabel Allende

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

The First Bad Man by Miranda July

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston

Disobedience by Naomi Alderman

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

The Narrows by Ann Petry

The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir

Under the Sea by Rachel Carson

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones

Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

@gaydalf @kishipurrun @unsentimentaltranslator @algolagniaa @stariduks @hippodamoi

[abwwia]

Audre Lorde (left) with writers Meridel Le Sueur (middle) and Adrienne Rich (right) at a writing workshop in Austin, Texas, 1980 via Wikipedia

[jonkatzatbedlamfarm]

Learning To Live In My Seventies. Seeing Life In A Different Way "I'm Luminous With Age..." I Finally Have A Passion For Life

“I am luminous with age...”  Meridel Le Sueur, at ninety-six. The problem with aging is that most of my attention was focused on paying for medicines, obsessing about health, and preparing for infirmity and death. My belief about aging is different and out of sync with our culture. There is no particular reason to listen to me, and I don’t believe in telling others what to do. This has put me at…

[marginaliaandspines]

Ripening

Meridel Le Sueur

to-read stack

[joshuahowls]

Survival is a form of resistance.

Meridel Le Sueur

[lgbfightback]

Check out this gorgeous photoshoot of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich with fellow writer Meridel Le Sueur in 1980. Lorde and Rich were lesbian poets, essayists, and women’s rights activists who had great respect for each other’s work.

Rich dedicated her poem “Hunger” to Lorde. The poem’s last line will ring true among lesbians until homophobia and misogyny end:

“Until we find each other, we are alone.”

Happy LGB Day of Visibility! Share your favorite LGB icons with us here and on Twitter, using the hashtags #LGBDayofVisibility #LGBIcon

[onequoteperday]

The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed-upon myth of its conquerors.

Meridel Le Sueur

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Meridel Le Sueur

Meridel Le Sueur was born in 1900 in Murray, Iowa. Le Sueur became known for both fiction and nonfiction work that focused on the struggles of the working class, and for her lyrical and unique writing style. She wrote hundreds of works, including novels, poetry, novellas, short stories, and histories. The 1927 publication of her short story “Persephone” in Dial launched her writing career. Le Sueur’s short story collection Salute to Spring also won widespread admiration. Though she wrote her first novel, The Girl, in 1939, it was not published until 1978. Le Sueur was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. During that period, she wrote children’s books as well as biographies of American historical figures. 

Meridel Le Sueur died in 1996 at the age of 96. 

(image source)

[garadinervi]

Meridel Le Sueur, All Around Me, Come!, in Chant For My Sisters. Poems for the New Year, Women Against Imperialism, San Francisco, CA, 1987 (pdf here) [The Freedom Archives, Berkeley, CA]

[chthonicdivinebard]

In the story ["Persephone" by Meridel Le Sueur] an innocent young girl, whose peaceful life with her mother had been violently disrupted when she was abducted by a dark and fearful man, is now on her way to the hospital evidently fatally ill. This Persephone is lost in an underworld experience of which she can make no sense and from which there seems to be no rescue. There are many other Persephone figures in Le Sueur's later stories. Some are stories of sexual awakening rather than death. Some communicate Le Sueur's growing recognition that the underworld, although always frightening, may represent a fructifying chaos out of which something new might be born. Engagement with the dark side of life and creativity come to be seen as inextricably intertwined, and Le Sueur comes to emphasize Persephone's reunion with Her mother, a theme completely absent from that first story. Even when Le Sueur was in her eighties, this myth continued to inspire her writing, though by then she had come to speak as Demeter rather than as Persephone, as a Demeter who is "grieving but protective, strong and fierce," and identified with the natural cycle of birth, death, and renewal.

Women’s Re-Visionings in The Long Journey Home: Re-Visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time edited by Christine Downing (p 82)

[tomgilsenan]

Drake Neighborhood Experience on Facebook. Amelia Bloomer, Jessie Binford, Annie Wittenmyer. Discover notable Iowa women with Iowa roots every day this month. Meridel Le Sueur, Lee Hadley, Annabelle Irwin. You'll find biographies of these women and more on the FB page for Drake Neighborhood Experience. Dottie Ray, Sally Pederson, Evelyn Birkby. New posts every day during Women's History Month. (at Drake Neighborhood) https://www.instagram.com/p/CbJEF-MuDzz/?utm_medium=tumblr

[better-with-a-book-in-my-hand]

Annunciation

This short story by Meridel Le Sueur is truly eye opening.  It is based during the Great Depression & the main protagonist is pregnant.  Her lovely husband has certainly many things to say about her keeping the baby.....read to find out what she does   

[jonkatzatbedlamfarm]

"I Am Luminous With Age..." I Stand With The People Of Soul. No Old Talk Like "For Us Seniors..." My Life Is Far From Over

“I am luminous with age..” – Meridel Le Sueur, who lived to be 96. I feel luminous at 76. There is, I see, no language for me or people like me, people like Meridel Le Sueur. I often feel like a n outlier, disconnected from my peers, and my community. Almost every time I write about my revelation that cannabis gummy bears are helping me to sleep, I get a message like the one Barb sent yesterday:…

[toshootforthestars]

From the report by Bridget Read, posted 24 Sept 2020:

Meridel Le Sueur wrote in 1932 that she saw hunger “like the beak of a terrible bird at the vitals” in the breadlines and soup kitchens of the Great Depression, when unemployment rates reached 24.9 percent. There was no government welfare state at the time. Just under a century later, we have something called unemployment insurance. Now the breadlines have mostly moved out of sight, with hundreds of thousands of people on hold for hours with benefit representatives. And for those who can’t get help from the government, there is r/unemployment, which now functions as a kind of ad hoc, crowd-sourced, people’s benefit office, where some 46,000 members of the American unemployed have congregated to help themselves.

The anxious corridors of r/unemployment are riddled with acronyms: PUA, LWA, PEUC. The feed is inundated with Kafkaesque tales of dysfunction: One state has a 24/7 chat function from which no one has ever been able to get a response. Posters say they are required to respond to texts in order to claim their benefits, but they can’t afford cell service. After five months of silence, one claimant received a letter one day after its stated deadline to be returned.

Some of the local benefit programs are wildly ill-named — assistance in Pennsylvania, routinely late to deposit, goes on something called a “Reliacard.” California’s Employment Development Department uses a 60-year-old programming language called COBOL that was invented when Dwight Eisenhower was president. On days when assistance is set to arrive, the forum is consumed by spasms of fear. “Be honest, how many times have you logged into the unemployment website to check if you got your benefits today?” one poster asks. “I’ve checked at least 20 times,” someone replies. “It’s driving me crazy.”

But r/unemployment is an orderly, well-lit place compared to the rest of Reddit, where conversations are typically crude and unmanaged. Its moderators run it with temperance rules: no swearing, no memes, no trolling. “Remember the human,” regulations say. They do not allow posts of phone numbers or emails, lest they be reported as “doxxing” by Reddit administrators. Subscribers must tag their posts with “flair” that delineates what state they’re in, so unofficial experts, often on unemployment themselves — grad students, gas station managers, stadium workers, car salesmen, servers — can weigh in effectively on hyperspecific questions.

[ilovespinach]

“I don’t believe in being safe or right,”

“Write something inappropriate, however you define the term,” she prompts. “I give you absolute license,” she says, after a pause.

Guernica: You demonstrate the complexities of that anger through your characters.

...That’s class. Trying to write with love and respect about people who even as you love them are destroying themselves and to try to write it accurately and with some of the grace of Meridel Le Sueur is the challenge. But you can’t write about this stuff and be boring. That would be a sin against God.

“When I write these characters I try to take you inside what it feels like to be treated with contempt and to have such a narrow range of possibilities out.“

“But the options for marrying well are limited, and if you’re as angry and damaged as most working-class girls are you’ll marry the first mean-assed boy who takes you up, so the next thing you know you have three babies and he’s broken your jaw. They always break your jaw.“

“You win those awards by being humble and grateful. Gratitude can eat the heart out of you, because the first thing you have to do is acknowledge that you aren’t as good as the people you’re begging help from. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of the very successful working-class kids who win scholarships drink themselves to death or shoot themselves in the head.“

“Remember that all of the ways you derive strength can cut the other way. It can wear you down. I’ve noticed that it happens about once a decade again where all of the sudden they start using that language of contempt, and I have to stand up to it all over again with a whole new generation with another vocabulary.“

“The idea that great literature is written by nasty girls told me that nasty girls and women are my aunts. They don’t act out of meanness purely for the sake of meanness; they give back what is given to them. When they’re given respect, they return respect. When they’re given contempt, they show you that the contempt is not justified. The wages of violence is violence, so I try to avoid violence but confrontation I believe in. Holding people accountable I believe in, and that’s nasty. It means telling the truth even when it costs you something, even when no one wants to hear it or talk about it. You have to honor your version of the truth and you have to really search for it and make characters that live up to that. A no bones about it, we’re in this together approach is what I honor. My aunts were paragons of it. They were also self-destructive and fell in love with the wrong people and didn’t necessarily protect their children, but they tried. I don’t believe in simple.“

“The defining aspect of class is shame.“

It’s the bad bargain we make with girls all the time. Marry a man and move into his family. Yeah, right. It’s a lie. You never really leave your people behind.