Hey, AK…

I think it’s fine to be influenced by the writers and by the characters. We give ourselves to the stories and that’s our first impulse to write one of our own.

You would also love Robin Hobb, I think. Start with the Assassin Apprentice series. The protagonist is a boy, but this series sets up the later ones with strong female characters.

Thanks for posting!

My earliest author loves were Judy Blume and Laura Ingalls Wilder. As I got older, Louisa May Alcott and Anne McCaffery. Older yet, Ursula Le Guin and Robin McKinley… that gets you up into Junior high. I was influenced by Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler, and wrote an essay in Spanish about the Magical Realism of Maria Luisa Bombal.

Don’t think I really wanted to be any of them (Okay, I totally went through a Jo March phase in 6th grade) but I learned from them. 🙂

Tanesa, thanks for your post. Perseverance is a important quality for any writer. Women writers are swimming against the current, though, for presenting themes that appeal to women while meeting expectations for publishers and agents. When a writer is original, the question always arises about where she fits in the genres. More of us should ban together to break the mold and write for ourselves using themes that other women can recognize in their own lives.

Keep on truckin’!

I just want to be better at what I do actually. I’m aspiring and I would like to focus on teen novels and children’s fiction and nonfiction.

CeeJae, thanks for your thoughtful post.

Our beliefs don’t always fit into the roles society assigns us. Reconciling feminism with faith is not simple. I have been an advocate of women’s issues all my life, but I do not call myself a liberal, only liberated.

Our answers are often very different than the narrative for women that we find in the community.

Ursula Le Guin and Mary Doria Russell were two I deeply admired. I’ve read to try to understand myself, looking for answers to life’s questions and finally realized I was on a spiritual journey. I’ve been a feminist from the time I was about 14 and never dreamed I’d be in the place I am now. Trying to figure out how to tell people about what I’ve experienced has been really challenging, but I’m getting there. It’s coming from both my experiences as a feminist and experiences that made me start to believe that God works directly in our lives and what that’s meant for me, for women in general and for our democracy. It’s a strange place to be, but I’ve been driven to work on these ideas for about 15 years. Hope you’ll check out my most recent blog post – Lone Pine: Two Feminists’ Take On Spiritual Experiences. I share a little more on my Books and About pages.

This is a great thread. I’m getting all new names of women writers for hours of reading pleasure!

Kimberly, I was crazy about the speculative fiction writers who created worlds to where I could escape. EarthSea was one of my favorites. The women characters seemed more true to life (for leading and problem solving) than what I found in movies or TV or crime dramas or romance.

Go figure!