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You are here: Home / Theater / No Refuge but in Writing

No Refuge but in Writing

May 1st, 2018 by Sallie Bingham in Travel, Theater, Writing Leave a Comment

Summer and Smoke - Classic Stage Company, 2018

Summer and Smoke – Classic Stage Company, 2018

I have been blessed this week by two immersions in the work of Tennessee Williams, a writer I’ve always adored—too seldom produced to my mind, and never in the Southwest.

My first immersion came at the Morgan Library in midtown New York City which is holding an exhibit of photos, letters and journals from Williams’ life.

The journals, often penciled in plain brown notebooks, moved me most, the record of his torment as an enormously gifted writer who had to struggle against the blindness of his age. His first play, Battle of Angels, caused what he called a “hullabaloo,” the audience revolting against its raw depiction of sexuality and violence in the post-war repression that seemed, at that time, the permanent mood of the U.S. It would be disrupted and dismissed by the sixties only a few years later.

In the meantime, Williams, heartbroken by the failure of his play, retreated to work on what became Summer and Smoke, sharing a place with Carson McCullers, which perhaps caused the long-lasting rumor that he, not she, wrote The Member of the Wedding, a rumor reflecting not the fact of authorship but the long-lived distrust of women of genius.

I have been blessed this week by two immersions in the work of Tennessee Williams, a writer I've always adored.

Williams despaired of Summer and Smoke, which also had a troubled theatrical history before the overwhelming success of The Glass Menagerie. The production I saw at Classic Stage Company showed why the play had its share of troubles. The central character, Miss Alma (Alma is Spanish for “soul”) is too easily dismissed as a vaporous mystic—especially since, in this production and probably all others, she is costumed in a nightgown and has streaming blond hair, even directed, at one moment of despair, to collapse on the floor.

The reality of this character as Williams wrote her seems to me quite different. Immensely courageous, with the recklessness that tinges all acts of courage, Alma sets out from childhood to form her male counterpart, Dr. Johnny, into a man worthy of her love.

Of course she fails. How many self-help books and programs have attempted to cure us of this particular crusade?

But—she is right. She takes the material of an immature, selfish, and emotionally destructive young man and attempts to shape it into something finer.

How hopeless!

How noble!

A different production might have made more of her courage—but it would have to get her out of that nightgown.

The times, thank God, have changed to some degree, although not to the extent that we might wish in terms of the contests we women set ourselves to seeing the potential in men who will never allow us to “bring it out.”

And why should they?

And why should we keep on trying?

An example of the way this particular “journey” has developed means seeing the remarkable movie, Lean on Pete. The abandoned boy who breaks his heart over a horse is saved, literally, by his father’s cast-off girlfriend, who takes him in.

So we go on saving. Perhaps in the case of a sterling teenaged boy who has never been given a chance, we are justified.

Beyond this issue is the great courage and endurance of a writer as gifted and tormented as Tennessee Williams. In many ways he was also blessed, not least in learning early on that for him, as for me and so many other writers, there is “no refuge but in writing.”

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In Travel, Theater, Writing Tennessee Williams New York City

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

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Watch Sallie

Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
Visiting Linda Stein

Visiting Linda Stein

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Back on October 28th, 2008, I visited artist Linda Stein's studio in New York City and tried on a few of her handmade suits of armor.

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Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

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This event was recorded November 1, 2024 in Taos, NM at SOMOS Salon & Bookshop by KCEI Radio, Red River/Taos and broadcast on November 8, 2024.
Taken by the Shawnee Reading

Taken by the Shawnee Reading

September 1st, 2024
This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2024.

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Years ago a man I was in love with persuaded me to have a large fish pond dug near my studio. I think it was his attempt to be part of my necessarily solitary life there; like other such attempts it failed—and now I'm left with the fish pond! https://buff.ly/fGgnN39 #Koi #KoiPond

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Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican

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