Small Potatoes

One of those rare fortuitous meetings that make life so interesting occurred in the fall in a hallway at the New York Society Library, my home away from home in that city. A young woman greeted me, then took the time to look at my book, Little Brother, on display there with many other books by library patrons. Then she emailed me. It turns out that she knows me through my archive at Duke University—I call it “mine” because I founded it years ago, but it has grown and moved on, housing more and work by women, including this woman’s zines.

I plan to order her book, its title alone strikes a chord with me; I often introduce myself as “One of the many great unknown writers”—although as some of your will protest, I am not exactly unknown. But with sixteen books published—the sixteenth, Taken by Indians, is in the works at Turtle Point Press in New York, I still haven’t achieved the fame I thought I would earn through talent and hard work when I graduated from college.

No one does.

There are exceptions, of course, but their fame is often tied to something outside of their work. I’m thinking of Margaret Atwood, whose The Handmaid’s Tale had disappeared, in spite of good reviews, until our current apprehensions about the future of democracy brought it back full force. But for every Atwood, there are thousands of gifted writers, some of whom will never be published due to timing or habitation (living outside of New York is nearly fatal), and who may not possess the independent income that allows them to devote the many hours we need to hone our craft. This means, of course, that many writers who have no access to funds will not be able to sustain a career; teaching is incredibly draining, and since so many adjunct teachers—mostly women—make only a few thousand dollars a semester while teaching nearly all the Freshman comp courses offered, the exclusion will continue, limiting scope and depriving readers of many stories outside of the mainstream. Men, of course, seem to be able to surmount this problem, perhaps because if they teach they are more likely to reach tenure and a wage at least minimally sufficient.

But there is great reward, as well as disappointment, in being a small potato. To write as one wants to write, once some kind of income is assured, is, after all, what we all need to do. And if we become well-known, there is a steady pressure to write another version of whatever book established our success; in my case, to write over and over again about the curses and blessings of privilege. Without success, no one cares what we write, which is a liberation.

I’m reminded of a small shift in the emphasis of the enormously well-endowed Georgia O’Keeffe Museum here, still, as far as I know, the only museum devoted to the work of a woman artist. In its latest exhibit, the museum is showing four black and white dresses created by O’Keeffe, adding a dimension to her life as an artist, first expanded with a cookbook of her favorite recipes. We small potatoes know that we are creative in many fields, mostly outside the limitations of museums, mostly only now being taken seriously. I’m reminded of Rough Point in Newport, Doris Duke’s house, now a museum, the first as far as I know to build a case for the fact that her clothes were an essential part of her creativity, worthy of study and respect.

Now, with Christmas looming, those of us working hard to wrap presents, send Christmas cards—fewer and fewer of those—and cook to exhaustion, can perhaps benefit from realizing that all these activities are an aspect of our powerful creativity, not recognized or taken seriously, but potent none the less.

In Women, Writing Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Rough Point 20 Favorites of 2022 Georgia O'Keeffe