Essays by women are center stage at Eagle Harbor shop

February 24, 2017 8:20 am
Image courtesy of Eagle Harbor Book Company | A special author event highlighting a recent collection of essays by women, “Waveform: Twenty-first-Century Essays by Women,” will be held at Eagle Harbor Book Company at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26. Editor Marcia Aldrich will talk with one of her contributors, writer and teacher Brenda Miller.
Image courtesy of Eagle Harbor Book Company | A special author event highlighting a recent collection of essays by women, “Waveform: Twenty-first-Century Essays by Women,” will be held at Eagle Harbor Book Company at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26. Editor Marcia Aldrich will talk with one of her contributors, writer and teacher Brenda Miller.

A special author event highlighting a recent collection of essays by women, “Waveform: Twenty-first-Century Essays by Women,” will be held at Eagle Harbor Book Company at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26. Editor Marcia Aldrich will talk with one of her contributors, writer and teacher Brenda Miller.

“Waveform” celebrates the role of women essayists in contemporary literature.

Historically, the editor said, women have been instrumental in moving the essay to center stage, and “Waveform” continues this rich tradition, further expanding the dynamic genre’s boundaries and testing its edges. With 30 essays by 30 distinguished and diverse female writers, this carefully constructed anthology incorporates works ranging from the traditional to the experimental.

“Waveform” champions the diversity of women’s approaches to the structure of the essay today — a site of invention and innovation, with experiments in collage, fragments, segmentation, braids, triptychs and diptychs. Focused on these explorations of form, “Waveform” is not wed to a fixed theme or even to women’s experiences per se. It is not driven by subject matter but highlights the writers interaction with all manner of subject and circumstance through style, voice, tone and structure.

This anthology presents some of the women who are shaping the essay today, mapping an ever-changing landscape. Contributors include: Aldrich, Miller, Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Margo Jefferson, Jaquira Diaz and Eula Biss, among others.

Aldrich lives on Bainbridge Island and is a professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of “Girl Rearing: Memoir of a Girlhood Gone Astray” and “Companion to an Untold Story,” winner of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Miller teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and the MA program in English studies at Western Washington University.

She is the author of “An Earlier Life,” “Who You Will Become,” “Listening Against the Stone,” “Blessing of the Animals,” and “Season of the Body.” She co-authored, with poet Holly J. Hughes, “The Pen and the Bell: Mindful writing in a Busy World.”