JEANETTE RANKIN
Given the historic election of our first female VP in the US, I thought it fitting to start with the first woman ever elected to US Congress. She was elected in 1916, and is still the only women to ever be elected from Montana! This article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle offers interesting insight into her life including how she got elected, and pushed out for a time, and her pacifism as a feminist act.
MARY ANN SHADD CARY
Born in 1823 to free Black parents, Shadd Cary was a suffragist, attorney (having been the first Black woman enrolled at Howard University Law School) and then became the first Black female editor of a paper in North America, the Provincial Freeman, which was aimed at Americans living in Canada. More information is available from the National Women’s Hall of Fame, where she was inducted in 1998.
VITA SACKVILLE WEST
A poet and gardener, West was perhaps best known for wrecking havoc on various literary marriages. She was forthright about the limitations of marriage as she saw them (hers was open), her sexual orientation and gender fluidity. She is considered the inspiration for her lover Virginia’s Woolf’s important gender-fluid character Orlando. This erotic poem, written to a different lover, was recently discovered when it fell out of a book during conservation work in her home.
WILMA MANKILLER
The first woman elected Principle Chief of the Cherokee tribe (1987), Mankiller was grounded in and inspired by the fact that the Native American tradition had a long tradition of equality between the sexes before being upended by European invasion. She discusses discrimination as a woman as far worse than the discrimination she faced as a Native American in her autobiography.
PHILLIS WHEATLEY
Educated while enslaved in a prominent Boston household, Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was the first poetry collection published by an African American (1773). Snatched from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa at roughly 7-years old, she would become one of the best known poets of the 18th Century. You can find much more about her life and legacy in the Poetry Foundation’s profile.
It’s hard to describe what a wonderful adventure it has been to hear my book come to life as an Audio Book. I should tell you that I have become an incredible fan of audio books over the last few years. I have been known to sit in my driveway for an extra 12 minutes after a 4-hour drive, just to get to the end of a great chapter. And when I head out for my daily walk, I now swap out music in favor of listening to a book. It’s a completing engrossing experience. Just like when we used to have books read to us as kids, our minds still have to do the magical work of piecing together the picture that is being described, of sculpting each character’s features, imagining the texture of the world each character inhabits. But we also get the benefit of the book being “acted out” for us: dialogue infused with emotion, the emphasis of a particular word giving it more weight. And you should also know that my ultimate dream is to have FILL THE SKY one day become a movie– so an audiobook is like the first step in that journey of turning ink on a page into something with extra dimension.
questions that come up every time: “How long did it take you to write the book?” “How many drafts did you have to write?” and “What is your process?” The short answers are that it took me 3 years to write Fill the Sky, that I have no abacus sophisticated enough to count the number of drafts, and that my process is still…well… in process. So I often tell this story instead… one gal’s painful experience of revision on the way to publication. This is from an essay I wrote called “The First Time My Book Was Done,” which first appeared in The Quivering Pen: I have always been a big believer in revision, so by the time my first manuscript was done, it had been through countless iterations. I had work-shopped almost every chapter, revisited tricky scenes with my writing group, and incorporated feedback on the entire manuscript from three trusted readers. The changes along the way ran the gamut, from adding additional points of view, to removing whole pages of exposition, pretty paintings that were hard to destroy but had no impact on the characters in the room. Then I spent several months honing and polishing. And finally, I was done. That is, until I started over. 
How to describe LAUNCH DAY! So exciting to wake up and finally have my debut novel officially out into the world. First of all, seeing the book on a shelf in a real bookstore is a huge thrill (thank you to my hometown bookstore, Buttonwood Books!). The luck of the alphabet put me right below Richard Russo and directly beside Barbara Shapiro. I’ll take that positioning any day! I was actually down in NYC for the launch and was lucky enough to start my day with my oldest friend, who invited a group of lovely women to her apartment to introduce them to me and my book. What a treat to be able to sit in a living room, talk about the book, read a few passages, and have them all go home with my book in their hands! I was then treated to a wonderful event at Edelman (the PR firm) who invited a group of employees to step out of their project-mode for an hour and listen to me and Debra Copaken (also an author) discuss the process of writing a book and where creative inspiration comes from. My day ended with a tweet that the Barnes and Noble at the Prudential Center in Boston has selected Fill the Sky as their staff pick of the week. What a day. I am very grateful!
The first “message in a bottle” from the Fill the Sky book blessing was found! The bottle did not have to travel far on its journey, but seems to have landed in just the right hands. Having safely crossed the currents lorded over by hundreds of seals in Chatham, the bottle made its way from South Beach to North Beach where it was picked up by Linda B. Turns out that Linda and I both spent many of our childhood afternoons on that beautiful spit of sand between the bay and the ocean. She hadn’t been back in years, and said the bottle added to the joy of her day. The note inside was written by my friend Nancy, and expressed her hope that the book will be read with an open heart and an open mind, and bestow some of the magic of Ecuador upon the reader. Amen to that!