The POWER of the SISTERHOOD

A TANTALIZING photograph of LITERARY SUPERSTARS before their ASCENT, including TONI MORRISON and ALICE WALKER, evokes the DREAM of ARTISTIC COMMUNITY

- KAITLYN GREENIDGE

Members of the Sisterhood, 1977. Front row, from left: Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, and Louise Meriwether. Back row, from left: Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Alice Walker, Audrey Edwards, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan.

The first thing I knew about writers was that you could not trust them in a group. My older sister is a writer. She went to the University of Iowa for playwriting, and by then, as a precocious teen, I knew it was where the supposedly best novelists studied in the fiction program. "Oh, the fiction writers won't even talk to us," my sister told me. "They stay by themselves. And the way they find out if they are doing badly is by their mailboxes. If they don't like your work, they move your space around so everyone knows it and you lose your funding."

Was this true? Had she been joking? It didn't matter. I knew by then that I, too, desperately wanted to write. It would be embarrassing, I thought, having your artistic work reduced to a mailbox assignment, but it would be a deeper, more troubling thing to discover you were the type of person who would abide by that humiliation. If that's what being in a community of writers was, I didn't want any part of it.

I am lucky enough to say that my life as a writer and my relationship with other writers have been different. I'm part of a community I can trust implicitly, where I can confess some tender insecurity or just a rant about a book I irrationally envy. But that kind of jockeying for power, that relentless attention to an imaginary pecking order that skims just above actual talent, makes me wince, gives me the same light-headed feeling that comes from drinking too much rum.