“Writing’s a lonely business,” the poet Cindi Reiss confided the other day. “It’s helpful not to feel like you’re the only one doing it.”
We were talking about the Phoenix Writers Club, the 100-year-old organization of which Reiss is president. The club was founded in 1926 by a group of women whose membership in the Arizona Press Club had been denied because, well, they were female.
“So, they formed their own club,” Reiss told me a few days after I’d visited a Saturday morning gathering of the group. “We were women-only until 1996.”
I’d noticed, during my visit to the group’s monthly meeting, that the club was still mostly made up of women – women “of a certain age,” in fact. Reiss thought she knew why that was.
“A lot of people wait until they retire to pursue writing,” she guessed. “So, we’re not getting a lot of members in their 30s. Sometimes, the men in our group have retired from really big careers where they were in charge – doctors and CEOs. And they get to us, and they’re thinking, ‘Why are these women running everything?’”
They’re not running things so much as kibbitzing. When I was there, club members were mostly eating bagels and passing around copies of the trade paperbacks they’d self-published. There was a lot of friendly chatter and occasionally a little complaining about lousy sales.
“We used to be a social club,” the group’s publicist, Ilsa Manning, told me. “And so we had to have lunch. We met in restaurants, but it got too expensive, and then you know how restaurants are – they go out of business without telling you, and you show up for a meeting and the doors are locked.”
Now, the group meets at the Devonshire Senior Center. “You know, you want to be around people who do what you do,” a member named Bobbie Bennett told me on the day I joined them there. She’d written a book about being a widow and was planning a one-woman performance that detailed the group’s history at its upcoming centennial celebration in November.
The party, Manning said, was going to be “a cocktail evening-y thing,” but with mocktails because the group doesn’t usually imbibe when they get together.
Manning, a fragrance designer and mother of two by day, told me she’s found plenty of company among the 86 members of the Phoenix Writers Club.
“My friends who aren’t writers are always like, ‘Why are you still in that club?’ They don’t get it. I need to be able to talk to other writers about this crazy thing we’re doing.”
– Robrt L. Pela
READ IT: The Manda
“The personal is political,” as the second-wave feminist slogan goes. For Phoenix healer Patricia Federico Ruiz, that line might be amended to: “The personal is spiritual.” In her debut book The Manda: A Curandera’s Journey to Heal Herself, Her Community and Our World (As You Wish Publishing, $15.97), Federico Ruiz shares the experience of awakening to her spiritual gifts and her training in the Mesoamerican healing tradition of curanderismo, commonly described as Mexican folk medicine. Since training as a curandera, Federico Ruiz has ministered to more than 5,000 people as a sobadora (hands-on healer) and consejera (spiritual consultant). In The Manda, she shares how she has used ancient treatments and techniques to heal her own trauma and that of others. She also provides practical tools and encouragement for readers to heal themselves and, ultimately, the world around us. It’s heady stuff, but Federico Ruiz is a calm, grounding guide throughout the quick read.
– Leah LeMoine
