Brenda Ueland – Author and Hero

Brenda Ueland lived most of her life in Minneapolis, the city where I grew up. She wrote and she taught writing and lived within a mile or two of where I have lived most of my life…and though we were contemporaries, for a time, I never met her.

I was still in my teens when she died.

I was well into my forties before I knew who she was. From the moment I began to read her book: If You Want to Write I knew that I had found a mentor whose simple prose and honesty could guide me in the maturation of my own work.

Brenda taught writing at the YWCA, she published a memoir about her life growing up in Minneapolis, a book that bears the title: Me. She wrote as a columnist for local newspapers and magazines, as well as national publications like Harper’s.

She was born in Minneapolis at the end of the nineteenth century; she spent her twenties in New York City where she was connected to various movements in the arts, literature and politics. She was a proto-feminist and a revolutionary thinker. She came to all of that with a simple self-assuredness that was the defining characteristic of her public persona, and which I also believe was a true expression of her authentic self…as she called her muse.

Brenda is a hero to me.

As a teacher of writing, she provided (and continues to provide) simple and profound guidance to the author, and poet.

She teaches her students to find their own voice and write from there.

Brenda encourages her students to be themselves, to tell their stories with the written word as if they were speaking to their closest friend, to shout when they are shouting, and to whisper in the time of whispering.

She guided them to their true selves, so that they might write with authenticity…reminding her students that the reader will know if they are faking.

Brenda encouraged people to listen to themselves, as deeply and as interestedly as they might listen to any other, to become as familiar with the sound of their own voices as they are with the image of themselves they see in a mirror.

Her book on writing had been out of print for nearly forty years until, a few years after her death in the 1980’s, it went back into production and became a best seller.

Like Brenda herself, the book she wrote was ahead of its time, and is the best treatise on writing I have ever been assigned.