Brenda
Ueland lived most of her life in Minneapolis, the city where I grew up. She
wrote and she taught writing and lived most of her life within a mile or two of
where I have lived most of mine…and though we were contemporaries, for a time,
I never met her.
I was still in my teens when she died, and 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 wrote as a columnist for local newspapers and magazines, as well as national publications like Harper’s, she taught writing at the YWCA and published, among other things, a memoir about her life growing up in Minneapolis, a book that bears the title: Me.
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 believe was a true expression of her authentic self…her own self, which she though of as her muse.
Brenda Ueland is a hero to me.
As a teacher of writing, she provided (and continues to provide) simple and profound guidance to authors and poets.
She taught her students to find their own voice and write from there.
Brenda encouraged 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, to whisper in the time of whispering.
She guided them to their true-selves, helping them to find the muse within themselves 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, the book she wrote was ahead of its time, and is the best treatise on writing I have ever been assigned.
