Women make language - Marilynne Robinson

If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry. -Willa Cather, My Antonia

Suzanne Maggio-Hucek has inspired me to focus on women this month, in honor of Women's History Month. And so, a month of women, some you will know, others you won't, all women. All 500 words (ish) or less. Let's go, we're already a day late.

Marilynne Robinson is not a name I knew until recently when her novel, Housekeeping, was assigned reading in my writing course. I'm only three-quarters through it, and already I've put on real shoes and eyebrows and run back to buy everything she's ever written, including her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead.

There are only a few people I've read who had the same impact on me, spurring a reading marathon of everything they wrote: Canadian novelist Carol Shields was one after I read her book, Unless, and the spectacularly brilliant Richard Powers was the other after reading The Time of Our Singing, which ranks at the top of my "best books ever" list. Well, of course as a child, there was Astrid Lundgren, too, due to my Pippi adoration/fixation/obsession.