Female Writers in the Canon

Coming back to writing while in prison, I decided I needed to get caught up on my reading. Someone told me a writer is what they read. I had read Faulkner my Senior year of high school and Ernest Hemingway in college. I had given up writing when faced with those Great Writers. But I knew of other writers - Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Styron, Brett Easton Ellis - even if I had never read them. Prison gave me time to read them and others. 

I know enough to know the canon of Great Writers has been attacked and may even be in disrepute, but there were great writers. Do you really want to say Tolstoy or F. Scott Fitzgerald  or Thomas Mann did not know how to write? They did and we can still learn the art of fiction from them.

But they are not only one we can learn from. Have you read Toni Morrison or Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood or Rachel Cusk or Donna Tartt or Collette? 

Being in prison in New Jersey gave me a new perspective on Indiana, on my Indiana stories. Reading foreign writers, Black American writers, and female writers gave me a different perspective on my own writing - what was possible as far as content and style.

I'm finding The Paris Review's Feminize Your Canon an interesting read this afternoon.