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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us May 21, 2005 On Faith The best literature is often founded upon personal experience Scott Dalgarno One spring evening, ten years ago, I went over to Stevenson Union to hear the writer Tillie Olsen. I felt like a young cellist going for the first time to hear Pablo Casals. For my money, she was as good a writer as the century that was coming to close had produced. I took along a first edition of her only novel, “Yonnondio,” hoping she might sign it. After a spirited reading she took her place behind a table next to her daughter, Kathie (a Rogue Valley writer herself). When my turn came, Ms. Olsen took my book, opened to a page near the end, and with no warning, began crossing out several lines with a pen. She then added lines she insisted belonged in the book. I was a bit dumbfounded. Kathie looked up at me, nervously, “Eh, this will make your book more valuable.” Tillie Olsen’s story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” is my very favorite American short story. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s a first-person narrative of a woman whose first child, a daughter, is born during the depression of the 1930s. “She was a miracle to me,” the mother remembers. But when the baby was 8 months old there was a sudden change. “I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs for whom she was no miracle at all.” There follows a series of choices no mother would want to make, but sometimes has to. Word comes to her that a social worker believes that the child, grown to young womanhood, “needs help.” The mother, trying at once to be utterly honest and still hold on to her dignity, launches into a monologue — a sincere attempt to understand for herself how her daughter came to be the young woman she has become. It’s a stunning account. The mother comes round to saying the following about her troubled daughter: “So all that is in her will not bloom; in how many does it? There is still enough to live by.” Born in 1912 or 1913, Tillie Olsen was the second oldest of six children. Like so many women of her era she found herself burdened with the care of younger siblings. She never found much time for herself, a fact that would haunt most of her life. She never went to college, nor did she even finish high school, but she was an exceptional student, one of only a few in her working-class neighborhood invited to attend an academic high school, where an exceptional teacher introduced her to Shakespeare, and the poems of Thomas Hardy, a life-long favorite. The teacher also made sure she was present when Carl Sandburg came to Omaha to read his work. A child of politically active parents, Olsen was chosen to present roses to a visiting dignitary, Eugene V. Debs. He put her on his lap. She long remembered his passion for the poor and his artful use of language. Between 1936 and 1959 she worked at a variety of jobs — waitress, shaker in a laundry, transcriber in a dairy equipment company, capper of mayonnaise jars, secretary, “Kelly Girl” — and, against tremendous odds, tried to keep her writing alive. She copied passages from books she wanted but didn’t have the money to buy and tacked them on the wall by the kitchen sink for inspiration. She seized every moment she could to write: “Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough.” Kathie, in a lovely piece printed this week in “Joy” Magazine, wrote of her mother, “When we were all asleep she would sit down at her typewriter and write. She wrote beautiful, aching, unusual stories … all night, and then make oatmeal for us in the morning and head off to work.” She was the maternal version of Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch. Yet she insisted that the demands of mothering did not fracture her selfhood. Being female and an artist are complementary, not contradictory, she often said. Children and art “are different aspects of your being,” “I Stand Here Ironing” won Olsen a Stanford University Creative Writing Fellowship in 1955-56, even though the lack of a college degree had made her technically ineligible for admission At an initial screening intended to eliminate most of the applicants, one of the reviewers for the competition, after reading a few pages, tossed it in the wastebasket in disgust, muttering, “’Can you imagine? That woman went on for pages just about ironing,” However, one person on the screening committee with a working-class background happened to overhear the remark and asked to see the piece; he was so moved by it that he delivered it personally to Wallace Stegner, the director of the program. After reading the manuscript, Stegner said: “’Well, we have to have her.”’ After personally editing my copy of “Yonnondio,” I asked Ms. Olsen to inscribe it for my then six-year-old daughter, which she did. I won’t tell you the personal remarks she included, but she ended her message with the following wish: “May it be a changed world from what is in this book when you read it, and the best in you came to be.” Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Ashland’s First Presbyterian Church . 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