445 Stories and Never Boosted

This will make 446

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

Not one of my 445 entries into Medium has ever been boosted, cauterized — or whatever that is — or celebrated in any way. I’ve never been chosen as a top writer in anything, and my earnings have plummeted since the beginning of the year. Am I discouraged? Hell, no. I’m a darned good writer and always have been. I never got on Medium to make more money than I pay to belong. I don’t write to win prizes or recognition. I never have.

My essays in college were all in defenses of women characters, whether that was what the professor was going to like or not. I defended the Wife of Bath; I defended Hamlet’s mother; I defended the mother in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. So much of the literature we studied in high school and college was boy-becomes-man or middle aged man goes through mid-life crisis that sometimes it was easy to forget there were women who wrote. But where women would of course be interested in literature about men (not necessarily), what men would want to read about women’s lives? What could possibly be interesting to men in those stories?

When I was invited to write a paper for the Oxford Round Table at Oxford University in Oxford, England, I knew I could do a ton of research and write some scholarly, dry paper. But the topic was “Women in Literature,” and I had the perfect author already…