Women most certainly do walk. And they write about their walking, and their thinking, and have done for centuries.
(Kerri Andrews – Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, 2020.)
“Are you writing?” Athena asked, startling him.
“Not a lot,” Gregory admitted, which sounded better than Not at all. “I’ve been too drained.”
“Maybe not-writing is what’s draining you,” she said. “Maybe you’ve severed your energy source.”
(Jennifer Egan - The Candy House, 2022)
What I am reading
What do books and bots and boots have in common? That’s the question I’m pondering today through two, very different, books.
Kerri Andrews’ Wanderers: A History of Women Walking is this month’s Angling to Read book club choice. Following on from last month’s Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, Wanderers continues the conversation about what happens when women write about walking. There are chapters devoted to ten women writers including Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin, as well as contemporary writers like Cheryl Strayed, author of the memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. The beauty of Wanderers is the way you can dive into any chapter, you don’t need to follow a linear path from front to back. Follow any path you desire.
When it comes to wandering from the writing path, Jennifer Egan has carved an entirely new trail. Egan puts the creative into Creative Writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011 for her debut novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I read more than a decade ago and still reflect on today. (No-one can forget that chapter, written as a Powerpoint presentation.) Goon Squad embraces a multitude of creative techniques which tease out the entangled connections and narratives of a variety of characters. The Candy House expands on these writing methods to consider what happens when we invest time, trust, and desire in digital technologies. Her narrative style and the structure itself reflects the speed and connectivity of a changing world, and the consequences of automation. It insists we think about this machine-generated world, and the writing that occurs in it.
But, you may say1, why am I writing about The Candy House and Wanderers when there are a million other books about women and writing and the natural world that need to be read? Just as Virginia Woolf did, I will try to explain. Educators and writers (and a multitude of other groups) are buzzing right now with predictions and possible consequences from the rollout of the Chat GPT chatbot. I’m not an expert on AI by any stretch of the imagination, but Chat GPT is an AI system that can answer questions, write stories (well, parts of stories) and help generate ideas. Anyone can access it and results are immediate. So, I’m wondering, where does all this leave writing about being and becoming in the human and more than human world? What are the consequences of relying on a machine to represent experiences, or to build community?
Feminist writer Roxane Gay, tweeted her thoughts this week:
A student of UQ strategic communications scholar Elena Block posted some of her teacher’s insightful words to Linkedin this week:
Those words, “generosity and love” returned me to the Wanderers. When writing becomes automated, where does that leave women writers, particularly those who want to write about walking? Wanderers reveals that through their writing, women walkers have offered insights into the role walking played in “human creativity”.2 Anaïs Nin's writing about walking created an “imaginative community connected not only by their shared ideas but by pedestrianism.” 3 Through Andrews' book I have returned to Virginia Woolf's writing in my search for answers to the automation of words. For Woolf, says Andrews, writing “underpinned how she understood her place in the world.”4 And that, at least for now, is what so many women writers still want, and, perhaps, the world still needs.
I write this in mimicry to Virginia Woolf and the first sentence of her famous essay A Room of One’s Own.
Kerri Andrews, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, 2020. p.32.
Andrews, Wanderers. p.29.
Andrews, Wanderers. p. 27.
In my world in schools, the discourse of fear around ChatGPT can be overwhelming. Thank you for adding your thoughtful words to the conversation.