Zora and Women Artists Day

The blog for WomenArts has a thoughtful post noting the 75th anniversary of the WPA programs and the third annual Support Women Artists Now (SWAN) Day, coming up on March 27. Martha Richards notes the daunting obstacles that women artists faced then and now: "We put in long hours for under-staffed non-profits or juggle several part-time jobs along with childcare duties," and still often get overlooked in surveys of the workforce and the economy.

    Richards highlights WPA writers Eudora Welty, whose experiences as a publicity assistant and photographer fed her first short stories, and Zora Neale Hurston, a main figure in Soul of a People (see my 8/18/09 post). Hurston's great gift, said Alice Walker, was showing her characters "relishing the pleasure of each other's loquacious and bodacious company." Richards then looks forward another 75 years with the hope that women artists will continue to celebrate each other's bodacious company, in good times and bad.
    Watch their website and Facebook page for SWAN Day plans and opportunities.

1930s culture coming to a screen near you...

This Saturday the 26th I'll be at the National Book Festival talking with historian Douglas Brinkley about the WPA writers and what they found in 1930s America. Doug generously wrote the foreword for Soul of a People and appears in the film. After our talk in the History tent we'll head to the C-SPAN tent for a call-in show around 11 am.

This Saturday is also Museum Day, and for that Smithsonian magazine offers a coupon for free admission at hundreds of museums across the United States. Find a participating museum near you, and then find out if they're showing Soul of a People that day (some are). Then let us know what you think about the Writers' Project as an experiment in democracy.

Morris Dickstein has a fine essay in the current American Scholar about 1930s American culture, including the WPA Writers' Project and how they portrayed "an America under siege, gazing inward, taking an inventory of itself 150 years after becoming a nation." As if to underscore its significance, the National Book Foundation's poll this week, choosing the best National Book Award fiction author ever, includes three former WPA writers (Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty and John Cheever) among its six finalists.