Composing a Life

project the light of my childhood through the shadows of recent months. But when I finished, I was able to say, I am a writer, just as Joan could affirm that she is a dancer.
    New beginnings don’t happen overnight. I didn’t resign from Amherst in the heat of the moment; I took my time in leaving, returning to teach for a year and a half after the new administration was in place. I watched the discontents and turbulence of that first year and became increasingly proud of my own work and freed from the desire to think well of the institution.
    I think I brought Amherst to a turning point in its treatment of women. At the end of my last year in the dean’s office, I set up a minimum agenda to address the problem of sexism, which was eventually adopted in its entirety by the board. The first step in the agenda was to create several positions for senior women so that Amherst would not constantly be isolating and rejecting vulnerable young women of talent and so that there could be a critical mass of women faculty, for young teachers need secure role models as much as students do. The agenda also included the appointment of additional women to the board and the abolition of fraternities. That spring, I finally found a statistical key to demonstrating at least one aspect of the exploitation of women on the faculty. This finding led to the formation of an investigatory committee, which wrote eloquently about the ways in which women had been placed in contradictory situations and their “lives made unnecessarily and unduly difficult.” Today, Amherst is a better place for women faculty and students.
    When I left, it was to take a leave without pay to experiment with a writing career, until I found a combination of teaching and writing that would make sense at George Mason University. The identity of a writer is a frightening one—you know that you must work in solitude, without a clear defining context and without a reassuring response for months at a time. The prospect daunted me in high school, but the identity of writer remains truest to my sense of self. Given that I am a writer, as Joan is a dancer, I have put on other roles: linguist and anthropologist, educational planner and academic dean, and always, as part of my nurturing, teacher and lecturer. Writing is the most portable form of creativity, sometimes a vocation and sometimes an avocation. Each time some other engagement has been interrupted, I have gone back to clean paper. Otherwise I would probably be trapped today in narrow expertise, working in some prestigious and arid university department. Writing has been the constancy through which I have reinvented myself after every uprooting.
    Often continuity is visible only in retrospect. When this project started, Ellen expected to work out of her home indefinitely, but in 1988 she became president of a new organization called the Better Homes Foundation, created to raise money and fund demonstration projects to help homeless families. “This year has been an incredible culmination of a transition that started at the Bunting five years ago. There’s a process that occurs that you don’t even know is going on, but with my interests this is the opportunity of my life work-wise. I made a decision not to be institutionally affiliated, because being in an institution means you can’t run your own life. But this is an organization I’m building myself, with people that have the same belief systems—wonderful people—and I’m going to run this thing, which is like a dream come true. I don’t know how successful we’re going to be, but at the minimum we’ll be able to operate as a technical-assistance group. I always had the fantasy as a little kid that I wanted to be effective in some way, to be able to change things. It’s very exciting. We have the opportunity to make this grow together. It makes me feel as if I’m free. I feel grounded but also disoriented.” Ellen laughed, looking ruefully at her blue jeans and the dog at her feet. “It’s a new work life that I’ve created. I’ll have to get some clothes—and what about Suzie, she’ll have a nervous breakdown!”
    When Johnnetta’s husband left Amherst, accompanied by the new woman in his life, Johnnetta was working as associate provost at U. Mass., trying to develop a new general-education program that would be adopted by the university faculty. It wasn’t. Furthermore, the provost she had worked with, one of her principal mentors and