Susan Griffin

In this famously provocative cornerstone of feminist literature, Susan Griffin explores the identification of women with the earth--both as sustenance for humanity and as victim of male rage. Starting from Plato’s fateful division of the world into spirit and matter, her analysis of how patriarchal Western philosophy and religion have used language and science to bolster their power over both women and nature is brilliant and persuasive, coming alive in poetic prose. Griffin draws on an astonishing range of sources--from timbering manuals to medical texts to Scripture and classical literature--in showing how destructive has been the impulse to disembody the human soul, and how the long separated might once more be rejoined. Poet Adrienne Rich callsWoman and Nature "perhaps the most extraordinary nonfiction work to have merged from the matrix of contemporary female consciousness--a fusion of patriarchal science, ecology, female history and feminism, written by a poet who has created a new form for her vision. ...The book has the impact of a great film or a fresco; yet it is intimately personal, touching to the quick of woman’s experience.”

The Roaring Inside Her

Woman and Nature

A Catalogue of Their Virtues

The Book of the Courtesans

Explores the connections between the subordination of women and Western views of nature, religion, philosophy, and science

Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society

The Eros of Everyday Life

In an elegant but contemporary voice, award-winning author Susan Griffin breaks down the creative process step-by-step, guiding the reader through a practical course in how to begin and end a work of literature, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry, or prose The distinguished author of more than twenty-two books, many award-winning, Susan Griffin distills daily wisdom garnered from more than five decades teaching creative writing and editing manuscripts, as well as from her own writing. This collection of brief but ultimately pithy chapters designed to help beginning writers get started also guides experienced writers through blocks and difficulties of all kinds. Organized according to a practical timeline, Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something. elucidates the process of writing from beginning to end, presenting an approach that is similar to the practice of meditation as it encourages and enlarges the mind’s intrinsic capacity for creativity. An autobiographical account, a sometimes humorous, at times moving essay called “How I Learned to Write” is threaded throughout the book.

A Writers Guide

Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something.

After 30 years of publishing poetry and nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee Susan Griffin demonstrates once again why she is a major force in American letters. In poems ranging from the comic to the tragic, from the personal to the politically strategic, Griffin honors an essential element of domesticity in her writing as she celebrates motherhood, sex, the body, and the human role in Nature.

Selected & New Poems 1967-1998

Bending Home

Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something

Discusses how private life--family history, childhood experience, gender and sexuality, private aspiration and public image--assume a role in the causes and effects of war.

The Private Life of War

A Chorus of Stones

Explores the roots of rape and its expressions in today's male-dominated society, reveals how the feminist movement has altered people's ideas about the cry of rape, and reflects upon rape as an ever-present reality in a woman's consciousness

Rape, the Politics of Consciousness

Pornography and Silence

An unprecedented, provocative look at the extraordinary world of the great courtesans, from Veronica Franco, who graced the palazzi of sixteenth-century Venice, and Madame de Pompadour, the arbiter of all things fashionable at Versailles, to La Belle Otero of the Grand Boulevards of fin-de-siecle Paris, who frequently sported jewel-encrusted garters, and Marion Davies who took Hollywood by storm. The Book of the Courtesans enticingly illustrates the intricacies of their lavish lifestyles and their incredible life stories and further reveals how these cunning women seized the opportunity to become the West's first female liberators, free to choose their own lovers and command remarkable respect. 'A manifesto for flirtation. After all, the qualities that the courtesans exploited to achieve influence and riches are still those that are most likely to ensnare a man today. I intend to give a copy to all my singleton friends' Rowan Pelling, Mail on Sunday 'A eulogy to femininity, an essay on what sets certain women apart. Surrender to it: The Book of the Courtesans is as seductive as the women it describes' Lucy Moore, Sunday Times

What does is it mean to be a citizen of the United States? Susan Griffin’s provocative investigation of that question takes us from the Declaration of Independence to the Iraq War, with many stops in between. Her conclusion: democracy is nothing less than a revolution of consciousness, and the revolution has just begun.

On Being an American Citizen

Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy

Scarlett's Story is an emotional, gripping historical novel, about one woman's fight to overcome adversity, and the courage, hope and bravery of the resistance fighters in occupied France during WW2. Perfect for fans of Victoria Hislop and Dinah Jeffries.﻿ It is the summer of 1918 and the Spanish Flu epidemic hits East Sussex, leaving Scarlett Cunningham an orphan at the age of nine. Determined to escape her roots, Scarlett yearns for a better kind of life, while hiding her strange gift of second sight from the seeing eyes of the world. Scarlett chooses wealth over love when shipping tycoon Eric Johnson offers her a way out of her bleak existence. However, the outbreak of WW2 brings a chance meeting with Eric's son, Frankie. Scarlett recognises the mysterious stranger she so often sees in her dreams, and falls hopelessly in love. As war rages across Europe, Scarlett denies her feelings, sending RAF pilot Frankie away believing she doesn't love him. After completing a mission over the city of Stuttgart, Frankie's Spitfire develops engine trouble on the way back to base and he crashes over enemy-occupied France. While Scarlett waits anxiously for news of Frankie, can the bravery of the resistance fighters save his life in a country where Hitler's spies are everywhere?

The Sequel to The Amethyst Necklace

Scarlett's Story

A brilliant and provocative exploration of the interconnection of private life and the large-scale horrors of war and devastation. A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and a winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award, Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones is an extraordinary reevaluation of history that explores the links between individual lives and catastrophic, world-altering violence. One of the most acclaimed and poetic voices of contemporary American feminism, Griffin delves into the perspective of those whose personal relationships and family histories were profoundly influenced by war and its often secret mechanisms: the bomb-maker and the bombing victim, the soldier and the pacifist, the grand architects who were shaped by personal experience and in turn reshaped the world. Declaring that “each solitary story belongs to a larger story”—and beginning with the brutal and heartbreaking circumstances of her own childhood—Griffin examines how the subtle dynamics of parenthood, childhood, and marriage interweave with the monumental violence of global conflict. She proffers a bold and powerful new understanding of the psychology of war through illuminating glimpses into the personal lives of Ernest Hemingway, Mahatma Gandhi, Heinrich Himmler, British officer Sir Hugh Trenchard, and other historic figures—as well as the munitions workers at Oak Ridge, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, and other humbler yet indispensible witnesses to history.

Culture's Revenge Against Nature

Richard Cookson

Anthony J. Culyer

Ole F. Norheim

Health inequalities blight lives, generate enormous costs, and exist everywhere. This book is the definitive all-in-one guide for anyone who wishes to learn about, commission, and use distributional cost-effectiveness analysis to promote both equity and efficiency in health and healthcare.

Quantifying Health Equity Impacts and Trade-Offs

Distributional Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

"Susan Griffin has come to be regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the women's movement. But even her most devoted readers will be surprised by the range and richness of work in Made from this Earth, the first anthology of her writing"--Back cover.

An Anthology of Writings

Made from this Earth

In this boldly intimate and intelligent blend of personal memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Susan Griffin profoundly illuminates our understanding of illness. She explores its physical, emotional, spiritual, and social aspects, revealing how it magnifies our yearning for connection and reconciliation. Griffin begins with a gripping account of her own harrowing experiences with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), a potentially life-threatening illness that has been misconstrued and marginalized through the label "psychosomatic." Faced with terrifying bouts of fatigue, pain, and diminished thinking, the shame of illness, and the difficulty of being told you are "not really ill," she was driven to understand how early childhood loss made her susceptible to disease. Alongside her own story, Griffin weaves in her fascinating interpretation of the story of Marie du Plessis, popularized as the fictional Camille, an eighteenth-century courtesan whose young life was taken by tuberculosis. In the old story, Griffin finds contemporary themes of "money, bills, creditors, class, social standing, who is acceptable and who not, who is to be protected and who abandoned." In our current economy, she sees "how to be sick can impoverish, how poverty increases the misery of sickness, and how the implicit violence of this process wounds the soul as well as the body." Griffin insists that we must tell our stories to maintain our own integrity and authority, so that the sources of suffering become visible and validated. She writes passionately of a society where we are all cared for through "the rootedness of our connections. How the wound of being allowed to suffer points to a need to meet at the deepest level, to make an exchange at the nadir of life and death, the giving and taking which will weave a more spacious fabric of existence, communitas, community." Her views of the larger problems of illness and society are deeply illuminating.

A Journey Into the Shadows

What Her Body Thought

A masterwork of feminist ideology, brilliantly exposing pornography as the antithesis of free expression and the enemy of liberty In this powerful and devastating critique, poet, philosopher, and feminist Susan Griffin exposes the inherent psychological horrors of pornography. Griffin argues that, rather than encouraging expression, pornographic images and the philosophies that support them actually stifle freedoms through the dehumanization, subjugation, and degradation of female subjects. The pornographic mindset, Griffin contends, is akin to racism in that it causes dangerous schisms in society and promotes sexual regression, fear, and hatred. This violent rift in Western culture is explored by examining the lives of six notable individuals across two centuries: Franz Marc, the Marquis de Sade, Kate Chopin, Lawrence Singleton, Anne Frank, and Marilyn Monroe. The result is an extraordinary new approach to evaluating sexual health and the parameters of erotic imagination. Griffin reveals pornography as “not a love of the life of the body, but a fear of bodily knowledge, and a desire to silence Eros.”

The class divide during Edwardian Britain is at the heart of this dramatic story of Beth Hamilton-Green and her fight for freedom.Fighting to break free from her overbearing and manipulative parents, who are intent on her marrying the man of their choice, Beth is pressured towards leading a life devoid of any freedom that fits in with the social standing of the era. In contrast Beth's wayward brother James has no such restrictions on the way he leads his life and is free to sow his wild oats with whomever he pleases.Determined not to succumb to her parents' demands Beth befriends the headstrong Suffragette, Alice Sparks, and finds herself drawn into the fight for the emancipation of women. Alice's declaration of undying love for Beth throws her into confusion just as the handsome and mysterious Finn McGuiness appears in her life. But the real fight has only just begun, as Beth becomes embroiled in a powerful struggle for her own survival, where her beliefs and emotions are threatened and the resulting events lead to dramatic consequences. A passionate story of love, a woman's fight for equality in the early twentieth century and friendships pushed to the very limits of endurance.

Susan Griffin

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