Remembering Bobbie Louise Hawkins

The New York Times marked Bobbie Louise Hawkins's death with a tribute recognizing her legacy in prose and poetry. The only daughter of a young mother in Abilene, Texas, with just a high school diploma (and an endless appetite for books) Hawkins played a significant role in the Beat Generation. According to Sam Roberts at NYT, her "work reverberated with her hardscrabble Texas childhood and her belated liberation from an overbearing husband." From there:

Equipped with only a high school education but, as a voracious reader, fortified with a copious vocabulary, Ms. Hawkins left her literary imprint on a cultural landscape dominated by men and as a mentor to a generation of female writers.

“People are absolutely willing to let a woman be a ‘muse,’ and that has to be the worst job description in the world,” she said in an interview in 2011 with the poet and novelist Barbara Henning. “Being a muse means you sit someplace and watch this other person have all the fun.”

Ms. Hawkins, who grew up as an attentive listener to what she called her family’s “unimprovable” oral histories, wrote more than 20 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and impressionist monologues, which she delivered in her West Texas drawl while touring with the folk singer Rosalie Sorrelsand the singer and guitarist Terry Garthwaite, all billed simply as “Three Women.”

“Hawkins half-consciously wants to set down the kind of women’s history usually heard only over kitchen tables when the menfolk aren’t around,” Don Shewey wrote in The Village Voice Literary Supplement in 1983, “and she thoroughly succeeds, whether the subject is how to cook liver and onions, geriatric sex or sexual harassment at work.”

Ms. Hawkins’s writing, a stream of consciousness that blended poetry and prose, rang true — because it often was.

“When at one point I started looking back through my stories,” she told Ms. Henning, “I thought, I have almost never written a fictional line in my life. Your mind gets on something and you just meander along with it. I don’t think that’s fiction. It’s all autobiography.”

Read more at the New York Times.