A question

When is waiting a form of refusal?

Some waiting is a politics. Some is a wound that has learned to look like hope. The weaving is not only patience.

• A Gossamer Life

  A wife in a polygamous Fujiwara marriage keeps a record of being left to wait. The diary is not a romance of patience. It is what neglect looks like from inside the house.

• I Go My Way with Pride

  An Umayyad princess-poet in Córdoba took lovers in public and wrote in her own name. The affair with Ibn Zaydūn burned, then tore. She is not his muse. She is the other poet.

• Chunhyang at Namwon

  Mongryong and Chunhyang pledge themselves. A magistrate later treats her body as something office can take. The pansori is a story of fidelity. It is also a story of coercion. Name the coercion.

• The Woman in the Deutzia Month

  Heian-kyō, 1003. A court woman writes of a prince in the third person, as if the life were already a tale. Waka go back and forth. The prince’s wife leaves. Moonlight is not the whole weather.

• Crypthand

  Anne Lister writes a life in code, and on Easter 1834 takes communion with Ann Walker as marriage. The diaries are private, sexual, economic, and sometimes controlling. She is not a series.