Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide
August 2001
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
by Alice Walker
- The term "womanist prose" is on the book's cover. What do you think the phrase means? How is it different from "women's prose" or "feminist prose"? How does the material on pages xi and xii help to interpret the phrase?
- Here is some biographical information about Alice Walker:
http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~melindaj/bio.html. Does the biographical material help you to better understand the book? (If you follow the links, you'll find other information about her.)
- Which of the essays do you find most personally revealing? Why?
- Which essay touches you most deeply? Why?
- Which essay did you find most difficult to read, or hard to connect with? Why?
- On page 249 (in the Harvest/HBJ edition, in the essay "From an Interview") Alice writes this about her most creative moments: "...It seems to me that all of my poems...are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing dispair, and stand again in the sunlight. Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before." When do your most creative moments occur? What are the conditions of creativity in your life?
- In the essay, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," Alice searches for and finds the creativity of the women who shaped her life and her spirit. About her mother, she says (p. 240), "...No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories." Is this true for you? In what sense does your creativity arise from your mother's or your grandmother's creativity?
- What other books by Alice Walker have you read? Which do you like best? Why? If we wanted to read more, which books would you recommend?