from the Introduction by Lizbeth Goodman:

A few of the pieces were written as poems or part of poetic sequences: Jackie Kay's, Dorothea Smartt's Kim Morrissey's. While the language is poetic - marked by the rhythms and internal rhymes and assonances of free verse and inflected by the language patterns of the authors (who come, in turn,  from Scotland, the Cribbean and the Canadian Prairies) - the work has a theatrical impact when read or performed. The voices of the work demand to be heard; the stories they tell are both familiar and strange; the images conjured in the words and metaphors of the language are ripe for visualization and physicalization.....

Kim Morrissey's linked poems from the sequence called Poems For Men Who Dream of Lolita deal much more directly with sexuality and with the identity of a young girl. in this work, though, the voice of female guidance is missing altogether; at first this girl is not even aware of what is happening to her is unusual .... The poems are disturbing, vivid, intense. The verse is spare, direct, intended to hurt. There is no looking away from the image the poems create: the girl who looks in the mirror and cannot find herself, but knows she has no choices, that she will be left, that she has become the 'sore' he 'picked red, never wanting it to heal.' Morrissey takes on the mother's role, giving voice to the character so that she might heal. As readers and viewers of this work in performance we become the community helping the healing to continue.

Lizbeth Goodman, Director of the Institute for New Media Performance Research and Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Surrey, has carefully selected the pieces around the notion of 'real' and 'mythic' women. Her comprehensive introduction illustrates the diversity of form and content in the work, explores the relationship between gender and power, and considers ways in which women are looked at and look at themselves, both in writing and in performance.

Mythic Women/Real Women provides a wealth of performance pieces for women as well as being a provocative and fascinating primer for women's studies and theatre studies.

larger photograph of book cover & list of contributors