Hurricane Alice: A Feminist Review was a feminist journal edited by a volunteer group of academics, graduate students, university staff, and community members from 1983 to 1998. From its first issue in the spring of 1983 through the end of 1995, it was housed in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. [1] [2] The journal moved to Rhode Island College in 1996, where it continued publication until 1998. An outgrowth of second-wave feminism, Hurricane Alice sought to address local, regional, and national audiences by publishing a variety of feminist perspectives on matters of social, political, and cultural concern. [3] It included original essays, reviews, interviews, and creative writing by established and emerging writers, such as Jewelle Gomez, Susan Griffin, Alice Walker,and Nellie Wong, as well as original graphics by area artists. [2] [3] The editors were committed to a feminist understanding that all oppressions are connected and that coalitions across divides of race, class, sexuality, and geography are the path to liberation. [4] That commitment led to the journal's consistent attention to those interconnections, including publishing the work of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars and writers of color as well as that of lesbian and working-class women of all races. [4]
Hurricane Alice grew out of an after-theater discussion among Shirley Garner, Martha Roth, Madelon Sprengnether, and Regina (Jeanne) Strauchon of a play about the life of Willa Cather. [1] [3] [5] This performance, titled Willa, was developed by playwright Marisha Chamberlain in collaboration with members of Illusion Theater, which mounted the stage production. [3]
The four friends, all of whom went on to serve as original editors of the journal, mused about how a conversation such as theirs might find its way into print. [3] They discussed The New York Review of Books and the Women's Review of Books as models for the kind of venue they imagined, concluding that they wanted to address a wider range of issues, to feature more genres (e.g. fiction and art work), and to utilize a cheaper format than did either model. [1] At the end of the evening, they resolved to create a journal of their own. The Hurricane Alice Foundation was established as a 501c3 on 23 July 1984 and dissolved in 1998, after the journal relocated to Rhode Island. Funding for the journal was provided by a combination of subscriptions, donations, benefit readings, and grants for special issues. [1] [3] [6]
In the course of their initial conversation, Shirley Garner said she had long dreamed of such a journal and proposed the name Hurricane Alice as an allusion to the National Weather Service's mid-20th century policy of naming hurricanes after women. [1] [5] [6] In an interview with University of Minnesota History Professor Clarke Chambers, she explained, "I thought of it as turning things upside down, turning a habit of naming bad things after women into something good, and I thought of Alice because Geoffrey Chaucer's name for the Wife of Bath is Alice." [1] [3] Madelon added her association to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. [3] Jeanne offered her understanding of hurricanes as starting from a depression or low pressure area. [6] Although hurricanes are destructive, Jeanne explained, they could also be viewed as a creative force as the new replaced what had been destroyed or broken, which was perfectly in line with what the friends hoped to do as they explored women's issues. [1] [6] [7]
Jeanne Strauchon solicited the logo for Hurricane Alice from graphic designer Gail Swanlund. [1] This image appeared on the cover of each issue. Jeanne's statement describing its origin (paraphrased in "Name," above) was repeated on the masthead page from the journal's inauguration to its conclusion.
From 1983 through 2001, a total of eighty-two women—students, faculty members, and community members from both Minneapolis and Providence—served on the editorial staff of Hurricane Alice. Named here are the founding editors [8] and the first group of Rhode Island editors.
| Year | Volume & Issue | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| 1984 | 1.3 | Women and Work |
| 1985 | 3.1 | Ancestors, (M)others, and Others |
| 1986/1987 | 4.2 | Images of Women |
| 1987 | 4.3 | Reimagining Gender for Children's Literature |
| 1987 | 4.4 | Women and Film |
| 1988 | 5.1 | Women and Money |
| 1988 | 5.2 | Women and Violence |
| 1988 | 5.4 | Women and War |
| 1988 | 5.3 | A Celebration of Meridel Le Sueur |
| 1989 | 6.1 | Growing Up and Growing Old |
| 1989 | 6.2 | Adorning Our Bodies |
| 1989 | 6.3 | Visions and Transformations: Feminist Possibilities |
| 1989 | 6.4 | Reflecting on Our Sexualities |
| 1991 | 7.3 | Women at Play |
| 1992 | 8.4 | Women World Wide: Our Current Conditions |
| 1992 | 9.1 & 9.2 | Misogynies |
| 1993 | 9.4 | Common Politics |
| 1993 | 10.1 | Women in Land and Landscape |
| 1994 | 10.2 | Native Women Writers |
| 1994 | 10.3 | Danger and Nature—Feminism for a Small Planet |
Mother Journeys: Feminists Write about Mothering (Minneapolis: Spinsters Ink, 1994) grew out of a special issue of Hurricane Alice titled "Reimagining Gender for Children's Literature," vol. 4, no. 3, guest edited by Amy Sheldon. Sheldon's lead piece, "Bedtime Stories," prompted her to propose a collection of essays about feminist mothering, a topic largely absent from feminist literature and theory. Maureen Reddy and Martha Roth, both founding editors of Hurricane Alice, joined her as co-editors of this volume.
In addition to essays by Hurricane Alice editors Shirley Nelson Garner, Maureen T. Reddy, Judy Remington, Martha Roth, Amy Sheldon, and Madelon Sprengnether, Mother Journeys includes contributions by Linda P. Aaker, Judith Arcana, Martha Boesing, Sheila Fay Braithwaite, Sarah Bruckner, Judith Lerner Crawley, Rita Dove, Jewelle Gomez, Marilyn Hacker, Kimiko Hahn, Molly Hite, Linda Hogan, Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Linnea Johnson, Maxine Kumin, Molly Collins Layton, Jane Lazarre, Sherry Lee, Genny Lim, Kathryn S. March, Lynda Marin, Diane McPherson, Greta Hofmann Nemiroff, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, and Rose Stone. Nicole Hollander, Nancy Spero, and Vera B. Williams contributed cartoons and drawings.
Mother Journeys received the 1995 Minnesota Book Award in nonfiction. It also won the Susan B. Koppelman Award, from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) in 1995.
Hurricane Alice ceased publication after Volume 14 (1998) due to financial difficulties, as the costs of publishing rose and outpaced the editors' ability to raise funds. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) offered free consulting; the CLMP consultant helped the Rhode Island editors recognize the intractability of the economic bind and to decide to close the journal.
All fourteen volumes of Hurricane Alice, including links to individual articles, may be accessed at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Hurricane Alice is also available on microfilm in the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota Historical Society.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.
Boston Review is an American quarterly political and literary magazine. It publishes political, social, and historical analysis, literary and cultural criticism, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, both online and in print. Its signature form is a "forum", featuring a lead essay and several responses. Boston Review also publishes an imprint of books with MIT Press.
Diversicon is an annual speculative fiction convention held in July or August in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota area. Diversicon provides programming and social opportunities to encourage the multicultural, multimedia exploration and celebration of SF by those within and outside of the traditional SF community. Diversicon includes both live and posthumous guests. It is sponsored by SF Minnesota.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Linnea Johnson is an American poet, and feminist writer, winner of the inaugural Beatrice Hawley Award for The Chicago Home. Johnson was raised in Chicago, and lives and writes in Topeka, Kansas. She earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and an M.A. in writing and women's studies from Goddard College. She has hosted radio shows on WGLT-FM and on KRNU. Among her performance pieces are Swedish Christmas and a multi-media piece, Crazy Song. She studied papermaking at Carriage House Paper in Boston, and is founder and director of Red Stuga Studio and Espelunda 3 Productions, a Writing, Creativity, and Mentoring Consultancy also offering classes in creativity, poetry, prose, and play writing; Play, CD, and Staged Reading Productions. Her photographs can be found in Blatant Image, Nebraska Review, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Poetry Journal.
Sojourners for Truth and Justice was a radical civil rights organization led by African American women from 1951 to 1952. It was led by activists such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Shirley Graham Du Bois and Charlotta Bass.
Claire Kahane is an American writer, scholar and feminist literary critic. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University at Buffalo, where she taught from 1974 to 2000. Kahane is the author of Passions of the Voice, a study of narrative and "the strategies of hysteric discourse." Scholar Christine Wiesenthal, writing in the journal Victorian Review, wrote that "the confluence of feminist, narrative, and psychoanalytic theory" in Passions of the Voice was "an innovative and provocative mix." Kahane is also the co-editor, with Charles Bernheimer, of In Dora's Case, a collection of essays from a feminist perspective criticizing Sigmund Freud's efforts to "put words into Dora's mouth." Kahane completed her undergraduate education at the City College of New York and earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the fiction of Flannery O'Connor.
Toni McNaron, also known as Toni A. H. McNaron, is an American literary scholar. She is a professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota, and the author of several books, including Poisoned Ivy, about lesbophobic and homophobic workplace bullying in academia.
Mother Journeys: Feminists Write about Mothering is a collection of essays, poems, cartoons, and drawings edited by Maureen T. Reddy, Martha Roth, and Amy Sheldon and published by Spinsters Ink in 1994. The collection was among the first books to address the topic of mothering from a specifically feminist perspective at a time when many assumed "feminism and mothering were mutually incompatible".