Among this region’s proudest claims to fame is bookishness. Specifically, the astounding number of writers who have developed world-changing literature here.
A good chunk of the credit for that goes to Nancy Nordhoff, who founded the Hedgebrook retreat for women writers 38 years ago on Whidbey Island. Nordhoff died Jan. 7, at age 93. But her impact will reverberate as long as people read.
Since Nordhoff opened the retreat in 1988, with a single writer for whom she cooked dinner, an array of literary lights — from Dorothy Allison to Jacqueline Woodson, Gloria Steinem to Ursula K. LeGuin — have hopped on the ferry at Mukilteo to hunker down in Hedgebrook’s fairy-tale cottages and do their work. Or sometimes, just to muse.
That was part of Nordhoff’s plan, giving women the space to mentally meander, to take risks. She’d purchased the 30-acre farm as a home. But wandering its forest, fields and trails, Nordhoff began to wonder if there might be a better use.
“What really matters to you?” a friend had asked, nudging her toward an idea. “Who are you really?”
Nordhoff was an adventurer, a pilot and an avid baseball fan — all things that made her an iconoclast in the world of privilege she’d been born to. She could have continued with the proper, ladies-who-lunch style of philanthropy expected of her. But Nordhoff had been shaped by attending Mount Holyoke, the women’s college, and moved by the book “Silences,” by Tillie Olsen, which describes the way so many women find reasons to keep quiet.
“I could identify with that,” Nordhoff told an interviewer, “because I was in a kind of: ‘This is what you should do, Nancy, be a good girl and do it for 50 years.’ ”
That was never going to work for Nordhoff, so in late middle age she took a leap. The result is Hedgebrook, a place designed solely to help women writers nurture their voices on the page — free of charge. Because self-sufficiency and independence were important to its founder, each cottage would have its own wood stove; residents who’d never lived outside an apartment building would learn to build fires to keep themselves warm. The symbolism — patiently tending the flames, rebuilding and trying again when they sputtered out — was inescapable.
Hedgebrook welcomed any kind of writer — novelists and poets, screenwriters and journalists, ranging in age from 18 to 85. Most were accustomed to caring for their families, shunting creative work to the side. But at Hedgebrook, nothing would be asked of them — no cooking for others, no cleaning or chores — nothing aside from focusing on their own ideas.
To date, Nordhoff’s vision has benefited some 2,000 writers across the globe, who have generated thousands of literary works, influencing millions. The world is better for it.
