Laundry Lines: A Memoir in Stories and Poems (Inanna Memoir Series)

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Women's Studies. Ann Elizabeth Carson looks to the past from the perspective of a contemporary feminist in her exploration of similarities between the women's coded language and that used by those working on the Underground Railway. The positioning of laundry on a line and particular quilted patterns were used to convey, for instance, whether a man/woman or a travel route was safe. Ann uses her skill as a long-time psychotherapist and writer to elucidate the role of women's hidden language and how we communicate a rich subterranean world of emotion and knowledge. LAUNDRY LINES: A MEMOIR in Stories and Poems is about the imperative to tell our stories for our survival, the complex emotional inheritance and painful undertow in families, the slow reconciliation with the blows and beauties meted out by life that comes with age, and the deep sensual salve offered by surrender to nature.