Interview with Judith Barrington on the Publication of Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs

Mimi Wheatwind: Virginia’s Apple is your eighth book, published in your eightieth year! Trying to Be an Honest Woman was published in 1985, followed by another poetry book, History and Geography. In 1997, you gave us THE book on memoir, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. In 2000, your memoir Lifesaving came out to much acclaim (Lambda Literary Award and finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). Three more books of poetry followed: Horses and the Human Soul, The Conversation, and Long Love: New and Selected Poems, along with more awards and honors. You have not only enriched our lives with your literary work, you have also devoted a good deal of your life to supporting women writers with Flight of the Mind, a summer writing workshop for women that ran for seventeen years, and then with Soapstone, which, for many years offered a writing retreat for women in the Oregon Coast Range and now has been wonderfully reconceived to celebrate women writers. I want readers to know about them. They transformed so many lives.

Judith Barrington: Thank you, Mimi. I can’t tell you how astonished I am to have a new book just after turning eighty.

Mimi: The title chapter, “Virginia’s Apple,” is full of many landmarks visited in the UK over your adult years, including the monuments, former homes, and gravestones of important women in literary and feminist history. It’s also about the growing love between you and your soulmate, Ruth Gundle. You describe times with her as “brighter, clearer, more profound,” but also, in the early years, the “creeping awareness of how different you are” and how it will be a long time before you each “come to understand that [y]our different sensibilities could be a gift that gave each of [you] another set of eyes with which to look at the world.” The metaphor of an apple from a tree, plucked by Ruth and offered to you from Virginia Woolf’s garden, is a crisp, sweet moment, but one which caused you to be “embarrassed and irritated.” Can you say more about how your mutual love of literature may have helped to bridge the differences between you and Ruth and helped you through some of the difficult times in your early life together?

Judith: We’ve been together forty-five years now, something we couldn’t have imagined that day at Monk’s House in 1982. Certainly, our love of literature was a bond even through rough periods. Also, feminist activism. But probably most of all, simply our love and respect for one another. This is a subject better suited to poetry than prose. I recently came across Jane Hirshfield’s “For What Binds Us” and sent it to Ruth. Hirshfield says it beautifully.

Mimi: Was it your decision or the publisher’s to name your memoir Virginia’s Apple?

Judith: I chose the title. To me, it reverberates throughout the book in various ways. The apple is obviously a potent symbol—the story of Eve was one of the first that feminists rewrote or perhaps reinterpreted. But I was thinking specifically of Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple, a brilliant book about lesbian literature starting with Sappho. Judy wrote: “…we can reach our long-held apple, the one Sappho held back on the highest branch for us. This is a profoundly feminist and a profoundly poetic and a profoundly Lesbian idea.”

In the story that is titled “Virginia’s Apple,” Ruth and I are searching for places in England connected to the women we admire from the first wave of feminism. At that time, in the early eighties, that history was just being written by feminist historians, and we were devouring it. Places were seldom marked. Monk’s House, for example, was not yet open to the public. Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral didn’t mention that she was a writer. As you said, the incident with the apple from Virginia Woolf’s garden is about our relationship. My life with Ruth is one of the threads that runs through the stories; it’s another reason I chose Virginia’s Apple for the title. And finally, I loved having Virginia in the title. She pops up throughout the book.

Mimi: Can you say something about how significant Virginia Woolf’s writing (including her diaries and letters) was to you? When did you first become aware of Woolf as a writer? Did you read her work in school, or out of curiosity because she was a “famous neighbor?” Did you read her diaries and letters after reading her novels and essays?

Judith: Virginia Woolf is one of the most important writers of my life—writing life and other life. (The “Flight of the Mind” writing workshop name comes from one of her essays.) I had read some of her personal writings in the diaries and letters even before I read Adrienne Rich’s “Women and Honor.” The Rich essay and Woolf’s work pushed and encouraged me to confront and write about difficult subjects. As you know, Virginia and a small group of friends formed a memoir group in which she wrote about being sexually abused by her half-brother. In the diary she wrote of almost wishing she hadn’t done it—it was so hard.

I did not read Woolf’s work in school; I doubt we read any women novelists. I had long ago left home when I realized she had lived in Rodmell, a village in Sussex, not far from where I grew up. From childhood on, I had a strong love of the landscape of Sussex, particularly the Sussex Downs, where I rode my pony. Virginia also loved those Downs and walked on them while composing her work in her head. She was not a “famous neighbor” when I lived there; it was only with the Second Wave that she was reinstated as a major literary figure—and it was American feminist literary critics who brought her back to us. By the time I was moving in feminist circles, she was much revered as a novelist and feminist theorist. It was then that I started reading her work.

Olivia DelGandio: In Lifesaving, you describe being “frozen by the spare room window” after hearing of your parents’ death. I felt similarly after hearing about the death of a loved one, and when I think back on that morning, my body remembers exactly how I was feeling in that moment. What was it like to go back to recreate it in writing? Towards the end of Lifesaving, you talk about the understanding that tragedy and loss happen quickly and unexpectedly, something people don’t see clearly when they haven’t experienced grief. How does writing about your grief interact with this idea? How does this connect to your flatmates getting you a dog after your parents’ death as you write about in Virginia’s Apple?

Judith: It was hard to go back there, to write about that moment, even though it was decades later. In Virginia’s Apple, I describe how I became physically ill as well as thrown totally off balance writing the end to Lifesaving. But grief is part of life—and I have been drawn to write stories from my life, so it’s inevitable that they will include that story and the long aftermath of grief. Writing the story of my parents’ deaths opened me up to more grief—mine and other people’s, as well as other people’s attempts at being sympathetic, as in “The Condolence Dog.” I wasn’t looking for catharsis. I write because I love sentences, the sound of language, the rhythms of both poetry and prose. And, as Mark Doty said, “We make art to make meaning out of our mortality, to counteract its brutality with beauty. Every creative act is an act of consolation for our transience, for our despair about our transience.” By beauty, he doesn’t mean surface beauty but something more like profound truth artfully expressed.

Mimi: In one of your essays describing a night of feminist graffiti messages on billboards, you briefly allude to driving past a building in London named for the Esperanto Society, and mention that your grandfather translated Shakespeare into Esperanto. This is an impressive tidbit of information! Can you say more about how your linguistic curiosity might be connected to this relative or how your later accomplishments might be linked to other people in your family who influenced your literary and poetic talents?

Judith: My maternal grandfather, Daniel Lambert, whom I never knew, was an Esperanto enthusiast (as well as a lawyer and amateur astrologer), an eccentric character in an otherwise conventional family. He translated works of Shakespeare into Esperanto; when I once visited the Esperanto Society the people there were excited to meet me. Perhaps I inherited an interest in languages from him; I always enjoyed learning French and Spanish at school, and have been eternally grateful for having to take Latin.

In my family, it was my mother’s side that influenced me, from this grandfather down to my mother, who was musically talented and very word-oriented. She was a big reader and, like my sister, a regular master of crosswords. My sister, Ruth Rolt, chose music as her profession and studied at the Royal College of Music, where she became a Bach specialist on the piano and later devoted herself to chamber music, playing harpsichord and fortepiano. She provided for me a model of a woman making an artistic career her priority. I admired her for winning out against our father, who thought it ridiculously impractical.

Olivia: There are stories that appear in multiple places of your books, both poetry and prose. For example, in “Villanelles for a Drowned Parent,” you mention the cupboard under the stairs, which is also mentioned in Lifesaving. How do you see your books existing in relationship to each other, as opposed to each book standing as an individual work?

Judith: I want to write good stories, but a memoir isn’t just the subject matter. It’s the language, the angle it’s told from, how it’s structured, what the writer makes of it, etc. It’s meant to give the reader pleasure in the reading and also, ideally, a window into a world that’s new to them and hopefully, too, a flash of self-recognition. The same events can appear in many different stories and, indeed, in poetry as well.

Lifesaving is focused on the three years after my parents drowned when I lived in Spain; it ends just after I moved to Oregon when I was beginning to deal with the grief I’d denied for such a long time. “Nicolette” in Virginia’s Apple was written during the time I was working on Lifesaving but I didn’t include it, partly because people were still alive for whom it would have been distressing, but mainly because I thought it would distract from the story I was trying to tell—it’s such a punch of a story itself, I worried that it would introduce another major theme. I wanted Lifesaving to be an accumulation of small stories ruminating on grief and loss, building—as it turned out—to my terror of getting close to the reality of my parents climbing down the ladder into the night sea.

The strongest narrative thread in Virginia’s Apple is about being a lesbian before the women’s movement and during the early years, and later. Being a lesbian is alluded to in Lifesaving but never developed, just as my grief over my parents’ drowning pulses beneath the surface in Virginia’s Apple but is not developed.

I’d be happy to know that someone especially enjoyed reading Lifesaving and Virginia’s Apple together. They pair well! And why not throw in Long Love, my most recent poetry book?

Mimi: I love the video for Long Love with photos and hearing a poem from each of your books in your voice. And I know that people have been loving the photos you’ve been posting on instagram, @jbarrington77, with short clips from Virginia’s Apple.

Mimi Wheatwind and Olivia DelGandio conducted this interview throughout spring and summer 2024.

Marie-Elise Wheatwind has published poetry, interviews, articles, flash prose and fiction in various journals and magazines. She holds MA degrees from UC Berkeley [English], University of New Mexico [Special Education], and University of Arizona [Library Science]. Some of her work has garnered awards, including a PEN Syndicated Fiction prize. She was a regular contributor to the Women’s Review of Books for three decades. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Olivia DelGandio is a socially engaged artist, writer, and educator based in Portland, OR. Her work manifests in various forms, including a queer newspaper, memory-based installations, and intergenerational collaborations. She received a BA in Sociology and Gender Studies from New College of Florida and holds an MFA in Art + Social Practice from Portland State University.

Judith Barrington is a celebrated writer who has published five poetry collections, two poetry chapbooks, a prizewinning memoir, and a bestselling text on writing literary memoir. Her work includes Long Love: New and Selected Poems and Lifesaving: A Memoir. A passionate feminist activist since the early 1970s, first in London and then in Portland, Oregon, Barrington co-founded The Flight of the Mind Writing Workshops for women and is one of the founders of Soapstone, an organization supporting women writers. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Lambda Literary Award and The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the art of the memoir. Her latest work, Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, is set for release in September 2024.