If you could dream into being your ideal world, what would it look like? Who would live there—and who would not? How would they work things out when they went awry?
In A Circle Outside, a novel just published by Eye Books, Linda Rosewood brings to life one such dream, one with deep roots in Santa Cruz County. Rosewood evokes an effort to create a lesbian feminist utopia in the redwoods. Set in the 1980s, Rosewood’s world will be ruefully familiar to anyone who remembers those dreams, those days, but her writing is so immersive that a reader does not need to be anchored in memory.
Rosewood’s book is in the tradition of feminist utopias that go back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 book, Herland—books that, as Rosewood explains, allow readers to imagine “a different way of living, where the sexes are equal, where the planet is revered, and where women don’t need to be afraid to walk out the front door.” But in A Circle Outside, she wanted to explore not just what that world could be but how women could resolve the conflicts that arise within the community, the conflicts women bring with them.
She explains that “where the conflict in another utopia might be the men arriving in a big battle or something, I put a conflict resolution ritual.” The characters in conflict “are able to talk to each other about what happened and why, what they’ve learned, and eventually get to a moment of grace.”
Speaking from Ireland, where she now lives, Rosewood explains that she did not reread feminist utopias while she was writing. Nor, despite her 30 years in Santa Cruz, did she intend the book to be memoir or celebratory nostalgia?
“I intentionally wanted to leave all that in my deep memory,” she explains. Instead, she says, “I wanted to show women right now: Here’s some stuff you can try tomorrow. This is how they have meetings. This is how they do magic. This is a conflict resolution ritual. Here’s how we live.”
Inspired by Starhawk as well as Z Budapest—who now lives in Santa Cruz—Rosewood’s characters call themselves witches. “I like that word,” she says, “because it is a little transgressive. And it has a lot of meanings—my favorite meaning is ‘to bend.’” As witches, they invent detailed, compelling rituals and practices not just to resolve conflict but to create a life pervaded with meaning.
Through ritual, they come to understand that “the thing you hate about yourself is actually the source of your strength.” In the book, Rosewood says, and in many spiritual traditions, “this is called ‘the shadow.’” Wren, one of the main characters whose point of view shapes the book, has an overbearing mother who undermines her art and predicts the kind of women Wren is attracted to. Ritual allows her to free herself from her real and internalized mother and become present with her work and her people in a new way.
These references to ritual make the book sound solemn, but it is often quite funny. “Feminism has a reputation for being dour,” Rosewood says, and she wanted to undermine that perception. With the fractured wisdom of the present, it would have been tempting to parody the ’80s, but Rosewood’s satirical moments are loving rather than dismissive. She says she stripped the sarcasm from an early draft of the book and at the same time tried “to leave a little bit on every page that was delightful.”
Among the delightful moments are the descriptions—not only of the rituals but of the redwoods, of women learning to build structures, Wren’s art, the erotic birthday massages, really their whole invented lives. Rosewood’s training as a science writer shines through at these moments, in the precision and significance of the detail.
It is impossible to engage with these lives without wondering who they will become, what they will carry into their future. Fortunately, Rosewood is working on a second and third book: “The next book is about the responsibilities of mothers, both mothers who give birth and who don’t give birth. And then the last one will be about the legacy of crones, focusing on what they want to leave behind.”
Linda Rosewood will read from A Circle Outside at “Wonder and Awe in the Redwoods,” 2–4pm March 22 at 239 High St., Santa Cruz.
Rosewood will also appear 3–4:30pm March 28 at Felton Public Library, 6121 Gushee St., Felton.
