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Maureen Jones-Ryan

She: Tales of Womyn, 2005

21 Short Stories by Maureen Jones-Ryan
128 pp., 5 1/2" x 8 1/2",
perfect bound paperback
ISBN: 1-933126-20-5

To schedule Dr. Jones-Ryan for book discussion groups, readings,
lectures or seminars, send email to MJONESRYAN@AOL.COM .

• Author Profile - click here to expand profile

  • Tolstoy was talking as much about writers as he was about families
    when he said in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every
    unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Writers are all alike;
    made both happy and miserable by their writing. The author’s
    happiness is born of her writing and her unhappiness is spawned
    from the same womb.

    Dr. Maureen Jones-Ryan holds two doctorate degrees: an earned Ph.D.
    in the Psychology of Womyn and an honorary Litt.D. in Comparative
    World Literatures with a specialty in Womyn in Holy Literatures.
    Her profession is feminist psychology; her avocations are poetry and
    comparative world religions.

    Maureen is founder of the International Sexual Abuse and Domestic
    Violence Memorial; president of the Sexual Assault Recovery Institute;
    serves on several non-profit and for-profit boards of directors; Founder
    of and Spiritual Director for Universal Spirit Quest, a non-sectarian
    congregation; a political and social activist; a reader, writer, poet,
    gardener, and friend.

    She is currently working on a biography of Frida Kahlo. Pending
    publication is her book on sorology§, Thicker Than Blood: Friendships
    Between and Among Womyn.

    While her addresses are Arizona and Campbello Island, New Brunswick,
    her home is the Universe.

    § Sorology – from the Greek soro for sister and ology for the study of –
    is a newly coined word identifying the study of friendships between and
    among womyn; a subject that has been ignored, neglected, dismissed,
    and discredited over the centuries in literature, histories, religions,
    academics, psychology, philosophy, medicine, and sociology.

     

Review Comment:

In the field of psychology, the bar for literary achievement was set at a nearly super-human
level by the example of one of the earliest pioneers, Sigmund Freud. Other practitioners
have made respectable forays into the forest of literary work, most notably Irvin Yalom,
who has written clearly and perceptively about matters of psychology in research, textbooks,
and fiction – in the last, when justified by the glorious outcome, breaking history and resetting
its bones to allow the anachronistic context and bring the philosopher, Nietzsche, to the couch
for a therapy that delights and enlightens readers more than any historical formalist could imagine.

Maureen Jones-Ryan offers a similar level of challenge and achievement in the growing field of
feminist psychology. She mines twenty-five years of therapeutic engagement with womyn and
men and extracts powerful stories centered on a wide variety of themes encountered in the complex
and troubled lives of womyn searching for identities, running along the precarious edge between
inner reality and socially dictated roles, suffering and coping with the varieties of abuse visited on
womyn with frightening frequency. She also shows how strong the influence of spirituality can be
in the development of positive and negative outcomes for her characters, and how some negative
results can be seen, once viewed through the protagonist’s eyes, as ambivalent, if not wholly positive.

However, the power of these stories depends less on the narrow analysis of feminist psychology
or its caricature, political correctness, than on the expansive and generous humanity Jones-Ryan
brings to her stories. The absolute openness of her voice brings her readers into these stories
with such sure and delicate comfort that readers respond, without embarrassment, as strongly
as they feel their own lives. The stories suffuse the reader with their pathos as the readers infuse
themselves into the settings and minds conjured up, and their passion is released, often in tears,
as they take in and take on the telling burdens of the people they become. Such experiences are
sadly rare when literary works are driven by disengaging irony and experience is managed by
deconstruction. The world can be vicious and disappointing, but the danger and threat of extinction
does not prevent readers from recovering some of their lost humanity, their kinship, their sorority
through the experience of these engaging stories.
        - Back cover text by Wayne Allen Jones, Publisher, fractaledgepress

Contents - Click Table of Contents to see the story titles

• Table of Contents
  • Pyracantha                1
  • Janelle                        6
  • Margeena                10
  • Her Holiness          14
  • Frida                        18
  • Beth                          25
  • The Old Womyn    30
  • Faith                         31
  • Rosalind                  38
  • Mrs. Rousseau       45
  • Nora                         52
  • Polly                        61
  • Carnival                  65
  • The Offender          69
  • Moonpath               76
  • Aristotle                  80
  • Emily                       87
  • Maria                       92
  • Elephantina            97
  • Consummation    102
  • Olive                     106
  • Reader's Guide:
    Questions
    for Discussion
    Groups                 111

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Last modified: 09/30/07