Cover: “Mary,” by Erika Carter
“In A Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity: A Literary and Depth Psychological Perspective, Clara Oropeza explores the profound impact of mother-daughter relationships on our personal and creative lives. Oropeza illuminates how our mothers, both biological and literary, empower us to claim our place as artists in the world. This book is sure to spark important conversations about the unique challenges and opportunities faced by women of color in claiming our creative power and healing the mother wound.”
Coming in Spring 2025! Pre-order here.
Dear Reader,
Throughout history, being a woman has been a political act. Today is no different. Our rights continue to be stripped from us and the feminine undermined at the highest level. We must keep resisting. But how? From where do we draw strength? How does that ground our own resistance?
I wrote this book because I believe that we each internalize the psychological effects of living in a world that silences our matrilineal legacies through dominant patriarchal narratives, narratives that continue to devalue us and our contributions to society.
There is a long literary tradition that has advocated - and searched for - the feminine imagination. Perhaps Virginia Woolf said it best in her remark that “a woman writing thinks back to her mothers.” Gloria Anzaldúa put it this way: “My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman’s history of resistance.” My own investigation is connected to these and other female writers who have said this before me: women need to connect to the feminine imagination as a source of our own creativity and will.
In this book, I reflect on why this quest to find our feminine ancestral wisdom lives so deeply within, and how, once found, it helps us to develop our inner feminine authority. From this sensitivity, I include my own story about how tending to my maternal wound has been a well-spring of creativity, a place from which to ground my own resistance today.
The title of my book, A Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity, originates with the idea that I needed to follow my own matrilineal line, as in re-mapping where I have been, and how I got there. Re-mapping is also an expression of claiming and revealing contours of both real and imaginary lands, as I’ve come to understand female inheritance, histories, and legacies in my own terms. I was interested in the geography of charted and uncharted lands, crossings, and streams of stories that exists in the inner chambers of the self, awaiting discovery. I examine the experiences of a broad group of women as they too sought to position themselves uniquely in proximity to the harmful narratives around womanhood and creativity. This is why I have come to call this book a mother-map.
I hope A Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity: A Literary and Depth Psychological Perspective will offer you a path towards that connection within yourself.
With gratitude and love, Clara
Anais Nin: A Myth of Her Own
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“As a new-generation Nin scholar, Clara Oropeza expands Nin’s mythic territory into a feminist realm of self-realization beyond the strictures of literal male autobiography and logocentric Modernism. Informed by the academic field of self-life writing, Oropeza provocatively reexamines the diary as an exploratory genre in which Nin “slants” fact into fiction largely through her creative role as a literary trickster. This is a daring, fresh interpretation of Anaïs Nin’s artistic orientation.”
“Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own is more than a groundbreaking study of a major modernist author, for this book reveals a mythic method to rival that of T. S. Eliot on Joyce, one superbly crafted by Nin to re-make being as feminine, creative, flexibly narrative, embodied and trickster-like. Oropeza traces a new direction in Modernist studies that is Jungian, feminist, ecocritical and liberatory. This superb book is a must for all serious students of Modernism, women writers, life writing, feminist theory and psychoanalytical approaches to literature, as well as scholars of interdisciplinary breakthroughs to a new paradigm in the humanities.”
“Clara Oropeza’s Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own is a 114-page scholarly work on the neglected yet key modernist literary figure Anaïs Nin. The book’s aim is to re-vision Nin’s work as a diarist and writer of fiction within the modernist canon. Drawing on a broad spectrum of recent scholarship (feminist, modernist and myth studies, psychology), the book will appeal to many readers.”