Jane Goodall, UN Messenger of Peace

The question that keeps Jane Goodall traveling 300 days a year, losing her luggage twice in just two days, is this: “[If] a huge amount of the world's problem isn't malice, it's ignorance. The question is, have we got time for illumination?" She travels with a simple message, the same one that inspires my own environmental work: The time for action is now, each individual can make a difference, and, yes, there is reason for hope.

Edna Lewis, Chef and Cookbook Author

In Miss Lewis’s cooking, you can almost hear the stream trickling past the grassy banks where she picked watercress as a girl, you can see the wild strawberries dancing in the meadow. Ever since she left Freetown, Virginia, a small farming community founded by her grandparents, freed slaves, she cooked her way home, finding ways to make food taste as it used to—“before chemicals and hybrid seed and plastic packaging.”

Jan Karon, Novelist

Whenever my job made me frustrated, I thought about Jan Karon, author of the bestselling Mitford novels, who quit advertising at 51 to write. It takes only a minute to quit, a little longer to pack and resettle, but to trade a Mercedes for a rusted Toyota, to give up city sophistication for a mountain cottage, to sit at the computer and pray that something, anything, would happen—making that decision took years of courage-gathering. Jan’s voice quieted to a hush when she told me, “I saw it as an enormous looming shift. It was a true leap of faith.”

Sue Miller, Novelist

A writer’s process is always intriguing. When I interviewed Sue Miler, she claimed she wasn’t musical, despite the presence of a piano in the guest wing. Words were clearly her instrument. They echoed so strongly in her mind that she said needed absolute quiet when she writes. “Sometimes a fly will come into my studio,” she told me, “and I'll lose an hour waiting for it to come close enough to swat.”

Madeleine L’Engle, Novelist and Teacher

At Victoria, I edited the work of a series of Writers-in-Residence—Judith Thurman, Susan Minot, Diane Ackerman, Jan Karon and Madeleine L’Engle. During Madeline’s year-long tenure, she invited me into her writing class. After dinner with the nuns at the St. Hilda’s House on W. 113th St., she taught a room full of women, few of them writers, how to access their imaginations. “Don't think, write,” she said. “Think before, think after, but when you're writing, write.”

Jane Smiley, Dickens Biographer

Sometimes it takes a novelist to tackle the biography of a legend like Dickens. “Often he seemed to be seized by the characters,” she said. “He would say the words, make the gestures.” As Dickens wrote about social inequities, his activism increased. As his characters achieved love and intimacy, he became increasingly frustrated with his complacent, conventional wife. Other biographers, she felt, “hadn't understood the way in which Dickens’s novels were alive for him.”

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Pulitzer
Prize-Winning Historian

In her 30s, after ten years of child-rearing, Laurel began to wonder “whether housewives had a history.” She decided to venture into an archival wilderness, where she told me, “I was lucky to find two sentences about women.” With the persistence of a pioneer, she spun what she calls “shards of information” into groundbreaking books, including A Midwife's Tale, Good Wives, and Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.