found ''the comradeship of books and writing human beings." 7 In her eight months of "freed time" at Stanford, she completed "Hey Sailor, What Ship?", wrote "O Yes," and finished the first third of "Tell Me a Riddle." She describes this period in both personal and social terms in the passage from First Drafts, Last Drafts and the excerpt from Silences, both included here.
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Olsen continued to struggle with the circumstances imposing silence in her own writing life: the need to work for pay; the interruptions occasioned by family life; the loss of the habit of writing, of the feeling of being "peopled" by her characters. She seems to have suffered, too, from what she calls in Silences, quoting Louise Bogan, "The knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life"; "woman, economic, perfectionist causesall inextricably intertwined," she writes (9). "Requa I," published in 1970, was her first story in almost ten years, and its linguistic density suggests something of the perfectionist labor that created it. A stylistically complex work set in the depression era, "Requa" narrates a thirteen-year-old boy's slow recovery from the devastating loss of his mother. Though "Requa" is literally the American-Indian place-name of the North Pacific town where the boy, Stevie, comes to live with his clumsily nurturant uncle, a worker in a junkyard, the word also connotes a requiem, a commemoration of the dispossessed and forgotten. Written, as Blanche Gelfant puts it, "after long silence," "Requa" implies, in its simultaneous difficulty and beauty of form, an order won from disorder. Its final coherence, wrought from a chaos of fragments, blank spaces, catalogues of junkyard sounds and implements, ultimately draws a parallel, as Gelfant suggests, between "a child's renewed will to live" and "an artist's recovered power to write." 8
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Silence, or rather, the reclamation of lives and words from silence, from silencing, becomes Olsen's greatest theme, enacted in the rhythms of her life, documented in her essays on the lives, work, and words of others. Yonnondio: From the Thirties was reclaimed from silence, pieced together in 1972-73 from manuscripts written in the thirties, by the older writer, "in arduous partnership" with "that long ago young writer." 9 The novelactually the opening section of what
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