Five thousand years after the Sumerians developed the first written language, sixty-eight years after American women gained the right to vote, and four years after Geraldine Ferraro was nominated for vice-president, Chicago has its first anthology of work by local women writers, Naming the Daytime Moon.
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Imagine the stories waitresses could tell–their own as well as those they’ve overheard. Imagine legions of waitresses, their ambition suddenly freed: Don’t insult me, buddy, or I’ll immortalize you.
I threaten to transfer you to an
Between reception and the mail room.
my words
–“i am Cassandra”
Funded by a $3,740 CityArts grant from the Chicago Office of Fine Arts, Naming the Daytime Moon was only a year in the making. Because of grant stipulations, the book had to be compiled, edited, typeset, and printed before the end of 1987. “Probably the most difficult part of the project was putting out the call for submissions,” Parson says. The project’s editors (Parson, Jorjet Harper, Paula Berg, Lillian Anguiano, and Beatriz Badikian) wanted the call to reach the greatest possible number of women writers–published or not, well-known or unknown. Parson says, “We wanted to have the effect of saying to women, ‘Your work is important,’ even if we didn’t publish their piece.”
