This was NOT the plan, but obviously, it’s pre-full-moon-in Scorpio, Beltane is incoming AND it’s the anniversary of my mumma’s death + so we laugh LOUDLY in the face of the ‘plans’ that I did have, because, well…I’m BACK IN PARIS + well, it’s not the WORST THING that could happen, is it?!!!What if this is ALL for the plot?! + by the ‘plot’ I mean all of THIS *gesticulates wildly with both hands at EVERYTHING* the experiences + choices + decisions we make + take? It’s why I ALWAYS have a notebook + pen + I write EVERYTHING down. NOTE: For the stationery geeks - MY PEOPLE - the notebook is a cherry red, leather-bound Aspinal of London situation because yes, I’m a bougie bitch (+ it was also a gift from a friend so I didn’t pay for it! Ha!) + my pen of choice is USUALLY a fountain pen (I collect them, I have MANY) but I’ve also had enough red-ink-induced accidents while travelling to now know the only way forward when on the move is a uniball gel impact - red - 1.0 nib. Loves, if you want the stationery porn, I can do THIS ALL MOTHER-LOVING DAY!I digress.I write because it’s HOW I remember.There’s a very specific kind of knowing that only becomes available to me at least, when I write by hand, with an inky pen on thirsty paper. + it’s a knowing that doesn’t, + has NEVER, lived in my head, in fact it lives somewhere WAY older than the concept of thought + I suspect, because you’re here, + you read my words, that you know EXACTLY what I mean by that. In 1405, there was a woman named Christine de Pizan. She had spent years reading what men had written about women.The philosophers, poets, clerics, scholars, entire centuries of allllll-the-dudes putting their version of women’s nature, their version of women’s minds, their version of women’s worth into language + calling it ‘truth’ meant that our woman, Christine, reached, as she writes herself, a state of mother-loving ‘self-hatred’. She had read SO much of it that she’d began to believe that she + her entire sex were, as the texts insisted, ‘deficient’ by nature. Morally suspect. Intellectually inferior. Made, essentially, ‘wrong’. FYI: THIS is what the sustained, authoritative act of being written about INCORRECTLY will do, + has done to women, for entire millenia. It gets into your/my/our psyche + it starts to feel like fact. Now, it was at this point that Christine met who she called Reason, Rectitude + Justice. (A potential thrash-y guitar-girl-band name if EVER I heard one!) They came to her, in her Parisian study, + they told her to stop, put down those books by dudes, pick up her pen/quill + build something different. So she did. She wrote The Book of the City of Ladies (I’m holding my dog-earred, pages turned down battered book in the picture at the top of this feature) a city conjured entirely in language + populated with woman that HER history had overlooked, diminished, +/or refused to see. Scholars, warriors, artists, saints + poets. Women who had made things + been uncredited. Women who had said things + been unheard. She gave them ALL an address. She built them a city + she put their names on the entrance. It took her a year. She was forty-one. She was a widow supporting three children + her mother on her writing income alone, which makes her, as far as we know, the first professional woman writer in European history. “I realised that God has bestowed such great graces on the female sex that perhaps the women of past ages have been obscured by the ignorance or malice of those who write.”- Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405 In 1405, to suggest that the problem was NOT women (IMAGINE THAT!) + was actually the men WRITING women, to relocate the ‘error’ from the female + back to the male pen was a bold-ass, brilliant + audacious move -we love you for that, Christine! - it was an act of total structural inversion. She looked at centuries of authoritative text about women + said:“Babes, this is NOT TRUE. This is NOT who we are. Let me SHOW you who we REALLY are.” (NOT verbatim, but you get the idea, right?) And… SHE WROTE WHO WOMEN REALLY WERE INTO EXISTENCE. Five hundred + seventy years later, a French-Algerian philosopher named Hélène Cixous wrote an essay called The Laugh of the Medusa. It is one of THE most electric pieces of writing I have EVER encountered. Part feminist theory, part prose/poem, part mother-loving battle cry which essentially, is the very best reciepe for the kind of writing that I will always LOVE. She wrote it in 1975, the year my own mother was twenty-six, which on the anniversary of her death, I weirdly can’t stop thinking about: “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.”- Hélène Cixous The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975 Read that again. …From which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies… Cixous is NOT making a gentle suggestion about how we should all ‘journal’ (no shade, you KNOW I LOVE to journal!) or that women should find a creative outlet as a ‘nice’ hobby, she’s saying that the separation of women - US - from language, from the authority to name our own experience, to write + respell our own reality, to put our own version of the world on record - is an act of violence. It operates in exactly the same way as all the other acts of violence committed against women’s bodies, their autonomy + their right to self-determination. That it’s, in fact, the same mother-loving thing. She wrote it in 1975, I’m writing to you in 2026 + the essay is still true.This is WHY I’ve created + curated WRITE YOURSELF IN + it’s WHY I want YOU to join me. The City of Ladies is a city outside of time + exists in the same place that it’s always existed: in the act of reading + receiving it. Which means that every woman who opens the book, exists in the City of Ladies. Every woman who encounters it, steps through the door that de Pizan left open for us in 1405 + finds herself standing in a room full of women who wrote, performed, refused, reclaimed + insisted. Who did the thing they were told they could not do + WROTE THEMSELVES IN. Natalie Clifford Barney held her Friday salons at 20 rue Jacob for sixty years. In OUR City of Ladies, she is still holding those salons. Sylvia Beach published the book the entire English-speaking world said could not be published. In OUR City of Ladies, she is still publishing books that she’s told cannot be published. Janet Flanner filed her Paris Letter for fifty years with such precision that the whole weight of a city is held in her sentences. In OUR City of Ladies, she is still filing those letters for publication. The city is outside of time because the WRITING is outside of time. Because what a woman puts on the page when she says: I was here, I thought this, I felt this, this is what I know, doesn’t end when she does. It accumulates + becomes an entire lineage. Their books + art paper the walls of the city of ladies, they sit on the shelves of the SATURDAY CLUB salon, a place + space that women - YOU - can walk into, centuries later + realise that you are NOT doing this alone. Since being here, in THIS Paris, in person, I’ve remembered.I’ve remembered that I’m not starting this from scratch. None of us are. The city is already built, there’s an entire literary + arts lineage of women who are showing us the way, my SATURDAY CLUB salons already exists in time + space + YOUR name is always going to be on the list. The ONLY question is are you/me/we going to show up + claim our place?Are you going to WRITE YOURSELF IN? We begin on May 23rd, (twenty women are already inside!) + for five months, while the planet Venus is in her Evening Star phase, we will gather, read, write - + FYI: we will write TOGETHER EVERY WEEK in our Writer’s Room - + we’ll remember, with women from across four millennia as our companions AND our provocation. For all the details go to: https://www.lisalister.com/saturdayclubwyi …………………………………….BOTTOM OF THE PAGE LINK LOVE…………………………………… I WRITE. I DRAW. I TELL STORIES.You can find them HERE. SATURDAY CLUBA seasonal series of online + in person salons + experiences - part Venusian initiation, part women’s secret society, part book + film club, part remembering your power + magic.New season, WRITE YOURSELF IN, starts May 23rd. Join us HERE.THE SHE POWER COLLECTIVEA space for us to gather + be in process, and progress, TOGETHER.I share monthly online salons, weekly astrology, cosmic intel, rhythmic intelligence, card pulls, heart riffs + rituals + it’s the only way to work with me1 to 1. Join us HERE. :: SOURCE-ED is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts + support my work, please consider becoming a subscriber. Currently, all posts are created with love + are free AND…if you’re called, a paid subscription IS available + as an independent creatrix I VERY much appreciate the financial love! Get full access to :: SOURCE-ED at sassylisalister.substack.com/subscribe
