Born and raised in the Great Lakes region, living now in the Pacific Northwest, Judith Arcana is a writer of poems, stories, essays and books, and a longtime scholar, teacher and activist.
Praised by writers & readers, reviewers and community leaders, Judith’s work is published in many journals, online and on paper. Her latest collections are a poetry chapbook (4th Period English), a signed/numbered edition five-poem broadside (POEMS) and a chapbook manuscript in an envelope (Family Business). Her most recent full-length book is What if your mother, a collection of poems and monologues examining a constellation of motherhood themes rarely offered with such richness, including abortion, adoption, miscarriage and the contemporary biotechnology of childbirth.
She is the author of two classic prose books about motherhood, both published in the US and the UK: Our Mothers' Daughters – one of the earliest feminist analyses of the mother/daughter relationship; and Every Mother's Son – the first feminist book about the mother/son relationship published in the USA.
Judith is also the author of Grace Paley's Life Stories, A Literary Biography. Studying Grace and knowing her for many years gave Judith what she was wanting when she wrote, in that book’s Preface: “Where in literature are reflections of my experience, my sensibilities, my world view, my politics? When I read and write about John Keats, or D.H. Lawrence, or Beowulf, I am ranging far off, studying the history and possibilities of a distant ‘other.’ But when I study she-who-is-most-like-me, I learn what has been, and might be, possible for myself.”
Judith Arcana was a Jane, a member of the Chicago underground service that helped more than eleven thousand women and girls get safe illegal abortions before the US Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in January of 1973.
She is a skilled performer who has worked with audiences in the US, Britain and Canada, often visiting campus and community groups to talk about reproductive justice and perform her powerful writing. Judith appears in the documentary video Jane: An Abortion Service by Nell Lundy & Kate Kirtz, and is quoted (as Deborah) in The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan.
A longtime teacher of literature, writing and women’s studies, Judith has a PhD in Literature, an MA in Women's Studies, an Urban Preceptorship in Preventive Medicine and a BA in English. She’s taught in high schools, colleges, libraries, living rooms and other places, including the Parents School, Women’s Liberation School, Illinois State Women’s Reformatory and Washington County Jail in Oregon.
Her first and last teaching jobs were for students at Niles Township High School in Illinois (her own alma mater, now gone), and Union Graduate School, a progressive university-without-walls program (now morphed into a more conventional program at Union Institute and University). At Niles, Judith taught English, Creative Writing and Humanities, the latter as part of an experimental team of students and teachers. At Union, where she was also a dean, Judith advised interdisciplinary doctoral candidates, led residential seminars, and was founding director of the Union's Center for Women in Washington DC.
Her writing has been supported by the Puffin Foundation, Rockefeller Archive Center, Institute for Anarchist Studies, Union's doctoral faculty, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and Oregon Literary Arts – and fostered by residencies at Soapstone and MilePost5 in Oregon, the Montana Artists Refuge, Ragdale in Illinois, the Mesa Refuge in California and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico.
Judith’s poems, stories and essays have been published widely for more than thirty years, in print and online: in literary magazines (including 13th Moon, Prairie Schooner, 5AM, Calyx, ZYZZYVA, Passager, Witness, Bridges, Nimrod), political, cultural and medical journals (including Conscience, Reproductive Health Matters, Affilia, Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights Newsletter, VietNow), newspapers (including the Oregonian, Chicago Sun-Times, Hurricane Alice, Portland Alliance) and academic journals (including Studies in Short Fiction, Journal of Ritual Studies, D.H. Lawrence Journal); as well as anthologies (including Family Reunion, Fresh Water, A Fierce Brightness, Mother Journeys, Nice Jewish Erotica) and textbooks (Women’s Lives and Thinking Women). See WRITING for more info and links.
She began to study and read the Tarot in 1970, the same year she got fired from her teaching job, joined the underground abortion service, and drove from Chicago to the Pacific coast and back on a political/philosophical road trip - a quest with many stops, occasional passengers, and a probably-obligatory flat tire in the desert. 1970 was definitively a watershed year in Judith's life.
In the early nineteen-seventies, I had two experiences that turned me into a public person, put me out in front of an audience. I’d not been looking for or anticipating that change, though you could say (and I guess I would now) that teaching is public speaking; teaching is certainly performance for an audience - and I’d done that for six years already.
In 1970 I was fired from my teaching job (despite tenure), accused of unorthodox methods and attitudes. That decision by the school board catapulted two other teachers and me into a startlingly bright spotlight for eight months. Then, in 1972, I was one of seven Janes arrested by the Chicago police; that pushed me again - and more widely - into the public sphere, and ratcheted up the level of my sociopolitical education by many notches.
Those experiences were part of a great wave. Teachers were being fired (and worse) all over the USA, accused of various kinds of disrespect for tradition and law. Many thousands of people were taking street-level action to protest and counteract the effects of bad law and bad policy. A notable chunk of that action was around reproductive justice and women’s rights; these things were front-page news. Everyone was learning from the courage and intelligence of the civil rights movement, which had likewise fostered the current phase of the anti-war movement.
By the middle of the nineteen-seventies, I was no longer a high school teacher. I was talking & teaching about women’s health and sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth and nursing, abortion, adoption and other motherhood themes. I had become a mother and was learning what it means to actually make a person, consciously accepting responsibility for that tender human life. I’d started work on my first book and was teaching women’s studies at local colleges (all over the country, women were doing the necessary research and inventing courses) as well as writing workshops in my living room.
Writing (doing it and teaching about it) was moving into the center of my life. I saw that the making and meaning of literature would be my trade. My first two books came out in the late seventies and early eighties. Though I went to graduate school from 1984 to 1989 and definitely paid attention in class, I did manage to publish some poems and stories in those years.
Along with all that came performance, an important, much-loved part of my life. I do a lot of reading and talking in bookstores, libraries, college lecture halls, schoolrooms and living rooms. I write, I publish what I write, and I perform what I write. Both online and in the realm of books-as-objects (paper, ink, binding, design), I work in the theater of writing, wanting my words to rise from page and screen with the music of spoken language. At the same time, I’ve grown fierce about the relationship between art and action, the connection of poetry to politics.
I know it’s dicey for anybody/everybody, certainly for intellectuals, artists and politicals, to say we care about meaning and truth, about the value and use of literature, but I do. I’m a woman who began to be conscious at the end of the sixties, and began to grow into myself in the seventies; before that time, though I was intelligent and competent, I didn’t really know who I was – or what the world was. More important, I had no idea I didn’t know those things. Luckily, I was educated by powerful social movements created by people struggling for liberation and against injustice. Like Oliver Wendell Holmes (of all people) — through great good fortune, in youth my heart was touched with fire.