First, she spoke of a kind of personal writing: Many years of writing letters to a friend, as well as many years of writing in her journal, along with poems written late at night, all by hand. Very satisfying, relieving the agonies of the struggle, but often slow-going. And in the case of her journal, sometimes with lapses of many years.

Another kind of writing, she explained, are all those grant proposals and reports and opinion pieces. All on the keyboard, first the typewriter, now the computer, and all done very fast and with great ease. Once she knows what her goals are, she noted, she can write a grant proposal quickly, with everything flowing from the goal or focus of the grant.

Now she has embarked on a new writing experience. She has just completed a book, Paradigm Found, which shares her experiences in building the Global Fund for Women so other people can do something similar. It’s a how-to book, in many ways. Writing this involved pulling together all those old proposals and reports and telling her story. This went very well, and Professor Murray was able to use activist sensibility to work through the book.

But now she‘s writing yet another book, this one on critical issues of international health for women. She feels this is a more difficult book because she’s used to writing as an activist and this is supposed to be “academic.” There are a lot of problems she needs to address, such as trafficking in girls and female infanticide, but there has been very little research on these topics. So now she feels stymied because she doesn’t have the material to write about it. How can she say anything academically sound if she just doesn’t have the data to prove it?

This is a difficult situation, and it’s very common for writer’s, especially to students who feel awkward about their sense of authority. I offered Professor Murray some suggestions for how to overcome this block, and in the next post I will share them with you.

But as for the conversation we had that night, it was filled with emotion. There’s a lot of pain and determination involved in struggling year after year in the face of such intractable problems as female genital mutilation. People in the audience asked how she was able to sustain herself. She explained that she had her own spiritual practice, such as walking on the beach, communing with nature, and writing poems late at night, and that refreshed her spirit. Emotions were palpable in the room. Rarely have we had a “How I Write” conversation that brought together such a combination of pain, emotions, determination, spirituality, and writing, and it was a pleasure and an honor for everyone to participate in such an exchange.