As we all know too well, women writers -- not to mention directors, producers and other creative women -- are up against it when it comes to making our voices heard.  As VIDA's 2010 edition of "The Count" laid bare, men review more books, more books by men are reviewed, and more bylines by men are featured in every single major literary publication in this country. Just before Christmas I picked up The New Yorker in the airport and happened to do a little counting myself -- two articles by women; 15 by men.   "19 bylines in this week's NYorker, 2 women," I tweeted. If it had been "17 women and 2 men, they'd call it a women's rag and shelve it next to the tampons." (Kudos to Anne Hays at the Ms. Magazine blog for her open letter of protest to the magazine a few weeks later.)  It's also awesome that women are only speak 30% of the time in movies, even though they buy 55% of the tickets.  

Awesome, as in, I am in awe of how totally NOT AWESOME that statistic is.

So today, for International Women's Day, SPEAK, ye She Writers!  Use this opportunity to PROMOTE THE HELL out of women writers, creators, directors and producers.  Review a book.  Tweet a link.  Facebook a friend.  Buy a ticket, comment on a blog, download a novel!  And please please don't forget to tell us about everything you do today to promote women who write and create by updating your status here and tweeting #SWSO (shewrites shoutout) all over the web.  

Break a sweat.  Spend an hour.  Spend five minutes.  Spend what you got and then some.  But don't forget to push back against the wall keeping our books, our plays, our films and our stories from getting the attention they deserve.  If enough of us keep pushing, it will come down.

I for one would like to kick things off on a serious note, with a goodbye.  

A friend of mine, the biographer Hazel Rowley, passed away last week.  She was brilliant, blunt, generous and fearless, and her work was renowned for its meticulous intelligence and its deep emotional understanding.  She covered a wide range of subjects: Richard Wright; Sartre and de Beauvoir; Christina Stead.  Her latest was a biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and when she died, she was readying to travel to her native Australia on tour.  In The Washington Post, Carolyn See wrote that "Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage," read like "a wonderful novel at times," and NPR's Fresh Air named the "crackling" biography one of the 10 Best Books of the year. (Visit NPR for an excerpt of the book, which will hook you for sure.)  In her honor, I am asking everyone I know to order a copy of "Franklin and Eleanor" today.  I know Hazel would have liked nothing better than to know her book had reached an audience as wide as her passionate ambition.  I feel so lucky to have known her, and luckier still to have this community with whom to share her words.  And it is with those words that I will leave you on this important day.

"Some people wonder what my books have in common. An Australian woman, an African-American man, the most notorious French couple in the twentieth century, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt? For those who have read all four, the thread is clear. They were courageous people, who all, in some way, felt 'outsiders' in society. Above all, they were passionate people who cared about the world and felt angry about its injustices. It is no coincidence that they were born around the turn of the century, within a few years of each other. They came of age at a time of revolutionary change and hope. They were all progressives. And then the Cold War descended on them, like a thick fog. I see parallels with my own lifetime. I came of age in the late 60s and 70s, a time of revolutionary change and hope. And then came the fog.

"My books are all, in their different ways, voyages of discovery. I write books to learn, to stretch my horizons. These voyages of mine are full of risk and passion. But each time they leave me inspired and enriched. And I hope to do the same for my readers."

--Hazel Rowley