Writers Women

By the time James Michener celebrated his 56th birthday, he had published 16 novels--and he was considered a late bloomer. By the time Sandra Benitez celebrated her 56th birthday earlier this year, she had published exactly one. Last month's release of her second novel, "Bitter Grounds" (Hyperion), continues her 17-year journey from creative writing courses in night school to a place among rising Latina novelists.

"With every mile it feels like the sky and trail are moving with us, as if we're walking in place. . . . Only when I look down at my dusty shoes and see that, yes, I am walking forward and the footprints behind are mine, can I believe we are actually moving."

Last fall when Cynthia Saunders was writing the pilot script for "Profiler"--NBC's new Saturday night dramatic series about a crime-solving female forensic psychologist--she immersed herself in a dark, fictional world inhabited by a serial killer. Then she'd stop and drive her son to water polo practice. Or help her daughter with college applications. But Saunders didn't mind. "Life is about interruptions," she says.

Spunky Nancy Drew might faint with fright--golden locks flying, high heels twisting, pearls askew--if she knew what was to befall her flapper girl self: The '90s Nancy is a university journalism major who drives a Mustang, colors her hair and thinks way too much about boys. "They have changed Nancy Drew in a frightening way," sniffed Beth Caswell, founder of the Nancy Drew Detective Club, "taking away her manners, her roadster, her white gloves."

Clutching dogeared books, shiny hardbacks and ballpoint pens, more than 100 people, young and old, packed a tiny room at the East Los Angeles Public Library to meet distinguished Chilean author Isabel Allende as she discussed her new book as part of the library's effort to promote reading of authors from multicultural backgrounds. After the 45-minute conversation Tuesday afternoon with the author, dozens stayed to shake her hand or request an autograph.

Helena Maria Viramontes does not look like the voice of the oppressed. Shopping at a Mexican market in Orange County, the author known for her book on migrant farm workers is fashionably, and strikingly, dressed in a black skirt and colorful shawl. But this is what you get when you cross a bookworm with a self-described Chicana activist.

Helena Maria Viramontes does not look like the voice of the oppressed. Shopping at a Mexican market in Orange County, the author known for her book on migrant farm workers is fashionably, and strikingly, dressed in a black skirt and colorful shawl. But this is what you get when you cross a bookworm with a self-described Chicana activist.

As a 7-year-old girl, Dorothy West read a poem celebrating the last leaf on a tree and its proud but solitary fate. Right away, little Dorothy made a plea: Don't let that happen to me. I don't want to be around after everyone I love is dead. Eighty-one years later, it's safe to say her wish didn't come true.

The message is unmistakable: The all-male, cigar-chomping photo of screenwriters in Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue; the bidding wars that erupt over certain scripts--usually written by a man named Eszterhas or Black; a recent issue of Variety that listed the top 30 "sizzling" screenwriters--only two of whom were women. You'd think "E.T.," "Thelma & Louise" and "Sleepless in Seattle," all of which were written by women, had never happened.