By Keiko Ohnuma
Grieving from the death of a mother to whom
she had always been “uniquely connected,” Darlene
Chandler Bassett found herself utterly determined to
attend a workshop she had signed up for at Ghost
Ranch in Abiquiu.
It was July 2000, and the retired executive from
Los Angeles was still making the transition to an
early retirement after a lifetime on the go. “I didn’t
know why, but I was compelled to go,” she says of
the gathering, which she notes with a roll of the eyes
was for “women in midlife.”
Yet, it was in the haunting landscape of Abiquiu,
in the safe company of women, that Bassett
encountered the next major influence in her life,
someone whose previous 20 years had been the
polar opposite of her own.
Whereas Bassett had worked 80-hour weeks for
financier and arts patron Eli Broad, while also
serving as board chairman for the California
Abortion Rights League, Mary Johnson had been a
nun in the order of Mother Teresa. She had not
wanted to come to the workshop. And she told the
women her greatest need was to write a memoir of
her work with Mother Teresa, which her current
circumstances made impossible.
Bassett, who had a copy of Virginia Woolf’s
artistic manifesto “A Room of Her Own” under her
chair, had a life-changing moment. “It was kind of
like a visitation,” she says. “I immediately knew I
could do that for her.”
She didn’t even know Mary Johnson then, but
together they created an organization – A Room of
Her Own Foundation – that has remained very
nearly as it was conceived after that workshop eight
years ago. Every other year, the group gives just one
$50,000 grant, to one woman writer. More
significant, it is open to anyone, eschewing
patronage, introductions, or letters of reference. The
only requirement is the application process – an
arduous multiple-essay crucible that also has never
changed its wording.
Bassett explains that the award was created to
fit the needs of a particular woman, according to
Woolf’s tenet that “a woman must have money and
a room of her own if she is to write.” That’s why
multiple, smaller awards are not given: “Give her
just a little bit,” Bassett says of writers like Johnson,
“and she’s right back where she was a year from
now.” |
|
She offers the example of award winner Meredith Hall,
who wrote the bestselling memoir Without a Map under the
grant. Like most of the grant recipients, she was already an
award-winning writer when she applied. Yet she was
teaching five classes and working in construction to make
ends meet. After the grant, she had her teaching load
reduced and her pay tripled. “Now you can say she’s in the
writing world,” Bassett says emphatically. “It emboldened
her, because of how we handle our relationship with
recipients.”
The organization’s Gift of Freedom draws on corporate
ideas of benchmarks and accountability, requiring of
applicants a “moral contract” to produce a specific work – a
modified commission, Bassett calls it – which must be
outlined in a proposal that takes a good full-time month to
complete.
“The application is how we change the world, the gift
we can give to an unlimited number of women,” Bassett
says of the 800-some entries they nonetheless received in
the last round. “It takes tremendous courage – the way the
application is worded, they have to face all their demons and
ask, is this the time?”
Often it is not, Bassett says, once women consider what
it means to take a year off and write. “At certain times,
women are up for it – that’s why we call it the audacious
act. But when our objective and someone’s willingness
come together, it’s powerful.”
At turns exuberant, playful, steely, or disgusted, Bassett
makes an unlikely Placitas retiree. A self-proclaimed “L.A.
girl” who moved to the high desert in 1992 with Emmy
Award-winning husband Steve Bassett – it is one of their
three homes – she counts a lifetime of audacious acts
herself.
The only child of working-class parents, she describes
her mother as a role model who worked her way through
Rice University during the Depression to become an
accountant. “She taught me to be independent and love your
work,” Bassett says proudly. “I saw that if you’re going to
work, make something of it.”
Studying at the University of California at Santa
Barbara in the 1960s, Bassett graduated with a degree in
classics when most of her classmates were tuning in and
dropping out. Relentless effort and long hours took her to
the top of the corporate ladder by the age of 40. And while
she never set out to be a feminist crusader, Bassett firmly
believes women and artists need to master the world of
commerce.
“But what do I know?” she shrugs. “I just know my
work is to help women find out if they’re writers. And
whatever the answer is, it’s OK. Because we’re too hard on
ourselves, don’t you think?” she muses. “If not this year,
maybe next year.” |
|
photo by Keiko Ohnuma
|
