This week we travel back in time 100 years (!) to meet Edna St. Vincent Millay, girl poet and emblem of 1920s Greenwich Village bohemia. We are joined by the writer (and my former professor) Kate Bolick, who wrote extensively about Millay in her 2015 book Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own. We discuss Edna’s passionate free spirit, her tragic end, and the self-renewing Dream of writerly collaboration in downtown New York. More importantly, we discuss the age old question of how to build a sustainable life as a woman artist — how to define “meaning” vs. “noise” for yourself, and how to live it out with poise.

Discussed:

• Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Kate Bolick (2015)

• “All the Single Ladies” Kate Bolick in The Atlantic (2011)

• Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Nancy Milford (2002)

• “How Fame Fed on Edna St. Vincent Millay” Maggie Doherty in The New Yorker (2022)

• The Long Winded Lady (collection of essays by Maeve Brennan in The New Yorker)