“But when I start to tell them”: Celebrating Aries Writers

“But when I start to tell them”: Celebrating Aries Writers

Posted by Sarah Bofenkamp on

In 1967, author and militant feminist Valerie Solanas gave a copy of her play to Andy Warhol in hopes that he might produce it. Titled “Up Your Ass,” it was the work she thought might save her… might make her a writer. Except that Warhol, who promised to look over the manuscript, then lost it instead - offering the enraged Solanas a $25 role in a different film for her trouble. A year later, she did what any Aries would do; she put on make-up, packed her gun, and went looking for him.  


Ruled by the planet of action, passion and war, Aries authors are the first: the fiery babies of the zodiac, the new growth of Spring, the unreliable narrators of all literature. They are as decadent as Kathy Acker and as obsessive as Nella Larsen, as powerful as Maya Angelou and as potential-driven as Samuel R. Delany. They, like Erica Jong or John Fowles, are hot until they are cold.


Their pens, burning with that urgent Aries energy, spread language like seed. The words of Flannery O’Connor and John Fante growing up like weeds between sidewalk slabs while those of Toni Cade Bambara and Octavio Paz swell like the thick roots that crack them - prolific and indiscriminate, angry and optimistic.

Sarah J. Bofenkamp is a reader, writer, and librarian living in Palouse, Washington.

More Notable Aries Authors

Louis L'Amour - March 22, 1908

Billy Collins - March 22, 1941

Ama Ata Aidoo - March 23, 1942

Yoko Tawada - March 23, 1960

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - March 24, 1919

Flannery O’Connor - March 25, 1925

Toni Cade Bambara - March 25, 1939

Edward Bellamy - March 26, 1850

Robert Frost - March 26, 1874

Joseph Campbell - March 26, 1904

Tennessee Williams - March 26, 1911

Gregory Corso - March 26, 1930

Erica Jong - March 26, 1942

Frank O’Hara - March 27, 1926

Dorothea Lasky - March 27, 1978

Maxim Gorky - March 28, 1868

Nelson Algren - March 28, 1909

Mario Vargas Llosa - March 28, 1936

Ada Límon - ​​March 28, 1976

Judith Guest - March 29, 1936

Ernest Cline - March 29, 1972

Octavio Paz - March 31, 1914

John Fowles - March 31, 1926

Judith Rossner - March 31, 1935

Nikolai Gogol - April 1, 1809

Milan Kundera - April 1, 1929

Samuel R. Delany - April 1, 1942

Hans Christian Andersen - April 2, 1805

Emile Zola - April 2, 1840

Washington Irving - April 3, 1783

Ann Lister - April 3, 1791

Marguerite Duras - April 4, 1914

Maya Angelou - April 4, 1928

Booker T. Washington - April 5, 1856

Elena Ferrante - April 5, 1943

Leonora Carrington - April 6, 1917

William Wordsworth - April 7, 1770

John Fante - April 8, 1909

Charles Baudelaire - April 9, 1821

Valerie Solanas - April 9, 1936

Beverly Cleary - April 12, 1916

Jon Krakauer - ​​April 12, 1954

Samuel Beckett - April 13, 1906

Eudora Welty - April 13, 1909

Nella Larsen - April 13, 1891

Seamus Heaney - April 13, 1939

Henry James - April 15, 1843

Tristan Tzara - April 16, 1896

Kingsley Amis - April 16, 1922

Tracy K. Smith - April 16, 1972

Thornton Wilder - April 17, 1897

Cynthia Ozick - April 17, 1928

Nick Hornby - April 17, 1957

Kathy Acker - April 18, 1947

 

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