From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines

by Joyce Dyer (Editor), Jennifer Cognard-Black (Editor), Elizabeth MacLeod Walls (Editor)

The twenty-three distinguished writers included in From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines invite machines into their lives and onto the page. In every room and landscape these writers occupy, gadgets that both stir and stymie may be found: a Singer sewing machine, a stove, a gun, a vibrator, a prosthetic limb, a tractor, a Dodge Dart, a microphone, a smartphone, a stapler, a No. 1 pencil and, of course, a curling iron and a chainsaw.
From Curlers to Chainsaws is a groundbreaking collection of lyrical and illuminating essays about the serious, silly, seductive, and sometimes sorrowful relationships between women and their machines. This collection explores in depth objects we sometimes take for granted, focusing not only on their functions but also on their powers to inform identity.
For each writer, the device moves beyond the functional to become a symbolic extension of the writer’s own mind—altering and deepening each woman’s concept of herself.

335 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2016

About the author

Joyce Dyer is director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, and John S. Kenyon Professor of English. Dyer is the author of three books, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer’s Journey, and Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town, and the editor of Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers. She has published essays in magazines such as North American Review, cream city review, and High Plains Literary Review. Dyer has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 1998 Appalachian Book of the Year Award and the 2009 David B. Saunders Award in Creative Nonfiction.

Reviews

[Marci · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the editors makes a point of talking about trying to make her daughter afraid of the world. Screw that.