What readers are saying about Insurgent Muse:
The spirit of the legendary Woman's Building lives on in this unflinchingly brave and tender memoir. Terry Wolverton's Insurgent Muse is witty, heart-rending, superbly honest and deeply moving, providing an acute social analysis of a young life and a memorable era of feminism that fueled so much art and so many epiphanies. The great work of the Woman's Building deserves this book. — Lucy R. Lippard, author, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art
I taught my first creative writing class at the Woman's Building in the early 70s. One profoundly alone Christmas night, I read poetry with Adrienne Rich in an atmosphere so electrifying I can feel it now. The Woman's Building was magical, like the Hollywood sign and the Santa Monica pier. It was physical proof that the future was indeed here, now, and we were it. INSURGENT MUSE is a singular rite of passage that is simultaneously a collective coming of age. Wolverton is a passionate and accomplished writer. — Kate Braverman, author, Palm Latitudes
In a memoir, I expect a personal journey and hope for more. Terry Wolverton's Insurgent Muse delighted me with an individual, collective, institutional and historical view of a time and a place that we shared. Wolverton can always be counted upon to write with integrity, commitment, and charm. — Arlene Raven, Ph.D., Woman's Building co-founder, art historian
Written by one of the chief carpenters,Insurgent Muse is a history, personal and political, of a building and its spirits in residence. A wonderful mixture of personal memoir, performance art history, sea changes in feminism, novelist's narrative, lesbian soap opera and Los Angeles lore, Wolverton's work is informed, honest, hilarious and excruciating. It is particularly valuable for the claim it stakes to a West Coast history, both of lesbian culture and feminist art. — Catherine Lord, Chair, Visual Arts, University of California Irvine
Is any individual life a representative life? Terry Wolverton's seems to be in so many ways. Her searingly honest memoir tells what it was like to be a woman, an artist, a lesbian during those heady, storm and stress decades of the l970s and 80s. It's all here – the multi-lover dyke dramas, the intersection of personal and political, the Coming Out and Recovery and remembering sexual abuse movements, the rise and fall of a women's cultural center, the Woman's Building in LA. Wolverton has a poet's sense of the complexities of the interior life and an eyewitness's intimacy of the era. Anyone wanting to know what it was like to be a woman, an artist, a lesbian at the end of the last American century will find this book indispensable. — Rebecca Brown, author, The Gifts of the Body
Terry Wolverton's amazing Insurgent Muse is a smart, funny, sexy, and deeply honest tribute to the extraordinary community of women artists whose creativity and fierce living rocked the world from an old building in downtown L.A. Part engaging memoir and part trenchant social history, Wolverton tells a story that is remarkably moving and inspiring. Insurgent Muse is a triumph. — Tim Miller, solo performer and author of Shirts and Skins and Body Blows
Her documentation of the ideals, debates, and out-and-out battles waged during this important time in the feminist movement will give young women both a surprising and relatable snapshot of the era. . . . An inspirational read. — Bust Magazine