In this book, Mickey Pearlman listens to the voices of women who write. Some, like Grace Paley, Fay Weldon and Jane Smiley, have numerous admirers. Others - Janette Turner Hospital and Jessica Hagedorn - are just now achieving recognition. Novelists, short-story writers, poets and writers of non-fiction - twenty voices in all - talk candidly about childhood, religion, the transformation of memory and why they chose to write in a particular genre. Their feelings about being classified as hyphenated writers (Chinese- or Japanese-American) are aired, as are their reactions to the world of publishing. Here, in conversations that sometimes surprise the speakers themselves, are the most deeply felt concerns and emotions at the heart of the creative process.