"Little children love learning to talk. They love language; they love rhymes. To express oneself, to communicate, is a human need and capacity. I was lucky enough to fall in love with what was in books, thanks to a public library. In my novel Yonnondio, I wrote a scene where a mother is trying to get her kids to the library. 'That's what books are - the inside of people's heads you'd never get to know - getting to places you'd never get to really see."

To get to Tillie Olsen's East Bay home, you walk to her front door beneath a canopy of deep blue morning glories. It seems fitting that the Nebraska-born author should live surrounded by the quiet of a lush garden after nearly a century of fighting the good fight for such causes as women's right, civil rights and the rights of the working class. What makes her fiction compelling is the plain and powerful fact that it's charged with her politics without proselytizing or compromising her narrative art.

For example, in the much anthologized story "I Stand Here Ironing," the reader listens in on the thoughts of a woman set in place at her routine ironing duty. How rare it must have been to read fiction in the early 1950s - when the story was written - about the true grit and tedium of this type of woman's work. It was, in fact, a revolutionary mode of writing. In the following passage from her book of non-fiction, Silences, Ms. Olsen complements her fictional work by scrutinizing what was then an entrenched imbalance of male to female writers, and not insignificantly, the smaller oeuvres that women have been able to produce.

What possible difference, you may ask, does it make to literature whether or not a woman writer remains childless - free choice or not - especially in view of the marvels these childless women have created. Might there not have been other marvels, as well, or other dimensions to these marvels? Might there not have been present profound aspects and understandings of human life as yet largely absent in literature?

Olsen began asking these questions years before she first set pen to paper. She saw her mother, whose primary languages were Russian and Yiddish, raise six children on a farm without electricity and with water raised from a pump. She saw her mother go to night school so she could learn to read and write English. When Olsen began writing in earnest, it would have been impossible to excise the hardship of her formative years from her work. It was her own family life, with all its wonderful and terrible distractions, that silenced her writing life for twenty years. Silences, along with Tillie Olsen's other books, are a testament to the power of a woman who has regained her voice - a voice that will be read as prominently as the literature of men; a voice that erases the damage of all those silent years.

Tillie Olsen presents a monthly reading of local authors at Intersection for the Arts, which is online at http://www.gst.net/~intrsect/.