Biography
Nancy Venable Raine grew up in rural northern Virginia in the home her parents built themselves. "Living close to nature in the midst of a 'work-in-progress' that was a dynamic expression of my parents' artistic energies laid the foundation for my own creative work," Nancy says. She was born in 1946 in Arlington, Virginia, the second of four children and the only daughter; her father worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and her mother was a homemaker and teacher.
When Nancy was twelve years old, her father's work took the family to Germany where they lived for four years, traveling extensively throughout Europe. Nancy returned to Virginia for her last year of high school, graduating from W.T. Woodson High in Fairfax, Virginia in 1964.
She studied philosophy and classics at the University
of Iowa, where she graduated Magna cum laude in 1969. She received an
MA in philosophy in 1970 from the University of Iowa.
In 1971 Nancy moved to Washington, D.C. and taught English in a private
secondary school. Over the next four years, she began to explore the world
through poetry, writing on the themes of nature and the relationship of
language to society's views about women. Her poetry was published in literary
journals, including The Massachusetts Review and The Southern
Poetry Review.
From 1972 to 1977, she was Assistant Director of the Media Arts Program
at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which supported projects
in film, television, and radio.
Although she continued to write and publish poetry, she found herself
increasingly drawn to film and radio. In 1978 she moved to Boston and
produced and co-directed the highly praised independent documentary film
Light Coming Through about the visual artist, Maud Morgan. "My
writing took a back seat to film for several years," she recalls,
"but eventually I returned to it." The Women's Review of
Books published two of her poems in 1984.
Nancy was also the director of the Public Radio Cooperative, a national
satellite distribution service for independently produced radio programs.
In addition, she designed a community arts project in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
that put children's art and poetry on city buses, wrote essays about the
visual arts, and worked as an arts management consultant.
She was in the midst of her multi-faceted arts career when she was brutally
raped in her home on an October afternoon in 1985. "For a year afterward,"
she says, "my life basically stopped. I was just surviving."
In 1986 Nancy began working as a development officer for the Graduate
School of Design at Harvard University. In 1987, a year and eight months
after her attack, she married Stephen Stevick, then Executive Director
of the Sierra Club Foundation, and moved to San Francisco. There she was
a consultant to the NEA Advancement Program and several private foundations.
She also began work on a novel.
"The novel was going along fine," Nancy says. "But then
one October morning in 1993 I hit a wall. I simply couldn't write another
word. I began doing writing exercises and what came to the surface, like
magma rising up through granite, was an essay about my feelings on that
very day, the seventh anniversary of my rape." Her essay, "Returns of the Day," appeared a year later in the New
York Times Magazine.
For Nancy, the response of family, friends and other rape victims to the
essay was profoundly moving and telling her story publicly was liberating.
"I realized from the readers' letters I had given voice to other
victims. This gave me courage. I put the novel aside and started writing
about my rape and its aftermath."
After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back was published by Crown
Publishers in August, 1998, receiving high praise for its literary merit
and social perspective. During her book tour throughout the U.S. and Canada,
she meet hundreds of women who reaffirmed her experience. She has appeared
on numerous radio and television programs, including "The View"
(ABC) and "The Leeza Show" (NBC). ABC's Nightline devoted an
entire program produced by Laura Palmer, "The Journey Back,"
to Nancy and her book.
Soon after the book tour, Nancy and her husband moved to a farm in southern
Virginia, where they are pursuing their love of horses and nature and
supporting environmental causes. Nancy is continuing her writing and preparing
for the paperback release of After Silence in August, 1999.
"For years, I felt that the rapist had stolen something at the center
of what I had known as myself, that he had robbed me of my most precious
possession, my faith in words," Nancy says. "The inner silence
of my creative life was a terrible agony for me. Writing this book renewed
my faith in the redemptive power of language."