Happy Birthday, Judy Chicago!

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It's the birthday of feminist artist Judy Chicago, (books by this author) born Judy Cohen, in Chicago (1939). She grew up in a secular Jewish family and her father was, according to her, "an atheist, a radical, and a labor organizer." She began drawing when she was a toddler and from a very early age she knew she wanted to be an artist. She said, "Because my mother worked and because I saw women participating fully in all the discussions that went on in the house, I grew up with the sense that I could do what I wanted and be what I wanted." At age eight, she started taking Saturday lessons at the Chicago Art Institute.

Her father died when she was 13, and the event was for her particularly traumatic, shadowing her teenage years. When she graduated from high school, she was given a scholarship to study art. She left the Midwest for Southern California and went to UCLA to do a bachelor's and M.F.A. in art. She has noted that while she was there, she encountered several barriers that stemmed from male chauvinism. The art department didn't give teaching assistant stipends to women painters, so she had to teach in the sculpture section instead. Some of her master's advisers found that her work was too full of female genitalia and other "biomorphic imagery," which they found offensive, and they told her that they would no longer support her thesis if she continued to incorporate such imagery. She altered her art so that it became less graphic and more abstract.

She married a fellow student and thereby became Judy Gerowitz. Her husband died in a car accident, however, just a few years after they had married.

Five years after she received her master's, the Pasadena Art Museum featured her work in a solo show. Over the next many years, she devoted increasing energies to spotlighting women artists and their art. She founded the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles, which promoted art as well as leadership, and she saw to the opening of the Woman's Building, a facility for feminist political organizations, theater groups, and media. At one of her art shows, she posted an announcement: "Judy Gerowitz divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name, Judy Chicago."

She published an autobiography in 1975, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist. Some critics thought it a significant contribution to feminist literature, but the book was widely disparaged for sloppy and clichéd writing.

She is perhaps best known for her piece "The Dinner Party," which opened to the public in 1979 at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. It's a huge triangular banquet table with 39 full place settings, each for a significant woman in mythology or history. The Fertility goddess, Saint Bridget, Amazon, Sacajawea, Hildegard of Bingen, Susan B. Anthony, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, Virginia Woolf, and Georgia O'Keeffe are all honored with place settings—which include golden chalices, embroidered runners, and intricate porcelain plates.

Judy Chicago documented the process of making the exhibit, which took five years and the collaboration of many skilled artists, in The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979) and Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (1980). It's now on permanent exhibition at the New York's Brooklyn Museum.

She said, "I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind, and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism."

Showing Up

In general, when I do things, I like to do them well. I want to do more than the bare minimum. I want to excel at projects that I undertake. This is just fine when it comes to professional and academic achievement, but recently I’ve been exercising and realizing that a. I am not particularly good at it, and b. that the measure is not excellence, but rather “showing up.”

It’s an odd process to go through. Initially, I approach exercise by setting goals and expecting some sort of achievement pattern as a result of my goal setting and activities. To a degree, I have done that, but I must be honest, the achievements are fair to middling, not excellent, and there is no excellence in sight for me. For example, since February my goal has been to exercise everyday. By and large, I have done that, though I find myself settling into a pattern of thirteen days of exercise and one day off - usually a Sunday. I’ll be honest, I relish those days. The last two days off, I sat in bed, naked, and read all day. So in an honest assessment, I can say that I have achieved the goal. I’ve also gotten stronger and I can exercise more and longer than I could in February. Still, I’ve lost little weight and yes, I’ve had increases in energy, etc, but I’m no athlete. What I do in the exercise world is show up. Every day. I run or do yoga or go to the gym. I swim, use the cross trainer, lift weights. I’m not skinny or buff or athletic. I’m just showing up.

Is there anything wrong with showing up? Probably not. It’s just a mind shift to me. I think to myself, shouldn’t I be training for something? Shouldn’t I be aiming for some type of excellence? Is it enough to just show up? To just do it with no big plans or aspirations?

I’m doing a master update of all of my projects (in obeisance to Getting Things Done - though frankly I’m a bit behind. I am supposed to do this review weekly, but have gotten out of the habit because it is scheduled on Friday at 4 p.m. and at that time I am cleaning out flower coolers) and I wonder to myself, do I put any projects relating to exercise? I’m not sure. I don’t put in projects my dentist appointments or my doctor visits. I don’t put in many activities of daily life. Isn’t that what exercise is supposed to be?

I’m not sure if I will put any projects in relating to exercise. I’m still mulling it. I’m also still wrestling with “just showing up.” For now though that is what I am doing. Every day for thirteen days, then resting.

The Robin Becker Chapbook Competition - Winner Announced

I am completely thrilled that there will be a new chapbook by Judith Barrington in the world courtesy of the amazing Ron Mohring and Seven Kitchens Press. Barrington won the first annual Robin Becker Chapbook Prize for the chapbook titled Lost Lands. Two other chapbooks will be published from the competition. One by Steve Riel titled Postcards from P-Town and one by Matthew Hittinger titled Platos de Sal. I can’t wait to read them all. I’m also pleased that my chapbook, One Explanation, was a finalist in the competition. Such good company to keep!
(Kudos, too, to Christopher Hennessy over at Outside the Lines who was a semi-finalist!)

The Timeframe of Our Work

This morning’s Writer’s Almanac reminded me of the timeframe of our work. On Thursday night, after a long day at work, I sat down to read the mail and had a mailing to all graduate students at the University of Maryland. There are 10,000 of us next year! One of the services offered to graduate students is “helping graduate students build skills relevant to completing the dissertation (i.e., goal setting and time management). This lead me to despair. Those are two goals that I have worked on and, while they are always a process, are two areas in which I believe I have some mastery. No where in this six page mailing is there anything about how the University will make me smart enough to write a dissertation. That is what I wanted to read. So I think of that as I think of Mott and Stanton. Our horizon must necessarily be long.

To celebrate this historic convention, we’ll be having dinner with friends and going to see Mamma Mia. I think Emma Goldman would approve.

On this day in 1848, a convention on women's rights was held at Seneca Falls, New York, which was organized by Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. At the convention, they discussed property rights, divorce and women's suffrage. It was the start of the organized women's rights movement in America. But it wasn't until 72 years after the convention, in 1920, that women finally achieved the right to vote.
From The Writer’s Almanac

Kay Ryan is the new Poet Laureate!

I’m thrilled that Kay Ryan is the new Poet Laureate! Here are some excerpts from the press coverage.

From the New York Times
Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 17, 2008

When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1994, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

From the Washington Post
Verse of the Turtle
Taking On the Role of Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan Sticks Her Neck Out

More than a decade and a half ago, despairing that her poems would ever find an audience, Kay Ryan found herself writing one about a turtle. It was about as personal as a Kay Ryan poem ever gets.

Ryan's appointment as the nation's new poet laureate, to be announced today by Librarian of Congress James Billington, will cap one of the most unusual careers in American letters. Hers is "a very original poetic voice," Billington says, "almost the antithesis of the things you hear booming at you every day."

**

The Washington Post article talks about her 30 year partnership with Carol Adair. They were married last month in Marin County. It shouldn’t be true, but everytime I read about queer couples getting married, legally, officially, I cry. So congratulations Kay Ryan. I hope you spend lots of time at the Library in Washington, DC!

My Website without Advertising

I have finally broken with AOL and launched my website without advertising. Check it out here.

There are still some updates to do and a few things that are missing, but I think it looks good! I’m excited about it and pleased with my work of learning iWeb on my mac. I’ll keep updating over the next week, including launching the new CIVILesbianIZATION blog.

Lifting Belly High: A Conference on Women’s Poetry Since 1900

I’m excited that I’m going to be presenting a paper at this fabulous conference in September.

Lifting Belly High: A Conference on Women’s Poetry Since 1900 will be held at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 11, 12 & 13, 2008

Lifting Belly High: A Conference on Women’s Poetry Since 1900 celebrates women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through a national gathering of critics, scholars and poets. Exploring the rich and diverse textures of poetry and scholarship, the conference encourages discussion about the shape and direction of women’s poetry and discourse that can carry poetry into academic, social and political life. The conference will include a range of contexts for discussing and hearing poetry.

* • Plenary panels featuring invited scholars and poets, discussing “New Directions in Scholarship”; “Poetry and the Visual”; “Poetry and Sound”; and “Feminism, Formalism and Innovation”
* • Readings by contemporary poets
* • Break-out sessions for submitted papers and panels
* • Seminar discussions of pre-submitted papers on various topics

Featuring the following poets and critics:

Jan Beatty • Mei-mei Berssenbrugge • Rachel Blau DuPlessis • Lynn Emanuel
Annie Finch • Kathleen Fraser • Susan Stanford Friedman • Elisabeth Frost
Melissa Girard • Alan Golding • Arielle Greenberg • Jeanne Heuving
Cynthia Hogue • Stacy Hubbard • Lynn Keller • Dawn Lundy Martin
Cristanne Miller • Deborah Mix • Adalaide Morris • Claudia Rankine
Lisa Samuels • Lesley Wheeler • Elizabeth Willis

For more information, click here.

What I'm Reading

While I’d like to write a long blog entry on what I am reading, I can’t. I’m reading a lot and everything is just gestating, which means I don’t have sustained things to say about any of it. Here’s what on my shelf, however:

Excitable Speech by Judith Butler
Cassandra by Christa Wolf
Medea by Christa Wolf
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Orestia by Aeschlyus
Selected Work by Angelina Weld Grimke

All very interesting and all leaving me somewhat speechless.

The Donald Hall Standard - January through June 2008

I’ve written about the Donald Hall standard before here and here. It’s my semi-annual ritual of benchmarking my work as a writer against the standard of my idol/mentor, Donald Hall. Hall writes in Life Work about publishing one piece per week in general. So that is what I have been trying to do for the past year or two.

Although I’ve done an extraordinary amount of work in the past six months, I do feel like the volume of poems and reviews that I am publishing has decreased. Until recently, I had only a few things pending publication. That has changed in the past few weeks, but it is my general sense. I’m not worried about this, rather, I think that my poems are getting better and taking longer to germinate.

This productivity though isn’t just about poems and reviews. It is about my writing life writ large. So here’s the report on what I have done from January through June 2008:

2 poems in print journals (“Dear Donald” in billet-doux and “My Father’s Mimeograph” in MiPOesias - sort of a hybrid between print and online, but I’m calling it print here.)
4 poem in an online journal (Mahnaz Badihian ran four poems of mine here: http://www.mahmag.org/english.htm)
1 poem in an anthology (Letters to the World from Red Hen Press.)
3 column - outside of the CIVILesbianIZATION series
4 columns for CIVILesbianIZATION (you will note CIVILesbianIZATION is down - I’m going to relaunch it elsewhere)
1 article
7 reviews
1 readings
3 conference paper presentations

I also wrote a seminar paper and an encyclopedia entry and many creative non-fiction pieces - but I’m saving those for when they are published. It’s all about the pipeline!

So the goal is to have 26 items published (an average of one a week which is what Hall said he was doing in his book) and I had 26 items out. I feel a bit like I squeaked by, which amazes me because I am working like buggery. Oh, well, I made it with the number. I don’t think that I will in the second half of the year though unless something bizarre happens. Nevertheless, so far, it’s a great year of writing.

I Knew A Woman by Theodore Roethke

I Knew a Woman
by Theodore Roethke
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

When small birds signed, she would sigh back at them;

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:

The shapes a bright container can contain!

Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,

Or English poets who grew up on Greek

(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).



How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,

She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;

She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;

I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,

Coming behind her for her pretty sake

(But what prodigious mowing we did make).



Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:

Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;

She played it quick, she played it light and loose;

My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;

Her several parts could keep a pure repose,

Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose

(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).



Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

I'm martyr to a motion not my own;

What's freedom for? To know eternity.

I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.

But who would count eternity in days?

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

"I Knew A Woman" by Theodore Roethke, from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. © Anchor Press/ Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1975.

As seen in The Writer’s Almanac.

Poem by Shahid Ali

On Hearing a Lover Not Seen for Twenty Years Has Attempted Suicide
 
I suspect it was over me.

The White Crane/James White Poetry Prize is given biennially for a book-length poetry collection.

http://www.jameswhitepoetryprize.org/

The prize consists of a monetary prize of $1,000, publication of the winning manuscript by White Crane Books, and 5 author copies.

Submit 48 to 80 pages of original poetry with a $25 entry fee by October 30.

All submissions must be in English.
All submissions must be the work of the applicant.
Applicants must be Gay-identified males. 
The winner’s book will be published by White Crane Books.

Please include a cover letter with a short biographical statement and contact information. This contest will be judged blind, so we insist that manuscripts to be judged NOT include your name or any identifying information.

Submissions not following exact guidelines will be rejected.
Manuscripts will not be returned.
For notification of receipt, please include a self-addressed stamped postcard with the submission.

Entry fees should be in the form of check or money order made out to

James White Poetry Prize

Submissions must be postmarked no later than October 30, 2008 and should be mailed to:

James White Poetry Prize
172 Fifth Avenue, Suite 69
Brooklyn, NY 11217

New Column: It's Time for Real Marriage

CIVILesbianIZATION :: It’s time for real marriage, nationwide
by Julie R. Enszer
EDGE Contributor
Monday Jun 30, 2008


It is time for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to speak out with some policy options for the next administration- and all Americans- to consider. There are a host of interesting policy changes that we might hope for from a more GLBT-supportive federal government, from ending don’t ask, don’t tell to a transgender-inclusive ENDA and a repeal of the tax on domestic partner benefits. One policy that isn’t currently being discussed, and that I’d like to propose, is "real marriage."

Read the rest of the column here.

A Room of One's Own

The Guardian has photos of writer’s rooms.

Virginia Woolf’s work room is my favorite.

Though Claire Tomalin’s room - and her statement - is probably most like me.

I covet the room of Geoff Dyer. And Colm Toibin.

In spite of all this, I’m still pretty fond of my very own writing room. Cluttered, facing a window to our back yard. It suits me quite well and it is indeed a room of my own.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver, from The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

From The Writer’s Almanac

New Poem in journal, MiPOesias

Download the July 2008 issue of MiPOesias here and read my poem, “My Father’s Mimeograph.” As a bonus, there is a lovely full-page photo of yours truly in an environment you may not have seen - or imagined - me in.

MFA Reflections #2

The year I was accepted into the MFA program at the University of Maryland, I had as one of my goals to bring more houseplants into our home. Let me be honest: I have a brown thumb. I’ve killed lots of plants. More than I like to think about. That was probably one of the reasons I decided on that goal about houseplants for the year. Like all goals, though, it was discarded by life events. Working and going to school full time made it necessary for me to prune my goals for the year and focus on the things that were most important at this time, in my case, work and school. So with some sadness, I decided, no houseplants. Space for growing, living, green things would have to wait. Now, having just finished the MFA I find myself with a summer job at a flower shop. It’s tiring work for me to drive to Alexandria, stand up all day, and be cheerful, but I get to bring home fresh cut flowers nearing the end of their useful life at the flower shop, and last Friday, I brought home a palm tree, that while still alive needs some care in order to be full and lush. It didn’t meet the exacting standards of our proprietor, so I chucked it in the back seat of my car. Now it’s in our dining room. I still need to repot it, but I am hopeful that in a few months I’ll have a gorgeous living green thing in our home.

When I was accepted into the MFA, my good friend, Sally, and her family sent me a hydrangea plant. I feared it would go the way of other plants in my life, but my beloved planted it in our back yard. Today it is large and heavy with flowers. She’s happy that it is a thing of beauty as I enter the next degree program.

One of the most important class on poetry that I took as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland was a one credit course on Elizabeth Bishop. We read her complete poems and prose. I return to Bishop regularly. She is an inspiration and a challenging mistress. When my mentor suggested I continue to return to Bishop to think about my own writing, I resisted. In many ways, I don’t want to be like Bishop: small, closeted, drunk, but her poems are so gorgeous and so filled with important messages for me and solutions about my own writing, I continue to return to her, in spite of my own resistances.

In these stories are my second round of reflections about the MFA. Things that are important for me to do always return. House plants. Elizabeth Bishop’s dirty hermit. Sometimes it isn’t a matter of finding the time to do something, only a matter of finding the right time.

New Project from Stacy Bias: The Fat Experience

Sweet friends and talented associates -

Thanks for taking the time to read this. :) If you're receiving this
email, it is because you have stayed on this list as a means of being
notified about new/upcoming projects in the afterlife of
TechnoDyke.Com.

I wanted to let you know that I've recently launched a new project
that I'm very excited about!

The new project is called "The Fat Experience Project." and you can
view it here:

The Fat Experience

The goal of the Fat Experience Project is to map the global
experience of fat in a way that is human, has a face, a heart, a mind,
a body and a voice.
The Fat Experience Project is an oral, visual and written history
project which seeks to be a humanizing force in body image activism.
By collecting and sharing the many and varied stories of individuals
of size, the Fat Experience Project® seeks to engage with, educate,
empower and enrich the lives of people of size, our allies and the
world at large.

As the project grows, it will be filled with first-person,
non-fiction narratives (in text, video or mp3 format) that speak to
the many and varied aspects of the life lived large.
Some of the content will come from interviews already gathered on my
extensive 2-month road trip (with the lovely Val Garrison) in both
audio and video format. Some content will come from trips on the
horizon. Most content will be submitted via the website by readers
such as yourself.

It is my hope that the project will be a community tool to combat
prejudice/stereotype/discrimination as well as to help externalize
shame so it can discussed and dissipated. The things we keep silent
about are the things that do us the most harm. Shared burden is
lighter. I am hoping, as well, that the project may be used as a
humanizing resource for fat studies and social anthropology courses.

I am writing to ask for your help in both the promotion of and the
participation in this project. I realize not everyone receiving this
email identifies as fat. I have included everyone on this mailing
because it is my fondest hope that, ultimately, with time and
resources, this project will grow past a specific fat focus and move
toward addressing the many intersections of shame.

In the meantime, I would love your help in the form of submissions to
the project, spreading the word to friends and family, passing this
along to contacts in publication and/or fundraising help.

I also welcome comments, constructive criticism and volunteers.
Specifically, I would love to have a small crew of editors who can
help with the text submissions, or folks with a little free time who
wouldn't mind transcribing the shorter audio interviews. Anyone with
video editing experience would be a blessing as well!

Thanks for your time and energy!
Big BIG love,

Stacy Bias

Sarah Schulman in Publisher's Weekly

Our literature is disappearing at the same time we are being told that we are winning our rights.
Equal but Separate
Lesbian and gay literature is for everyone
By Sarah Schulman
If you are a lesbian and you want to get married in California, you’re in luck. But if you are a human being who would like to read novels with lesbian protagonists by openly lesbian authors, you’d better move to England. In the U.K., openly lesbian novelists with lesbian content like Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters are treated like people, and their books are treated like books. They are published by the most mainstream publishers, represented by high-rolling agents, reviewed in regular newspapers by real critics, contextualized with other British intellectuals, given mainstream awards, broadcast on television as movies... and as a result of all this respect and consideration, they are read by a broad constituency in England and the rest of the world. For those of us writing here in the United States, England seems like the Promised Land.
 
In America, lesbian literature has gone the way of cheap rents, good public schools, nonmonogamy, integrated neighborhoods and free will. At this year’s Lambda Literary Awards (the awards the LGBT community gives to our best books ignored by the straight book awards), not a single lesbian book nominated for best novel was published by a mainstream press. Our literature is disappearing at the same time we are being told that we are winning our rights. How can we be equal citizens if our stories are not allowed to be part of our nation’s story?
In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis forced America to admit that gay people exist, and for a brief period the vibrant but underground literature of authentic gay and lesbian experience was able to surface through corporate presses and hover on the margins of American letters. By the early 1990s the country’s most powerful presses started presenting lesbian literature as an integrated part of U.S. intellectual life. But that’s when cultural containment kicked in, in the form of niche marketing. Corporations began the process of transforming a political movement into a consumer group, by selecting particular products to be sold to queers alone. Chain bookstores literally took lesbian literature off of the Fiction shelves and tucked it away in newly formed Gay Book sections, which are usually found on the fourth floor in the back behind the potted plants. At the same time, lesbian writers who avoided protagonists as lesbian as they are were allowed to stay in Fiction. The industry created incentives for authors to avoid the specificity of their own experience, absurdly creating the only literature in the world in which the authors’ actual lives are never recorded. The best known example of many would be Susan Sontag, who maintained her stature as a Major American Intellectual while never applying her prodigious intellectual gifts to a public analysis of her own condition. She even wrote a book analyzing AIDS stigma while staying in the closet.
 
Ironically, in our conservative cultural moment, familiarity is confused with quality. It is actually harder to write a lesbian novel than one with a dominant culture protagonist, because there isn’t the recycling of agreed upon narrative conventions that mainstream writers depend on. As a result, writing that actually brings new information about how people live and expands American literature is coded as “wrong” and irrelevant, while the U.S. continues its obsession with the coming-of-age of the white male as the central story of the nation.
Now that we face the possibility of an Obama presidency, LGBT people hope for a more equitable society, in which we can enjoy a country that reflects our needs as much as those of heterosexuals. In a media culture, not being represented accurately and with variety is a serious disability. If they can do it in England, they can do it in New York. Let all the writers, agents, editors, publishers, marketers, publicists, critics, book buyers and booksellers act as if lesbian and gay literature is for everyone. If we expect this from each other and behave accordingly, it will come to be.
Sarah Schulman is the author of 12 books, most recently The Child (Carroll & Graf, 2007).
 

Statement of Refusals and Commitments

This came across the Women’s Studies List-serv and I find it quite compelling.

Statement written by Ann Russo, Women's and Gender Studies, DePaul University, arusso@depaul.edu; Melissa Spatz, Women and Girls CAN; calltoaction@2008@gmail.com

WE REFUSE….

We refuse a feminism that assumes that “women” are a homogeneous group.  We recognize that women identify along a spectrum of identities, and that gender is not always the most prominent one.  Gender is a significant structure, to be sure, but it is not the only structure shaping women’s lives.  Multiple systems of oppression and privilege, including racism, white supremacy, class hierarchy, religious intolerance, xenophobia, anti-immigrant policies, heterosexism, ableism and ageism shape women’s lives, identities, and experiences.  We need movements that recognize these multiplicities.

We refuse a feminism that pits sexism against racism, that claims that sexism is more entrenched than racism, and that the existence of sexism means that racism no longer exists.  We do not accept the logic that criticizing sexism must be tied to a denial or minimization of racism.  Sexism and racism, as well as other forms of oppression, are interconnected.  The misogynist spectacle against Hillary Clinton is directly tied to her white, middle-class heterosexuality, which is different from attacks on women who are not white, middle-class and heterosexual.  We are dismayed that when media pundits frame Michelle Obama as an angry black woman, or as unpatriotic, or suggest that she should be the target of a “lynching party”, there has been no similar feminist outcry by white women.

We refuse a feminism that claims to speak for all women, while denying and minimizing the ongoing legacy of white supremacy and racism in this country.  This legacy includes the ways that women’s movements and organizations are embedded in white supremacist structures, ideas, and practices.  We refuse to participate in women’s organizations that demand allegiance to women with no accountability for privilege and complicity in racism, class exploitation, homophobia, transphobia, imperialism, ableism, ageism, etc.

We refuse a feminism that marginalizes and undermines young women’s voices and perspectives.  We reject the adultism of older women activists who dismiss the views of young women as naïve, unrealistic, sexist, and based in sexual fantasy.  We reject the presumption that if younger women do not agree with older women, it is because they are less radical.  We need to create intergenerational dialogues around our different political ideas and commitments.  

We refuse a feminism that mobilizes white folks by cultivating solidarity on the basis of whiteness. We reject any attempt to play divide and conquer by cultivating the racism of white middle class professional women and white working class women and men against women and men of color.  We do not accept the reframing of this racism as “racial resentment.” We reject the way that the media and some feminists divide people into homogeneous categories that do not reflect the complexities of any of our lives.  Everyone has a race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality.  

We refuse a feminism that blames people of color for focusing attention on racism as if that focus was the cause of sexism and misogyny.  We refuse this zero sum game politics, and we refuse to undermine efforts to dismantle white supremacy as a way to bolster attention to sexism.  We reject attempts by some white feminists to silence people of color and to cultivate white racist bonding with claims of “reverse racism.”

We refuse a feminism that confuses a campaign with a movement.  We reject the idea that as feminists, we must all agree on a particular candidate. As Barbara Ransby pointed out in a lecture at DePaul University (Chicago, April 2008), campaigns are not movements, and we need to actively engage all candidates around their positions on issues and use the campaigns as opportunities to push candidates to address our issues and visions for social change and justice.

AND WE COMMIT…
We commit to consistently challenge ourselves to be self-reflective.  We recognize that we are in process in our work to dismantle white supremacy and other systems of oppression, and we do not claim to have all of the answers.  However, we are firmly committed to continuing to build our awareness of, and accountability for, our own participation in systems and processes of power and privilege.

We commit to critically engaging our communities about this historic moment in U.S. feminism and progressive politics.  We commit to taking an active role in creating community dialogues and town hall forums that re-center feminist and women’s activism based in coalitional politics.  

We commit to holding any and all politicians accountable for their politics, rather than their identities.  We believe that identity does matter in terms of who is represented in the government, and yet, we believe that all candidates must be evaluated based on their commitments and actions.  As movements, we need to hold allpoliticians accountable to our issues and goals.  

We commit to challenging misogyny and racism and other forms of oppression in media coverage.  We will challenge all discourses that make women of color invisible, by assuming that gender = white women, and race = men of color.  We will disrupt the media’s promotion of divisions between gender-based agendas and race-based agendas, between different racial and ethnic groups, and between different political movements.  We will call out the media’s racism and sexism, as well as other forms of oppression.

We commit to speaking publicly against white supremacy as it operates in our movement and in the upcoming election.  We believe it is the responsibility of progressive white women and feminists to consistently challenge white supremacy as part of our work for social change.  We will insist that white people in feminist organizations dialogue, challenge, disrupt, and transform white supremacist thinking, ideas, and practices, particularly as they play out in creating divides between race and gender politics.

We commit to challenging feminist media activists and organizations to use an anti-oppression approach. We commit to consistently look not solely at gender, but at interconnected forms of oppression in media coverage, and we challenge other activists and organizations to do the same.  Along these lines, we call on the National Organization for Women’s campaign against media sexism, the “Media Hall of Shame,” to include all the forms of oppression that shape the representation of women, including racism and white supremacy, as well as heterosexism, ableism, classism, adultism, xenophobia.  

We commit to creating intergenerational dialogues between women of all ages.  Older women need to check adultism when working with and/or responding to young women. It is important to learn from young women, particularly young women of color and those facing multiple oppressions, who do not enter the social justice movement with a race versus gender versus sexuality divide.  All of us, old and young, need to find ways to create intergenerational dialogues that honor our different knowledge, experiences, and frames of reference.  

We commit to building a broad-based movement for social justice by working in solidarity across differences.  We must build connections, not divisions.  In order to build coalitions, we must commit to being accountable for our own privilege and complicity in systems of oppression.  We believe that accountability is a necessary starting point to creating collaborations, coalitions, and alliances across identities and issues.

Ann Russo, Women's and Gender Studies, DePaul University, arusso@depaul.edu

Some Good News and a Hidden Desire

It’s been a week of good writing news!

I’m a finalist in the Robin Becker Chapbook Competition.

Two poems of mine were accepted for the Women’s Review of Books.

Meanwhile, I’m having lust for Miko’s shoes from Nike that upload his running times and distances to his blog.

Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

Butler’s third book, Bodies That Matter, seeks in many ways to clarify and expand the arguments that she made in Gender Trouble. I started reading the book last week and on Friday night at dinner with my beloved after the Mystics basketball game I was telling her how profound it is to encounter Butler’s mind and the degree of complexity in her thinking in the book. I’ve read many references to Butler and I have heard many people talk about Butler’s work, but reading it directly for myself is an engagement in complexity and her own resistance to simplification or facile understandings.

The opening question of the introduction (after quotations from Haraway, Spivak, and Derrida - just so you know the background of the mind at work) is this: Is there a way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender? (N.B. one of the things that has struck me about the introduction in this book and about how she sets up each chapter is the way she uses questions - primarily as a series - to frame what she is going to write about. This is something that I could use more of and would change how I think about my scholarly writing as well. I think that I too often start with answers and then back into what the questions may be. Beginning more with lists of questions and then seeking to answer them through the process of writing would be quite fruitful, I think.) The text organizes itself into two parts, each of four chapters.

This morning I am going to start with a few comments on the first chapter of Part Two, titled, “Dangerous Crossing”: Willa Cather’s Masculine Names. Perhaps this chapter was more accessible to me because Butler is writing about literature and not philosophy where I still feel I struggle to keep up and lack the background to engage with her. This chapter also appealed to me because it relates directly to my thinking about lesbian poets. Butler begins by saying that “Cather has appeared not to place herself in a legible relation to women or to lesbianism” (BTM, p. 143.) This I find fascinating because I have always read Cather in relationship to women and lesbianism. I suppose though that could be seen more as my reader’s practice than Cather’s presentation. Butler then does a nice reading of Sharon O’Brien’s biography of Cather and compare O’Brien’s readings with those of Hermione Lee. This brief paragraph fascinated me because it highlights some of the decisions made in writing biography. Butler concludes her introductory framework of Cather with this,

Within Cather’s text, this sexuality never qualifies as a truth, distinct from heterosexuality. It is almost nowhere figured mimetically, but it is to be read as an exchange in which sacrifice and appropriation converge, and where the name becomes the ambivalent site of this prohibited taking, this anguished giving away.

What interests me in this is the way sexuality is constructed as an exchange, which is what I wrote about in relationship to Sappho and the Victorians, and what I have been thinking about in regard to how sexuality is constructed communally.

Butler then reads the names of My Antonia, notably, of course, Jim Burden, and the short story by Cather “Tommy the Unsentimental.” Ultimately, Butler is exploring the ways of writing as a man while being a woman and being a lesbian and what that says about gender performativity. That is of course exactly the distillation that Butler resists throughout her work. Another aspect of the chapter is how the body - the materiality of a body and the body within a text - is written and constructed, by both Cather and also I would argue by Butler.

Butler’s next chapter is on passing and the internecine relationship between homosexuality and miscegenation - a topic that always interests me. I’ll return to talking about that - and about the earlier part of the book, including “The Lesbian Phallus,” shortly. I’ve also started to read her fourth book, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. I need time both to read the books and to think about how to write about them in an intelligent and responsible fashion.

Gay People - We're Just Like You

Yesterday morning was beautiful in Washington, DC. We read the newspaper out on the back porch with the dogs lying in the grass. It would have been perfect if I had not become enraged at the cover story about gay and lesbian people and marriage in the New York Times.

Gay Couples Find Marriage Is a Mixed Bag


By PAM BELLUCK
Published: June 15, 2008

BOSTON — Four years after Massachusetts became the first state to allow gay couples to marry, there have been blissful unions, painful divorces and everything in between. “There are no role models for gay marriage,” said Jacob Venter of Boston, right, with his husband of four years, Billy Boney.

Some same-sex couples say being married has made a big difference, and some say it has made no difference at all. There are devoted couples who have decided marriage is not for them, couples whose lawyers or accountants advised them against marrying, and couples in which one partner wants to marry but the other does not.

Read the rest of the article here.

I find it depressing that less than forty years after gay liberation with it’s vision for a different sort of sexual freedom and a new restructuring of family and community that we’re reduced to heterosexual mimicry in some of the worst ways. The article includes stories of couples who hesitate about marriage until one has “a profession,” people who speaking to a New York Times reporter use incorrect grammar (as bad as hearing President Bush in the UK talking about the ravishes (sic) of Afghanistan when presumable he meant the ravages of Afghanistan), and gay people saying that marriage makes them feel legitimate in the world. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

The one thing about the article that I did delight in is the couple talking about just living together and not marrying using Brad and Angelina as the justification for that. For those watching such things, the reproducing mimicry there is delightful because, of course, Brad and Angelina are not marrying until all people can marry including gay and lesbian couples. It was a moment of confirmation that Judith Butler has much insight into the world when you really sit down and think about it.

At any rate at 5:01 p.m. PST today, the state of California will be issuing marriage licenses. I am an old crabby dyke with a profound dislike for the institution of marriage, but I do have the good manners to say to all who will marry today or in the next days and months, Mazel Tov!

Josephine Jacobsen

Last summer I read Josephine Jacobsen’s poetry and her prose. It was delightful. There was a particular reserve and organization of her thinking in her prose writing in particular that I responded to. It was reassuring to me in a way that I hunger for order when my own mind is disorderly and feels, at times, about to fall apart. There is a new chapbook of poetry coming out by Jacobsen, edited by Elizabeth Spires. You can read about the chapbook, Jacobsen, and the relationship between Spires and Jacobsen in this interview in the Baltimore Sun.

Poem by Liam Rector from The Writer's Almanac

First Marriage
by Liam Rector

I made it cross country

In a little under three days. 

The engine blew out 



About a hundred miles north

Of San Francisco, where I'd

Hoped to start living again



With a woman I'd abandoned

Only a few months before. 

The reasons I'd left her were



Wincingly obvious

Soon as I got back

To her, and it didn't take long



Before I again left her.

In a few weeks I'd meet 

The woman who became



My first wife, the one

With whom I spent 

Almost the entirety



Of my twenties. It took

About twenty years 

Getting over her, after



We divorced at thirty.

Broke then, I took

A bus cross-country



And was back in the East

By Christmas, thinking it

Would take three years maybe



To put this one behind me.

But getting over her

Happened as we were



Both in our third marriages,

Both then with children,

Heading for our fifties.



She came cross-country

To tend to me when I had

Cancer, with a 20% chance



Of recovery. The recovery

From all she had been to me,

Me abiding with her as long



As I did, took place finally

When we, her sitting on my bed

And me lying in it, held hands



And watched ourselves watching

TV, something we'd never quite 

Been able to do comfortably



All those years ago. So many

Things turn this way over time,

So much tenderness and memory,



Problems not to be solved

But lived, and I resolved

Right then to start living



Only in this kind of time.

Cancer gave this to me: being

Able to sit, comfortably, to get



Over her finally, and to 

Get on with the fight to live while

Staying ready to die daily.



"First Marriage" by Liam Rector, from The Executive Director of The Fallen World. © The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Queer Literature Linkage

Just a collection of links as I decompress after some travel this week and going to see the LPGA tournament in Havre de Grace, MD. (I’m really crabby about how poorly the LPGA is merchandised and marketed. It’s an incredible group of athletes and a great opportunity for promoting women in sports that is completely bland and underpromoted. Sad. It was hot though in Havre de Grace today - nearly 100. We left after two hours.)

The Lambda Literary Awards covered by The Advocate. Here is a report of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s move to Los Angeles.

Controversy about The Lambda Literary Awards over at the Gay Recluse. Gay Recluse reviewed the book in question here. Christopher Hennessey at Outside the Lines weighed in on his blog here. I’m torn about these questions. Part of me wants to be separatist in the inclination of preserving the Lambda Literary Awards for queer writers, but perhaps due to the influence of Judith Butler, I also take the perspective that excellent books that deal with gay and lesbian people and issues should be recognized regardless of the sexual orientation of the author in question. I see all sides and don’t have easy answers.

Meanwhile, the GLBT encyclopedia to which I contributed is scheduled to come out.

Also, I’ve just learned that a paper of mine was accepted for Lifting Belly High: Women Poets Since 1900. I promised myself I would travel less next semester and not do any conferences, but this one was just too good to pass up. It looks excellent!

Congratulations to Kate Evans who just announced that her first novel has been accepted for publication! I’m thrilled for you Kate.

My Changing Contexts

I mentioned a while back that I was reconsidering my contexts. I’ve done that - after a few days away on a work retreat. My old contexts were these:

Experience
Wife
Home
Professional
Writing
LGBT Activism
Relationships
Spirituality

In each of my contexts, I have one year, three year, five year, and ten year goals. I review them each year and I build all of my daily activities around these different contexts. Now, as I am looking at the next four years as a graduate student, with the ultimate goal of changing my professional life, I’ve realized that I need to update and change my contexts. So here are my new eight contexts:

Experience
Wife
Home
Poetry
Creative Work
Scholarly Work
Relationships/Spirituality
Work for Hire

As you can see, I’ve left the first three the same. The experience context is where I put activities that I like to do (travel, visiting museums, seeing plays) that fuel both my growth as a human being but also my enjoyment of life. This is also a generative space for my writing - poetry, creative, and scholarly. I split my professional/writing contexts into four contexts that I can consider and monitor separately. Poetry is one in and of itself because I am a poet and it is an area that needs devoted time and attention. I have some concrete short and long-term goals in that area and so a focused way to think about them is important. I also want to keep a context of creative work. This is both creative non-fiction work, reviewing work, and also things like embroidery, sewing, and other creative endeavors. Scholarly work will be things associated with my PhD program. I combined Relationships and Spirituality. This may just be for the next few years while in graduate school. We shall see. I actually really like having them separate, but didn’t want to exceed eight contexts. The final one is the work that I do for money.

Next I’ll be updating these in my calendar and on my master planning documents. We’ll see how they work. The goal of the contexts is to have a way to build great attention, mindfulness, and productivity in the various areas of my life. I’ll check in later on how it is going.

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble

I’m not quite done with Gender Trouble, (N.B. The image shown on the link is a reissue of the book for its tenth anniversary - I have the original edition) Judith Butler’s second book, published in 1990. (Here’s the dirty secret: I’ve not purchased and am not planning to read her first book, which was her dissertation, titled, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections on Twentieth-Century France. I feel like it has less to help me with on my project of being literate on feminist theory. I’m open to quibbles from readers - or would love a report from someone who has read the book.) In spite of not being done, I’m going to write a bit about it. My intention in writing blog entries on Butler’s work is initially to simply understand it. To in some ways recount her arguments so that I may understand them better for myself. I imagine as time progresses I may share some of my reflections and thinking beyond her work, but for tonight at least, I know that this will primarily be a reporting out on the book.

Gender Trouble, subtitled Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, is divided into three chapters with a preface and conclusion. The book is an intervention into the basic assumption of feminist theory in which women are a category of people who exist and can be the subject of theoretical consideration. One of the interesting things for me about reading this book is recalling my own first encounter with it when it was published in 1990. I was twenty years old and in my final year of my undergraduate education. I remember being riveted by the book, but also frightened by it. What Butler suggests, then and now, is a complete new direction in thinking about feminism. Let me start with the preface, however. Butler outlines the general arguments of the book quite succinctly in the preface. She writes,

Precisely because “female” no longer appears to be a stable notion, its meaning is as troubled and unfixed as “woman,” and because both terms gain their troubled significations only as relational terms, this inquiry takes as its focus gender and the relational analysis it suggests. Further, it is no longer clear that feminist theory ought to try to settle the questions of primary identity in order to get on with the tasks of politics. Instead, we ought to ask, what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity? What new shape of politics emerges when identity as a common ground no longer constrains the discourse of feminist politics? And to what extend does the effort to locate a common identity as the foundation for a feminist politics preclude a radical inquiry into the political construction and regulation of identity itself? (Gender Trouble, p. ix.)

The first chapter is Butler’s analysis of “women” as the subject of feminism. By the conclusion of this chapter, she writes, “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” (p. 33.) Butler reaches this assertion through an analysis of the construction of gender as a binary category and the placement of gender within a binary system.

The second chapter is Butler’s analysis of psychoanalysis and the construction of heterosexuality and homosexuality. The opening of this chapter interested me in particular because she positions the analysis as a critique of strands of feminist theory that imagine an “origin, a time before what some would call “patriarch” that would provide an imaginary perspective from which to establish the contingency of the history of women’s oppression.” This interests me especially because I have been reading Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple, which makes that move about Sappho’s place in history. Butler’s critique of that “utopic origin” strand of feminist theory is important. She writes, “As feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy.” (p. 35.)

Butler begins this second chapter with a recapitulation of the structuralist’s work, particularly Levi-Strauss, and then moves through a conversation with Lacan, Riviere, and Freud. This chapter looks at how psychoanalytic theory informs thinking about gender and sexual orientation. Butler draws on Gayle Rubin’s work in mobilizing her critique of Levi-Strauss and in formulating the conclusion of this chapter which comes to an understanding of prohibition as power.

The third chapter, titled, “Subversive Bodily Acts,” is about Kristeva, Foucault, and Wittig. Her work on Kristeva, which is a pretty powerful critique of Kristeva’s work, makes me think that Kristeva should be my next reading project, especially as much of what she wrote was about poetry in particular. Butler has a particularly cheeky and interesting conversation about Foucault and the case of Hermuline. It’s fascinating and worth many chuckles. I’m still reading the part about Wittig.

Butler’s conclusion is basically within this sentence: “My argument is that there need not be a “doer behind the deed,” but that the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed.” (p. 142.) She then in the conclusion explores how parody functions as a way to construct the doer and to suggest ways that her work relates to feminist politics.

Reading this after eighteen years (with my original marginalia - I was reading it for university work then, too), reminds me of how profoundly exciting and frightening I found this text then. It is less frightening now because I can begin to understand the implications that it had both for theory but also for how our lives have been lived in the intervening years, something I couldn’t understand or anticipate then. This was frightening to me those years ago because of the instability that it suggested. It truly was troubling about things I needed to believe as foundational. I think this is an area that I’ll write more about as I work through Butler’s other books this summer.

MFA Reflections #1

Beyond basking the the blush of graduation, I’ve been reflecting on learnings from the MFA and will do a few blog entries on that this summer. I’m not going to talk about the obvious learnings, but what I hope are some more nuanced reflections of the degree and how it shapes poets and writers. I started thinking about this when madly searching for Christa Wolf’s Cassandra (which I have come to believe was eaten alive by my house as it is frankly no where and my book group is now nearly done reading it. Sigh. I proposed it and was looking forward to the reading and discussion with a group.) I came across Lisa Lewis’ book of poetry, Silent Treatment. I purchased this book of poetry shortly after it came out and treasured it. A few years later, Stan Plumly told me to read it. To study it. To make it a model for my work. I reread and reencountered the book. Stan also told me to study C. K. Williams. Both of them were about understanding line length and line break as well as how narrative structures works in poetry. Both of them, also, were in many ways foreign to what I was reading - to the poets that I love and return to time and time again (Rich, Hacker, Rukeyser, Bishop). C. K. Williams, in particular, is not a poet whose books I would have picked up and studied without the exhortations from Stan. This to me seems to be an important part of an MFA: the informed recommendations from a mentor of what to read and the immersion in reading all of the work of a poet. The benefits of this are multiple. First, there is the craft and technique perspective for which I was directed to encounter Lewis and Williams. This was significant, but less significant than I thought at the time. When I encountered these poets, I was looking first for a simple and easy application of their work to my own. I never found it. (Earlier Stan had directed me to Merwin to study his punctuation. In a nutshell, in his mature work, Merwin doesn’t use any punctuation. This was incredibly frustrating to me, at first; then, over time, it was profoundly illuminating.) What I found in the work of Lewis and Williams instead of a craft seminar is a process of encountering a contemporary poets work and immersing myself in it as a writer. A consequence of that is learning to think of one’s own work over a lifetime of writing. I started to think about my work in different ways. Studying Lewis’ first book and the progression of Williams’ poems over many books was incredible. Partly because I began to think of my own work in relation to theirs. Not in content, partially in form, but mostly as one poet to another. This may be one of the most significant learnings of the MFA: being told that this poet is a guide for you and then discovering over time, how that poet will guide you. The path was never as I expected, but it was always a worthwhile path. In retrospect, I find my immersion in Lewis and Williams satisfying and meaningful. I’m not sure that over my lifetime I will say that they were profoundly influential on my work. I don’t think that Stan has some particular key to my soul and can provide the perfect match for my intellectual and emotional writing needs. I do think that he has a profound intuitive insight that brings information to bear that I would not find without him. I’ve learned to appreciate that in ways that I didn’t anticipate. Mostly, I appreciate him directing me on a path that helped me to think about myself as a poet and to find a mirror for that poet self in unlikely places.

The Thorn Birds

I’m going to reread the book, The Thorn Birds, this summer in anticipation of the trip to Australia. I think I last read it when I was thirteen or fourteen. I can’t wait to see what I think of it now.

Today is Colleen McCullough’s birthday - Happy Birthday!

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It's the birthday of novelist Colleen McCullough, (books by this author) born in Wellington, Australia (1937). She came from a rural, working-class family that wandered around Australia until finally settling in Sydney when Colleen was 12 years old. She wanted to be a doctor, but she wasn't allowed to go to medical school because of a skin condition, and so she went into neurophysiology, the study of the nervous system.
She got a job at a hospital in London, and while she was there she met an American professor who was so impressed with her ability that he invited her to manage his laboratories back at Yale. She did all kinds of work in the laboratories, but because she was a woman, she was paid about half as much as her co-workers. So, to try to make a little extra money, she decided to write a novel.
Her first novel, Tim, was published in 1974. That book sold well, but her first great success was The Thorn Birds (1977), an epic novel that tells the story of an Australian family across three generations. It became an international best seller and enabled McCullough to quit her job and devote all of her time to writing.

20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Announced

Last night in Los Angeles the 20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced. Wish I had been there! I’m most excited about Michael Sherry and Jane Marcus’ extraordinary books, both of which I’ve read and adore. I’m also thrilled for Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel who work so tirelessly on behalf of gay and lesbian literary cultures as both writers and editors. I’ve not read Henri Cole’s award-winning book, but will order it immediately and drink it up.

Congratulations to all of the winners and thanks to the Lambda Literary Foundation and the organization’s extraordinary leader, Charles Flowers for all that they do to enhance our literary lives.

May 29, 2008, 11:00 PM--Winners for the 20th annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced tonight by the Lambda Literary Foundation at a gala celebration attended by 300 people.

Awards were presented in 21 categories. Winners were chosen by a jury of judges who come from all walks of literary life: journalists, authors, booksellers, librarians, playwrights, illustrators. In all, 85 judges participated in the selection of winners from the pool of 463 books that were nominated by 190 publishers.

In addition, Ann Bannon, Malcolm Boyd, and Mark Thompson were recognized for their lifetime achievements by receiving the Pioneer Award from Lambda Literary Foundation.

LGBT ANTHOLOGIES

* First Person Queer, Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel (Arsenal Pulp Press)

LGBT ARTS & CULTURE

* The View From Here, Matthew Hays (Arsenal Pulp Press)

LGBT CHILDRENS/YOUNG ADULT

* Hero, Perry Moore (Hyperion)

LGBT DRAMA/THEATER

* Return to the Caffe Cino, edited by Steve Susoyev and
George Birimisa (Moving Finger Press)

LGBT EROTICA

* Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica, Simon Sheppard (Running Press)

LGBT NONFICTION

* Gay Artists in Modern American Culture, Michael S. Sherry (University of North Carolina Press)

LGBT POETRY

* Blackbird and Wolf, Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR

* The Dust of Wonderland, Lee Thomas (Alyson Books)

LGBT STUDIES

* Between Women, Sharon Marcus (Princeton University Press)

BISEXUAL

* Split Screen, Brent Hartinger (Harper Collins Children's Books)

TRANSGENDER

* Transparent, Cris Beam (Harcourt)

LESBIAN DEBUT FICTION

* Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking, Aoibheann Sweeney (The Penguin Press)

GAY DEBUT FICTION

* A Push and a Shove, Christopher Kelly (Alyson Books)

WOMEN'S FICTION

* The IHOP Papers, Ali Liebegott (Carroll & Graf)

WOMEN'S ROMANCE

* Out of Love, K. G. MacGregor (Bella Books)

WOMEN'S MYSTERY

* Wall of Silence, Gabrielle Goldsby (Bold Strokes Books)

WOMEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

* And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, Nicola Griffith (Payseur & Schmidt)

MEN's FICTION

* Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman (Farrar Straus Giroux)

MEN's ROMANCE

* Changing Tides, Michael Thomas Ford (Kensington)

MEN's MYSTERY

* Murder in the Rue Chartres, Greg Herren (Alyson Books)

MEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

* Mississippi Sissy, Kevin Sessums (St. Martin's Press)

My Graduation from the University of Maryland with the MFA

Last week I attended three graduation ceremonies to be fully awarded my MFA in Creative Writing. It was great fun. The full photo gallery is available here.

To tantalize you, here are a few photos from the festivities.

The University of Maryland Stole


With Kim after all of the ceremonies



Delicious veggies from our party. Kim barbecued for over four hours!




I started the program just after Kim's mother died. In death, she provided the tuition money for the first semester. Her totem was the turtle, so turtles sat with us all night. She would have loved the party and been very proud.



A good time was had by all!



See the rest of the photos here!

Summer Goals and Changing Contexts

If you know me, you know that all of my activities emanate from my personal mission statement, which is grounded in seven areas of focus in my life. Each area of focus, or context, has 1 year, 5 year, and 10 year goals associated with it. I review each of the goals, the contexts, and the mission statement every year around Rosh Hashana. My planning and living method is a hybrid of my first love, Stephen Covey, and now David Allen. I am, in short, one of those people who takes living productively seriously.

So while I have a whole series of goals and activities that I will be working on during the summer break from school, two that are uppermost on my mind are: reading all of Judith Butler and running 25 miles in a week.

Judith Butler should be no surprise. I’m going on to get my PhD in Women’s Studies and she is one of the preeminent theorists in women’s studies. During each of the seminar papers that I wrote for my MFA at some point I had a crisis of wondering how to position my work in relationship to Judith Butler. So part of reading all of her work and really understanding it is to avoid that crisis in the future.

The second goal is odder. I am no athlete. I have been exercising a minimum of thirty minutes each day though and recently I’ve discovered the efficiency of running to satisfy the exercise commitment. Right now, I’m running about three miles in forty minutes. I want to ramp that up so that I can run five miles in an hour and do that five days of a week. We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I am realizing that my contexts are changing. I think of contexts more with people as the orientation to them than other definitions. Contexts to me are a combination of roles that I play in life and environments in which I do my work. mine are changing because being back in school, I am organizing my thinking and my work to a new profession. So one of my tasks over the next week or so is to review my contexts, my areas of focus, and reorganize them. This will result in a variety of changes into my personal management system for living. I’ll change my email box organization, my calendar coding, my overall master task list and workplans. That will be the easy computer work though. First I have to do the thinking work that gives me a foundation with a vision for my new life and ensures the time and attention to accomplishing things in my current life.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep running in the mornings and reading Judith Butler. Changing contexts are important, but so is marking everything off of today’s task list!

Stan Plumly's Posthumous Keats: The Type of Book I'd Like to Write Someday

I’ve been reading Stan Plumly’s new book Posthumous Keats. Subtitled, A Personal Biography, the book is a gorgeous exploration of Keats in the last year of his life and the creation of his reputation after his death. First, after having studied with Stan at the University of Maryland it is incredibly powerful to read this book. I hear his voice mulling through the great poet which has been a source of profound inspiration for him. There is something quite intimate about reading a book in that way.

My admiration for this book is more than knowing Stan, however. This is a beautiful meditation on a major poet. There are oodles of books on Keats and that is one of the challenges in writing a new book about Keats. I think about that in relationship to my own work and writing about and thinking about Elizabeth Bishop. I have always felt and in some ways continue to feel that I never want to publish anything about Bishop. I love her too much, first of all, and second of all, everything seems to have already been said, in most cases more delicately or beautifully than I could ever say it. Yet, Posthumous Keats takes this challenge and runs with it. It brings together many things that have already been written about, but writes them anew, in a profound and ruminative way.

Another thing that I admire about this book is its structure. It sits you in the middle of things and spirals you as the reader out from there. Stan talked about organizing the book as one organizes a book of poems. I like that idea. There are seven chapters; each has seven parts. (Oh, the prime numbers bring me bliss, too!) Each of the parts is an extended meditation on an object, an incident, a relationship. It is extraordinary in its structure and in how it choses to cast the narrative eye.

I”ve not yet finished the book, choosing instead to read slowly and savor it. I read a section. Set it down. Read another book or embroider (this is the joy of summer!) On each page, I think to myself, this is the type of book I’d like to write someday. Read it. You’ll see what I mean.

Mariela Castro continues to speak on behalf of Gay and Lesbian Equality

A good article about it in the International Herald Tribune.

Beyond Masculinity

Two things interest me about this website/book. First, Beyond Masculinity seems to be filled with good thinking about the intersections of queerness and gender and I always appreciate a good read on that intersection. Second, I am interested in the publishing and distribution of it. The website is very well designed. It offers a huge variety of ways to access the information and the book. It seems easy and intuitive. I wonder if this is a future vision of book publishing. What do you think?

More on Elizabeth McFarland

There has been a very thoughtful and substantive response by Kathleen Rooney and others on the McFarland review at the Contemporary Poetry Review over on Joan Houlihan’s blog. It is well worth the read.

Final Paper of my MFA Degree

Today I turned in my final paper in completion of my MFA at the University of Maryland. What a feeling! (With all of the self-consciuos reference to the great Irene Cara.)

The paper is titled:

Lesbian Identity as a Conversation with the Imagined Sappho:
Apostrophe and Dramatic Monologue
in the Construction and Imagination of Lesbian Identity

and as has become my practice, I’ve linked it as a PDF here at the blog.

As always, I have lots of new ideas about how to revise this paper and what to do with it next. This one in particular is part of a much broader argument I am putting together about lesbians and poetry. There will be more over the next three and four years on this as I write toward my PhD dissertation.

Stay tuned for photos from graduation this week as well as some insight into the summer plans and goals and objectives.

Elizabeth McFarland and the Work of Writing Reviews

There has recently been a wonderful and spirited conversation over at the Wom-po list serv about a review in the Contemporary Poetry Review about a new book of poems by Elizabeth McFarland. Below is my response to the discussion. Joan Houlihan has also written about it with great thought at her blog.

I'm the person who used the word "catty" and so I feel I need to try and respond in some sort of way, with the caveat that I wrote my original email hastily while traveling. Still, here are my thoughts and why I felt initial peevishness about the CPR review. Rooney actually begins the review with an important question, and perhaps the question of all reviews:

Why should we bother reading this poem or care who wrote it?

I approach all reviews with that question in mind (though I tend to think of it as a first person I and not a plural we, but that my just be stylistic). In fact, as Claire's comment indicates, I don't think that the review really answers that question fully.

One of my first reactions to the review is exactly that, why review this book at all if indeed it is as the reviewer presents it to be. I think one of the first and important questions for a reviewer is why spend this time and energy writing about a book. When I invest time and energy in writing about a book, I do it because there is some exigent reason to read the book or at least know about it. I felt like some of that was missing from Rooney's review - and I think there is an editorial responsibility to answer that question about reviews run.

Also when I encountered the review, the language that Rooney used to describe McFarland's poems was language embedded in gender roles and sexism. I challenge you to find a review of a book by a man in which the words "prim" "quaint" "winsome" and "romantic" are used, particularly all piled atop one another. In addition, the entire paragraph about McFarland's attire while on it's face I take issue with (again when is the last review of a book of poetry by a man talked about his attire) but in addition if the attire is going to be discussed at such length, it seems to me it deserves to be contextualized in a particular time and place for which it may be, actually, quite appropriate! That simply wasn't done.

To add insult to injury (at least to this reader) there is a substantial paragraph about McFarland's marriage. Again, why isn't her work taken as autonomous? Why is it important to contextualize her (for what there is of that) in light of her husband ? Again, I think about this as a question of parity. When you read reviews of male poets, is there a paragraph or two discussing their husbands? Some perhaps, but I would argue those are anomalous.

Those were the things that I found peevish and lead me to say that the review was "catty." And by that I mean, the easy "fight" or tousle was picked. I take the point made on Wompo that "catty" is a word with sexist connotations, but I do think that the tone is "catty" and not say "combative" or "negative".

As I have reread the review and have been mulling it in the back of my mind, the other things that bothers me most about it is the complete failure to contextualize McFarland's poetry either with peers at the time or to consider it in relation to other poetry in other historical contexts.

Rooney mentions McFarland in comparison to Sexton, Plath, and Lowell. It's an easy statement, but I just don't think that it takes McFarland's work on her own terms. From what I know of her poetry, I think that the comparatives to consider are more along the lines of Stevie Smith, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Sitwell or Letitia E. Landon. Reading the poetry and biography of McFarland against any of those would, I think, make a much more interesting and illuminating review and put McFarland's work into relief to answer the question that Rooney poses at the beginning of it.

Ultimately, I think that CPR, from what I have read of it, is invested in judging "excellence" as though it were a term not bound by time and changing standards of reading and understanding poetry, and I think that underlies Rooney's review. Though I haven't read the new book, I don't think McFarland is a poet who I will love and who will change my life, but I do think that she deserves a fair appraisal and one that contextualizes her work on her own terms and in conversation with others who would be sympathetic with her project.

Happy Birthday, Adrienne Rich

From The Writer’s Almanac:
It's the birthday of poet Adrienne Rich, (books by this author) born in Baltimore, Maryland (1929). Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World (1951), came out when she was only twenty-one years old. She has gone on to write many books of poetry, including Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978).

A literary way to celebrate GLBT Pride Month

Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Split This Rock present: "GLBT Poets of Washington," a guided walking tour of the Dupont Circle neighborhood, June 21, 10:30 am to Noon. Led by Dan Vera, the tour costs $5 and advance reservations are required. 
 
Celebrate Gay Pride Month and learn how gay literary culture has flourished from the 1970s to the present in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, with the influence of such writers as Essex Hemphill, Ed Cox, Tim Dlugos, Michael Lally, Lee Lally, Richard McCann, Andrew Holleran, and many others.  Stops include Dupont Park, Lambda Rising Bookstore, the site of the Community Bookshop, and writer's homes.  This is an expanded version of the tour first developed for the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in March 2008.
 
The tour takes approximately 1.5 hours and will run rain or shine.  Limited to 25 participants.  Please wear comfortable walking shoes and carry water.  The tour starts outside the Starbucks Coffee where Connecticut Avenue and New Hampshire Avenue intersect with the northern part of Dupont Circle.
 
Dan Vera is Managing Editor of White Crane, a gay men's quarterly magazine, and co-publisher of Vrzhu Press, which publishes books of fine poetry.  He co-curates two monthly public reading series, the Brookland Reading Series, and the OutWrite Series. His blog, "Wondermachine": http://wondermachine.org.
 
To register, please send your name, email, and phone to beltway@mac.com.

From May 3rd: Poem by May Sarton and her Birthday

Below is the information from the Writer’s Almanac of May 3rd. I recently read Margo Peters’ biography of May Sarton which was delightful though I don’t think that I wrote about it in a substantive way. Peters does a thoughtful assessment of Sarton’s work and a well-researched biography. I consider it now a model for some things that I want to do.
"Fruit of Loneliness" by May Sarton, from Encounter in April. © Houghton Mifflin, 1937. (buy now) 

Fruit of Loneliness 

Now for a little I have fed on loneliness
As on some strange fruit from a frost-touched vine—
Persimmon in its yellow comeliness,
Of pomegranate-juice color of wine,
The pucker-mouth crab apple, or late plum—
On fruit of loneliness have I been fed.
But now after short absence I am come
Back from felicity to the wine and bread.
For, being mortal, this luxurious heart
Would starve for you, my dear, I must admit,
If it were held another hour apart
From that food which alone can comfort it—
I am come home to you, for at the end
I find I cannot live without you, friend.

(1930)

It's the birthday of poet and novelist May Sarton, (books by this author) born in Wondelgem, Belgium (1912), the daughter of science historian George Sarton and artist Mabel Elwes Sarton. When she was four, her family fled Belgium to escape invading Germans and eventually settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Sarton attended the progressive Shady Hill School and learned poetry from Agnes Hocking.
She graduated from high school, declined a scholarship offer to Vassar, and moved to New York City to be an apprentice at Eva Le Galienne's Civic Repertory Theatre. She moved to Paris when she was 19, then returned to the States and wrote poetry, supporting herself by teaching in Boston, writing film scripts for the Office of War Information, and lecturing on poetry at various college campuses.
Her first book of poems, Encounter in April, came out in 1937 and included a series of sonnets that had been published in Poetry magazine when she was just 17. Over the course of 60 years, she had an incredibly prolific career, publishing about 50 books, including 19 novels, more than a dozen poetry collections, several volumes of journals, and two children's books.
One of her most influential works was Journal of a Solitude (1973), which became important reading for feminists and a primary text in woman's studies courses. Critic Carolyn Heilbrun said, "I would name 1972 as the turning point for modern women's autobiography … the publication of Journal of a Solitude in 1973 may be acknowledged as the watershed in women's autobiography."
Even after a stroke in her mid-70s, she continued to compose and publish; she recorded onto a tape cassette Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992) and dictated Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (1993). In her final book, At Eighty-Two: A Journal (1995), which was published the year she died, she said she felt like a "stranger in the land of old age."
She said, "One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."