Saturday, November 19, 2011
Saturday, November 12, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Crying for Barbara Grier
The Amazon Trail
Crying for Barbara Grier
She could raise you like a glorious garden. She could plough you under with the sharp tines of her raking words. She could see the promise of what you could yield or trample eager green first growth. Called a force of nature, she was more than that: she was the force itself and we were her fallow earth, her heritage seed, her variant crop of many colors.
Her megalomania was my own: improving our lot in life. She devoted herself, and all around her, to nourishing and encouraging lesbians: Lesbis sustineo! (Lesbian, stand up!). Her methods could be elevating or harsh. She praised with one hand and bullied with the other, intimidating both the meek and the strong among us. She made me cry frequently, yet I’d also cried with the utter triumph and pleasure of holding a book of my own.
Of course she had an oft cursed habit of calling her writers at the crack of dawn - it was her bounden duty to Wake Us Up. She told me in just these words to “light up the skies!” and she meant that quite literally. The lesbian skies had been full of storm clouds far too long. She willed the sun to shine on us and shine it did, in the form of book after book, story after story, until she saw a deluge of lesbian literature. Our work is taught in universities. Libraries offer lesbian children’s books. We sate ourselves on our harvest: mystery, romance, speculative fiction, classics, serious novels, historical stories, text books, poetry.
She would have us keep farmers’ hours. She was our rooster rousing us, our overseer pushing us, our scarecrow guarding us. Her crops were writers and poets, yes, but also editors, distributors, booksellers, organizers, reviewers, shippers, lecturers, students, critics, activists, publishers, and most of all, readers. We flourished, directly or indirectly, in her hands.
It didn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blew even for lesbians. Our time was here. She seized that time and assigned us our graven duty: to awaken Lesbian Nation. She did her darnedest to synchronize our revolution. She woke early, slept little, seldom set down her phone.
She wasn’t the only one, or even the first, but she had the vision, the will, the gay grit. She, and the strong, soft-spoken, laughing butch at her side for 41 years, Donna McBride. For Barbara Grier was the ultimate bossy femme. She knew what was best for us and would move heaven and earth to make us achieve that best if it killed us, or her. Donna made sure it didn’t kill her.
Barbara Grier’s job was sales. She sold us on our talents. She marketed what we wrote. She charmed academics and earned the enmity of writers. She inveigled booksellers everywhere and cut deals with straight devils. She discovered the power of profit and abandoned what no longer fed her bottom line.
Then her work was done. With one foot in the age of closets, the other leading gay pride parades, she’d pioneered the wilderness between, set her labyris to trees hard as rock, bulldozed stone walls, then fertilized and tilled the formerly shaded soil and made it bloom. Where once there were a few toiling at that stubborn rock and soil, now there were generations harvesting. An entire civilization had become more civil for lesbians and gay men.
Barbara was my mentor, my lesbian mother. I would have written, and written what I do, without her, but would any but the few have been able to read it? Would I have had this wealth of lesbian words to read? Much has been and should be made of Barbara Grier’s life. There should be mourning and forgiveness, gratitude and celebration. Whatever her accomplishments, successes and failures – her humanity - there is no denying that she is a mythic figure in our pantheon and will be remembered with reverence.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2010
Crying for Barbara Grier
She could raise you like a glorious garden. She could plough you under with the sharp tines of her raking words. She could see the promise of what you could yield or trample eager green first growth. Called a force of nature, she was more than that: she was the force itself and we were her fallow earth, her heritage seed, her variant crop of many colors.
Her megalomania was my own: improving our lot in life. She devoted herself, and all around her, to nourishing and encouraging lesbians: Lesbis sustineo! (Lesbian, stand up!). Her methods could be elevating or harsh. She praised with one hand and bullied with the other, intimidating both the meek and the strong among us. She made me cry frequently, yet I’d also cried with the utter triumph and pleasure of holding a book of my own.
Of course she had an oft cursed habit of calling her writers at the crack of dawn - it was her bounden duty to Wake Us Up. She told me in just these words to “light up the skies!” and she meant that quite literally. The lesbian skies had been full of storm clouds far too long. She willed the sun to shine on us and shine it did, in the form of book after book, story after story, until she saw a deluge of lesbian literature. Our work is taught in universities. Libraries offer lesbian children’s books. We sate ourselves on our harvest: mystery, romance, speculative fiction, classics, serious novels, historical stories, text books, poetry.
She would have us keep farmers’ hours. She was our rooster rousing us, our overseer pushing us, our scarecrow guarding us. Her crops were writers and poets, yes, but also editors, distributors, booksellers, organizers, reviewers, shippers, lecturers, students, critics, activists, publishers, and most of all, readers. We flourished, directly or indirectly, in her hands.
It didn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blew even for lesbians. Our time was here. She seized that time and assigned us our graven duty: to awaken Lesbian Nation. She did her darnedest to synchronize our revolution. She woke early, slept little, seldom set down her phone.
She wasn’t the only one, or even the first, but she had the vision, the will, the gay grit. She, and the strong, soft-spoken, laughing butch at her side for 41 years, Donna McBride. For Barbara Grier was the ultimate bossy femme. She knew what was best for us and would move heaven and earth to make us achieve that best if it killed us, or her. Donna made sure it didn’t kill her.
Barbara Grier’s job was sales. She sold us on our talents. She marketed what we wrote. She charmed academics and earned the enmity of writers. She inveigled booksellers everywhere and cut deals with straight devils. She discovered the power of profit and abandoned what no longer fed her bottom line.
Then her work was done. With one foot in the age of closets, the other leading gay pride parades, she’d pioneered the wilderness between, set her labyris to trees hard as rock, bulldozed stone walls, then fertilized and tilled the formerly shaded soil and made it bloom. Where once there were a few toiling at that stubborn rock and soil, now there were generations harvesting. An entire civilization had become more civil for lesbians and gay men.
Barbara was my mentor, my lesbian mother. I would have written, and written what I do, without her, but would any but the few have been able to read it? Would I have had this wealth of lesbian words to read? Much has been and should be made of Barbara Grier’s life. There should be mourning and forgiveness, gratitude and celebration. Whatever her accomplishments, successes and failures – her humanity - there is no denying that she is a mythic figure in our pantheon and will be remembered with reverence.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2010
Friday, October 7, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Scared Little Dyke Writer
The Amazon Trail - Scared Little Dyke Writer
Now that I've been around for a while, new writers sometimes tell me how terrified they are of reading in public. All I have to offer them is enormous, sincere sympathy and the story of how I started my public life as a writer.
No one warns us that we can’t hermit in our garrets and only leave to buy more Amy’s frozen dinners. No one tells us that writers don’t merely write, we also must market. No one tells us in college speech classes that it’s not over with the semester - we’ll have to keep speaking to rooms and auditoriums filled with people for the rest of our shy lives.
It’s another trick, like the one where they lead us on to think we can earn enough in royalties to be able to write full time when in reality we’ll be working at jobs full time and squeezing in a paragraph here and there when the boss isn’t looking.
The first time I read to a group I was so scared I cried. The story was about a couple of schoolteachers in the closet and the glimpse they had of freedom. I hadn’t realized the depth of my sadness about their situation, but, in my fear at reading aloud, especially in Tee Corinne’s living room, especially to a large group of mostly back-to-the land pilgrims to the rural northwest, especially as I’m an urban Yankee - I got all emotional about the story and cried in front of them.
I thought, humiliated and relieved, that was the end. No one would ever want me to read my work again. But the audience loved it. Crying made me real to them, a dyke who wrote their stories. They enveloped me in their warmth.
This experience should have made my next reading less daunting. My publishers had laughed and told me I’d better get used to it. Again, I was in a living room, this time back east. I was so scared I was practically comatose. The fact that I knew these women made the experience more, not less, frightening. I started to read, stumbled, got more anxious and then the cat who lived there jumped on my lap. In front, as cats are wont to do, of my reading material.
There could have been no better ice breaker. The audience laughed. I felt visited by my totem animal. It was as if a caring hand had come and lifted enough of my fear that I could give something to the audience rather than steel myself against them.
My fear made me inaccessible. I wanted them to disappear, I wanted a spaceship to land in the middle of the living room and take the focus off me. I also wanted to share something with these people I was writing for. Reading aloud was for them, not for me, and I needed to change my focus away from my fear and toward these readers with their expectant faces.
Did I learn my lesson? Of course not. The third time I was on a conference panel. I was teamed up with some very accomplished women, including Jewelle Gomez and two filmmakers. My publishers were in the audience. Was this a moment I had dreamed of all my life? A pinnacle? The opportunity of a lifetime?
I spent most of the 24 hours before the panel on the toilet, or with my head in the toilet. I missed a meeting to prepare – my mind was frozen. This was not something I had the courage to do and it wasn’t something I could get out of doing. The room was gargantuan. The faces dissolved in the tears I tried not to shed. I was weak and dizzy from hunger. My hands shook, but not as badly as one of the other panelist’s hands. I remember reassuring her, this veteran of two appearances. That’s all I remember. I was a block of wood, or ice. Or a scared little dyke writer.
I was like today’s new writers who quail when it’s their turn to read.
Here’s what I did. I learned to speak with my higher power: goddess, universe, my own highest spirit, it doesn’t matter. I began to take a few minutes to ask for help in giving the audience what they needed. I breathe slowly and deeply. I envision a personification of that higher power holding my hand. I even take a small dose of a tranquillizer to dissolve the fear chemicals in me. My wife hugs or holds me, whichever I need. We both hang out with the audience, introducing ourselves, exchanging a few words, breaking down artificial walls. So many readers and writers are as shy as I am.
Does the stage fright ever go away? Not entirely for me, but with exposure, time, practicing the steps that calm me, I usually don’t embarrass myself. Last month at In Other Words in Portland, Oregon, there were seven of us reading. I remember assuring one scared little dyke that, for the most part, readers would rather like us than not. When I let myself like them back, instead of fearing them, and remember that I’m there for the readers, not me, reading in public becomes a kind of holy lesbian ritual that enhances us all.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
October 2011
Now that I've been around for a while, new writers sometimes tell me how terrified they are of reading in public. All I have to offer them is enormous, sincere sympathy and the story of how I started my public life as a writer.
No one warns us that we can’t hermit in our garrets and only leave to buy more Amy’s frozen dinners. No one tells us that writers don’t merely write, we also must market. No one tells us in college speech classes that it’s not over with the semester - we’ll have to keep speaking to rooms and auditoriums filled with people for the rest of our shy lives.
It’s another trick, like the one where they lead us on to think we can earn enough in royalties to be able to write full time when in reality we’ll be working at jobs full time and squeezing in a paragraph here and there when the boss isn’t looking.
The first time I read to a group I was so scared I cried. The story was about a couple of schoolteachers in the closet and the glimpse they had of freedom. I hadn’t realized the depth of my sadness about their situation, but, in my fear at reading aloud, especially in Tee Corinne’s living room, especially to a large group of mostly back-to-the land pilgrims to the rural northwest, especially as I’m an urban Yankee - I got all emotional about the story and cried in front of them.
I thought, humiliated and relieved, that was the end. No one would ever want me to read my work again. But the audience loved it. Crying made me real to them, a dyke who wrote their stories. They enveloped me in their warmth.
This experience should have made my next reading less daunting. My publishers had laughed and told me I’d better get used to it. Again, I was in a living room, this time back east. I was so scared I was practically comatose. The fact that I knew these women made the experience more, not less, frightening. I started to read, stumbled, got more anxious and then the cat who lived there jumped on my lap. In front, as cats are wont to do, of my reading material.
There could have been no better ice breaker. The audience laughed. I felt visited by my totem animal. It was as if a caring hand had come and lifted enough of my fear that I could give something to the audience rather than steel myself against them.
My fear made me inaccessible. I wanted them to disappear, I wanted a spaceship to land in the middle of the living room and take the focus off me. I also wanted to share something with these people I was writing for. Reading aloud was for them, not for me, and I needed to change my focus away from my fear and toward these readers with their expectant faces.
Did I learn my lesson? Of course not. The third time I was on a conference panel. I was teamed up with some very accomplished women, including Jewelle Gomez and two filmmakers. My publishers were in the audience. Was this a moment I had dreamed of all my life? A pinnacle? The opportunity of a lifetime?
I spent most of the 24 hours before the panel on the toilet, or with my head in the toilet. I missed a meeting to prepare – my mind was frozen. This was not something I had the courage to do and it wasn’t something I could get out of doing. The room was gargantuan. The faces dissolved in the tears I tried not to shed. I was weak and dizzy from hunger. My hands shook, but not as badly as one of the other panelist’s hands. I remember reassuring her, this veteran of two appearances. That’s all I remember. I was a block of wood, or ice. Or a scared little dyke writer.
I was like today’s new writers who quail when it’s their turn to read.
Here’s what I did. I learned to speak with my higher power: goddess, universe, my own highest spirit, it doesn’t matter. I began to take a few minutes to ask for help in giving the audience what they needed. I breathe slowly and deeply. I envision a personification of that higher power holding my hand. I even take a small dose of a tranquillizer to dissolve the fear chemicals in me. My wife hugs or holds me, whichever I need. We both hang out with the audience, introducing ourselves, exchanging a few words, breaking down artificial walls. So many readers and writers are as shy as I am.
Does the stage fright ever go away? Not entirely for me, but with exposure, time, practicing the steps that calm me, I usually don’t embarrass myself. Last month at In Other Words in Portland, Oregon, there were seven of us reading. I remember assuring one scared little dyke that, for the most part, readers would rather like us than not. When I let myself like them back, instead of fearing them, and remember that I’m there for the readers, not me, reading in public becomes a kind of holy lesbian ritual that enhances us all.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
October 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
The Amazon Trail - The Butch Sewing Kit
The Amazon Trail
The Butch Sewing Kit
I don’t know about butch guys, but butch women are a mass of incongruities. I used to know a butch who drove cement trucks for a living and was a minister in her free time. You don’t just drive a cement truck, you’re out there with the boys using your rake and shovel. You don’t just preach from a pulpit, you have the delicate task of counseling the human spirit. I don’t know if she sewed, but if she did, her sewing kit might have been a lot like mine.
One of the first things my wife told me was that she doesn’t sew. She’s a good cook, she organizes our home, she’ll iron on occasion, but she never sews. That is what dry cleaners are for, is her philosophy. I, on the other hand, have always had a sewing kit. When I moved out west a friend gave me a going away gift that came in a small wicker case something like a lunch box. To this day, I use that thing as my sewing basket.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I make overalls from scratch or sewed my sweetheart’s wedding outfit. Mostly, I repair. I carry so many objects in my pockets, and manufacturers make such flimsy pockets, that I mostly patch up holes in my pant pockets. I have no patience or interest in anything beyond the basic rudiments of needle and thread.
Someone like me should probably master the sewing machine. I do own one, the simplest model I could find. Unfortunately, I was required to take a sewing class and make a skirt in junior high and was so traumatized I have never been able overcome my fear of the contraption. I use it only once a year, to make catnip mice at the winter holidays. That project always transforms me into a grouch, what with thread breaking and bobbins running out and never remembering the order in which one threads a machine. This year should go a bit better, though, as my sweetheart suggested that we purchase pre-wound bobbins. “You think there IS such a thing?” I asked. We raced right out to JoAnn Fabrics and got me a bunch.
Meanwhile, the primary purpose of my little sewing kit is to entangle threads of differing colors from various spools into rainbow jumbles. The pin cushion gets into it too, snagging errant dangles and wrapping them around the heads of pins until the whole collision of stuff is unusable.
My sewing technique is not subtle. My stitching tends to look like an elongated version of the scar on Harry Potter’s forehead. The basting stitch is my specialty. That’s the long loping suture whose purpose is to hold the fabric in place until a more attractive finish can be applied. Except that basting, in my case, is the finished product.
Thimbles are my enemies; I just cannot maneuver with one on, and needles poke through them with ease, so my fingers at times become the pincushions.
Sewing stores make me nauseous, so I use whatever threads and materials I find at garage sales, which leaves me with a basket full of ribbons and binding tape (good for catnip mouse tails), old-fashioned snaps, hooks and eyes, zippers and strips of elastic I have never known how to use; so many buttons I keep them in glass canisters and my wife decorates the house with them, having discovered they’re heavy enough to make great bookends; metal hem holder-uppers or whatever the technical term is (I don’t know to use them); safety pins (thank you, whoever invented safety pins); some kind of marker which could probably be very useful; a needle threader that I’ll probably have to start using now that cataract surgery has eliminated my very useful myopia; and dozens of tiny spools of thread, the kind you take along in your travel bag except for the trip when you tear something and really need one of the colors.
I did buy a bright shiny new-looking hem ripper, which I believe is one of the greatest inventions of all time. It’s unfortunate, but if I’m going to rip out a hem, I’m likely to do it with the heel of a sneaker while jumping from rock to rock across a creek.
I remember learning as a kid that needles were expensive and I was taught never to lose such a precious item. One didn’t waste thread for the same reason. Possibly, that’s why the most useful tool in my sewing kit, the one I have in spades, the one I turn to for 99% of my repair needs, is not needle or thread, but is the equivalent of the handy dyke’s duct tape: sticky-backed industrial strength Velcro.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
September 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Night Owl
The Amazon Trail - Night Owl
It all started when I wouldn’t get up on Sunday mornings to go to church. I was an energetic, nervous baby dyke, and I simply could not sit still that long with nothing to engage me. And the old guy up front was talking Latin, for pete’s sake. So, over some of my most formative years, say 10 through 13, I got in the habit of staying in bed really late on Sunday mornings until my mother finally gave up trying to unearth me.
Sleeping late on Sundays led to the complete and utter pleasure of staying up really late on Saturday nights. That became my time. Listening to the alternative radio station, watching horror movies on the $15.00 used console TV and, by high school, writing love poetry to my girlfriend and my crushes.
It didn’t take long before I was staying up Friday nights and as many other nights as I could get away with. That usually depended on when my mother got up to wake my father in his recliner, turn off the TV and make sure he went to bed. Then she’d sleep a couple more hours before discovering my light was still on. The poor woman. Riding herd on her Lynches was an unwinnable battle. I remember her warning me, “You’ll read your eyes out!”
So here I am all grown up - or so I'm told. My night still doesn't end until three or four in the morning. For most of these years I've fought myself, acting as my own insomniac mother and ordering myself to bed, then not complying. Mornings I was wont to beat myself up for starting work so late yet again and I'd tell myself I’d go to sleep earlier that very night, only to be lured by the sirens of stillness and solitude into another rendezvous with an absorbing book or a project I wanted to finish.
So sue me: nights are when my inner owl awakens and challenges my intellect. I get ideas then and work out knotty writing quandaries. I dream then, of what I might achieve given leisure and a long enough life. I read my eyes out. I delight at the 3:00 A.M. madness of the cats and try to quiet them so they don't wake my wife, sleeping all lonesome in the next room.
But there I go, beating myself up again. My sweetheart doesn't. I fear creating a rift in our relationship by abandoning her to the night, when in fact she is the one with enough insight to recognize and accept - and still love - this night-fired insomniac. Just make sure you sleep long enough to get at least seven hours, she urges. What a simple revelation: be who you are.
I work on west coast time so I don’t have to be at my desk and my job till noon. Why not answer the call of my nature, she reasons. When I force myself toward early sleep, I come wide awake next to her, wriggling and itchy and grabbing index cards or the iPod to jot notes. The early hours of the morning, the rich dark of deep night, fan the fires in me. Their light flares and I’m up again, much to the cats' delight.
It's taken most of a lifetime and a perfect match to understand this quirk of mine. My wife is teaching me what love really is as she embraces this flawed being. She’s teaching me that flaws are not flaws: they are what make us ourselves when we're not trying to conform to someone else’s agenda of normal. What makes me this way? I don't know the answer any more than I know why I'm gay or how I came to be able to put pretty words on a page or how my wife got so wise and understanding.
With August's wilding of England; America’s confusion between religion and power, people and corporations; with people drunk on hate of gays and colors; with the abandonment of wildlife to bulldozing developers - how I wish my sweetheart had a counterpart who could marry the world and steer it, also, to simply love all its parts and stop trying to quash the differences among living things that make this earth whole in its glorious self.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
August 2011
It all started when I wouldn’t get up on Sunday mornings to go to church. I was an energetic, nervous baby dyke, and I simply could not sit still that long with nothing to engage me. And the old guy up front was talking Latin, for pete’s sake. So, over some of my most formative years, say 10 through 13, I got in the habit of staying in bed really late on Sunday mornings until my mother finally gave up trying to unearth me.
Sleeping late on Sundays led to the complete and utter pleasure of staying up really late on Saturday nights. That became my time. Listening to the alternative radio station, watching horror movies on the $15.00 used console TV and, by high school, writing love poetry to my girlfriend and my crushes.
It didn’t take long before I was staying up Friday nights and as many other nights as I could get away with. That usually depended on when my mother got up to wake my father in his recliner, turn off the TV and make sure he went to bed. Then she’d sleep a couple more hours before discovering my light was still on. The poor woman. Riding herd on her Lynches was an unwinnable battle. I remember her warning me, “You’ll read your eyes out!”
So here I am all grown up - or so I'm told. My night still doesn't end until three or four in the morning. For most of these years I've fought myself, acting as my own insomniac mother and ordering myself to bed, then not complying. Mornings I was wont to beat myself up for starting work so late yet again and I'd tell myself I’d go to sleep earlier that very night, only to be lured by the sirens of stillness and solitude into another rendezvous with an absorbing book or a project I wanted to finish.
So sue me: nights are when my inner owl awakens and challenges my intellect. I get ideas then and work out knotty writing quandaries. I dream then, of what I might achieve given leisure and a long enough life. I read my eyes out. I delight at the 3:00 A.M. madness of the cats and try to quiet them so they don't wake my wife, sleeping all lonesome in the next room.
But there I go, beating myself up again. My sweetheart doesn't. I fear creating a rift in our relationship by abandoning her to the night, when in fact she is the one with enough insight to recognize and accept - and still love - this night-fired insomniac. Just make sure you sleep long enough to get at least seven hours, she urges. What a simple revelation: be who you are.
I work on west coast time so I don’t have to be at my desk and my job till noon. Why not answer the call of my nature, she reasons. When I force myself toward early sleep, I come wide awake next to her, wriggling and itchy and grabbing index cards or the iPod to jot notes. The early hours of the morning, the rich dark of deep night, fan the fires in me. Their light flares and I’m up again, much to the cats' delight.
It's taken most of a lifetime and a perfect match to understand this quirk of mine. My wife is teaching me what love really is as she embraces this flawed being. She’s teaching me that flaws are not flaws: they are what make us ourselves when we're not trying to conform to someone else’s agenda of normal. What makes me this way? I don't know the answer any more than I know why I'm gay or how I came to be able to put pretty words on a page or how my wife got so wise and understanding.
With August's wilding of England; America’s confusion between religion and power, people and corporations; with people drunk on hate of gays and colors; with the abandonment of wildlife to bulldozing developers - how I wish my sweetheart had a counterpart who could marry the world and steer it, also, to simply love all its parts and stop trying to quash the differences among living things that make this earth whole in its glorious self.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
August 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Beggar of Love
The Amazon Trial - Beggar of Love
The highest recommendation I can give Lee Lynch’s writing is that you will not mistake it for anyone else’s. Her voice and imagination are uniquely her own. Lynch has been out and proudly writing about it for longer than many of us have been alive. In her new novel, Beggar of Love, she creates a protagonist, Jefferson (known by her surname), so fully realised that the story seems to distill the last several decades of lesbian life.
Since The Swashbuckler (1985), Lynch has unapologetically written novels about and for dykes. As Nicola Griffith has said about ‘lesbian fiction’ (asknicola.blogspot.com), it would not be a compliment to suggest that Lynch transcends the genre; good books are not a genre. A good book can make the reader laugh, feel desire, and think, sometimes all in the same scene. Lynch does this with pithy sentences that can convey an entire relationship and more: ‘The occasional harshness that remained in Ginger’s accent grated on Jefferson, who’d been raised to sound like a class, not a location’ (p. 88). Here she describes a phenomenon this reader never had words for, but recognised instantly. Lynch is that rare US writer who knows that class—not race or sexuality—is the great American taboo. Her fiction can be relied upon to show us characters not only of different classes, pace American denial, but of different ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds—and she introduces them effortlessly, because her dyke world cuts across all those lines. This diversity is one of the things lesbian and feminist literature was supposed to deliver. Lynch delivers.
Another thing Beggar of Love does, that novelists rarely achieve, is to keep the outcome for the hero in genuine doubt until the very last page. The reader comes to know Jefferson in all her charming, sometimes infuriating butch complexity, and Lynch honors her readers’ intelligence by giving Jefferson many dimensions. In bringing these fully to life, she also does justice to her character.
Nor is gender diversity absent from Beggar of Love. Like much of Lynch’s work it celebrates butch and femme, especially butch sexuality, as more than fixed references to one point in time. There are few male characters, although there are hints that Jefferson’s father, Jarvy, sought the company of other men while married to Jefferson’s mother. Jefferson seems to have inherited her father’s roving eye, as surely as his alcoholism. Jarvy’s story brings to mind the father’s tragedy in Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic (in the sense of drawn media) memoir.
What takes the reader through the years and pages of this novel is, finally, the writing. ‘She'd been in love before, of course. Angela was still like ivy entwining her heart that some day would leave impressions, fossils of love, but her sensations now moved inside those ivied walls’ (p. 85). Jefferson’s feelings, if not her experiences, are universal. ‘Now that she knew she was capable of betrayal and inflicting pain in order to have what she wanted, she suspected everyone else in the world was capable of the same thing. She'd discovered that she couldn't trust herself to honor what she'd thought she'd believed in. How could she now trust anyone else?’ (pp. 101-02)
Lee Lynch finds the words.
The highest recommendation I can give Lee Lynch’s writing is that you will not mistake it for anyone else’s. Her voice and imagination are uniquely her own. Lynch has been out and proudly writing about it for longer than many of us have been alive. In her new novel, Beggar of Love, she creates a protagonist, Jefferson (known by her surname), so fully realised that the story seems to distill the last several decades of lesbian life.
Since The Swashbuckler (1985), Lynch has unapologetically written novels about and for dykes. As Nicola Griffith has said about ‘lesbian fiction’ (asknicola.blogspot.com), it would not be a compliment to suggest that Lynch transcends the genre; good books are not a genre. A good book can make the reader laugh, feel desire, and think, sometimes all in the same scene. Lynch does this with pithy sentences that can convey an entire relationship and more: ‘The occasional harshness that remained in Ginger’s accent grated on Jefferson, who’d been raised to sound like a class, not a location’ (p. 88). Here she describes a phenomenon this reader never had words for, but recognised instantly. Lynch is that rare US writer who knows that class—not race or sexuality—is the great American taboo. Her fiction can be relied upon to show us characters not only of different classes, pace American denial, but of different ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds—and she introduces them effortlessly, because her dyke world cuts across all those lines. This diversity is one of the things lesbian and feminist literature was supposed to deliver. Lynch delivers.
Another thing Beggar of Love does, that novelists rarely achieve, is to keep the outcome for the hero in genuine doubt until the very last page. The reader comes to know Jefferson in all her charming, sometimes infuriating butch complexity, and Lynch honors her readers’ intelligence by giving Jefferson many dimensions. In bringing these fully to life, she also does justice to her character.
Nor is gender diversity absent from Beggar of Love. Like much of Lynch’s work it celebrates butch and femme, especially butch sexuality, as more than fixed references to one point in time. There are few male characters, although there are hints that Jefferson’s father, Jarvy, sought the company of other men while married to Jefferson’s mother. Jefferson seems to have inherited her father’s roving eye, as surely as his alcoholism. Jarvy’s story brings to mind the father’s tragedy in Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic (in the sense of drawn media) memoir.
What takes the reader through the years and pages of this novel is, finally, the writing. ‘She'd been in love before, of course. Angela was still like ivy entwining her heart that some day would leave impressions, fossils of love, but her sensations now moved inside those ivied walls’ (p. 85). Jefferson’s feelings, if not her experiences, are universal. ‘Now that she knew she was capable of betrayal and inflicting pain in order to have what she wanted, she suspected everyone else in the world was capable of the same thing. She'd discovered that she couldn't trust herself to honor what she'd thought she'd believed in. How could she now trust anyone else?’ (pp. 101-02)
Lee Lynch finds the words.
Friday, July 8, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Oddly Hungry For More
The Amazon Trail
“Oddly Hungry For More”
A woman who has devoted her life to writing our stories, Karen Kallmaker has inspired waves of writers while gathering, like a femme pied piper, whole throngs of readers who await each of her books with anticipation of ever more delight. This year, author Karen Kallmaker was honored with the 2011 Golden Crown Literary Society’s (GCLS) Trailblazer Award. She is as beloved as her books.
This is a woman who, as a child, wanted to be Mary Poppins. Later, her super hero was Batgirl. She discovered, very young, that she couldn’t fly, and broke her arm trying. She still takes this approach to life and jumps into challenges. This style is clearly genetic, as she is a descendent of Lady Godiva. Fortunately for us, Batgirl grew up and discovered lesbian fiction in a library catalog after seeing the film “Desert Hearts” in 1986. She has not turned back since.
She was born in Sacramento, California in 1960. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, has worked in non-profit financial management and the vagaries of California law have led her to thrice marry her lucky partner of over three decades. They have two children.
Karin Kallmaker is a serious writer. Writing is who she is. She’s acutely aware that she writes not for a publisher, not for a royalty check, not for celebrity, but for her readers. Early on, Kallmaker made lesbian lives more bearable; she continues to enhance our lives by depicting us as we are. It’s not that her characters don't have issues, but that lesbians deserve happy endings.
Says friend M.J. Lowe, “Karin is honestly one of the most gracious and kind women I know. All things being equal, she genuinely does the nicer, more generous thing rather than not. It's not just diplomatic.”
I couldn't agree more. At a GCLS conference, during the dance, I emerged, dripping with sweat, into the lobby. Kallmaker didn’t say a word, but went to a table of ice and water and brought me some. Then, with breathtaking femme grace, she stepped away, giving me respectful space to be my sodden butch self. I’ve been secretly in her thrall from that moment. Another time, at the gay beach in Provincetown, a jumble of chilly lesbians huddled around a bonfire. Karin appeared out of the darkness with, what else, chocolate! And thawed the frozen lesbians with goodies and kindness.
The first day I met my sweetheart, the first meal we shared, we were with Karin and M.J. Lowe. Truly, Karin is the Queen of Lesbian Romance (as she was dubbed by “The Journal of Lesbian Studies”) in real life as well as her stories.
Karin’s first book, In Every Port, came out in 1990. She has 37 novels, collections and anthologies in print. These include her much-loved Touchwood; Goldie winners: 18th and Castro, Just Like That, and Sugar; an Ann Bannon Popular Choice winner: The Kiss That Counted; Lammy winners: In Deep Waters 2: Cruising the Strip (with Radclyffe); The Kiss That Counted, and the classic title Maybe Next Time. This year she was honored with the GCLS Trailblazer Award. She’s a four-time winner of the Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Award. She writes romance, lesbian erotica, essays, general fiction and, under the name Laura Adams, lesbian science-fiction fantasy. Her books have been award finalists too many times to count. Karin’s work has been translated into four languages and she has dozens of short stories in various anthologies.
Karin on writing: “I really think it boils down to whether you feel you're being asked to be inauthentic to your vision - and whether you will be able to live with it later.”
“[Patricia] Cornwall, unlike others, has at least never claimed or used the lesbian community that I know of. There are others that do, and expect the adulation and kudos and community support etc., while doing nothing overt to bring our existence into a realistic mainstream setting. With some writers I fear I have a ‘yes, but what have you done for us lately’ attitude - I basically feel that if you want someone's support, you need to consistently court it. Since I write exclusively for myself and lesbian readers, I take the responsibility very seriously. My plots may not be reality, but they are (I sincerely hope) reflective of a reality any lesbian would enjoy.”
On lesbians: “I've long been of the opinion that lesbians do just about everything better. Can't help myself on that one. It's why other folks sometimes try to co-opt our community events and others get just plain envious of the support network, for example the way we've learned to create families we can't *wait* to spend Thanksgiving with. In difficult situations there are times when I *really* want to say, ‘Whatever, fool. I'm having better sex than you are.’"
“My partner and I found each other very young, and had to make it all up for ourselves, being the only two girls ever in the history of the world to fall in love, you know.”
“I think I heard the word ‘lesbian’ only once before I was having sex with one, and I didn't connect what I was doing with that word at all.”
On readers: “…my feeling is my books are to be enjoyed in whatever way the reader will most enjoy them... my goal is to leave her happy, exhausted, pleased, satisfied and yet oddly hungry for more. How she gets into that condition is her business; I'm quite pleased to be in the room when it happens.”
Can you fall (platonically) in love with a woman while writing about her? Lesbian readers everywhere have made room in our hearts for this talented trailblazer. What a poorer place our world would be without Karin Kallmaker,
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
July 2011
“Oddly Hungry For More”
A woman who has devoted her life to writing our stories, Karen Kallmaker has inspired waves of writers while gathering, like a femme pied piper, whole throngs of readers who await each of her books with anticipation of ever more delight. This year, author Karen Kallmaker was honored with the 2011 Golden Crown Literary Society’s (GCLS) Trailblazer Award. She is as beloved as her books.
This is a woman who, as a child, wanted to be Mary Poppins. Later, her super hero was Batgirl. She discovered, very young, that she couldn’t fly, and broke her arm trying. She still takes this approach to life and jumps into challenges. This style is clearly genetic, as she is a descendent of Lady Godiva. Fortunately for us, Batgirl grew up and discovered lesbian fiction in a library catalog after seeing the film “Desert Hearts” in 1986. She has not turned back since.
She was born in Sacramento, California in 1960. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, has worked in non-profit financial management and the vagaries of California law have led her to thrice marry her lucky partner of over three decades. They have two children.
Karin Kallmaker is a serious writer. Writing is who she is. She’s acutely aware that she writes not for a publisher, not for a royalty check, not for celebrity, but for her readers. Early on, Kallmaker made lesbian lives more bearable; she continues to enhance our lives by depicting us as we are. It’s not that her characters don't have issues, but that lesbians deserve happy endings.
Says friend M.J. Lowe, “Karin is honestly one of the most gracious and kind women I know. All things being equal, she genuinely does the nicer, more generous thing rather than not. It's not just diplomatic.”
I couldn't agree more. At a GCLS conference, during the dance, I emerged, dripping with sweat, into the lobby. Kallmaker didn’t say a word, but went to a table of ice and water and brought me some. Then, with breathtaking femme grace, she stepped away, giving me respectful space to be my sodden butch self. I’ve been secretly in her thrall from that moment. Another time, at the gay beach in Provincetown, a jumble of chilly lesbians huddled around a bonfire. Karin appeared out of the darkness with, what else, chocolate! And thawed the frozen lesbians with goodies and kindness.
The first day I met my sweetheart, the first meal we shared, we were with Karin and M.J. Lowe. Truly, Karin is the Queen of Lesbian Romance (as she was dubbed by “The Journal of Lesbian Studies”) in real life as well as her stories.
Karin’s first book, In Every Port, came out in 1990. She has 37 novels, collections and anthologies in print. These include her much-loved Touchwood; Goldie winners: 18th and Castro, Just Like That, and Sugar; an Ann Bannon Popular Choice winner: The Kiss That Counted; Lammy winners: In Deep Waters 2: Cruising the Strip (with Radclyffe); The Kiss That Counted, and the classic title Maybe Next Time. This year she was honored with the GCLS Trailblazer Award. She’s a four-time winner of the Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Award. She writes romance, lesbian erotica, essays, general fiction and, under the name Laura Adams, lesbian science-fiction fantasy. Her books have been award finalists too many times to count. Karin’s work has been translated into four languages and she has dozens of short stories in various anthologies.
Karin on writing: “I really think it boils down to whether you feel you're being asked to be inauthentic to your vision - and whether you will be able to live with it later.”
“[Patricia] Cornwall, unlike others, has at least never claimed or used the lesbian community that I know of. There are others that do, and expect the adulation and kudos and community support etc., while doing nothing overt to bring our existence into a realistic mainstream setting. With some writers I fear I have a ‘yes, but what have you done for us lately’ attitude - I basically feel that if you want someone's support, you need to consistently court it. Since I write exclusively for myself and lesbian readers, I take the responsibility very seriously. My plots may not be reality, but they are (I sincerely hope) reflective of a reality any lesbian would enjoy.”
On lesbians: “I've long been of the opinion that lesbians do just about everything better. Can't help myself on that one. It's why other folks sometimes try to co-opt our community events and others get just plain envious of the support network, for example the way we've learned to create families we can't *wait* to spend Thanksgiving with. In difficult situations there are times when I *really* want to say, ‘Whatever, fool. I'm having better sex than you are.’"
“My partner and I found each other very young, and had to make it all up for ourselves, being the only two girls ever in the history of the world to fall in love, you know.”
“I think I heard the word ‘lesbian’ only once before I was having sex with one, and I didn't connect what I was doing with that word at all.”
On readers: “…my feeling is my books are to be enjoyed in whatever way the reader will most enjoy them... my goal is to leave her happy, exhausted, pleased, satisfied and yet oddly hungry for more. How she gets into that condition is her business; I'm quite pleased to be in the room when it happens.”
Can you fall (platonically) in love with a woman while writing about her? Lesbian readers everywhere have made room in our hearts for this talented trailblazer. What a poorer place our world would be without Karin Kallmaker,
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
July 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)