Giovanni's Room, Sunday, July 11 at 5:30 pm

So I'm reading in Philadelphia at Giovanni's Room!!!! Yayyy!!

Thanks ericaceous (and plasticsturgeon kind of by proxy!) and prrpltrrtl and all for urging me to come.

It's very soon after the end of the Nolose conference, which is looking so exciting this year. But not so soon that those of us who are going to be there can't go to every single delicious event and then drift on over the bookstore for the reading as if the conference were never going to end.

Any and all help in spreading the word about the reading to Philadelphia folks would be much appreciated!

Lucky me, I get to stay in Philly with the fabulous writer Toni Brown, who will be just back from a week in Provincetown at the Fine Arts Work Center. One of the very lovely thing about all of this travelling is the chance to spend time with old friends.

I'm editing to add that if you're in Philly this weekend, check out Queer Bodies, "a celebration of those of us in LGBT communities that live in bodies that exist outside of the cultural norms, including fat folks, trans and genderqueer folks, folks with disability issues, and others." beccawrites is one of the presenters, and it looks very cool. There's a fat queer flea market, too!

Sally Bellerose

My dear friend, Sally Bellerose, was just awarded a grant in fiction from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund!

Barbara Deming was a brave and amazing activist and writer. I've linked to a website that includes excerpts from some of her writing.

Sally is also a very hot writer. We first met each other in a writers group in the late eighties, and, all these years later, we still meet once a week to talk about writing. She is solid, steady, honest, funny and loves to drop down to the deepest levels of observation and imagination. She's got a really great novel called The Girls Club. It's about growing up working class and Catholic, about living with chronic illness and coming out as a dyke. Sometimes all of those things melt together in this book in an amazing, unsettling way. It's sexy, unflinching, reverent and very funny -- just gorgeous, gorgeous work.

Sally's received an NEA grant for part of this book, and won the Fiction prize from Writers at Work, and been a finalist for I don't know how many competitions -- including one where an outraged judge called her up to tell her that the only reason she didn't win was because of biased reactions of others to the content. She's been told that her work is unpublishable because of the frankness with which she writes about ostomies and illness, and her work has also been published by a huge association of folks with ostomies because there is such an aching need for exactly such explicit, powerful, honest reflections of those realities in literature. Nursing magazines have published her work (she's a former nurse). Tons of queer erotic anthologies of various kinds have published her over and over -- Sally writes about human realities that include the body like nobody else. She's amazing.

The Girls Club doesn't have a publisher yet. Sally's working on a new book, now, one that I'm very, very excited about.

Yay for her latest award! Here's to getting The Girls Club into more people's hands very soon.