Fat and the Academy spill
Apr. 11th, 2006 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susanstinsonI have a recently updated work plan (thanks to beautiful help from my friends -- but doing this isn't on it!) and a ridiculous amount of work I need to be doing -- some of it lovely and exciting, some of it doing my taxes, none of it optional, so won't be able to respond to comments much – apologies -- but wanted to say a few things about how Fat and the Academy was for me.
I was there, of course, from a place of enormous privilege, both because I was an invited speaker and because Smith is a very easy trike ride from my house, and, although I'm neither an academic nor have ever been officially associated with Smith, I have been working in the office of a friend who teaches there every Saturday for a while (she plays medieval chants while we work --it's great), and skimming what I can from the truly amazing array of speakers and performances that this elite private women's college brings to my town, along with benefiting from the energy and insights of the waves of students for many years. Smith College is expanding in a way that is wiping out increasingly rare and important low and middle income housing here and turning long established neighborhoods into parking garages and new buildings (not without community protest), and it also has been an ongoing source of resources (I can't check them out, but I do research in the library there, for instance) and stimulation for me. And I'd been lucky enough to read for Size Matters in February, so I had met the conference organizers.
It is, in a back door kind of way, home territory for me. Two different Smith students came up to talk to me about having recognized my trike last week when I was on campus – one had been worried that somebody was stealing it at the sight of somebody else unlocking it, but then recognized my friend Alison.
Also, since I was at home, and had some other pressing things I needed to help take care of, I had to miss a lot of the conference – I saw Katie LeBesco, Stefanie Snyder, Paul Campos, Marilyn Wann, but didn't get to see To The Earth (Tribal Belly dance) , the Royal Renegades (the Philadelphia Drag Kings) – I got to hug![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pinkprincesszoe very quickly while she was talking on a cell phone, but didn't even realize that kellidunham was there until I read it in her lj later. I heard a lot of praise for the performances, though. I was also sorry not to meet keryx -- but totally happy to get called adorable in her lj. I also didn't see Pattie Thomas or Paul McAleer of Big Fat Blog, although I was happy to get to meet them both. (Folks are currently discussing the conference on Big Fat Blog, too.)
So, for me, it was the kind of thing that I wish everybody could have -- I'm thinking about issues thatcharlottecooper has been raising about (me paraphrasing, and probably getting some parts wrong) the ways that American identity so often shapes and is implicitly assumed as the central perspective from which much fat organizing, including the new discipline of Fat Studies, is being constructed, and what other ways of organizing and communicating there are besides conferences that are more geographically accessible – but this was a fantasy set-up for me – hop on my trike (one day, anyway), ride through the sunny streets (I only rode it on the sunny day…), and get to hear some of the most experienced and exciting thinkers in the country on fat talk, get to meet and hang out with them and other interesting folks, and, when I was ready, to get to add my own voice and contributions to the mix. So, for me, a very, very big gift.
And, you know, I have enormous respect for Size Matters, the organizers of the conference. I worry that the speakers (me!) may have over praised them from the podium in a way that made the, of course, many and important critiques of the conference feel harder to voice or feel like such a big contrast to the criticism as to make the praise seem hollow to the organizers. I hope that didn't happen. I come from a Texas-rooted tradition of very high praise (if we weren't loudly and repeatedly swooning over my mother's biscuits, we were clearly not doing our job at the breakfast table – not that that was hard – as the praise in point wasn't hard either – because I really, really, really loved them.). And I've been in an administrative role for many political conferences and events, both at the Center for Popular Economics and as an undergraduate (as everybody in Size Matters is -- well, I think one recently graduated and 2 more are about to) so I have such a visceral sense of both how important deep, serious, respectful feedback can be to transforming what happens next, and also of what a lot that can be to handle along with sleep deprivation and everything else organizers – in this case, five people – are juggling in one weekend.
So, yeah, more structured discussion and interaction for everyone at the conference, working hard to get analysis of race, class, gender and disability on the table with fat in a serious way, taking on that complicated task of making clear that people are welcome to speak on these issues and fully participate in this process at all sizes, and encouraging people to be actively friendly and welcoming to each other, working with others to try to figure out the most effective steps to take to interrupt US cultural dominance (while still, says me, for those of us who are US citizens making sure we use our power and privilege in that role to try to do what we can to shift the messages that our cultural machinery spews out and slathers everyone else with) – very important things to keep after if we are lucky enough to get more structured moments to gather to think and talk and perform about fat.
I've been participating in fat liberation for more than twenty years. I've never had anything like such an event in my hometown. For me, it was amazing. Here are a few other things I've been thinking about it:
• I was sorryalways_in_drag left early, not only because she'd offered to take pictures of me on my trike -- mermeydele and Katie both did, though, in my reading outfit, too, so I'll have some to post as soon as they send them to me -- but also because I was talking about ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fatshionista with almost everybody I met. I spoke about it before I read, too – not only because almost everything I was wearing stuff I had found out about on fatshionista, but also because the conversations about race, class, body size, dieting history, tensions and connections between people of different sizes and everything else that the fabulous members (and outstanding, dedicated, skilled, smart and funny facilitators – whooooooo!) have been getting into on fatshionista are so important. It's hugely reminiscent to me of the conscious-raising groups that were such an important force in the social change that came from the feminist movement in the sixties, seventies and beyond, and it just makes total sense to me that really cutting edge and complicated, body-based analysis is coming out of that kind of forum that the academy hasn't caught up to – so much great writing and thinking -- and, in this case, also hard to find knee socks! – have come out of that kind of forum. It's really important work. By the end, Marilyn Wann (who didn't know about it before), gave it a plug, too.
• Katie LeBesco said that when she was a grad student at Umass and we had coffee and talked about fat stuff a few times, that I had been the first fat activist she had ever gotten to know, and that meeting me had been important for her. I didn't know that (she surely didn't let on at the time!), and it's one of those things that marks for me how a person rarely knows what might be influenced by the casual, ordinary, daily things one says or does, you know?
Katie is thinner than the last time I saw her speak, and made a reference to that in her talk. It wasn't a big deal at all for me, but I noticed that many, many people wanted to talk to her about it or referred to it when thinking about what she said. I forget how charged that is – my own position is that body size (like everything else about bodies) isn't static – that it changes, sometimes in unexpected ways (or sometimes, temporarily or – much more rarely – permanently, through specific efforts), so that one problem with the idea of loving your body, is that it isn't just the body I (or anybody) has now, but loving a changing body.
When I first met her, I noticed that Katie was much smaller than me, and, coming from that kind of defensive place that fat people sometimes take on as we live our lives under the pressure of fat oppression, I asked her why she was interested in fat politics. The way I remember her answer is that she said that she had recently lost a lot of weight, maybe the circumstance of her life had changed and she was walking a lot more, but that she knew the statistics, and knew that she was very likely to become more fat again, and that she wanted to do everything she could to use her temporary thin privilege to make the world better for fat people – she described it as self-interested. And I remember being surprised and moved when she told me that she was profoundly angry because she was being treated so much better on a day to day basis as a smaller woman than she had been when she was bigger, and it just filled her with fury. That's the way I remember what she said then, and I think it was part of what changed my thinking about changing sizes – that there is enormously useful power from every perspective.
• I really enjoyed meeting Stefanie, and her presentation was so interesting. It was also intense to see FaT GiRL and Size Queen, and so, photos of people I know, in the context of intellectual analysis rather than in context of a participatory community (of course, through the hard work and talent and relationships and inspiration of very individual people) creating the art it needs.
• This was the biggest thing for me, and I've left it for last. It's hard to describe. I read after Paul Campos and before Marilyn Wann. These are two people whose work I admire a lot (and I've know Marilyn for years – I was really loving recognizing the common references to radical feminism in the ways she works, and she was really on fire, I thought – it was the most exciting presentation I'd ever seen her give, and she's always full of energy), and it's the fact the Paul is in there asking pointed questions of the obesity doctors and calling them liars and talking about fear of death and using fat people as a stand-in for anxieties about American greed and over consumption (and yeah, I wanted to shout – what *does* it mean that government health officials are calling the obesity epidemic "the terror within" and pumping up the pressure and the rhetoric of this damaging, expensive, distracting obsession while, as Eli Claire pointed out at a presentation I was at not too long ago, more deaths and newly disabled people are being created every day as part of the conduct and consequences of the war in Iraq and our reckless over consumption of oil) – it's the fact that he's taken apart the studies and sometimes gets listened to by the New York Times, and that Marilyn is out there communicating in ways that not only radical queer fat activists but also the Today show pay attention to, their work, along with the work of so many others I know and have known over the years, the fact that I've been participating in grassroots feminist fat liberation ever since I was in my early twenties -- I'm forty-five now -- IS what has created the possibility for me to do the deepest work of my heart, my fiction and poetry, even when the connections between my writing and this movement may not be readily visible to others – they are deeply, profoundly, there.
So, I read on Sunday, after Paul, before Marilyn. Many people who I know in other ways, including lj, had left. Many others cleared out to get lunch or a little sun and then came back for Marilyn – of course I noticed, wished it wasn't true, and Paul was getting on a plane to go home to urgent matters (but I was glad he was there for the prologue) – but there were plenty of people still there. And I read the prologue, chapter one and a section from the walk by the road from Venus of Chalk. This is explicit lesbian sex (there had been a lovely abundance of queer sexual expression at the conference – perhaps surprising some participants), and also a scene of self mutilation – intense pain. It's vulnerable stuff for me to read, and vulnerable stuff for some fat people to hear, because it goes to the terrible pain place, leaves the excitement of seeing the possibility of change embodied and discussed, of hearing something that sounds like a version of truth for once (always imperfect) about fat, and going back to a truly horrible moment of being targeted on the street and then turning that kind of hatred against your own body (and/or your own spirit). I think that almost everyone – fat or not, with a history of self-mutilation or not --knows a version of that moment, and it's part of expanding the depth and complexity of our lives and our politics that we can see and acknowledge and have an aesthetic experience of the depth and complexities and pain, self-hatred and how to move through them, imperfectly, partially, amazingly, doggedly, to something else.
It was silent after I read – no questions, although we talked a little when I asked them one. So different than the hands waving to have a conversation with Paul, or the total explosion of energy after Marilyn (AND it was so great, so freeing for me knowing that she was after me, so I didn't have to worry about leaving people with images and maybe reawakened memories of pain with no place to go with them, because Marilyn is so full of ideas for ways that people can use their energy, to work, and start making change.)
It was, for me, a very beautiful moment. Vulnerable and rare. To get to fully offer the deepest part of what I have to offer in a context with other people – some of whom I've been swimming with in these difficult fat liberation oceans for a decade or more – working so hard to offer their best work about fat, too.
In the town where I live, just down the street from where I'm typing right now? Had to be a dream.
PS Robert Chang was there making a film about fat activists, which he said will be screened, along with others from his program at the Landmark theater in New York on May 8. If I learn more, I'll let you know.
I was there, of course, from a place of enormous privilege, both because I was an invited speaker and because Smith is a very easy trike ride from my house, and, although I'm neither an academic nor have ever been officially associated with Smith, I have been working in the office of a friend who teaches there every Saturday for a while (she plays medieval chants while we work --it's great), and skimming what I can from the truly amazing array of speakers and performances that this elite private women's college brings to my town, along with benefiting from the energy and insights of the waves of students for many years. Smith College is expanding in a way that is wiping out increasingly rare and important low and middle income housing here and turning long established neighborhoods into parking garages and new buildings (not without community protest), and it also has been an ongoing source of resources (I can't check them out, but I do research in the library there, for instance) and stimulation for me. And I'd been lucky enough to read for Size Matters in February, so I had met the conference organizers.
It is, in a back door kind of way, home territory for me. Two different Smith students came up to talk to me about having recognized my trike last week when I was on campus – one had been worried that somebody was stealing it at the sight of somebody else unlocking it, but then recognized my friend Alison.
Also, since I was at home, and had some other pressing things I needed to help take care of, I had to miss a lot of the conference – I saw Katie LeBesco, Stefanie Snyder, Paul Campos, Marilyn Wann, but didn't get to see To The Earth (Tribal Belly dance) , the Royal Renegades (the Philadelphia Drag Kings) – I got to hug
pinkprincesszoe very quickly while she was talking on a cell phone, but didn't even realize that kellidunham was there until I read it in her lj later. I heard a lot of praise for the performances, though. I was also sorry not to meet keryx -- but totally happy to get called adorable in her lj. I also didn't see Pattie Thomas or Paul McAleer of Big Fat Blog, although I was happy to get to meet them both. (Folks are currently discussing the conference on Big Fat Blog, too.) So, for me, it was the kind of thing that I wish everybody could have -- I'm thinking about issues that
charlottecooper has been raising about (me paraphrasing, and probably getting some parts wrong) the ways that American identity so often shapes and is implicitly assumed as the central perspective from which much fat organizing, including the new discipline of Fat Studies, is being constructed, and what other ways of organizing and communicating there are besides conferences that are more geographically accessible – but this was a fantasy set-up for me – hop on my trike (one day, anyway), ride through the sunny streets (I only rode it on the sunny day…), and get to hear some of the most experienced and exciting thinkers in the country on fat talk, get to meet and hang out with them and other interesting folks, and, when I was ready, to get to add my own voice and contributions to the mix. So, for me, a very, very big gift. And, you know, I have enormous respect for Size Matters, the organizers of the conference. I worry that the speakers (me!) may have over praised them from the podium in a way that made the, of course, many and important critiques of the conference feel harder to voice or feel like such a big contrast to the criticism as to make the praise seem hollow to the organizers. I hope that didn't happen. I come from a Texas-rooted tradition of very high praise (if we weren't loudly and repeatedly swooning over my mother's biscuits, we were clearly not doing our job at the breakfast table – not that that was hard – as the praise in point wasn't hard either – because I really, really, really loved them.). And I've been in an administrative role for many political conferences and events, both at the Center for Popular Economics and as an undergraduate (as everybody in Size Matters is -- well, I think one recently graduated and 2 more are about to) so I have such a visceral sense of both how important deep, serious, respectful feedback can be to transforming what happens next, and also of what a lot that can be to handle along with sleep deprivation and everything else organizers – in this case, five people – are juggling in one weekend.
So, yeah, more structured discussion and interaction for everyone at the conference, working hard to get analysis of race, class, gender and disability on the table with fat in a serious way, taking on that complicated task of making clear that people are welcome to speak on these issues and fully participate in this process at all sizes, and encouraging people to be actively friendly and welcoming to each other, working with others to try to figure out the most effective steps to take to interrupt US cultural dominance (while still, says me, for those of us who are US citizens making sure we use our power and privilege in that role to try to do what we can to shift the messages that our cultural machinery spews out and slathers everyone else with) – very important things to keep after if we are lucky enough to get more structured moments to gather to think and talk and perform about fat.
I've been participating in fat liberation for more than twenty years. I've never had anything like such an event in my hometown. For me, it was amazing. Here are a few other things I've been thinking about it:
• I was sorry
always_in_drag left early, not only because she'd offered to take pictures of me on my trike -- mermeydele and Katie both did, though, in my reading outfit, too, so I'll have some to post as soon as they send them to me -- but also because I was talking about fatshionista with almost everybody I met. I spoke about it before I read, too – not only because almost everything I was wearing stuff I had found out about on fatshionista, but also because the conversations about race, class, body size, dieting history, tensions and connections between people of different sizes and everything else that the fabulous members (and outstanding, dedicated, skilled, smart and funny facilitators – whooooooo!) have been getting into on fatshionista are so important. It's hugely reminiscent to me of the conscious-raising groups that were such an important force in the social change that came from the feminist movement in the sixties, seventies and beyond, and it just makes total sense to me that really cutting edge and complicated, body-based analysis is coming out of that kind of forum that the academy hasn't caught up to – so much great writing and thinking -- and, in this case, also hard to find knee socks! – have come out of that kind of forum. It's really important work. By the end, Marilyn Wann (who didn't know about it before), gave it a plug, too. • Katie LeBesco said that when she was a grad student at Umass and we had coffee and talked about fat stuff a few times, that I had been the first fat activist she had ever gotten to know, and that meeting me had been important for her. I didn't know that (she surely didn't let on at the time!), and it's one of those things that marks for me how a person rarely knows what might be influenced by the casual, ordinary, daily things one says or does, you know?
Katie is thinner than the last time I saw her speak, and made a reference to that in her talk. It wasn't a big deal at all for me, but I noticed that many, many people wanted to talk to her about it or referred to it when thinking about what she said. I forget how charged that is – my own position is that body size (like everything else about bodies) isn't static – that it changes, sometimes in unexpected ways (or sometimes, temporarily or – much more rarely – permanently, through specific efforts), so that one problem with the idea of loving your body, is that it isn't just the body I (or anybody) has now, but loving a changing body.
When I first met her, I noticed that Katie was much smaller than me, and, coming from that kind of defensive place that fat people sometimes take on as we live our lives under the pressure of fat oppression, I asked her why she was interested in fat politics. The way I remember her answer is that she said that she had recently lost a lot of weight, maybe the circumstance of her life had changed and she was walking a lot more, but that she knew the statistics, and knew that she was very likely to become more fat again, and that she wanted to do everything she could to use her temporary thin privilege to make the world better for fat people – she described it as self-interested. And I remember being surprised and moved when she told me that she was profoundly angry because she was being treated so much better on a day to day basis as a smaller woman than she had been when she was bigger, and it just filled her with fury. That's the way I remember what she said then, and I think it was part of what changed my thinking about changing sizes – that there is enormously useful power from every perspective.
• I really enjoyed meeting Stefanie, and her presentation was so interesting. It was also intense to see FaT GiRL and Size Queen, and so, photos of people I know, in the context of intellectual analysis rather than in context of a participatory community (of course, through the hard work and talent and relationships and inspiration of very individual people) creating the art it needs.
• This was the biggest thing for me, and I've left it for last. It's hard to describe. I read after Paul Campos and before Marilyn Wann. These are two people whose work I admire a lot (and I've know Marilyn for years – I was really loving recognizing the common references to radical feminism in the ways she works, and she was really on fire, I thought – it was the most exciting presentation I'd ever seen her give, and she's always full of energy), and it's the fact the Paul is in there asking pointed questions of the obesity doctors and calling them liars and talking about fear of death and using fat people as a stand-in for anxieties about American greed and over consumption (and yeah, I wanted to shout – what *does* it mean that government health officials are calling the obesity epidemic "the terror within" and pumping up the pressure and the rhetoric of this damaging, expensive, distracting obsession while, as Eli Claire pointed out at a presentation I was at not too long ago, more deaths and newly disabled people are being created every day as part of the conduct and consequences of the war in Iraq and our reckless over consumption of oil) – it's the fact that he's taken apart the studies and sometimes gets listened to by the New York Times, and that Marilyn is out there communicating in ways that not only radical queer fat activists but also the Today show pay attention to, their work, along with the work of so many others I know and have known over the years, the fact that I've been participating in grassroots feminist fat liberation ever since I was in my early twenties -- I'm forty-five now -- IS what has created the possibility for me to do the deepest work of my heart, my fiction and poetry, even when the connections between my writing and this movement may not be readily visible to others – they are deeply, profoundly, there.
So, I read on Sunday, after Paul, before Marilyn. Many people who I know in other ways, including lj, had left. Many others cleared out to get lunch or a little sun and then came back for Marilyn – of course I noticed, wished it wasn't true, and Paul was getting on a plane to go home to urgent matters (but I was glad he was there for the prologue) – but there were plenty of people still there. And I read the prologue, chapter one and a section from the walk by the road from Venus of Chalk. This is explicit lesbian sex (there had been a lovely abundance of queer sexual expression at the conference – perhaps surprising some participants), and also a scene of self mutilation – intense pain. It's vulnerable stuff for me to read, and vulnerable stuff for some fat people to hear, because it goes to the terrible pain place, leaves the excitement of seeing the possibility of change embodied and discussed, of hearing something that sounds like a version of truth for once (always imperfect) about fat, and going back to a truly horrible moment of being targeted on the street and then turning that kind of hatred against your own body (and/or your own spirit). I think that almost everyone – fat or not, with a history of self-mutilation or not --knows a version of that moment, and it's part of expanding the depth and complexity of our lives and our politics that we can see and acknowledge and have an aesthetic experience of the depth and complexities and pain, self-hatred and how to move through them, imperfectly, partially, amazingly, doggedly, to something else.
It was silent after I read – no questions, although we talked a little when I asked them one. So different than the hands waving to have a conversation with Paul, or the total explosion of energy after Marilyn (AND it was so great, so freeing for me knowing that she was after me, so I didn't have to worry about leaving people with images and maybe reawakened memories of pain with no place to go with them, because Marilyn is so full of ideas for ways that people can use their energy, to work, and start making change.)
It was, for me, a very beautiful moment. Vulnerable and rare. To get to fully offer the deepest part of what I have to offer in a context with other people – some of whom I've been swimming with in these difficult fat liberation oceans for a decade or more – working so hard to offer their best work about fat, too.
In the town where I live, just down the street from where I'm typing right now? Had to be a dream.
PS Robert Chang was there making a film about fat activists, which he said will be screened, along with others from his program at the Landmark theater in New York on May 8. If I learn more, I'll let you know.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 04:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:50 pm (UTC)Hope the overwhelmedness clears soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:36 pm (UTC)I am very interested in reading what people thought and felt about this conference. Hopefully, there will be another and I will get to it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:50 pm (UTC)Fingers crossed about somebody pulling off another.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 05:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 06:09 pm (UTC)I really want to see more discussion about race, class, disability, and gender issues in the fat movements. I know there has been some but more would be better.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 06:15 pm (UTC)They're also talking about the conference on bigfatblog, linked above -- maybe I should add comment that says that.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 07:37 pm (UTC)Now I've got to go read all the other write-ups and critiques of the event. Since I'm still a neophyte in this movement, I was just dazzled by the conference and how good it felt to be talking openly with smart people about these issues.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 07:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 11:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-12 12:28 am (UTC)You know, the best way to find the heart of what I've done with this stuff would be to check out my book, linked above. I think the deconstructing comment came from Paul at Big Fat Blog, and he was talking about a poem, "Pretty Fat," which is more of an oral piece, so I don't think posting it would work.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-14 06:59 pm (UTC)- Paul
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-14 09:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-14 09:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-11 11:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-12 12:38 am (UTC)Also, I ran into a friend of yours -- Paisley (don't know if I'm spelling that right) on a balcony at a party in New York City last week -- and we talked about how wonderful you are and I got to hear about how when Paisley asked you about a software you said that you liked the software but didn't like the documentation, so had written your own, and handed over a 100 page, personally prepared manual. You are something special, becca, for sure.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-12 01:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-12 04:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-13 03:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-12 12:53 pm (UTC)Yes. You inspire me, Susan. You are one of those people who makes me think that, yes, this life is amazingly worthwhile and there is so much good out there worth fighting for. Thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-13 03:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-18 06:23 am (UTC)Thanks for an excellent writeup of the conference.
PS, what kind of trike do you have?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-18 06:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 11:55 pm (UTC)Would you be interested in working this into a little piece for me for my zine Figure 8? I really want to let people know about this, but not having gone I would prefer it if someone who was there could report on it. Sadly, there is no pay, only gratitude and the chance to affect lots of young women who read the zine. Let me know what you think. Of course you are welcome to write something else to if you like. my email ponyboypress@yahoo.com
Thanks! Krissy
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-02 10:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-02 11:06 pm (UTC)http://www.geocities.com/ponyboypress/zinesnewpage.html