susanstinson

I've got to prep for a work planning meeting in a couple of hours (I know I've mentioned that I do this with friends -- it's hugely helpful, and this one's particularly charged and important to me), but I would feel derelict in my bloggerly duties if I didn't report that Alison Bechdel made a post this morning which includes both a link to a video of one of her highly entertaining presentations about The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and a picture of Alison and me at her talk last night.

We met for tea before the talk. Alison didn't spot The Haymarket, although she did see my parked trike. I went out to stand by it as landmark, and there she was, was rushing down the main street of Northampton carrying a full, heavy case of some kind of soda pop that she had promised a reader of her blog who had won a contest there. She had lugged it all of the way from the hotel, and if that's not way beyond the call of bloggerly duty (and probably my first inkling of such a concept in the first place), I don't know what is.

I stayed up way too late reading (in most cases rereading) the Dykes To Watch Out For strips in the anthology. Doing that makes me feel like I'm inhaling clove cigarettes and patchouli in the backseat of a small car on the way to the Women's Peace Encampment and/or the Marquee (name your nostalgia dyke bar -- the Duchess definitely works, too, or the Globe, or, way, way back -- the Apartment). It's just so wild, that Alison's eye and her artist's obsessiveness and her wit caught so much detail (right now I'm looking at panel of Lois spraying Windex to polish the bookstore's display case of crystals and goddess figures and labryses -- God, she's got it down to the credit card sign and the pen jar with joined women's symbols next to the cash register) of these worlds that really are pretty much gone. It just nails formerly obscure mileaux that I spent a lot of time in, too. (And nails the wood grain on the play structure when Clarice and Toni move on out to the suburbs, too.) It's trippy. The strip and the books were/are there in real time, too, in the past, in the present. The artist's introduction raises questions about the effects of all of this observation, and there's plenty to mull over, but yeah, no, to me, despite the "nailed it" thing, this is not a case of a butterfly pinned (thereby killed) and preserved for better, more meticulous observation, but, because this is art, there is heat and mystery alive here, there just is, rising from a heightened, expansive dyke quotidian. And yeah, that turns out to be a heightened, expansive human quotidian. It kind of had to turn out that way, and part of the trick of both this work and negotiating the weird melting edges of identity through time is both the inescapable awareness of that, and the insistence of the particulars.


PS Holly Rae Taylor, who is Alison's girlfriend, took the picture. Check out her new website: Waste Free Living.

I bought Fun Home this morning at Broadside Books in Northampton, where Alison will be speaking June 24. I’m going to be in Cleveland at a conference, but I marked it on my calendar, anyway (that’s how good I think it'll be). She’s traveling a lot, and the whole tour schedule is here.

( This is what I thought of the book.  )

Guess what just got a mention in Alison Bechdel's blog?

Clue: it's shiny and red and tippy and broad and goes like the wind on a sunny spring day. Also, it's developed an odd click when pedalled that I need to get checked out.

It was so good to see Alison yesterday, and her slideshow and talk were stimulating and funny. She said about drawing that looking at the world and working to see what's actually there, not just what you expect to see, is a political act. I love that so much, the enormous power and meaning that can rise from just using the senses and trying to accurately convey what you see. And I love that she articulated it.

Spinsters Ink, which published my first two novels, is in the process of closing. This, sadly, is due in part to the serious illness of the current publisher, Sharon Silvas. It's also part of the larger trend of the disappearance of many feminist publishers, bookstores, and journals that made up much of the context in which I first became a published writer, and where the great majority of readers have found my work.

My most recent book was published by Firebrand, itself revived from closure by Karen Oosterhous after publishing some of the most powerful, influential and well-loved books in recent feminist literary history, books by Dorothy Allison, Shay Youngblood, Les Feinberg, Cheryl Clarke, Cherrie Moraga, Beth Brant, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kitty Tsui, Jewelle Gomez, Judith Katz and Alison Bechdel among them. Oh, I read these books with such voraciousness and desire, steaming up my glasses with urgent language and hot, hot, hot aspirations. Many of these books are still available from Firebrand, mind you, and I'm proud to be published by this press, and to have my work on a list with such great history and such really fine new work.

One of the gifts that small, independent presses give their authors is that the books often stay in print for much longer than at larger houses. But now my first book, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, is out of print. I only have seven copies (including two I just bought secondhand over the internet) left, so if I'll have to be very selective if I want to show the book to anyone. There are more copies of Martha Moody. There is always the possibility of new life for these books – new editions or new ways to distribute existing copies – but, for now, I just want to say that I love them enormously, and I love what I know about the life they've had in the world, and in the brains and dreams of individual readers, some of you dear to me on my friends list. I wish them more life.