susanstinson

Saturday morning, at the very moment when I was most tense about the reading that day (I always get tense before a reading, but this felt like unfamiliar territory, and made me even more edgy), I got a great email out of the blue from Phil, who is part of the inspiration for the fictional bus driver, Tucker, in my last novel, Venus of Chalk. With his permission, here it is. It's true, he always waves to me as his bus goes by, which makes me feel like a Northampton sidewalk celebrity.

( It also totally makes me grin and blush that Phil thinks I'm such a stylish fat lady. And don't miss the links he provides to discussion of designer Gaultier's use of a fat model in the blog of the amazing blues singer, Candye Kane. )

This is a story I emailed to some friends this morning, but I thought you, dear lj, might be interested, too.

This weekend, I was at a small conference about historical New England diaries, doing research for the novel I'm working on now. It was very wonderful in a lot of ways, including the passion (sometimes complete with blushing) in people's faces as they talked about the long-dead people whose diaries they were devoted to. As I came out of one session, I saw a small group of women clustered together, then noticed that one of them was very carefully holding something on a bed of white tissue paper. It turned out to be an ivory colored linen baby's shirt from 1799, and at least some of the women were textile historians, flipping up the lace collar and admiring the fine stitching.

I loved this, and it made me think of Carline from Venus of Chalk. So did the woman with very passionate opinions about the invention of pantyhose who is writing a history of clothes in the 1950s, and the one whose friend's mother had collected thousands of home economics pamphlets... The combination of experiencing that moment, and reading some Tennessee Williams reminded me that one of the things I drew on in writing the scene in Venus of Chalk in which Mel unfolds his bundle of cloth to show it to Carline in the shed was a similiar moment -- in a boat, yes? -- in Night of the Iguana. Tennessee Williams again.

Other influences on that moment include Thomas Hardy, who had a character very devoted to his beloved's glove, and John Ford, an artist I met in Missouri when my painter brother, Don Stinson, was very generously driving me over part of the route of the road trip in the novel, taking photos. John unwrapped a bundle of a very old -- again, ivory-colored -- corset that he had found wrapped around a glass kind of photo negative with the people's eyes blacked out that he had found in an attic in Ireland. And, you know, old white nylon slips. (My brother did a drawing once of me in one of my mother's. One version is on the cover of Belly Songs.) And all.

Venus of Chalk is a finalist in the gay/lesbian category. Yay!

• This is an award to "recognize excellence in independent publishing": a small press award.


• Judy Frank's book Crybaby Butch is nominated, too, so Fireband Books are two out of the three finalists. The other one is a book published by the American Bar Associaton.


• There's an award ceremony on June 1 at a Marriot in NYC and the Lambda awards are on June 2. Ceremonial city.


• My first novel, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, was a finalist in this category, too. My second novel, Martha Moody, won in the fiction category. There were silver stickers for finalist that my publisher put on FGDWR, and gold stickers for Martha Moody, but I was shy about them, and asked the publisher to stop putting them on my books, so, while you may see copies of FGDWR with the silver sticker, you won't see any of Martha Moody with the gold.


• I'm not shy quite like that any more.


• Books published by Readers' Digest have nominations in various categories.
Longtime readers here may remember my childhood devotion to Readers' Digest Condensed Books, but do they really count as "excellence in independent publishing?" There's a sprinkling of audio books from the BBC and Penguin, and a Random House finalist, but eight from Readers' Digest?

Wow.

I just got the latest issue of Lambda Book Report. (It's Vol. 13.04-05). The cover story is "Critical Mass: A New Generation of Gay Poets."

And on the upper left cover, there's a little picture that my friend James took of me in front of the radiator in his old apartment. The issue includes an article I wrote about fat, queer women writers: "No Longer Vigilant: Fat and the Word." The phrase "no longer vigilant" comes from a moving and powerful essay that amarama wrote as an lj entry, which is also quoted in the piece. Lots of other writers and artists with ljs are mentioned: technodyke, charlottecooper, misia, fattest, and there are photos of me, amarama (sticking doll arms into cake! credit: gordonzola), charlottecooper, and fattest too. There's also a bit of discussion of lj as a phenom.

The article opens with a description of reading at last year's Nolose and the way I experienced the reading that followed at Giovanni's Room in Philadelphia. (waves at ericaceous, plasticsturgeon and kayisgay.)

There's a copy of "Drink," a short story I wrote. I experimented with gender a little in the process of this piece, but ended up here with "she," which is how I originally wrote it. It's dedicated for everyone of every gender who has ever gotten even a little wet at a Nolose conference.

Then, on page 35, there's "Mortal Softness," which I love as a title for a very warm review of Venus of Chalk by Elisabeth Flynn, whose bio says she lives and writes in Philadelphia.

And on the next page, there's a review I wrote of the wonderful Life Mask, by Emma Donoghue, which is also a finalist for a Lambda Literary award.

There's a review of final_girl's most recent book of poetry in there, too.

Again, wow. If ever I should start complaining about having my work ignored by the queer press, would somebody please remind me of this? And wow!! A whole range of fat writers are a bit more visible on the queer literary landscape. And I got a chance to say publicly that Charlotte Cooper's site includes "some of the most witty, observant and passionate travel writing I've seen." Yay.

Check it out!

Oh, I'm so excited! I'm so excited!!!!!

I just got an email that the Publishing Triangle has released lists of the Notable Lesbian Books of 2004, and Venus of Chalk is on the list of the top ten!!! Yayyyyyy!!!


Here it is, here it is!

Alison Smith's book Name All The Animals is on there, too, which is so great because she's a friend!!! And Crybaby Butch by Judy Frank made the lists, too!! Oh, and a bunch of other really fabulous writers -- Emma Donoghue's Life Mask is there (I wrote a review of it for Lambda Book Report which hasn't appeared yet), and Rent Girl by Michelle Tea, and a biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux and another of Alice Walker by Evelyn C. White and poems by Mary Oliver and novels by Katherine V. Forrest and Stacy D'Erasmo, also Luna, which was nominated for a national book award in children's literature! Adrienne Rich is on there. Oh, go read the lists, please!!! I am SO happy and SO excited!!

All three of the novels that Firebrand published this year have been nominated for Lambda Literary Awards.

That's Dish It Up, Baby
Crybaby Butch
(which I read not long ago and got all stirred up about. It's got a lot of toughness and beauty and went deep into butch identity and power and sex and reading and mourning. It's lingering with me.)
and mine, Venus of Chalk.

So, first the novel was suggested to be nominated -- by many of you -- thanks again. And now it's on the list of nominated books. Then they choose five finalists, and then there is a winner, announced in June in New York City at a big dinner awards ceremony. I'm picturing a whole table of fatshionistas, rocking the queer literary world. Somebody would teach me how to measure correctly, and I would finally get a strapless bra for the occasion. (A fat girl can dream, can't she?)

You know, I've judged literary awards and prizes. I know that there are lots of variables (including the judges' moods, health and sheer reading fatigue) that influence these choices, and that, even under ideal conditions, they can be pretty arbitrary. Sometimes I think the choices are great and sometimes I've thought that they were biased, bland or insensitive. There's no money that comes with this. But my beloved books have never been among the finalists, and it would make me very deliciously happy if this one were. It would be even more fun to be on these lists with friends. So, knocking on wood, fingers crossed, and don't forget to get your black-eyed peas now to eat for prosperity on New Year's Day. (I've just learned that collard greens are for health and cornbread is for happiness, too.)

Unless there's an unexpected revival, December '04 is the last issue of the Women's Review of Books. At some point, I might come up with something thoughtful to say about that -- it's a complicated loss that's part of the crumbling over the past decade and a half of the highly imperfect but vital networks of women's presses, magazines and bookstores which shaped my early vision of what I could imagine saying as a writer.

And there's a review, by Mary Titus in this last issue, of Venus of Chalk along with The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness, edited by Susan Koppelman. There are a couple of factual errors. Venus of Chalk, as those of you who have been playing along at home may know, is my third novel, not my first. "Magnetic Force," my story that is in The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe, was originally published in Belly Songs, which came out in 1993, and isn't associated for me at all with Venus of Chalk, although it does draw on swimming pool experiences that I've had at fat feminist conferences over the years, which have also inspired new work. (What can I say, those pools are intense.)

But I love the review, especially that she calls the novel "an able and lovely work of picaresque fiction" and says that the book convinced her "that fat hatred could be completely overcome." And her comparison of Carline, the narrator, to a heroine in a gothic novel is pretty funny, if you happen to be acquainted with Carline.

Hit the link, click on the table of contents, and scroll down past a bunch of great stuff -- including a review by Rebecca Johnson of both a new biography and a collection of conversations with Audre Lorde -- to find the review.

Okay, now I've really, really, really got to pack.

The book has a review up at Altar Magazine, which is dedicated to social change. My favorite line:

"Like her characters, Stinson is 'chronically interested' in every aspect of life and her incredible eye for detail is astonishing and translates movingly into the pages of this wonderful novel."

Yay! If you go to read the whole thing, click reviews, then scroll about 4/5s down the books column on the left, past where the green part in the middle ends. I think this might be the first review in a national publication in this country -- mind you, I don't know if it's web-only. And hey, if you're thinking about buying the book but haven't yet, if you do it by the end of July, it'll show up in my first royalty check. And who doesn't want that?

Here's a call for submissions for Feminist Media Studies: ( Is Fat Still a Feminist Issue? Gender and the Plus-Size Body )