Clippings

[ellenkushner]

So glad everyone's enjoying the Bob Morris piece on gay marriage! burgundy sent a link to a really great piece by Sarah Sarasohn of Berkeley, CA (and NPR - gosh, I always thought it was spelt "Saracen"!) from the Washington Post: "A Marriage Form will just be Icing on our Cake." While it also gives you the warm cuddlies, it is longer and more profound than Morris's piece. (It also echoes Delia's & my situation in some entertaining ways that I'll write about later, as I'm on deadline....) I particularly like her analysis:

For most of history . . . the day the priest blessed a couple, they became a single legal entity. That day, they moved into a new house together and had sex for the first time. The myriad distinct ways two people can put their lives together were rolled up in a single event.

In the past several decades, that has changed. . . . Couples routinely live together and have sex before marriage. Babies are born to unmarried women, mostly without scandal. Couples might buy a house together but keep separate bank accounts. . . . I can't pretend to speak for the people who are against gay marriage, but I think this is part of what they mean when they say that gay marriage will unravel the whole institution . . . . Now, adults have the prerogative to mix and match the various things that make a marriage in whatever way they choose. It's just that when gay people do it, it's more obvious that "marriage" has already been deconstructed.

To read everything she says, without my ellipses, click here.

* * *

Meanwhile, deliasherman's trying to create a new website, and finding it a challenge to organize & taxonomize, as she has careers (and publications) in middle-grade/YA and adult fiction. I refer you to her post on the subject. My question: What other authors can you think of with the same issue? How did they deal with it on their sites?

And speaking of YA, I just finished A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama (ah! that telltale moment of authorial anxiety - like when I insisted on subtitling Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners and Thomas the Rhymer: A Romance) by Laura Amy Schlitz. Fantastic book. Read, read, read if you like well-rendered period setting with complex characters . . . its other virtues are for you to discover.

Comments

[bondgwendabond.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love that book!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Did you review it? I'd love to see what you said about it.

Any thoughts on Delia's dilemma, btw? We should have thought of you first!

[bondgwendabond.livejournal.com]

I saw Delia's post, but couldn't come up with anything better than the other people were. I even went to poke around Jane Yolen's site and see how she did it; some variation on E Bear's suggestion strikes me as the way to go.

I don't think I did, actually; I meant to and never got around to it (story of my life) and so just constantly said how fabulous it was for awhile. Schlitz's Newbery acceptance speech is worth tracking down; it was in the Horn Book and fabulous. And I recent found out that she wrote a Regency romance for adults called A Gypsy at Almack's under the name Chloe Cheshire way back in 1993--I need to track it down.

[squidflakes.livejournal.com]

Judy Bloom had this problem. As far as I know though, she didn't put up a webiste.

My suggestion would be to have two different domains. One for YA and one for YOWZA!

[rosefox]

The Sarasohn piece is beautiful... but I am so tired of "gay marriage" being touted as an inclusive term, I have not the words. Inclusion doesn't mean "both kinds, country and western".

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed that book. It managed to say some very true things about children and adults in ways that made it a great read.

[rosefox]

Speaking of queer marriage, Del Martin has died. I'm fighting back tears.

[elswhere1.livejournal.com]

Oh man I LOVE A Drowned Maiden's Hair. So glad you got to read it! Have you seen Schlitz's other book, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! It just won the Newbery and is utterly wonderful. I want so much to get a party together to read it out loud.

Off to comment on Delia's now as I can think of one or two other authors with that issue...

[elswhere1.livejournal.com]

Oh-- forgot why I originally came over here, which was to say that also I love the Sarah Sarahson piece (and I also thought it was spelled Saracen) and that one of my favorite memories of our Vancouver marriage (5 years ago this Saturday! And do we have a big celebration planned? No, we do not; we're not even done unpacking yet) anyway, one of the most moving things about it was the bored clerk behind the little desk in the London Drugs who processed our paperwork a day or two before, along with all the people who needed to file title to their cars &etc. He was a middle-aged Asian guy, English wasn't his first language, and he barely gave us a second glance. "We're both women," we explained carefully, wanting to make sure he didn't get something wrong on the papers. "We're getting married to each other."

"Yeah, yeah, okay," he nodded, filing and stamping and perforating and barely stifling a yawn. "Lots of people doing this. You sign here."

It was great.

Happy belated legalversary, and many more! (anniversaries, if not marriages...)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

omfg - THAT was HER???! Wow. Fortune - and Talent - sure have kissed her on the mouth.

[elswhere1.livejournal.com]

Yes and school librarians everywhere are kvelling, as she is one! (She wrote Good Masters! for her 5th graders; they wanted to do a performance to cap off their Middle Ages unit but no one wanted a bit part, so she wrote them all monologues. Kind of puts any creative lesson planning I've ever done in the shade, to say the least.)

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Couples routinely live together and have sex before marriage.

Actually, they often did back in the day. Someone went through the records of Plymouth Colony and found an amazing percent-- 40%? 60% Something like that-- of first children were born fewer than nine months after the parents' marriage. Since that was occurring in the most rigid, culturally self-contained, theocratic society America has ever known, I often wonder how conservatives can possibly ambition to prevent it today, when kids have even more freedom.