PUGGY'S HILL

I am pleased beyond measure to have had a story of mine* included in Brit Mandelo's wonderful new anthology BEYOND BINARY: GENDERQUEER AND SEXUALLY FLUID SPECULATIVE FICTION (from Steve Berman's ground-breaking Lethe Press).

But I confess I was stumped, right on page 1 of her Introduction, by the term Cisgendered.

I called Brit up to get her to tell me, and she, a Gender Studies grad student, patiently explained, and I thought I understood . . .  sorta. 

But I didn't really - and I wasn't really comfortable, either, with the idea of yet another category I had to try to squeeeeze my bad interstitial self into - until my dear friend Pat O'Connor (who teaches at Oberlin) said:

"It means you feel like a woman trapped in a woman's body."

- Yes!!! I hollered (in the restaurant, frightening the other patrons). - So true!!!



*The story is "'A Wild and a Wicked Youth'" - which is about the childhood of Richard St Vier, one of the Swordspoint protags - but unlike a few of my other Riverside short stories, I think stands unquestionably on its own without reference to the novels . . . despite the disparaging words of the Locus reviewer, who loved nearly everything else in Beyond Binary.  Which really gave me a mauvais quart d'heure:  Nobody likes to hear that a work of theirs didn't "land" properly.  It is very discouraging and demoralizing.  And it does happen, as often as not.  I hope it makes you laugh to know that I got myself out of the funk by reminding myself that that self-same awful story that someone had disparaged in print had also been selected for two "Best of the Year" collections [Jonathan Strahan's Vol. 4 from Nightshade, and David Hartwell's upcoming e-book from Tor]!

I say this not to boast, but to remind us all that These Things Happen.  And there's (almost) always a way out.

This is my first post directly to DreamWidth, with a cross-posting set up to LiveJournal (thanks to my wonderful new assistant, Katharine Duckett - wonderful, that is, if it works....!).

"So when a book is about a girl who is the best at something and about the boys (and/or girls) that love her and how she defeats the bad guy, well, that's because she's the protagonist. It is good and right that she be at the center of the story."

My love for Holly Black / blackholly  ,  it knows no bounds.

Wow. Just . . . wow. A beautifully-designed website (& Twitter feed) devoted to "vintage photographs of men together (and sometimes women together) circa 1880 to 1950...paired with text to narrate what... the couples might be saying, doing, feeling. Text is drawn from poetry, fiction, letters, lyrics...."

The choice of the Cavafy poem = Win. Great translation. If you don't know Cavafy, you should.

Plus, much love for the quote on the homepage: "WHEN SOMEONE SHOWS YOU WHO THEY ARE, BELIEVE THEM." -- MAYA ANGELOU

We finally watched MILK (as in "Harvey") this weekend. Very moving and well-done. It made me want to revisit - and share with you - this long & thoughtful post by libba_bray, written back in May 2009 after California's sad & terrible vote upholding Prop. 8. Libba begins:

I was raised by a gay father. My dad came of age in the 1940’s in the Deep South. Being gay was more than just not okay then; it was downright dangerous. . . . When my father came out to our family, I was fourteen, and it was explained to me that we had to keep it a secret because my father would lose his job and might be attacked physically. The message conveyed was one of fear and shame which trickled down to all of us . . . .

Have you noticed that no one in my books ever eats bacon or ham? No hard feelings; it's just not a part of my world view, and therefore doesn't show up in my worlds! (I only realized this recently when someone in a novel I was enjoying tucked into some....)

I was raised in the branch of Judaism called "Conservative" - less rule-bound than the Orthodox, but with a lot more Hebrew and tradition than Reform Judaism. It was founded partly in reaction to the Jews being allowed to join the modern world about 100 years ago. What to give up, and what to keep? As Wiki explains, it's "a modern stream of Judaism that arose out of intellectual currents in Germany in the mid-19th century and took institutional form in the United States in the early 1900s."

I drifted away, but am proud to see that it is continuing to evolve in response to changes in society. My mom handed me their new quarterly magazine last month, "The Freedom Issue: Looking at Passover, Liberty and Identity." Imagine my surprise to find a ton of articles about GLBT Conservative Jews - including rabbis! Because in a landmark decision in 2006, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (yes, it's complicated. There is no Central Authority in Judaism. Think of it as . . . oh, different schools of Kung Fu which you can choose to adhere to?) voted to allow out gay men and lesbians to be ordained as rabbis and to allow rabbis to perform same-sex commitment ceremonies. I learned a lot and was very moved by the articles. They're all online for you to read at will. Here are some of my favorite excerpts from longer articles:
( Read more... )

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And finally, there's a swell article on the origins of the Seder: a Greco-Roman Symposium of the 2nd century! It's short, so I won't excerpt it, and just urge you to read it if you've always wondered why the emphasis on reclining, hand-washing, and arguing philosophy around the meaning of food. Not to mention Why Four Cups of Wine? It just makes my cultural syncretism heart go pitta-pat.

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Tonight was the first Seder. Smallish, for various reasons. My mom, Delia & I worked hard, and it was good. Another tomorrow night.

May your parsley be springy & green, and your Liberation joyous!

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:

( quoted here: )

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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.