J. E. Knowles

The snowbow, or How I met Father Christmas

2011-12-13T08:34:00.004-05:00

Unlike anyone else in my culture I've ever talked to about it, my brother and sister and I were never brought up to believe in Santa Claus. Our parents' reason was that they wanted us to know who gave us our presents. Far from taking something away from the magic of Christmas, I've always thought this was a stroke of luck for me. I never had to "unlearn" Santa Claus, or have my faith shattered in everything my parents had ever said to believe...

I'm kidding. Sort of. But in my thirties, all this changed.

A little over three years ago I was on a flight from Toronto to Cleveland, for my Grandma Knowles's memorial service. Everyone who knew her seems to agree that Grandma was something like a saint on earth (the real kind of saint, not a perfect person but a heroic person). In her considerate way, she had passed away early enough not to conflict with the holidays, but it was still snowing. I looked out the window of the plane, into the clouds of snow, and saw a perfect, circular rainbow.

If you've ever seen a rainbow from the air, you'll know that instead of the arc which is the most you can see from the ground, you see the spectrum of color in a full circle, imprinted on the clouds. And because it was snowing, not raining, I decided that Grandma must have sent me a snowbow. A big, shiny ornament, hung right there in the sky. Just because she could.

"I do set my bow in the cloud..."

So then that December, I was on another flight, this time to Chicago. Like most flights to O'Hare, this one was late, and very crowded. I was seated next to a gentleman I can only describe as jolly. He had the white beard, twinkling eyes, everything to look just like Santa Claus. Only he was dressed in plain clothes, and once we got to talking, it emerged that he worked in Michigan, in a prison.

Now everyone knows that Père Noël must live in Canada, because the magnetic North Pole is in Canadian territory. But part of Michigan is actually north of part of Ontario, so, close enough. What I now report is what he told me; I haven't researched it, so don't feel obligated to believe. I am only telling you what I remember.

He supervised the prison shop, where the prisoners did metalwork. According to him, the people he really wanted working for him were those convicted of the most serious crimes, like murder. Yes, they had done terrible things, but they knew that they were in prison for life and that the only way they could possibly redeem the time was to make something of it. So they worked hard for him and did a good job.

On the other hand, those convicted of drug offenses or something that had put them in prison for a year or so, he found pretty useless. He believed that they had no stake in making their lives in prison better, so they gave him trouble.

When we arrived in Chicago and he left to (probably) miss his connecting flight, it occurred to me that he hadn't told me his name. Not even a first name. Kris?

I told Trish this, and that he'd looked just like Father Christmas. "Well, maybe he is, sweetie," she said, like the most normal thing in the world.

So that is the story of how I met Santa Claus. He works off-season at a prison in Michigan somewhere.

Merry Christmas.

11/11/11

2011-11-11T03:47:00.002-05:00

Ever since I’ve lived in Britain or Canada, I’ve liked the custom of wearing a poppy. I was quite surprised to read this week that the first person to sell poppies in honor of veterans, in 1918, was actually American. Veterans Day was Armistice Day to begin with, and at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns of World War I fell silent.

For this reason, at 11:00 today we have the two-minute silence. Being silent, it is not coercive. It does not require everybody to agree about this or that conflict, or the best way of supporting our troops now. It is simply in honor of those whose sacrifices have been considerably greater than mine.

I’ve always tried to buy my poppies from an old guy, someone who might have been a veteran of World War II, but it gets harder every year. It has been my privilege to meet many people who survived the Second World War, the conflict of conflicts that must never be forgotten.

I am thinking of veterans—both my grandfathers, for example—but also of the woman I heard speak last week. A self-described German-Jewish Brit, she was one of the children saved from Nazi Germany who came to live in Britain, and never left. I went to see her because I thought it was important to witness, in the flesh, people who saw Hitler and his madness and lived to tell about it. As it turned out, she was a delight to hear.

I am also thinking of a survivor I met when I was sixteen years old. When she was sixteen, her apparently lifeless body was pulled from a pile in a Nazi concentration camp, by a U.S. soldier. She might have been expected to be a bitter person, but instead, she radiated hope and joy.

I am thinking of a lady I knew who was a child during the bombing of British industrial cities. Her house was blown to smithereens, on a day when she and her family happened to be out at the movies. She has been a big fan of going to the movies ever since.

And I’m thinking of another Holocaust survivor, a member of the Order of Canada, the man who swore me in as a Canadian citizen. Like me, he was a citizen of more than one country. His Austrian citizenship had been revoked under Hitler, but in a democratic Europe, he made sure to get it back.

When the Second World War ended, the Allies took those most unimaginably criminal people, the Nazis, and put them on trial at Nuremberg. Someone told me this week that the only reason “we” did this was to one-up the Soviet Union, which just wanted to shoot them. Well, so what? It was the right thing to do, it was in our interest, and it paid dividends in the history of Europe and the world since.

Really, if you’re not sure how far to go in war, you could do worse than take the moral high ground against Stalin.

Remembrance Day dates from the end of the First World War and I think that’s important, because it honors what all must want, and that is the end of conflict. So, honor to veterans and a special thanks to those who served during World War II. Who not only helped save the world, but came home and built a nation. Who grew up in the Great Depression and saw the horrors of war, but did not allow the rest of their lives to be blighted by brutality.

September 11

2011-09-05T10:09:00.006-05:00

Some things cannot be avoided. September 11, 2001 is one of those things for me. These are my personal thoughts and there are things I do try to avoid:

1. The term "anniversary." An anniversary is something we celebrate. It is not a term I want to associate with horrible crimes.

2. The term "9/11." This term has become commonly used, even in countries where the date is written the other way around (11/9). I am sure it is not meant this way, but to me, "9/11" sounds like slang, cheap and demeaning. It reminds me of 7-Eleven, the convenience store. Shorthand is also not something I wish to associate with terrible crimes.

3. Basically, any media coverage. Language can sometimes have the effect of corroding a sense of reality. How many times, in hearing again and again about those terrible crimes, did someone say "It was like a disaster movie"? But it wasn't a movie, and the terrorists were not cartoon characters, like the Legion of Doom on Superfriends. Mass murder is not a religion, a country or any grand concept. What cause or creed could be greater than the lives they took?

I must be one of the only people in the world who has never watched live-action images of planes crashing into the World Trade Centre. I didn't have a television on September 11, 2001, and I've never wished to recreate the events of that day as a movie in my mind. It's not that I doubt historical coverage of those events is a good thing. If people are in ignorance of what happened, then they should be shown.

But I do remember September 11. I was in Toronto, working. I remember who was there and what they said about it. I remember one co-worker who thought her brother had been on one of the planes. He wasn't, but the hours of waiting and not knowing must have been agony for her. I remember another co-worker, a Japanese-Canadian, who wondered if people of the wrong ethnicity would be put in internment camps, like her grandparents had been during World War II. Everyone had a fear.

I also remember what it was like to be in a neighboring country. I remember compassion: people rolling up their sleeves to donate blood. A radio interview with someone I knew in high school, who drove his ambulance all the way to New York from Tennessee. Americans volunteering to serve in the armed forces, not to go fight people far away, but to defend their country from attack. Our one-bedroom apartment filled with British people who were my family. I remember Canadians hosting stranded air passengers for days. People in countries thought hostile to Americans, mourning the victims. The French news headline: WE ARE ALL AMERICANS.

I've read that the U.S.A. has become a harder, less trusting place since 2001, that a generation of Americans has come of age not knowing the open, friendly country I grew up in. I haven't lived there since 2000, so I can't say whether this is true. But we triumph over terrorism to the extent to which September 11 did not change the world.

What I mean is, evil was not invented that day. Terrorists had been killing innocent people for years--in other countries. But if September 11 was not the beginning of evil, nor was it the end of good. Yes, there was murder on that day but there was also rescue. Yes, there have been hate crimes, but there have also been many instances of reaching out across faiths. Many people helped their neighbors on that day, or just started talking to them.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus (revered as a prophet in Islam) tells a story in answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" It is the story of a Samaritan who helped a man he didn't know, after the man was the victim of a violent attack. Samaritans were a nationality and a religion that Jesus knew his audience despised. His message was clear: It is showing mercy that makes us neighbors to each other.

September 11 is to my generation what the assassination of President Kennedy was to the generation of Americans before mine. For some families (like the Kennedys) it was the most important event of their own lives. For the rest of us, we all remember where we were.

If you remember, I hope your memories are like mine. Not only of horror and grief but also of good people; of good neighbors; of different nationalities coming together. Of lives lost on one day, but also of how we can live every day.

Talking civil rights

2011-06-20T05:47:00.004-05:00

I tend to feel that the civil rights movement that began in the 1950s was the United States of America’s finest hour. A whole class of people, so put down for so long, rising up in a nonviolent movement to gain equality. In the process, they made their country a better place.

I’m thinking about this today because over the weekend, I and a few friends had the chance to chat informally with a teenaged boy in Northern Ireland. Among the things we talked about (it was very early Sunday morning!) was the troubled history of N. Ireland, which he was learning about it in his history class.

What is it that somebody said history was? Old newspapers. What's history today was on the radio every day when I was younger.

Someone brought up the almost-as-recent history of segregation in the southern U. S. “Yes,” this young man said, “there was a lady who was sitting in the back of the bus, and she refused to give up her seat to a white person—”

“Rosa Parks,” we chorused.

To me, Rosa Parks is one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. She, and a young little-known preacher named Martin Luther King and some others of their circle, took some steps and the steps they took led to Selma, to Montgomery, Alabama and Washington, D. C. They reverberate around the world.

I love it that a kid in a part of the world once known for its troubles knows who Rosa Parks is. Maybe the best thing that could happen to his country is that, to him, that troubled past is history.

UPDATE: In the 24 hours since I wrote this, two things have happened. Northern Ireland, specifically an area east of Belfast, has been experiencing its worst riots in years, and my book club discussed Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun. This groundbreaking play about the black American experience was first staged in 1959, and the British readers in my book group wondered if it wasn't a bit dated now, since all this time has passed? No, I said. It's astonishing how contemporary it is.

Plus ça change...

Interview in electric green

2011-03-14T04:03:00.000-05:00

R. Chazz Chute runs a lively writing 'blog in Canada, and has kindly posted an interview with me this morning.

Just look for the bright green font!

http://chazzwrites.wordpress.com/

Life Among the Lowly

2011-03-12T04:47:00.006-05:00

That’s the subtitle of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I’ve recently reread this book—it’s one of the classics I first read in high school, and it’s been interesting to see my response to books more than twenty years later. I’ve concluded that, though Uncle Tom's Cabin has been controversial since its publication, this is a misunderstood book, not a bad one.

“Uncle Tom,” of course, has become a caricature of black subservience, and the novel is commonly thought of as a melodrama, written solely for the purpose of agitating American readers against one of the great evils of their day: slavery. If that were Stowe’s only accomplishment with her first novel, it would be impressive enough. No other novelist of nineteenth-century America, and certainly no female novelist, can touch her for effect. President Lincoln called her “the little lady who made this big war.” A lot of the book makes uncomfortable reading now too, but having finished it, I question whether the real problem is Stowe writing racist caricatures. I read her black characters as people living under a horrible, degrading institution, whether Mammy, who reminds us of a stereotype, or George Harris, the proud, strong young man who leads his family to Canada. Historically, Stowe portrayed slavery accurately, as part of America’s whole society, whether in slave or free states—and her point was that it demeaned every single American, slave, slave owner, or “innocent” third party.

Rita Mae Brown (no fan of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) writes in the preface to her Civil War novel, High Hearts, of the importance of giving characters their voices, including slaves who would not speak the same way as the people who owned them. I believe Stowe writes dialogue extremely well, and when George escapes to his education, he writes, speaks, and thinks in a different way from the plantation slave. Stowe’s story has limitations (would anyone in the nineteenth century write the same way as a writer today?) but that’s not what makes it uncomfortable reading. It’s the fact that, long after Stowe and all the slaves have died, it is still shocking and horrifying to think about what really went on in day-to-day America.

As for Tom, his character is ultimately a martyr. In contrast to cringing master-pleasers, Tom defies any master’s control of what is most precious to him—his soul. Like Job in the Hebrew Bible (falsely thought of as “patient”), Tom is steadfast in the knowledge that what he is doing is right. He will not obey his last and cruelest master, Simon Legree, because Legree wants to make Tom cruel. In a situation where every earthly hope and even the integrity of his own body is taken away, Tom remains steadfast. Is the message that a free black man like George Harris should behave like “an Uncle Tom”? I believe Stowe’s message is that Tom is a martyr made by slavery—that this is the only alternative left to him, because the hateful institution itself is so debasing. Legree has bought Tom’s body, but Tom believes that only God is master of his soul.

“Soul” and “martyr” bring me to this inescapable conclusion: More than a book about slavery, Stowe’s novel is most of all a book about Christianity. It is suffused with Tom’s Christian faith, the struggles of slaves with Christianity, and the appalling failure of slave owners to live up to the Christianity they profess. Without understanding this, I don't see how the book can be appreciated. Stowe came from a family of preachers and she excoriates the Christian church of her time for equivocating, failing to welcome the stranger, to raise up the slave as the equal son or daughter of God. As René Girard pointed out in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Christianity came into the pagan world with the new, shocking idea that the victim was blessed, that the lowly, the helpless, the person most ground down was precious and that God in Christ had become like that person. This idea, Paul wrote in the New Testament, was “folly to the Gentiles” and it has been ever since. What Nietzsche found most disgusting about Christianity was that it was a slave religion.

I found Uncle Tom’s Cabin not least a compelling page turner, and I tried throughout to figure out what was also making my twenty-first century self so disturbed. I think it is the fact that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s first novel is, beginning to end, a call to what is right. Stowe is absolutely certain what is right, her hero Tom is absolutely certain what is right, and that makes disturbing reading today. We live in a century when even the slavery of our era—torture—has somehow become an equivocal matter. Well, maybe a little bit of torture, or something like it, you know, for really bad people. How do we respond to a book that warned of God’s judgment against a nation that mistreated strangers within it, and did not live up to its own ideals of freedom and equality? A book that called America’s failings a “sin”?

The late science writer Stephen Jay Gould, in Rocks of Ages, made a point that kept coming back to me as I read Stowe’s novel: that the biggest single difference between people in our Western societies today, and any other people at any other time, is how seldom we bury our children. In the nineteenth century, you could be rich or white or free, but whoever you were, when you had a baby you had to know how likely you were to lose that baby in childhood. Charles Darwin was not exempt from this personal tragedy, and neither was Harriet Beecher Stowe. This note recurs over and over again in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Stowe appeals to mothers—white mothers, free mothers, mothers in the North—to remember the loss of their own children, and understand that the same pain and grief were felt by slave mothers whose children were sold away from them. This seems as far away from our experience as slavery, but it shouldn’t—it is still the experience of parents in many countries in the world. Stowe could make this appeal because her readers knew what it was like, and the interesting thing is that her appeal is not colored, as it were, by racism, in the way that some contemporary comments about African birth rates are! She doesn’t feel the need to tell a white mother reading her novel that a black mother feels the same grief. She writes about women, and children, and men.

That is the power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly.

Spinsters Ink author news

2011-02-04T04:15:00.004-05:00

Just a quick link to the great new page at my publisher's blog.

To those of you snowed in across North America, I wish you many good books to read!

A story for you

2010-12-03T04:30:00.001-05:00

Dear Readers,

Because it's December, I have posted a story at my Web site, free to read. It's my favorite story, "The Fear of God," and was previously available only in the Canadian journal QWERTY (like the keyboard).

Simply visit jeknowles.com and, in the left column, click on "The Fear of God."

I wish you happy reading.

The pleasure of writing

2010-10-26T02:21:00.001-05:00

Today, I am grateful for writing and all that it gives me. Of course, I mean all the work that has gone into books I love, as well as my own writing. Anyone who complains about what hard work writing is is missing the point of being a writer, I think.

Losing oneself in a story, becoming excited about a character, coming up with ideas and dialogue seemingly without conscious planning--this is what it is all about. I know how blessed I am to have this pleasure, as it is by no means guaranteed to each of us that we will find it. So many people hate their work, complain about what they do each day, and never seem to experience the purposeful activity that writing is for me.

I consider myself lucky because every job I do is a way of supporting my writing habit; every place I have lived has been a place to pursue writing. I have this constant in my life. For some people, their constant purpose is the job that pays their mortgage, or the hobby that fills their weekends. For me it is writing.

Thank you for sharing it with me.

Cancer cuts a swath

2010-09-25T10:18:00.002-05:00

...of death and destruction through so many of our families. On Sunday, 3 October, I'll be running my first 10K (!) on behalf of Cancer Research UK. Please join me in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace, or on my fundraising page--thank you!

Meet and greet in London

2010-07-28T10:49:00.000-05:00

Author Claire Rooney and I will meet and greet readers in London (England) on Saturday, the 14th of August, starting at 3:00pm at Gay's the Word. When the bookshop gets too crowded (!), we'll head down Marchmont Street to check out a new gay bar, The New Bloomsbury Set.

Gay's the Word
66 Marchmont Street
LondonWC1N 1AB
2 minutes walk from Russell Square Tube Station and 10 minutes from either Euston or King's Cross.
http://freespace.virgin.net/gays.theword/index.htm

The New Bloomsbury Set
76b Marchmont Street
Bloomsbury
LondonWC1N 1AG
(020) 7383 3084
thebar@newbloomsburyset.co.uk
http://www.newbloomsburyset.co.uk/

New story

2010-07-05T14:05:00.002-05:00

Please enjoy a free download of Read These Lips, which includes my story "Orange Crush." "See the world unfolding through young eyes":

http://readtheselips.com

Denouement: In praise of the audience

2010-06-08T03:32:00.006-05:00

The Lambda Literary Foundation co-sponsored Bi Lines III the night after the awards ceremony. I was scheduled to read last. This fulfilled the other dream of an American writer: to give a reading in Greenwich Village, in a room resembling a church basement, complete with piano.

(The droll expression indicates the voice of Edith, Arusha's hero.)

My lasting impression of that evening: The audience was absolutely fantastic. They did everything right, thereby overcoming any challenges we may have had, starting with the acoustics. Here are the things these wonderful men and women did, that I try to do and recommend everybody at readings should do:

1. They filled the seats. Granted, this is not something any individual audience member can control. But a room full of people is halfway to a successful reading no matter what else happens.

2. They listened. It wasn't always easy (see above). But the people in this room seemed to be there out of genuine interest. They could have been driving somewhere for the Memorial Day weekend, or in the bar with their friends, but they spent their Friday night at a reading instead. Cool.

3. They applauded every writer, musician, and photographer.

4. If they were there as friends of one performer, they did not leave when their friend's time was up. They stayed to The Bitter End (as one of the old folk clubs in the area was called). In other words, to hear me, who knew almost no one in the room.

5. Afterwards, they talked to us, asked questions, expressed interest in our books. I would not have blamed them if they had been ready to go home!

Audience, and readers everywhere: thank you. Whether or not you are writers also, readers are the reason we write. The folks at Bi Lines III truly impressed me by showing what my old band director always exhorted us to show: class. An old-fashioned concept, I know--like courtesy and reading from the printed page. Thanks a lot.

Signing books with Bobbie Geary (far left), Audrey Beth Stein (third from right), and Herukhuti (far right).

Photography: Efrain Gonzalez

Lambda 4--The Climax

2010-06-06T14:14:00.007-05:00

I would say it's an honor just to be nominated. But that's a cliche, and I'm already going to have to explain to Sandi from writing group that I didn't wear denim to the awards ceremony in Manhattan. Can't disappoint her again.

The Lambda Literary Awards, at the School of Visual Arts Theatre in Chelsea, were a blast. New York City was a blast. In fact America was a blast, which is why I am only now posting more than a week later.

We had the pleasure of meeting writers we know, both nominees and others, before we even walked in the door. In just a few days in New York I ran into more than one person I knew just walking down the street, which is something I never expected to happen in a city I've never before visited. And at least three of us came all the way from the UK--here we are with Dalia Craig.

I finally met, in person, some of the most important people in my novel's life, including the great Katherine Forrest, my editor, and Linda Hill, my publisher. Katherine was doing double duty as Board President of the Lambda Literary Foundation, and Linda had her turn accepting the Lambda on behalf of my fellow Spinsters Ink author, Rhiannon Argo, for her debut novel, The Creamsickle.

Those Gay and Lesbian Debut Fiction Awards are named for the late Betty Berzon, author of nonfiction works including Positively Gay and Permanent Partners: Building Gay and Lesbian Relationships That Last. The awards presentation was by Teresa DeCrescenzo, who was Berzon's life partner and remains a pioneering figure in our community. One of the highlights of the Lambdas, for me, was simply being in the same room with luminaries like DeCrescenzo as well as the Pioneer Award recipients, Larry Kramer and Kate Clinton.

Berzon was a hero of mine from the time when, as an adolescent, I found Permanent Partners in my hometown's public library, and was able to begin shaping a vision of what I (someday) wanted my gay adult life to be like. Clinton makes people laugh as well as think, which is heroic to me. And if anyone has been gay for five minutes in America and somehow missed Larry Kramer's contribution, please look him up. Kramer is a survivor, a voice crying in the wilderness of the early AIDS years, but his award at the Lambdas was for his writing. His 1970s novel, Faggots, is a work of prophetic satire that can justly be (and has been) compared to English literature's greatest of the genre, Jonathan Swift. Yes I'm letting my preferences show, and loudly. Kramer is a hero of mine, too.

For me, the evening concluded with one of the dreams of an American writer: dinner with my publisher in New York. There were four finalists present from Spinsters and Bella Books: the others were Tracey Richardson, KG MacGregor, and Karin Kallmaker.

I'll wrap up in a day or two with news from my reading the night after. Thanks to Cheri and Karin for the pictures.

Lambda 3--Reading in New York

2010-05-19T02:47:00.007-05:00

I'll be reading the night after the Lambda Literary Awards in New York City. If you're in town, please come along for Bi Lines III: A Celebration of Bisexual Writing in Reading, Music & Culture. Arusha is featured as a finalist in the Bisexual Fiction category.

Date and time: Friday, May 28. Program 7:00-9:30pm; doors open 6:30
Location: The LGBT Center, 208 W. 13th Street
Suggested donation: $7 US (to cover the costs of space, art exhibits and music) or FREE for Lambda Awards ceremony attendees

Authors and the books we'll be reading from:
Blake Bailey Cheever: A Life
Audrey Beth Stein Map
J.E. Knowles Arusha
Ann Herendeen Pride/Prejudice
Herukhuti Conjuring Black Funk
Bobbie Geary The Janeid

Music: Meech Morrison, Jade Zabric, Drew
Photography: Efrain Gonzalez, Amanda Morgan

Hosted by the Bi Writers Association. Co-sponsored by BiRequest, Lambda Literary Foundation & Bi Women of All Colors

Lambda 2--Chicago

2010-05-12T04:23:00.019-05:00

On the 4th of May, I was in Chicago, visiting some of my favorite people and places. What serendipity that that evening was also the Lambda Finalists Reading at the Gerber/Hart Library! Hosted by Karen Sendziak and Lambda's Judith Markowitz (right), it was a terrific success, meaning that the library had to put out more chairs. Always better than looking out at empty ones.

Some people's first love is a girl or boy, a woman or a man. Not mine. The first time I fell in love it was with the city of Chicago, and that love remains as unreasonable and passionate now as it was when I moved there at the age of seventeen. I have always personified Chicago as a woman, and as with a woman I forgive her all her faults, because I loved her when I was very young.

So it was particularly special for me to come "home" to Chicago to read. I was further delighted by the quality of all the readings. I am not a reviewer, and folks who know me know that I am not inclined to praise unless I'm truly impressed by something!

First up was Tracey Richardson, a finalist in Lesbian Romance. Tracey read a haunting passage from No Rules of Engagement, about a Canadian military doctor in Afghanistan. The deep issues--equal treatment for gays in the Canadian Forces, the war in which Canada is participating, life and death--show why that novel stands out from ordinary romances. I don't envy the judge of that category: Karin Kallmaker, Colette Moody, KG MacGregor, and Carsen Taite are the other finalists!

Next was Kristin Naca reading from her first book (Lesbian Poetry). Kristin is the kind of poet that makes me want to write poetry (a category in which it is probably safe to say I would never be nominated). Other members of the audience were also impressed with the accessibility of her poems, which reflect a broad range of human experience. She has some real stars in her corner, too: Yusef Komunyakaa, Sandra Cisneros, and Joy Harjo have all praised Bird Eating Bird.

After Arusha was Deborah B. Gould's Moving Politics, in the category of LGBT ("quiltbag") Studies. While I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, coming out in the context of gay-bashing and demonstrations, Debbie was a graduate student and member of ACT UP--the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. So I was very interested in her history of that provocative alliance between lesbians and gay men. Her closing passage, about what was to be the final meeting of ACT UP Chicago, was a poignant evocation of what it feels like to watch the passing of a movement to which we have been deeply committed. No wonder her book's subtitle is: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS.

Mystery writer Rob Byrnes was unable to make it (damn those day jobs!), but Karen wrapped up the evening, appropriately, by reading from Sugarless. James Magruder's book (Gay Debut Fiction) made me laugh, and I brought a copy home.

Let me just say, if all the other finalists are as excellent as these authors with whom I was privileged to share a stage, quiltbag literature is in very good shape indeed.

Photography: Susan Franz

Lambda 1

2010-05-12T03:39:00.002-05:00

A reader (oh, how thankful I am for readers) suggested I use this space to share a bit about being a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Strictly speaking, it is my novel, Arusha, that is the finalist. I have nice gold stickers to put on copies of the book that say so!

Being shortlisted for a Lambda Award is, truly, an honor, something I hoped would happen someday but did not expect for my first book. These awards have been around since the 1980s, and some of our most admired writers have won: Nicola Griffith. Emma Donoghue. Jane Rule. Mark Doty. The list of winners for a single year can read like a Who's Who of writers in our community. And, since this is my rambling post, I would like to borrow an expression from Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge: instead of the cumbersome "LGBT" I am going to use the more pronounceable nickname QLTBG or "quiltbag."

Not everyone, of course, is familiar with the Lambda Awards. Here in Britain, for example, I'm not sure writers understand why the USA has special awards for literature relating to quiltbag people. This might have something to do with the fact that writers in other countries who are quiltbag, or who write about quiltbag characters, are just part of mainstream publishing. And that, in turn, might have something to do with the fact that in a country like Britain, we have achieved more or less full equality. What a different experience from that of an American, whose entire adult life has been shaped by homophobic laws!

So, why the Lambdas? Quiltbag literature is literature, and it is global. The Lambdas are given to US-published books regardless of where the winners live, or are from. Griffith is English and lives in the US. Donoghue is Irish and lives in Canada. Rule was a US-born Canadian, and one of our greats.

So, that's why I'm honored that Arusha is among the finalists for this year's award, the first ever in the category of Bisexual Fiction.

Sing it, sister

2010-04-28T06:46:00.004-05:00

Jennifer Knapp is a Christian. Jennifer Knapp is a musician. And now, the world knows, Jennifer Knapp is gay.

As a result of this seemingly insurmountable paradox, Knapp was invited on Larry King Live to defend herself against someone called Bob Botsford, a pastor representing the "other side." I'll let this excerpt from the transcript speak for itself, because Sister Knapp does a pretty darn good job:

KNAPP: If I am a sinner and homosexuality is a sin, let’s just go on that premise for a moment. But what separates that particular sin out from the fact that I’m angry or mad at someone or that I cheat or maybe, you know — what separates that out as so grievous to you that we have to sit here and have this type of conversation?

BOTSFORD: Well, it’s interesting. There’s — sin is sin. You’re absolutely right. And we all have sin.

KNAPP: So, why are we — why am I — why aren’t you in this seat and I’m in the other seat condemning you on national television?

BOTSFORD: I’m not condemning you. Listen, I’m here because I love you. And I told you that off-air, I’ll say it on air. I’m here because I’m concerned. I’m here as a family member.

KNAPP: You get my phone number.

BOTSFORD: You calling yourself a Christian still as part of the family of God saying, as I said in the blog, Jen, come home. Come back. Come out.

KNAPP: I will say this to you again on air. I have spiritual leadership in my life.

BOTSFORD: Yes.

KNAPP: The pastoral counsel of those who are dear to me, who understand the Scripture as sacred text. You know, also, want to –

BOTSFORD: I’m not sure they do, Jen.

KNAPP: Don’t interrupt me. You are not that man in my life. Speak to your congregation –

BOTSFORD: I agree. I’m not saying that I’m you’re spiritual authority.

KNAPP: You do not know me, and don’t have the right to speak to me in the manner which you have publicly.

BOTSFORD: Well, I do have a role to stand up for truth.

KNAPP: In your congregation and your community.

BOTSFORD: I’m –

KNAPP: But do not — I’m asking you not to do that. I ask you not say that you’re doing that on my behalf.

BOTSFORD: I’m here as a representative of Jesus Christ.

See, here's the thing, Brother Botsford. We are all here as representatives of Jesus Christ. Everyone who dares take on the name of Christian: you, me, and Jennifer Knapp. If "the world" out there is scratching its collective head--can you blame people?

We all need to think long and carefully when we identify as representatives of him who came not into the world to condemn the world...

Lambda Literary Award Reading

2010-04-20T06:25:00.002-05:00

From Chicago's Gerber/Hart Library:

"The Lambda Literary Foundation and Gerber/Hart Library will host a reading by Chicago and Midwestern Lambda Literary Award finalists on Tuesday, May 4, at 7 pm at Gerber/Hart Library. The authors, their works, and the categories in which they are nominated are:

•Rob Byrnes, for Straight Lies in the Gay Mystery category
•Deborah B. Gould, for Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS in the LGBT Studies category
•J.E. Knowles for Arusha in the Bisexual Fiction category
•Kristin Naca for Bird Eating Bird in the Lesbian Poetry category
•Tracey Richardson for No Rules of Engagement in the Lesbian Romance category
Books will be available for purchase at the event, and refreshments will be served. The 22nd Lambda Literary Awards Awards ceremony will take place on May 27 in New York."

What success looks like

2010-03-29T03:00:00.001-05:00

Kim Moritsugu defines success in the field of fiction writing:"I would define success as being published by a reputable publisher, getting positive feedback from reviewers and readers, and selling more books than one has friends and family members."

2010-03-17T10:00:00.001-05:00

Take a look at this page: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/datastream/news/03/16/finalists-announced-for-the-22nd-annual-lambda-literary-awards/#more-752

Reading on Blog Talk Radio

2010-03-15T03:05:00.006-05:00

Please join me on Saturday, April 10, at 2:00 PM EDT for my first radio interview. I'll be speaking with Lara Zielinsky on Blog Talk Radio.

Lara hosts "Readings in Lesbian and Bisexual Women's Fiction," a highly intelligent and entertaining show. The discussion ranges from poetry to religion; writers read from their work, and the audience can call in with questions! I expect to have a lot of fun, and thank Lara (also a writer) for this opportunity.

To listen to the show, click on the player below at 2:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Saturday, April 10, or later if you can't catch it live.

PG-rated fun

2010-03-10T04:48:00.000-05:00

The British invasion

2010-02-15T09:26:00.000-05:00

My "new book" is signed and for sale here in England! First to stock it is Gay's the Word, London's first and last bookstore of its kind. You can find it in the historic Bloomsbury neighborhood. Arusha will soon be available at other UK bookstores, including Foyles on Charing Cross Road.

Incidentally, if you walk from Euston Station to Bloomsbury, you pass the headquarters of the National Union of Teachers (NUT). Surely I'm not the only person to find this abbreviation unfortunate.

For the duration of the Winter Olympics, a piece of my heart is back in Canada, the land of winter. Enjoy the Games.

Snow

2010-01-09T11:46:00.003-05:00

A poem for today is "Cat & The Weather" by May Swenson. Look it up--I don't violate copyright. But here's a picture.

Moments: an end-of-year quote

2009-12-04T07:00:00.006-05:00

One of the best books I read this year was Wanting, by the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan. The story has three historical threads, and one of them features a fictional Charles Dickens. In this passage, Flanagan's Dickens is speaking to Ellen Ternan.

"We have in our lives only a few moments. A moment of joy and wonder with another. Some might say beauty or transcendence. Or all those things. Then you reach an age, Miss Ternan, and you realize that moment, or, if you are very lucky, a handful of those moments, was your life. That those moments are all, and that they are everything. And yet we persist in thinking that such moments will only have worth if we can make them go on forever. We should live for moments, yet we are so fraught with pursuing everything else, with the future, with the anchors that pull us down, so busy that we sometimes don't even see the moments for what they are."

Signed copies available!

2009-11-19T12:59:00.001-05:00

Contact me to order Arusha. Please provide your shipping address and how you would like the book signed. Thanks!

What kind of writer?

2009-11-09T11:37:00.004-05:00

Nicola Griffith says: "In an AOL author chat many years ago, the moderator asked me, 'What kind of writer are you?' I said, 'A good one.' No doubt he meant, What genre do you work in?, but that's a question I've never been interested in answering. I write good novels. I aim to write great novels. Sometimes the publisher calls these novels science fiction, or lesbian fiction, or crime fiction, or historical fiction. I call them good books."

Pictures from book tour

2009-10-17T09:31:00.007-05:00

Reading in P'town, Women's Week

Thanks for the photos, Watty (above) and Wayne (below).

Book launch in Toronto

2009-10-09T17:26:00.000-05:00

Here is how ARUSHA is featured by Glad Day Bookshop: "Thoughtful, compelling story of a married-with-kids couple in '80s Tennessee--he's a homo and she's a dyke, and it all comes crashing down. The novel follows Edith (the wife) as she escapes the scorn of her small town and her family, and follows her lover to Arusha, an African town, to witness the Rwanda peace talks. It's been amazingly reviewed and the launch was wildly successful."

Mary Travers

2009-09-23T09:28:00.001-05:00

Blessed is her memory.

Click here for a gorgeous rendition of a song by Laura Nyro--who herself died of cancer, in her forties.

And the winner is...

2009-08-25T08:03:00.003-05:00

It's official: a reader (that I know of) has received an actual, printed copy of Arusha. While some sites are still staying "pre-order" even though today is the 25th of August, the original Amazon bookstore managed to get a book from Minneapolis, where it is located, to New York City yesterday!

That's True Colors Bookstore, folks. Fastest draw in the Midwest. Or anywhere, apparently.

The USA needs and deserves better health care

2009-08-24T11:23:00.004-05:00

There is a lot of fear and hatred coming out of the U.S. health care debate back home. But most of all, there is a lot of rubbish. Americans who have never lived in another country, and therefore experienced an alternative to the U.S. "system," are panicking about what they do not know.

I remember, when I lived in the U.S., a dying friend telling me, whatever I do, make sure my job offered health insurance. Since I've lived in other industrialized democracies, of course, that fear is gone. I never have to worry about losing health care, no matter what happens to my job.

But don't ask me--listen to veteran journalist T. R. Reid, whose family has lived all over the world.
One of his key points is that it is actually less costly--in both health and money terms--for other countries to pay for preventive care. Preventive care costs up front, but it works in the long run to keep people healthy, as well as save money. When health care is a public responsibility (i.e., in every industrialized democracy except the U.S.), there is an incentive to pay for prevention. In the U.S., where you typically change (or lose) insurance every few years, there is none.

Ignorant hicks?

2009-08-19T09:38:00.005-05:00

David Adams Richards on faith and fiction.

The Novel

2009-08-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

Arusha is published today by Attitude Books (Spinsters Ink), in both print and e-book formats.
If you are in the Toronto area, I hope you will come to my book launch with Glad Day Bookshop.

For options outside Toronto, please see Buying Books? You Have Choices!

"Arusha is a quietly affective, gracefully written and heart-wrenching novel, written in an assured, convincing and sympathetic narrative voice, about a woman’s struggle to break free of the strictures of family, religion and societal convention and find her own kind of happiness."
-- Kim Moritsugu, author of The Restoration of Emily and The Glenwood Treasure

"A star is born. J.E. Knowles takes on lesbianism and a whole lot more in this novel of a nuclear family gone nuclear. She explores the damage done by the panicked, blatant homophobia that runs like a lit fuse through America. Her first novel is impressive in its characters, construction and evidence of storytelling talent. I hope we’ll be reading a lot more from Ms. Knowles."
-- Lee Lynch, author of Sweet Creek and The Amazon Trail

Canary in the coal mine

2009-08-07T09:27:00.003-05:00

(Only italics are mine.)
Immigration Equality Blacklisted by Bush DOJ

The Washington Blade reported on July 15 that, under President George W. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the U.S. Department of Justice “blacklisted” a number of organizations focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) and immigration rights, among other issues, in a campaign to deny employment to applicants who worked for “liberal” organizations.

The blacklist, which referred to DOJ’s honors and intern programs, included one national LGBT group: Immigration Equality.

Rachel B. Tiven, Immigration Equality’s executive director, said in a statement that we were “proud to be the only national LGBT organization included in the Bush Justice Department’s list of dangerous organizations” and that “opponents of equality and justice are right to fear us.”

“While few gay rights groups are included on the DOJ’s blacklist, immigrant advocacy groups make up 25 percent of the list,” she said. “The rights of non-citizens are the canary in our constitutional coal mine, and LGBT people, both immigrants and non-immigrants, know that immigrant rights must be zealously defended for everyone’s sake.”

To read the full story, click here.

May his memory be a blessing: E. Lynn Harris

2009-07-25T13:02:00.003-05:00

Novelist E. Lynn Harris has died suddenly, and too young.

Harris was one of the few writers whose new book I always had to read. Every time. Even when I couldn't afford to buy it in hardcover.

Here are three reasons he inspired me:

1. When he wrote his first, groundbreaking novel, publishing "wisdom" said no one wanted to read about black gay men. Since Harris couldn't get anyone to publish Invisible Life, he started selling it himself. Eventually, he sold millions.

2. I am neither African-American, nor male, nor bisexual. Yet Harris took me into the minds and hearts of those characters, and made me feel their emotions. Showing me something I could never experience in real life is one of the great gifts of fiction.

3. In some ways, I could relate to Harris's stories more than those of almost any white and/or lesbian writer. Faith and family are very important in the lives of many of his characters--as they are in mine.

We have lost a great storyteller.

2009-07-16T08:32:00.004-05:00

Immigration Equality is the U.S. organization that works on immigration issues that affect LGBT people. Of necessity, they work at the federal level.

One of their most important issues is helping "binational" couples, i.e., where one partner is American and the other is not, and therefore must either leave the country or be separated. However, they are also reporting that the HIV ban is nearing its end.

I don't know how many people are aware of the fact that people with HIV or AIDS are legally banned from entering the United States--even for one day. Foreigners living with HIV in the U.S. are required to leave. This ban dates from the earliest days of the AIDS crisis and has never been repealed.

Incredibly, until the 1990s people who were "mentally ill or homosexual" were also banned from entering the U.S., even as visitors. It is high time people were no longer treated this way.

The LA Daily News is reporting on the unprecedented efforts of Congress to recognize same-sex relationships as part of immigration reform. (Don't hold your breath...)

Proud Authors Read

2009-06-28T22:01:00.002-05:00

Thank you to my friends and supporters who came to hear Rachel Spangler and me read at the Church of the Holy Trinity. This was a special Pride Sunday, because it was exactly 40 years ago, in the early hours of June 28, 1969, that the modern gay rights movement began at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Police, enforcing the discriminatory laws of that time, raided the Stonewall, and gay men, lesbians, and people who would be described today as bisexual and transgendered fought back. For three days. Those were some angry queers!

One measure of the progress we have made, at least in some countries like Canada, is the massive number of police officers who marched today in the Pride Parade, along with proud members of the armed forces. None of this don't ask, don't tell %$#! The Pride theme was reflected in our audience, a wonderfully diverse group in terms of age, ethnicity, ability, orientation and gender. The more readers, the better is what I say!

Now, unbeknownst to me when I planned this event was that the service would be joined on Sunday by our Spanish-speaking congregation. Which meant that our reading had to follow a sacred salsa dance. Rachel bravely plugged away through the bilingual chaos, and all was well. I especially appreciate the support of my fellow writers: Carol Lawlor, an original member of my writing group who helped me with Arusha for years; and Jeffrey Round, author of The P-town Murders and Death in Key West, whom I met just a couple of months ago at another reading. Toronto writers are the best!

Thanks to the people of the church for hosting this event. They have welcomed me from the first days I ever spent in Toronto. As our new Pride banner says, "Every day is Pride Day at Holy Trinity."

Uniting American Families

2009-06-03T08:58:00.003-05:00

UPDATE: This morning a Senate committee is actually hearing couples speak on this issue. Which has never been addressed in Congress before.

Meanwhile, President Obama has proclaimed June Pride Month.

The Uniting American Families Act, which would enable gay and lesbian Americans to sponsor their partners for immigration (as married people can), has just been endorsed by the Washington Post.

There are an estimated thirty-five thousand same-sex couples in the United States who are of different nationalities. Who knows the number of us who had to leave the country because we fell in love with a foreigner?

The American Bar Association has also endorsed the UAFA.

"I shall hear in heaven!"

2009-06-02T09:47:00.003-05:00

These are reputedly the last words of Ludwig von Beethoven, who composed some of the greatest works in music while completely deaf. Fifth Symphony, anyone?

Buying Books? You Have Choices!

2009-05-13T07:28:00.005-05:00

**Additions to my independent bookstore "Hall of Fame":

Women & Children First, Chicago, Illinois

Carmichael's Bookstore, Louisville, Kentucky

Now Voyager, Provincetown, Massachusetts

Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, Asheville, North Carolina

Many of you have probably heard by now of the Easter weekend “glitch” at Amazon.com that caused sales rankings to be dropped from thousands of books, by authors including James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, and E. Annie Proulx. The arbitrary (and, it now seems, reversed) classification of these titles as “adult” kept readers from searching for them, and therefore buying them, while books with graphic violence and heterosex were curiously not affected.

I’m not saying not to buy from a certain online bookseller (whose name originally belonged to an independent women’s bookstore in Minneapolis). But I was reminded of something useful: We do have choices in where we buy books.

(1) We can go to a local bookstore and browse. Many independent bookstores have unfortunately closed, but in Toronto we are still blessed with several: This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, Toronto Women’s Bookstore, Glad Day Bookshop. Whenever I am in another city, I try to visit theirs: the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago; Lambda Rising in Washington, D.C.; Left Bank Books in St. Louis. Independent bookstores focus on readers first, so if they don’t have the book you want on the shelf, they will special order it for you, usually any book in print.

(2) We can try the chain bookstores. Many of the staff are book lovers too, and happy to help by stocking the books customers want. You never know until you ask!

(3) We can shop online. Sure, everybody knows the biggest names but what about Powells.com? Powell's Books is independent, unionized, and in addition to all the new books you can buy elsewhere, has the widest selection of used and out-of-print titles. So you can buy your favorite author’s new book, and at the same time, pick up something she published years ago that you might miss otherwise.

And you don’t have to give them your credit card number; you can use PayPal. Other online booksellers specialize, like their “bricks and mortar” counterparts. BellaBooks.com, which sells Spinsters Ink and other titles, explicitly does not track or monitor any information about what their customers order.

Just remember what I, myself, had temporarily forgotten: You have choices. Exercise them, and enjoy!

Lost Souls

2009-03-13T10:21:00.000-05:00

This is a new novel just published by Carol Lawlor. Set in 1960s Montreal, Lost Souls is about Tanya Kowalski, a psychiatric nurse who suspects that the great Dr. Strachan is abusing his patients. When she turns journalist and teams up with Max Callaghan to investigate Strachan, she uncovers the use of LSD, links to the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency, and psychiatric survivors who are determined to bring Strachan to justice.

I've had the privilege of reading Carol's work in draft form, and I can vouch for the quality of this story. The atmosphere is vividly realized, the characters are well drawn, and the tension is nonstop. I also laughed a lot reading it--comic relief is very important for me.

I'm not a reviewer and rarely plug books in a public forum, but you will not be disappointed if you pick up Lost Souls.

The Handle of Faith

2009-02-18T16:33:00.001-05:00

"Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith."

--Dwight D. Eisenhower, accepting the Republican nomination for President of the USA, 1956

Ride a Wild Horse

2009-02-11T10:44:00.004-05:00

This is a poem that has stuck with me for more than twenty years. The poet, Hannah Kahn, is worth reading about too. "Ride a Wild Horse" is at the Web site of the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation.

BHO

2009-01-21T15:39:00.037-05:00

On the 20th of January, I was present at the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the USA. My overwhelming sense was of everybody coming together and being nice to each other. We were all so excited, not about a president of one race (he is biracial), but about a president of a united nation. I know it meant something special to African-Americans, and I was surrounded by them, along with Kenyans, Canadians, and people from all over the world.

My day began with a ride in to North Capitol Street, with a taxi driver who articulated quite detailed proposals for what Obama should do about crime, energy, and foreign policy. He was a big fan of both Hillary Clinton and the Obamas, but as for the former president (boy, that sounds good!) he said it just goes to show that Harvard is better than Yale! After he dropped me off, he was going to take his two daughters to the Inauguration.

At one point the driver referred, in his heavy accent, to “my country,” and I thought he meant the country where he was born. So I asked which one? He said “United States!” with such indignation that I didn’t ask again! After all, I know what it means to immigrate.

That set the tone for the rest of Inauguration Day. The doors of Union Station had “Joy” and “Hope” signs on them. (And the portable toilets were reasonably clean, even had paper!) There were tons of security personnel, and on one side of Pennsylvania Avenue they seemed a lot less prepared to give information than on the other side of the National Mall. But even when one or two people got frustrated, the mood was so positive. Nobody pushed or was unpleasant. I have never experienced anything like it and emotionally, I’m still taking it all in. At the time I just wanted to absorb the images and the moment, and savor them later.

From Union Station, where I could see the Capitol dome glowing in the dark, I made my way down to behind the Canadian Embassy. This was a security checkpoint and Canadian residents (and many hundreds of others) were lining up to get in. There was one lady with a megaphone and I’m afraid we couldn’t hear her announcements at all, so this meant two hours of basically no movement while (I think) ticket holders were let in first. Eventually, I learned that this entrance was for the parade route only (the inaugural parade, scheduled for seven and a half hours later!) and I decided I wasn’t in town to watch a Jumbotron. I wanted to be on the Mall. So after several false starts I found a bicycle cop, who was warming himself on a grate like homeless people would if they had been allowed in the area. This officer seemed confident that I needed to cross under the Mall to get in to the viewing area for the general public.

Let me say that all the security services were doing a great job, but some of them only knew one thing, like “this is the exit.” A flight attendant I met later told me that many of these folks were volunteers. I presume this didn’t apply to the sniper on the roof behind us!

I left the Canadians still standing in line for the security checkpoint, and took off with many other people to walk through the 3rd Street Tunnel. Fortunately, there was lots of space and people kept moving, plus I could see the symbolic light at the end of the tunnel! I cannot overemphasize the cheerfulness of the crowds, and I was glad to be moving again, as my feet were getting pretty cold. (Note: pack extra socks for the first woman’s inauguration!)

On the other side of the Mall, there were suddenly tons of volunteers, plus a few cute soldiers, telling us where to go. Very friendly attitude, and vendors everywhere too. Memorabilia, not food. Somewhere around the appropriately ugly Dept. of HUD, a black man with a very good voice led us in singing “We Want Obama Right Now” to the tune of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” One of the ladies near me at the bottleneck near 14th St. said, “If people didn’t want anybody touching them, they came to the wrong place!” We laughed a lot.

So we walked all the way from 3rd to 14th Streets, waited for some vehicles (buses bringing in the marching bands), then all of a sudden the way was clear to the Mall—and the bathrooms! I never had to clear security. Too far back. I am so proud that the Inauguration was free to anyone who wanted to come, and that no one ever said, “Don’t come,” or discouraged people, just because the crowds would be large.

Anyway on the wide-open space it felt a lot less crowded than it probably looked on television. I always forget how huge the Mall is. I was hanging around the base of the Washington Monument. Near me were two young white women, probably lovers, and a Spanish-speaking family with young children. People kept going over and under the chain that ropes off the sidewalk there, trying to see the Jumbotron better. Strangers would help each other. Many folks went all the way back to the Lincoln Memorial because there was another big screen back there, but I stayed as high as I could get. From there, I could see the Capitol, and hear the sound pretty well—occasionally bouncing off the Monument. There was a group of people protesting Guantanamo Bay. (Within hours, President Obama got the military tribunals suspended there. One of his first acts as president.)

The first thing I heard was the MC, who I now know was Senator Dianne Feinstein, announcing former President Clinton. When President Bush was announced, I heard the crowd boo—I just laughed, I couldn’t help it. As a character says in Emma Donoghue’s Landing: “There’s a special high you only get from dumping someone you stayed with far too long.”

Then Rick Warren gave the invocation. Before the inauguration, there was a huge amount of attention paid to “how homophobic is Warren?” But for me, the high point of the entire ceremony was the closing prayer by Joseph Lowery, who has a rather different position. More on that in a moment.

Itzhak Perlman, Yo Yo Ma, et al played John Williams’s “Simple Gifts” variation, which sounded to me like a ripoff of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite. And around this, the vice president and president took their respective oaths of office. I did not hear until later how Chief Justice John Roberts had administered the words out of order, but both men have since cleaned it up.

And then we heard the inaugural address, which was directed to the world as much as to us who were there. It was important to me, not that I could see the president, but that he could see us. All of us on this vast area of land, the Mall, which was once used for slave markets. All the way down to the memorial to President Lincoln, who signed the death warrant for slavery.

A gentleman asked me to take his picture with that memorial in the background, and then offered to take mine. He told me to have a blessed year—not day, but year! Only later did I absorb the significance of two strangers, a white girl from the South and a black man, taking each other’s pictures at the Lincoln Memorial. The place where Martin Luther King, Jr. (who would have been 80 a few days before) delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

As I made my way back, I heard Joseph Lowery’s benediction: “We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right. Let all who do justice and love mercy say Amen! Amen! Amen!” The most moving part of my whole day was walking in that multicolored crowd of people, laughing, and repeating those “Amens.”

On the bus, I met the flight attendant who told me about all the local preparations. It turned out she went to East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City, where I was born. Altogether it felt like a very small world.

I had told the taxi driver that I’m a writer. So when he let me out, he said, “I hope you get a good report!” I hope I did, too. Have a blessed year.

The sacred bedroom

2008-12-05T10:52:00.005-05:00

I love it when I discover a new and wonderful writer...even if the rest of the country has been appreciating his voice for a while now.

Russell Wangersky has something wonderful to say about human desire and freedom that his American neighbors could learn a lot from. Read it here.

Timely, too, during Advent, when Christians celebrate an itinerant family, a single mother, and the man who married her, even though the child was not his.

Bristol

2008-09-26T10:38:00.003-05:00

It's not just Palin's daughter anymore.

The Bristol Herald Courier is one of many "battleground state" newspapers this morning calling for the presidential debates to go on--as they did during the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Candidates Must Debate

This is Bristol, Virginia--and Bristol, Tennessee. Part of the Tri-Cities. Where I was born.

It's not just the Washington suburbs that are in play in this election. This is southern Virginia.

Vote!

2008-09-17T09:49:00.001-05:00

It is another Election Year in the United States of America. Millions of Americans live outside the U.S., but many have not managed to get their votes in in the past. Anybody remember Florida 2000? No, not that part. The part where people suddenly paid attention to the counting of absentee ballots. Where the votes of Americans abroad could make the difference in an election.

U.S. and dual citizens are entitled to vote in U.S. elections, no matter where in the world we live.

One-stop U.S. voter registration

Even if you live in the States, deadlines are coming up quickly. All voters can use this link.

Every election I find many citizens who are surprised to know that they can vote, no matter if they are living outside the U.S. indefinitely, or have never lived there.

People all over the world would love to participate in our elections. Those of us who can, let's do.

"Nay, sir, do not complain."

2008-08-19T08:41:00.001-05:00

"It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends."

-- Dr. Johnson, in James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson

Loving

2008-05-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

"We loved each other and got married," Mildred Loving told The Washington Evening Star in 1965, when Loving v. Virginia was pending. Loving, who died last month, and her husband Richard were the interracial couple whose Supreme Court case overturned U.S. miscegenation laws.

"We are not marrying the state. The law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants."

Yesterday the supreme court of California agreed with the position Loving took towards the end of her life, declaring it unconstitutional to prevent same-sex couples from marrying in that state. The opinion declared that measures designed to discriminate against gays and lesbians should be as suspect as measures designed to discriminate against a racial group, or people of one sex. This should carry some weight, coming from a conservative court.

It will bring opposition. Representative democracies, like California and the United States, do not work by simple majority. The legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government work together to represent the people--a system designed to protect against abuses of power. In California, all three branches of government now agree that same-sex couples should not be prevented from marrying by the state.

Groups purporting to represent the majority--assuming that heterosexuals, who are the majority, automatically oppose the rights of gays to marry--will now try to keep this decision from coming into force. They will do so by ballot measures like those that have passed in many states. Conservative voices like The Wall Street Journal have already joined in, declaring this decision an example of judicial activism and associating it with Democrats. (In fact, the California supreme court was appointed almost entirely by Republicans, while neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Rodham Clinton supports same-sex marriage.)

Do not be fooled by these shibboleths. The judiciary is only one branch of California government, and all three agree. The legislature has already affirmed gay couples' rights, and the Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has said he will not support changes to the constitution to block it. Ballot propositions are designed to force through, by simple majority, a "corrective" to decisions already made by our representatives in government.

Forty years ago, there is no doubt that a majority of Americans would have disapproved of "interracial" marriages. Even now, such couples are a clear minority, and have a hard time. But the Lovings should not have had to wait until most Americans were ready to accept their lifestyle. And Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who have been together for more than 50 years, should not have to try getting married again and again--in their 80s!--while people around them squabble about a lifestyle that, frankly, is not their concern.

That is why we have this system of checks and balances: to protect minorities against abuse by the majority.

Mildred Loving would be proud.
http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5276

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

2008-04-04T10:28:00.004-05:00

by Rev. Martin Luther King

4 April 1967

This message is 41 years old today. One year later, at the age of 39, King was assassinated--40 years ago today.

The speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City.

Unlike his more famous speeches, this one goes beyond the subject of race relations to address the morality of an entire country, in the middle of a controversial war. The message was not welcomed from King then, but it is just as necessary now.

Never thought I'd quote this guy

2008-03-28T10:45:00.002-05:00

He's the governor of Arkansas, a former Republican presidential candidate, and a Baptist minister.

"As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, 'That's a terrible statement,' I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, 'You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus.' And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had ... more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."

- Mike Huckabee, offering his perspective on the preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Source: MSNBC)

Jane Rule

2008-03-03T09:00:00.002-05:00

For those who do not know, Jane Rule, who recently died, was born in the United States and for many years was the only openly lesbian writer in Canada. Her most famous novel, Desert of the Heart, was the basis for the film Desert Hearts.

The latest issue of Curve magazine contains a tribute to Jane by Lee Lynch. When I think of the previous generation of lesbian writers, I think of Lee Lynch, in the same way she thinks of Jane Rule. Lynch quotes Rule on the various ways in which she was identified as a writer: Canadian, American, lesbian, and six feet tall. So it seems appropriate that there is also a quote from "Canadian poet J. E. Knowles." If it was good enough for Jane Rule, why not identify as binational? Genre is fluid...

I just finished reading Rule's second novel, This Is Not For You. It's one of those times I'm glad not to be a book reviewer, because my first reaction was "Whoa." The novel is not set in Canada, has only one Canadian character, yet there's something very Canadian about it. The bleakness of the character and her outlook work in wonderful counterpoint with wry observations about human beings, so sharp I felt I could cut my fingers on the page. The book's back in print now with Insomniac Press.

A Jane Rule archive may be found at Xtra!

James Baldwin

2008-02-22T09:38:00.001-05:00

"Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice you can give anybody...."

An Innocent Time

2008-02-05T12:02:00.001-05:00

Published in Knoxville Bound: A Collection of Literary Works Inspired by Knoxville, Tennessee (University of Tennessee Press, 2004)

I've sojourned three times in Knoxville, twice that I remember. Both times, I felt as I feel about the city I live in now, that I was not really at home, but on loan from some place I belonged more exactly. I could not quite put my finger on the pulse of Knoxville, was not quite sure if the city had a character. Yet it stuck in my memory to a surprising degree.

On New Year's Eve, twenty-four years ago as I write now, my family was driving down from the Johnson City area so my father could begin an eight-month sabbatical at the University of Tennessee. My father and little brother were ahead in the U-Haul, and I was with my mother in our slightly-less-than-new Chevy Nova, where, at the age of seven, it was my job to "help" with my baby sister. She sat between us in the car seat. My mother was proud of the fact that Tennessee had, she said, been the first state to require infant seats.

I don't know how much help I was on the hundred-mile trip, which seemed much longer, but I arrived in Knoxville with one overpowering thought: I have to pee.

It's my first memory of Knoxville, though not the first time I'd been there. When I was a year old, I lived on a double-digit floor of an apartment building on Kingston Pike, where my mother rescued, from the garbage chute, recipe books that told how to stretch casseroles twice as far with frozen vegetables and lots of sour cream. My father had been finishing his master's degree at the time. In 1980 he was back to make a push towards his doctorate.

We left our house in Carter County in the care of people who had assured us that, although they smoked, they would not do so in the house because my mother was allergic, nor would they let their big dogs run all over the house, scratching at the door and spreading fleas. We moved into an apartment on Sutherland Avenue, L-308 to be exact. There we began what was for me the unfamiliar experience of urban living, going up and down stairs, being, if only on the surface, a "city girl."

At Pond Gap Elementary School, where I was briefly in the first grade before being bumped over to the second, I met a little boy who had never been to kindergarten. Tommy's father had taught him everything he needed to know. For example, did I know that the blue whale was the biggest creature in the world, bigger than any dinosaur? Or that diamond was the hardest substance in the world? And had I ever eaten hair? He tried it once. It sure hurt coming out. And did I know that you could keep water in a drinking straw if you held your thumb over the opening and pulled it out of the glass? I demanded proof. As Tommy performed this little marvel I glimpsed the mystery of hydrostatic equilibrium, a physical phenomenon with which I would not grapple again for more than ten years.

The year I learned about diamonds and blue whales was also the year of the Iranian hostage crisis. At the age of seven, I didn't grasp the concept of civilian hostages and was completely at a loss to understand why Iranian "students" had seized them. I thought of college-aged students as grownups. An Iranian student was someone like me, too young to seize hostages. Someone like my friend Elmira, for example.

My next-door neighbour and classmate, whose father was also a doctoral candidate at UT, spoke the Iranian language. Elmira's father was a soft-spoken man who often took both me and his daughter to school together. He had the kindest eyes and the gentlest manner of any father I knew. Because his wife was still in Iran, he and his daughter were everything to each other, and his constant presence in my friend's life intrigued me. Years later, when the American press confronted me again and again with the screaming figure of a stereotypical Muslim (first Iranian, then Arab), I often thought of this kindly man and his concern that we see him as such.

"We're Iranian," his daughter said to us. "But we don't believe in what they're doing."

Regardless, one morning my mother went out to our car to go grocery shopping and found the father and daughter packed to leave. "We're going back to Iran," Elmira said excitedly. "We're going back to see my mother. But my father tells me I can come back to America for the next grade."

Her father, standing beside her, shrugged. He did not look like a man with a choice. We never saw them again.

My brother, who was three at the time, remembers nothing about Elmira except that she taught him to eat grass. There was a large area of grass between two buildings of our apartment complex, which we called the field. To us, the distance between the buildings seemed enormous. Before Elmira left we often played softball there.

My father was the pitcher for the entire neighbourhood. I played, along with Elmira, two second-graders from the other building--one black, one white--a Japanese boy who smiled but never spoke, a British brother and sister, and another brother and sister, Nabil and May, who were Iraqi. My father was only in his early thirties, working incredibly hard to earn the third degree in English, yet chose to spend his evenings with these children, pushing my brother and the younger kids on the swings and playing softball with those old enough to be in school. The Ayatollah raged without our knowledge; Iranian and Iraqi children played softball together, and I never stopped to think that I was a white Christian. We played a good game.

Iraq was America's ally against Iran during the 1980s. But when I was eighteen, my country went to war against Iraq, and I remembered my friends from the apartments in Knoxville, who would have been about the same age. I imagined Nabil shooting somewhere in the desert, killing and dying for the government of the country where he'd been born.

The Iranian hostage crisis that year cost Jimmy Carter the presidency. I knew that my mother supported Carter and thought his opponent, Ronald Reagan, was a "clown." When Reagan was shot a year later I could not understand why she was upset. I did not yet distinguish between an opponent to be outvoted and an enemy to be shot. (Now where could I have gotten that idea?)

***

It may seem unlikely that I remember Knoxville as a haven of international cooperation. Diversity is not the watchword of East Tennessee, to those outsiders who can find it on a map at all. The World's Fair, which I duly visited in 1982, did not turn out to herald much progress. Who remembers where any other World's Fair in recent memory has taken place?

But after we returned to our rural home, and aired out the smoke and exterminated the fleas that had been left behind, I would find myself imagining Knoxville as this exotic locale, because it was a city, and a hundred miles away, and I had lived there. I didn't expect to live there again, but in my twenties, after sojourns in Chicago and Oxford, England, I found myself once again near the UT campus, apartment hunting with my brother.

As a three- and four-year-old, my brother had bonded well with the girls of Knoxville. My mother marvels now that children that age would run around all day in the apartment complex without their parents worrying. The past often seems like an innocent time, no matter whose past it is.

I hadn't spent much time in, or even near, Knoxville since moving north at the age of seventeen. The only thing I knew had changed in the interim was that an appeals court located in Knoxville had ruled against Tennessee's sodomy law, ultimately struck down by the state supreme court. I'd read this, of course, from the relative safety of Chicago, where a gay press flourished and gay people even had some protection in law, though not equality. It didn't change my perception that in moving back to East Tennessee I would have to remain discreet about my sexuality.

When I arrived and started meeting my brother's friends, and their friends, and others who were into art and other things in addition to the Vols, I got the impression that Knoxville was crawling with homosexuals, some far more obvious than I was. At least, they were to me. I remember an unbelievable conversation with a gay man who, given the field in which he worked, was understandably paranoid about being "found out" and driven from his job. The thing was, I have seldom met anyone more screamingly queer. He looked like he'd just come from rehearsal with the Village People.

This, I soon discovered, was how Knoxville worked. I lived there for another three years and there were people I saw every day who, to the very end, said things around me and to my face that I couldn't imagine them saying if they'd known I wasn't straight. Being back in the South, I found strangers more likely to strike up a friendly conversation than in a big northern city, but this could go terribly wrong when the stranger started making comments about blacks (usually calling them something different) which suggested they hadn't moved on from the nineteenth century. They looked at my face, saw a colour similar to theirs, and figured I thought the same. People see what they want to see, I guess.

I didn't think I'd be in Knoxville that long but I was involved in a long-distance relationship with a woman in England, and the process of getting permanent residency in the same country proved to be long and drawn-out. Even before September 11, 2001, the United States had a labyrinthine and ridiculously unwelcoming immigration system that, among other things, prevented British people from entering the "visa lottery"--but not people from Northern Ireland, which is part of the same United Kingdom. Not that I could explain this to my friends back home. Usually, once they learned of my unhappy situation, they either suggested that my partner move to the U.S. illegally (and never work or travel again?) or that I give up on the impossible and stop wasting my youth.

I didn't have a lot in common with some of these kids!

So, while we were filling out forms and waiting for a legal solution that, ultimately, took us to Canada, I worked at the circulation desk of the downtown public library. I understand that Knox County is trying to get a new main library and it probably needs one, but I'll bet it won't have such a colourful name as Lawson McGhee. It will be like the Pepsi Center or Conseco Dome. Whatever building it's in, the library will continue to play its rare and vital role in Knoxville as in the rest of American society: providing books and other resources of interest to the marginalized and isolated, holding the forces that would ban and pursue at bay. At least for now.

Knoxville isn't that big a town and I kept bumping into the same folks at musical performances and any arts-related event about town. The highlight of my Christmas season was, ironically, the Hanukkah concert at the Laurel Theatre by the Oak Ridge Klezmer Band. When they burst into "Bei Mir Bis Du Shein" or a hora, the librarians and arts folks would kick up their heels and dance, just as they did when the Irish band Solas came to the Laurel Theatre. Sometimes, I joined a shape-note group, singing a form of the Old Harp based on seven shapes (three more than I was used to), that also met at the Laurel. As much a gift to the community, I suspect, as it was as a church.

Yiddish theatre, Old Harp singing, a wedding in East Knoxville, the Pride festival in World's Fair park. The town may have changed since the days of Iranian-Iraqi softball at the Sutherland Apartments. Then again, as the French (or French Canadians?) would say, Plus ça change...

The wisest friend

2008-01-23T14:58:00.000-05:00

"It's so cryptic when someone tells you to be yourself but I think you know when you're not."

I had the pleasure this week of hearing Rabbi Steve Greenberg speak. He is the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, whose tagline is "Homophobia is just one room in the larger hotel of misogyny." He is also featured in For the Bible Tells Me So, which I just saw last night. It is about conservative religious folks (mostly Christian) and their gay children, who include Bishop Gene Robinson and Chrissy Gephardt (Richard's daughter). Desmond Tutu and many others are also featured in the film.

The interesting thing is that none of them gave up their faith nor are they all in the same place politically; rather, "love conquers all."
And isn't that what fans of romance believe in?

My city's gayer than yours

2008-01-16T14:30:00.000-05:00

Appeared 2005 in Xtra!

In the gym the other day, I caught a glimpse of a trailer for Million Dollar Baby. I hadn't seen Hilary Swank since Boys Don't Cry, so the prospect of her in another challenging role (as a boxer) grabbed my attention.

In the context of a locker room it made sense to look at what a weight trainer can do for an actress whose career might have tanked after she portrayed a transgendered character. It was only when women around me started murmuring about how old Clint Eastwood has gotten that I realized I was the only queer there.

Remember, long ago, coming out and chanting "We are everywhere?" Where I'm from--not just the States but one of those Red States--that did not appear to be true. It was only too obvious that I was the only queer in whatever room I was in. But now I live in a city that seems so queer and queer-positive that it can be unnerving.

For example, after years of immigration hassles, my lover and I were happy just to live in the same country for more than months at a time. We didn't ask to be recognized as same-sex partners, so when the realities of Canadian law found us being proclaimed such in a taxman's office, it was awkward. It seemed we should be celebrating something, but how romantic is H&R Block?

We have so far held out against what some see as the ultimate domestication of wild homos--marriage. Otherwise, we aren’t a very radical couple. Before I lived in Toronto, I always figured that not being straight was radical enough for most people. If nothing else, I figured it got me off the parenting hook, as the last thing straight society wanted was for us to breed.

How surprised I was by the Toronto phenomenon of straight co-workers who actually ask if marriage and/or children are in our future. These people all know we’re lesbians; they take lesbians so for granted now that they expect us to wed and go on maternity leave. No wonder other queers look at the same-sex marriage fight and wonder where we went wrong.

In the minds of our neighbours, it seems, the girls are all getting pregnant, and the boys have all quit the bathhouses and are lining up to pose in Condo Living. I feel the need for resistance--or at least harness shopping--just to maintain some clarity in "We're all gay now" Toronto.

My lover, who seems determined to remain a woman, nonetheless has a running joke about being, at heart, a gay man. In the Pride run, she observed that never before had she been handed water by a man in a thong. She seemed so thrilled, I hope it was only the affirmation of community and not pushing the boundaries of gender. Are her fondness for men in black leather and mania for cleaning the house signs that I live with a queen? Perhaps this is the ever-queerer future for some of us.

But what do I tell my friends in America, who are fighting legislative efforts to scale back rights they already have? “Forget marriage laws, pass the latex and lube?”

Let's face it, the longer you do something the more you have to seek bigger and bigger thrills. Even committed monogamists know that a little renewal can be a very good thing. We haven't come all this way in the sexual revolution just to register at Canadian Tire.

On the other hand, we can get a bit spoiled here. After the U.S. election lesbians down south were e-mailing me wondering where to go from here, now that bashing gay marriages had been used to re-elect Bush and to take away much of what Americans have gained over the years. Beyond North America, things are far worse. We do have it better up here than down in the States, but at least they’ve got rid of the sodomy laws.

Having grown up breaking those laws myself, I was floored when a Toronto colleague said that her young daughter had been called a lesbian at school. “And the first thing I said was, ‘That's not an insult!’” I’ve heard other parents say things like that, and they seem to have no idea how remarkable it is. On Remembrance Day, I heard a client talking about the Holocaust and mentioning the homosexuals and others who also died, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. What does “natural” even mean any more?

So I appreciate those locker-room moments when I'm watching Ellen while everyone else is looking at Jude Law. Then we get in the elevator with a pumped guy and his sugar daddy, and breathe a sigh of relief. All is well. For now.

CHRIST HAS

2007-12-01T11:03:00.000-05:00

no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion looks out on the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. And yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.
-- St. Teresa of Avila

Imaginationality

2007-10-26T12:15:00.000-05:00

In an online context, I was "eavesdropping" recently on a conversation about how, not to say whether, writers should write about characters different from themselves.

Hard to believe, isn't it? After all, fiction, by definition, is a made-up story. Characters, by definition, are made-up people. Even if a character is based on someone you know, it's still your version of that person. Heaven knows, we can never really know what's going in inside another person's head. That's what fiction is for.

Nonetheless, some readers (and non-readers) don't like it when they see writers "appropriating the voice" of a character different from themselves. One example given was some women--no doubt on university campuses, whence I've been absent too long--who disapproved of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, written in the voices of women including a real writer, Virginia Woolf. I wonder if these women want to claim Woolf for themselves, or only parts of her? The anti-Semitic parts, for instance?

Michael Cunningham, an incredibly gifted writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, doesn't need me defending him. But he is a white, U.S.-based man, and that's a pretty privileged group to belong to, isn't it? At least he's gay.

So, incidentally, is Camilla Gibb, who took a little flak for her Giller Prize-nominated novel, Sweetness in the Belly. Gibb is also white, a British-born Canadian, and an atheist. Nonetheless, after years of research living in Ethiopia, she dared to set her book there, and to write it in the voice of another white woman--a devoutly Muslim Ethiopian. Through the richness of her imagination, Gibb portrayed a character's religiosity and the conflicts surrounding it with a sensitivity I rarely see in fiction. Good thing she didn't let her inner censors disqualify her from trying!

One of the first adult novels (as opposed to children's books) I ever read was Clyde Egerton's Raney, and it's still a favorite of mine. Raney is a country girl in 1970s North Carolina who marries a more liberal guy from Atlanta. The story of their marriage is told in the strong, opinionated, and sometimes ignorant voice of Raney, and it is hilarious. Egerton said he wrote in the voice of the wife because in his family, stories were always told by women, and it just felt natural. I'm glad he didn't talk himself out of it by worrying about whether some readers might dislike it. No story can work for everybody.

I enjoy seeing myself in fictional characters, especially when we don't share surface, demographic criteria. Some of the books I've found most memorable have taken me deep into the mind of a character I could never possibly be. And I have read about many fictional characters who share my sexual orientation or race or religion, yet are nothing like me in personality.

As a white, U.S.-born, lesbian reader, I've observed that most white American characters never notice that they are white Americans or acknowledge the effect of those prejudices on other people's lives. Kind of like straight characters who almost never acknowledge their heterosexuality; it's just the default setting.

I think an extremely useful and diversifying thing for writers to do, next time [they] [we] are creating a cast of all or almost all white characters set in the USA--for example--is to have at least some of those characters aware of their nationality at least some of the time. No appropriation required.

Another of my favorite writers since youth, Jill McCorkle, wrote a novel called Carolina Moon (not to be confused with Nora Roberts's novel of the same title). All of the important characters in McCorkle's Carolina Moon are straight, and sexual orientation isn't a theme of the novel. But at a couple of subtle points, one of her characters, a woman named Denny, gives a nod to the fact that she has a sexual preference, and that it is hetero. That little nod of recognition--that there are other kinds of people in the world, and the character has thought about this--can deepen a story and make it more effective.

As always, a sense of humor helps too.

© J. E. Knowles

1989

2007-10-12T10:38:00.000-05:00

M. Y. T.

hello cerb my old dark friend
your three heads roaring at the gates of hell
the last outpost of living at the door of death
death eternal stretching behind you
black bleak river styx and ferryman before you
i come to you before i die
i have paid tribute to the gods on the mountain
i have wandered searching all over the earth
i have come under the earth to hades's house
i have crossed the styx and paid the ferryman
and now i want to know,
what makes it grey? because the sky is grey
most of the time, and even when it's black or white
it's grey, grey-blue, grey-red, but always grey
and the earth is grey, and even when it's brown
or morning-green or colour-feasting fall

still at dawn it's grey and dusk is grey
it's grey underground and the river is grey
and the old mean ferryman is shrivelled grey
and you, yes even you black dog, are grey
what makes it grey? is that why people bleed
and scream and breathe and sleep
is that why it rains and tears and there are
wars and fears and footsteps and people hear
why not black and white and easy and hard
and serious and fun and heaven and hell
and war and peace and safe and dangerous and
life and death and gods and men?
why grey? and for goodness' bloody sake
why pain and fire and frightened children?
and why do ragged voices cry desperation
and why does mister hell play chess with men
and why can i barely speak from the ripping
tearing bleeding burning pain of love
why do i need and hurt that something as deep
and calling as a restless soul is empty,
empty as my arms and a thousand thousand
miles from a night of sleep
why is it so dark? and why is there light in the
dark? and why did the love break when mama's
maid swept it off the dresser? it broke, you know
why did it break and destroy? i didn't want it
to destroy anybody, i never meant to fail

what, oh what now has torn up everything
and made the separation of the little storms
i was only misguided, only misguided
and it is cold and there is only a very slight chance
that truth will win out in the end
and there are very few rivers in the desert
and i don't have time to wait for then, i want
then now because otherwise i will be dead
tomorrow i could be gone and i don't have time
to wait before i wonder why and what makes it grey
in the same way that if you jump from the sears
tower to a patch of grass it is harder than
jumping from a chair to concrete
although concrete is harder than grass
and chairs and concrete and the sears tower are all
greyer than grass
i knelt in the stained-glass filtered air
of the chapel and i prayed that the gods would
live and that earth would be blessed
i have only now to live
and i have found that life is a crucifixion
in which each one of us must sacrifice one hand
to the nails
we must reach as far as we can before the
un-nailed hand crumbles to dust

because life like time is only a brief history
in the midst of infinity
and the gods after all are only life
and one day even time will be old
well if this is my life i accept it
i love it
and i will live it to the best of my ability
even if that means that which it may not
i shall go back to earth now
alone
thank you
goodnight
but cerb, first tell me in a whispered sound
what makes it grey

Shooting star

2007-09-10T08:10:00.001-05:00

Madeleine L'Engle, 1918-2007
"I'm going home like a shooting star."--Sojourner Truth

Immigration equality

2007-07-18T15:29:00.000-05:00

Last night Rachel Tiven, the director of Immigration Equality, was a guest on Bill O'Reilly's show on Fox News.

Bless her heart.

Immigration Equality is the organization working for the rights of gay and lesbian and HIV+ immigrants to the United States. This means they are working at the nexus of two burning issues in the U.S. today, or, to put it another way, two hated groups: LGBT people, and immigrants.

Until about 1990, gay and lesbian people were banned from entering the U.S.--even as visitors. (A booklet printed in 1989 explained that you are not allowed to cross the border of the United States if "you are mentally ill or homosexual," even though homosexuality had not been classed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association since 1973!) This ban still applies today to people with HIV.

There has been a bill floating around Congress for years that would enable thousands of U.S. citizens to sponsor their same-sex partners, instead of what happens to us now--deportations, bannings, and families and livelihoods abandoned as we have to leave our country. Every year, many of us come to Canada. Not because our partners are Canadian, but because a third country is the only way.

If you need options now, check out Immigration Equality.

If you are an American with a minute on your hands, go to their site and ask your members of Congress to pass this bill.

Thank you.

Those never met

2007-07-09T07:37:00.000-05:00

*Note: Unrelentingly Drawn: The Editorial Cartoons of Danny Sotomayor is open at Gerber/Hart Library in Chicago for the summer of 2007.

When Larry Kramer came to Toronto last year for the International Festival of Authors, I was interested to read Xtra's interview with him. He said some surprisingly hard-hitting things about what has happened in the last twenty years. "It’s as if all those people in the ’80s died in vain," he was quoted as saying. "I don’t see a lot of us fighting and campaigning, I see a lot of us dancing and going to the gym."

Now if anybody else said that, he or she would probably be dismissed as a nagging big sister, like someone who says everybody should quit smoking. But this was Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT UP. His comments made me start thinking about those earlier days and who "all those people" were.

In my life, the people who died were not often those I had known personally. More of them were people whose paths I probably would have crossed eventually, had their lives not been cut so short.

These relationships are defined by their absence. Someone I might have known, I did not know, and the opportunity has been lost forever.

A decade ago, as a newly out lesbian, I discovered that I was a member of something called "the gay and lesbian community." "Gay and lesbian" had a particular meaning in the 1980s and early 1990s. It meant a degree of cooperation between queer women and men that had not happened before, and which has probably not happened since.

That cooperation was around one particular issue. AIDS was seen by those outside our community as a problem for us alone. It was not recognized as a problem for heterosexuals, let alone for the developing world, where it is now an unprecedented catastrophe.

So gays and lesbians responded to AIDS. There was caretaking within the community, and outrage directed at those outside it who expressed indifference or revulsion. The impetus to community was hard to deny: People were dying. Men, many of them young, were dying around us in disastrous numbers, and if "the gay and lesbian community" did not do something about it, who would?

Now there are drugs that did not exist a decade ago. These treatments are "good news," in the way that chemotherapy is good news to someone with cancer. They keep something deadly and incurable at bay. They do not restore any of us to the world of the 1970s, when no one knew about AIDS. And nothing can bring back all the people we lost.

There can be no nostalgia about that period, because it was a time of death. As in a war of self-defence, people really were fighting for their lives. Great love and great art came out of that time, because that was all we could do. What we really wanted to do was to change the way the world was, to open the bathhouses and not have to worry about a deadly disease.

The gay playwright Scott McPherson, who was living in Chicago at the same time I was, wrote about the caretaking that was going on in the gay community. He described the presence of AIDS in his life, in the life of his lover, Danny Sotomayor, and in the lives of their friends.

I wish I had known this writer, but I never met him. He died ten years ago. Danny Sotomayor, a gifted cartoonist and AIDS activist, also died. There is no collection of this man's work.* He should have been drawing for many more years, but instead, he gave his energy to the political fight for AIDS funding and research.

Not enough is left of these men. There is not a lifetime of work for us to appreciate. There should be many more plays and cartoons and other works of art, and they should be about the many joys of life, not just the pain of loss. There is nothing redemptive about the loss of so many people, so many relationships cut short or never started. It is a massive tragedy.

Because there was so much death that could not have been expected, gay and lesbian people were forced to deal with mortality--our own, as well as others'. In many cases, these were people whose families or communities of origin had rejected them, who did not have the comfort of traditional faith. Instead, women and men who may not previously have considered themselves allies came together and supported each other.

It should not have taken tragedy to bring us together. Community life should not be one more life we've lost, along with so many other lives. Art and memories are not enough.

I hope we can continue to love those around us as if it were, as it can be, a matter of life and death.

Published 2003 in Xtra!

Pride in the Month of June

2007-06-15T11:09:00.000-05:00

2003 Writer's Digest Writing Competition
Inspirational Winner

In English translations of the New Testament, Romans is the first of Paul’s letters to appear. Scholars believe, however, that Paul’s letter to the Romans was one of the last he wrote, late in his life, to the church in the city where he would ultimately die. It has been my habit for many years to read through the Bible, and around June I always find myself reading Romans. It is one of Paul’s most difficult letters to read, but also one of his most gracious.

Eighteen years ago I was baptized into the Christian church. It is the custom of the branch of Christianity in which I was raised to baptize people when they are supposed to be old enough to choose faith for themselves. In those eighteen years I have veered from one extreme to another in my faith or lack thereof, but I have always managed to be reading the Bible. It has been the literary constant to my variable religion.

I have tried, for at least that long, always to be honest about Christianity. And for the last twelve years, I have tried also to be honest about being gay. In the gay and lesbian community, we call such honesty “coming out.” It is a process that never really ends, and it can be just as traumatic with the person who has never heard it before as it was the first time.

I came out in the early part of 1991, to some people I knew, then in public and in print. And it was a heady time to do so. “Come out in spring. Everything else does.” I decided to be open about something I had known for a long while because I saw people around me, openly gay students at my university, being harassed with death threats and attacks. People of all sexual identities rallied around these students and demanded that the administration do something to respond. Before I graduated three years later, I would see that university grant equal benefits to same-sex partners. At the time, however, coming out was an act of some defiance.

We wore pink triangles, the symbol the Nazis had used to identify homosexuals in the concentration camps. I didn’t know, when I was eighteen, that a pink triangle stood in Amsterdam as the first memorial in the world to gay victims of the Nazis. I knew it as the symbol of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, one of the groups active in the early 1990s. Gay people were angry then because so many men, young men, in our community were dying, and few other people seemed to care because AIDS was a “gay disease.” We know AIDS now as the scourge of heterosexual communities, an epidemic in the developing world. But in those days many people told us that the plague was sent by God on our community of sinners.

I think about these things every June because June marks Pride, commemorating the first modern demonstration of defiance by gay people in public, at Stonewall in New York City. Stonewall happened in 1969, the year of the moon landing and Woodstock. It was also the year Penelope, whom I met and fell in love with in 1992, was born.

The past twelve years have been tremendously exciting and frustrating, for the gay and lesbian community and for me personally. We have gone from being “everywhere spoken against,” like the early Christian church, to gaining some measure of equality, in law and/or in fact. I have seen one community I am a part of, the gay community, lose so many bright members to disaster, and I have heard HIV statuses both negative and positive, in waiting rooms and over phone lines. I have seen another community I am a part of, the church, bitterly divided over “gay issues,” with clergy and laity of many communions turning their backs on one another and walking out because they could not stand him or her or them. I have lost some friends and gained others.

I have walked in a Pride parade in London, protesting for the right to live in the same country as my British partner (something we only achieved in Canada, after nearly eight years). I have celebrated Pride in Oxford and Chicago. I have walked with Integrity, an Anglican group, at Pride in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the only Integrity members who dared to walk beside me were either straight (God bless them) or self-employed, and so had less to fear. And one year, I walked with the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, in front of close to a million people, only one of whom overtly challenged us:

“Stop sinning,” his poster said, “or burn forever in the lake of fire.”

Twelve years “out,” and still my heart beats faster when I see this man--because there are many of him. A dozen years of telling people, and yet so many still don’t know, or I don’t know they know. All those years and immigrating to another country and living in its largest and most diverse city, and still there’s only one weekend of the year when I feel safe walking hand-in-hand with the woman I love, a public display that has earned women death in Appalachia, where I’m from. I was in high school when two lesbians were shot on the Appalachian Trail by a man who couldn’t stand to share the wide world with their sexuality. I didn’t learn this until I read it in a poem by Adrienne Rich, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Chicago the year I first came out.

I say I came out twelve years ago, but there is so much more to do. There will be so many more moments when I am forced to choose: do I confront this “issue,” or do I take the easy way? Do I tell you whom I choose to spend my life with, or do I mention “someone,” a “friend,” a really good friend--who crossed the world to be with me? When I walk down the street at Pride Toronto with gay and supportive Christians, with Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays, with the politicians and the workers, the hedonists and hangers-on--who am I? Am I a lesbian? A Christian? Or just a human being?

For make no mistake about it: There is a choice to be made. To be openly gay, to be “out,” to be proud, is a choice. To confess or deny. To stand with Jesus, who despised the shame, or to despise and shame. Christians, of all people, should be familiar with the need to choose.

That Pride Sunday, before the parade, we had a visitor in church, a woman from Virginia. She looked much like any older woman I might meet in the South, except that she was dressed in rainbow colours, and during the prayers she thanked God for this congregation and for leading her to celebrate with us this morning. After the service I went to talk with her and she explained that her husband was in Toronto for a conference. She was originally from Ohio, and I told her about my connection with the States. When we were getting ready to leave, she said to Penelope and me, “I bless you in the name of Jesus.”

I came home from Pride both elated and disturbed. Christians, like gay people, are familiar with proclaiming victory year after year and yet never really seeing it come. My reading for that Sunday was from Paul’s letter to the Romans. I turned to chapter 8 and read:

“What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn?

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I bless you in the name of Jesus.

Washroom police

2007-06-04T09:13:00.000-05:00

By now, the story is a familiar one. A youthful woman, marooned in the 905, heads for the door marked "Women." The usual skirted pictogram is missing from the door Of course, this woman bears no resemblance to the pictogram anyway.

"This is the women's room," says the self-appointed washroom monitor who meets her. Perhaps she thinks the woman cannot read.

"I know, that's why I'm here," comes the testy rejoinder.

Really, that should be the end of it, but no. "What do you mean, that's why you're here?"

In the past, I have been flabbergasted by such incidents. Why am I the one who feels uncomfortable, although it is the other person who is being incredibly rude? Later, I have thought of many things to say in return. But this time, I gave her four sweet words: "Mind your own business."

Sure, I could have said worse, much worse. I have been storing up these insults since I was fourteen years old and still not wearing makeup or the right kind of earrings. This was in the American South, and Southern speech, like French, is laced with small courtesies. So I've been called "sir" more times than I can count. But is that rudeness, or just misplaced politeness? I always want to say "Thank you, ma'am" (if it's a man). Many times, however, it's the women who are the rudest ones. (Incidentally, I've never known a French speaker to make this mistake.)

Maybe it's my Southern background, but I think courtesy is undervalued. So it really isn't my natural instinct to be insulting. I'm still surprised, and offended, when grown human beings flout the rules of adult interaction. If you have a problem with the way someone else looks or acts or what s/

he does, at least keep it to yourself!

I have no interest whatsoever in imagining what it is about my appearance that causes someone else to lose all manners. This goes beyond rudeness, though. For lack of a better word, it's really sexist.

Sexism is often reduced to mean discrimination by men against women. I think that definition is itself sexist. What I mean by sexism is anytime one person can't handle another's failure to conform to gender expectations, whatever they may be. Anyone can be sexist, in this sense. And anyone can be the target of sexism.

For the washroom monitor, who clearly doesn't get out much, a baseball cap was enough to send her running for the smelling salts. But other gender expectations can have more serious consequences.

There is a Peggy Seeger song based on the statement "You can't be an engineer because you are a woman." I think this sounds an awful lot like "You can't be her lover because you are a woman." "You can't be his lover because you are a man." "I won't let you go about your business, because I can't decide what I think your gender is (as if you owe me an explanation)."

Homophobia is a particularly virulent form of this, because everyone gets heated up when sexuality is involved. Centuries of history have accustomed people to dictating the sexual behaviour of others, and they get especially offended when their gender expectations in this area aren't met.

But intolerance for any sexual minority is intimately tied up with sexism. The basic problem is making gender an issue in all kinds of areas that are nobody else's business. Is being told that you can't marry the person of your choice because you are a woman fundamentally different from being told that you can't wear skirts because you are a man? In my fantasies, if everyone (including me) could get over their own sexist expectations, homophobia would disappear.

But I am realistic enough to know that prejudice is not just going to disappear. Some attitudes really will change. Ignorance can be overcome, but prejudice remains. If people cannot get comfortable with the existence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people in their world, then the least they can do is shut up about it. This is where courtesy could really make a comeback.

If I have nothing better to do than guess the gender of someone going into a washroom, I'll decide based on which door the person actually goes in. If my guess turns out to have been wrong, it's my mistake.

We want to be out and proud. We want to hold hands, kiss, wear gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered on our T-shirts and be "in your face." We want to say, in the words of the old hymn, "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!" But truly, there are some people out there who are just beyond hope. The best they deserve is a good old-fashioned "Mind your own business!"

Originally published in Xtra!
© 2002 J. E. Knowles

There go the ships

2007-05-03T08:29:00.000-05:00

Howard Moltz, who died a year or so ago, was a professor at the University of Chicago.

His field was biopsychology, but he had a side interest in the Hebrew scriptures, which is how I ended up in two of his classes. He taught two of the most radical parts of the Bible: the books of the prophets, and Job and Ecclesiastes, which challenge the goodness of God in a world of evil and seeming futility.

It was Mr. Moltz (no one at the U of C went by "Prof." or "Dr.") who introduced me to the Biblia Hebraica and the Oxford University Hebrew-English dictionary, both of which I would eventually study myself. He pointed out many interesting things in the Bible that another reader might have overlooked.

Recently I was reading Psalm 104, and came across this verse about God making the sea and its creatures: "There go the ships, and Leviathan that you made to sport in it."

Leviathan is the mythological sea monster, but from the divine perspective, he is like "God's rubber duck."

That's what Mr. Moltz said.
May his memory be a blessing.

Reading: The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

Grand Canyon

2007-04-11T09:03:00.000-05:00

Grand Canyon is a movie ("The Big Chill for the '90s") about an ensemble of people, all of whom go to the Grand Canyon in Arizona and experience something bigger than themselves.

It is also a song by Susan Ashton, in which the Grand Canyon represents the gulf between the human and the divine.

I was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon on Holy Saturday, the day when, according to Christian tradition, Jesus was harrowing hell. From down there, in the heat, looking up, I heard Susan Ashton's song a different way. It felt to me like being somewhere so big was rather like being very close to God.

Reading: Dupont Circle by Paul Kafka-Gibbons
The Gospel of John
The Vision of Theodorus Verax by Bryce Blair

The eighteenth century

2007-04-03T08:19:00.000-05:00

I am not a formal student of literature. In fact, I've taken exactly one English class since high school, and that was only to impress a girl.

The "long" eighteenth century (starting in the 1660s) was a great time for literature, though. Women were back on the stage, Nell Gwynn was running around with the king of England, the novel was invented, and satire bloomed. The comedy of manners (with character names like Flit and Flounce, the women of the town) came over from continental Europe. Life was good.

Reading: William Wycherley
The Gentleman Dancing-Master
The Country Wife
The Plain Dealer (not to be confused with the Cleveland newspaper of the same title)

Blessed Assurance

2007-03-09T13:41:00.000-05:00

A Moral Tale
by Allan Gurganus

You've got to hand it to this guy: he can do titles. Naming this story after a Fanny J. Crosby hymn is a stroke of something close to genius. And a book called Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, well...

Read. Read, read, read.

Everything that rises must converge

2007-03-05T14:25:00.000-05:00

What can I say about Flannery O'Connor? Known for one novel (Wise Blood) and some of the most admired short stories certainly of twentieth-century America, she was a Southerner who almost never left home, except for a brief stint in New York as, of all things, an advertising copywriter.

She was Roman Catholic and a fierce moral sensibility infuses her work, but it can't be called "religious" or even hopeful.

Her stories are terribly bleak, yet a descriptive line can cut so sharply I find myself laughing out loud.

She had autoimmune disease and died at the age of thirty-nine.

She's quotable as hell, but I will limit myself to one: "What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God."

- Habit of Being

Much more at http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/08/i_hear_you_got_.html

Reading: The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Gospel of Luke

High tech

2007-02-27T14:38:00.000-05:00

For someone who learned to type on a Royal manual standard typewriter that weighed about as much as I did at the time, computers are a wonderful thing.

To be sure, I can't quite get over the feeling that a computer is *work*. Spending my evenings downloading music files, or "surfing the Net" (a phrase that is now years old and so might as well date from ancient Greece), holds little appeal. The usefulness of computers for the business of writing, though, is undeniable. Researching anything is much easier with the Internet than it ever was before. There is no excuse for not knowing an editor's name when the publisher has a Web site.

And, of course, there's the unprecedented and amazing possibility that someone I've never heard of--or have, and admire--or someone who wouldn't write me a letter if you tied a pen to his or her hand--will see a blurb or a post and e-mail: Hey, how interesting, what else have you got?

Reading: Mark

Ash Wednesday

2007-02-19T16:54:00.001-05:00

"Surely, if there is sin, it must be that--to throw life away as if it were nothing."
--Tomorrow's Promise

Statistic

2007-02-14T11:11:00.000-05:00

Here is the real statistic to watch:

According to a March 2006 poll by the Pew Research Center, 51 percent of Americans oppose same-sex marriage, down from 63 percent in February 2004.

Fifty-one percent is a bare majority. Canada was there in the last 10 years.

Twelve percentage point drop in two years is amazing.

Reading: Tyrannic Love, or The Royal Martyr by John Dryden

Left Behind

2007-02-05T10:42:00.001-05:00

I haven't read more than a few pages of the LaHaye/Jenkins series (just shelved many, many copies at a public library). And it is probably my literary (as opposed to theological) bias, but I don't find the popularity of this series quite as alarming as many commentators, particularly in Britain, seem to. It looks to me like a parallel to the phenomenal success of other "Christian/inspirational" genre publishing, such as romances.

Genres like thrillers and romances are enormously popular as entertainment, but there is a large market of folks who are uncomfortable with certain conventions, like the context of sex in a traditional romance. So they buy these other series. I think readers buy these apocalyptic books because they want to read thrillers, but regular thrillers make them uncomfortable, so they substitute Satan and God for the bad/good guys in, say, Tom Clancy.

Certainly, if large numbers of individuals actually want to provoke Armageddon in the Middle East then that is alarming, but even most of those "true believers" are not active participants in the destruction. After all, like non-Zionist Jews before 1948, they hold that this is all in the hands of G-d and we have nothing to say about it at all.

I don't think that most readers are buying fiction because they want to enact it in their actual lives. They buy it because they are bored.

Reading: Paradise Lost by John Milton
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

Fear and dread

2007-01-25T09:37:00.000-05:00

Our text for today is a verse from Isaiah. I say it over to myself frequently, especially in recent days and weeks:

"Do not call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD your God, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread."

I never used to understand the idea of "God-fearing." It seemed that fear was something very different from trust, and weren't we supposed to trust rather than fear God? But now, plagued by years of adult anxieties, I have a somewhat different idea.

We all have fear and dread; the question is, is it worth it? Do we direct it towards something like nuclear war (how twentieth century of me), which we cannot control and which may never happen? What a waste of worry that would be. (Thanks to my seventh-grade language arts teacher for pointing this out.)

One of the points of having a God is that "he" is big enough to be worth our fear and trust. Yes, of course I hear Richard Dawkins saying this is a delusion. I respect Dawkins, but as an evangelical preacher--which, for atheism, he is--not a practicing scientist. He hasn't done original research in years.

The point of this delusion, if that is what it is, is that it is insulated from time. The fear and dread are not linked to today's conspiracy theories or the woes of this particular generation. There is far more at stake in this universe of grace than that.

Reading:
Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle
Sidney Godolphin

In other words

2007-01-18T14:44:00.000-05:00

It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America last week. Reading (let alone listening to) MLK's sermons, sometimes called "speeches," is a reminder that others often say it better than I do. So, from the sublime to the ridiculous, here are a few others' words:

(MLK on his opposition to the war in Vietnam) "This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men…?"

Lillian Hellman in her memoir, Scoundrel Time: "The traceries from what you were to what you became are always too raw and too simple."

Reading: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

"In my experience, the world's happiest man is a young professor building bookcases"

Finally, I suggest going to Opinionated Lesbian and scrolling down to February 28, 2005 11:03 AM
Shallow book reviewers

Why'd you come to Canada?

2007-01-10T14:14:00.000-05:00

I am asked this question probably more often than any other, once people realize that I'm American. (Clarification: Although I now have Canadian as well as U.S. citizenship, I have a hard time thinking of myself or my writing as anything other than American. It's just where I'm coming from.)

The people who ask this are themselves Canadian, and I wonder if Americans would ask a version of this question. I can't imagine, back in the U.S., asking an immigrant "Why'd you come to America?" In the first place, it seems rude to me, but beyond that, Americans tend to assume that everyone would live in the USA if they could. While this is not true of lots of people, there's a kind of American confidence that takes for granted what a great country the U.S. is. And, while there are also huge problems there, I do miss that confidence.

To answer the question I go one of two ways, depending on how much I want to go into it with the particular person asking:

(Short answer) Because my partner lives here.
(Long answer) I would still live in the U.S. if Penelope (the "partner" referred to above) had an unrestricted right to live there with me (and if she wanted to). Unfortunately, one of the problems with the U.S. is that federal law (which governs immigration) does not recognize any relationship whatsoever existing between two women, although we have shared our lives for more than fourteen years. For the first half of those years, we did not share a home, or indeed even a country. She is British, and Britain is where we met. In those days, Britain was almost as unwilling to recognize a same-sex relationship as the U.S. still is. Other people have found other solutions, but ours was to find a country where 1) at least one of us could immigrate in her own right, and 2) the other, if necessary, could be recognized as the first one's partner so that we could end up in the same country together.

The country that met those criteria, at that time (2000), was Canada. We do not know if our relationship was taken into account when we immigrated, or if we simply both qualified.

I get very, very tired of people born in Canada, invariably white like me, making comments about "immigrants" when they clearly haven't the first idea what it takes to get into this country. I feel that I have more in common with others who have come to Canada in search of a better life than I do with these people. Just because we look alike and our first language is English, they spout this xenophobia. It reminds me of the things people say about gays when they aren't aware the person they're speaking to is gay.

Because people rarely know these things unless they've dealt with them personally, here are a few important facts:
1) Immigrating even to a relatively welcoming country like Canada is a long, hard, expensive process. Laws change all the time and then you have to start over. In fact, under current regulations, with the education and experience I had in 2000, I would probably not be allowed in myself.
2) Some of the United States, and some cities, have started to recognize same-sex relationships and even marriages. Unfortunately, this does not help anyone whose partner is not American. Immigration law is federal and the federal government is not particularly keen on either gays or immigrants right now.
3) A good organization working to change these laws is Immigration Equality.

Reading: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Conception and birth

2007-01-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

No, this is not a comment on that highly politicized subject of when life begins. I am talking about an altogether different kind of giving birth--to a story. At this very earliest of stages, there is no story yet and no guarantee that there ever will be one. It is more like flirting in a bar. I'm there with a character or two, our eyes meet, and I wonder, Who are they? What is their story? Will I get to find out? And, on a long and possibly tortuous (and torturous) journey of meeting and dating, we just may get to the point of conceiving a new book.

Or not.

There may be a faster, better, more efficient way of getting through this process, but I can only trust that the way that's worked for me in the past will work again.

Reading: The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton
"Let me tell you, scholar, that Diogenes walked on a day, with his friend, to see a country fair; where he saw ribbons, and looking-glasses, and nut-crackers, and fiddles, and hobby-horses, and many other gimcracks; and, having observed them and all the other finnimbruns that make a complete country fair, he said to his friend, 'Lord, how many things are there in this world of which Diogenes hath no need?'"

Matthew

Poets & Writers magazine

The mystery novelist Anne Perry reminds us to write not what we know, but what we care about. We can always find out what we don't know, but if we don't care, how can we make anyone else?

A reading year

2007-01-02T15:50:00.000-05:00

My main concerns, here as in life, are reading and writing. In that order, because readers make writers. This is true in two senses. First, writers are writing for readers. We may not get them but we all hope for them. I doubt anyone is satisfied doing it solely for him- or herself.

Second, I will bet that most, if not all, writers got into this habit because we love (or loved) to read. We loved a book that would take us somewhere, or make us forget how boring our life otherwise was, and we dream of doing this for some stranger. If you are a writer and have gotten out of the habit of reading, get back in! Call it "research" if you must--if your Protestant ethic is even more troubling than mine--but have a book on your bedside table. One that, unlike some presidents, you are actually reading.

Waging a rearguard struggle against forgetting all the other languages I've ever studied, I try to spend a few minutes each day reading biblical Hebrew. For years now, I've been laboring through the Psalms. The Psalms, of course, are poems, and poetry is notoriously difficult to translate; its forms are specific to the language it's written in (not that this isn't true of all literature). If you're familiar with any Psalms in English translation, for example, you may know that one of the structures of this poetry is parallel lines; for example:

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
he leadeth me beside the still waters.

There are also acrostics and all sorts of other difficulties that are lost in translation. I manage about three verses a day.

Whereas a Psalm such as the twenty-third has sustained generations through experiences like trench warfare, a thriller or romance can be relied on to entertain us during tedious journeys or sleepless nights. I've (belatedly) discovered both in Radclyffe's Honor series. A writer can get away with a heck of a lot if, no matter what, the reader has to keep turning the pages. If I'm engrossed in the story, if I have to know what happens next or how the heroine and heroine are going to get together...The other end of the spectrum from poetry, as it were.

Like the sugar on raisin bran.

Long December

2006-12-21T10:26:00.000-05:00

If you know the Counting Crows song, you'll know the next line.

I've heard the publishing industry takes off at least the week between Christmas and New Year's, and frankly, I think we all should. Americans work too hard.

Reading: The Tenth Muse by Anne Bradstreet; A Love of My Own by E. Lynn Harris; Revelation

See you in 2007.

The story

2006-12-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

I'm an old-fashioned reader. When I pick up a book, a work of fiction, I want a story. The story can be about pretty much anyone, and anything can happen in it. But something has to.

Other writers, at least as articulate as I am, have ranted about writing that isn't really story and that's not my purpose here. What I mean is that when I recommend a book, it's a story that has taken me somewhere, shown me something, whether it's another planet or just the perspective of a character who's different from me. That's what I try for when I write, too.

Here, for example, is a version of my story: I was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1972, grew up in Carter County, and published my first poem in the University of Tennessee Phoenix when I was seventeen. I earned a B.A. from the University of Chicago, where my work appeared in Chicago Poet and the Chicago Literary Review and I was a member of the Grey City Journal Editorial Collective.

In 1992 I went to Oxford and fell in love. I kept going back until the University gave me a Diploma in Jewish Studies.

Returning to Tennessee, I needed to find a way to live in the same country as my British partner, a right not granted to same-sex couples under U.S. law (then or now). The solution we eventually found, almost eight years into the relationship, was to emigrate to Canada. "Long-distance love and its hurdles" appeared in The Globe and Mail on 3 March 2005.

That is why I've lived in Toronto for six years. It has turned out to be a great place to write. I started collecting rejection slips again, as I had in high school, but this time, some of them were personal notes. If you don't already know, a personal note is better than the ordinary kind of rejection. And some of them weren't rejections at all. In 2001, I wrote my first column for Xtra!, the lesbian and gay biweekly, and had a hard time believing someone actually cut me a check for this. I've contributed ever since.

I also joined the Humber School for Writers, a fantastic opportunity to study with published authors. Some of them have sold many books and won all kinds of awards, and others are not dissimilar to you and me. They just get up in the morning and do the work.

As for the fiction, I did finally get a short story published . . . but that's a story for another post.

Choose this day whom you will serve

2006-12-07T09:54:00.000-05:00

Publishing is a business. Writing is an art. We have probably all heard this, but the distinction is important.

Not because one is good and one is bad, or because they're in opposition to one another. I know, as a writer, it's easy to disparage "the market" and criticize other writers (who have sold more) for "selling out." But to publish a book, story, article, etc., you have to convince someone to buy it. There is nothing wrong with selling something, as long as it is something you believe is worth paying for.

At its best, "marketing" can force you to take a look at your work, and appraise it more critically. Is this really the best you can do? Writers often say at this point, "But such-and-such sold 8 bazillion copies, and it's crap: full of cliches, repetitions, stock characters, stiff dialogue..." What we need to understand is that, as unknown or unpublished writers, we have nothing to fall back on but the quality of our art. It is not enough for us to write as well as the worst writers being published--or even the best. We must try to write better.

Because publishing is a business, much of what goes on there is not controlled by writers. This sometimes feels as unfair to us as anyone else's industry feels to them. I recently read of a very experienced novelist who has published many novels, writing them on deadline--i.e., at the request of a publisher--only to write her latest novel "on spec." Translation: the way we are writing our first, second, third, fourth novels. Writing the best book we can, and hoping someone, somewhere, will want to publish it.

The point is not to be discouraged. While we struggle with how hard it is to publish a first novel, a published writer like this can look around and envy a "fresh, new" voice whose first novel has distracted publishers from the voice of experience. The grass is always greener (cliche). But this is true of life, not just writing!

So we need to learn as much as we can about the business of publishing and treat everyone in it with respect. More significantly, we need to decide whether we are going to devote ourselves to writing or publishing. If we are going to get up every day and do this, I don't think we can be sustained by the vagaries of an industry that are largely out of our control. We just don't know what readers are going to want next year or whatever year our book finally wends its way into the world.

But here's the secret: neither do publishers. They are hoping, just like we are. Our chances of writing a story that will move readers--and, more mundanely, move books off the shelves--are greater if we forget about the business and concentrate on the art.

As Joshua said in the biblical book named after him: "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve." If we love stories, if we dedicate ourselves to telling them with the best words possible, there will be more than enough to keep us busy.

And the Bible is still selling rather well after thousands of years.