Julie R. Enszer's Blog

Where Are They Now?

I was so tickled to be featured in a series at Between The Lines, Michigan’s LGBT Newspaper. The writer Liam Clymer was a student of my Michigan buddy, Dr. Tim Retzloff. The print version ran a number of photos, including of my beloved Mike Hickey z’l. Sharing the piece below as images and as a PDF available to download.

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Pentamerous Reflections on Black Lesbian Periodicals

On Friday, I am thrilled to be doing a presentation at this workshop. It should be a fantastic day of thinking and talking with colleagues from the UK.

As is my usual practice, I am posting my comments and my slides here for all to share.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

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Minnie Bruce Pratt 1946-2023

It feels sadder and more final seeing the print version of The New York Times. An extraordinary writer, activist, comrade. I am missing Minnie Bruce Pratt and all of the future conversations we might have had every single day.

Irena Klepfisz and Her Work

Comments by Julie R. Enszer

AWP March 2023, pre-recorded panel event

Thank you all for joining us and what a pleasure to be here to celebrate Irena’s wonderful new book, Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971-2021. Thank you especially to Stephanie from Wesleyan University Press for organizing us, to the distinguished panelists, and to Irena for her vision, her work, her poems, and this wonderful book.

My comments today trace a brief history of Irena’s publishing work situating her in a feminist publishing habitus that transformed literary spaces. These comments with embedded links for further information are available on my blog at JulieREnszer.com.

In an interview with Irena during the height of the pandemic, she said about her work on the feminist magazine Conditions:

Conditions made me fall in love with publishing. Conditions gave me the bug. If I could do my life over again, I would have my own publishing house. I wanted to have a Froyen farlag, “Women’s Press” in Yiddish. I didn’t intend it to be for Yiddish work only, but I wanted the press to have a Yiddish name. I love putting words and visuals on paper and sending them out into the world. A flyer, a newsletter, a memorial book, an anthology, proceedings of a conference—I love doing them all. I still love, more than anything, a physical book.

These sentiments—loving publishing and loving, more than anything, a physical book—first become manifest in Irena’s first book of poetry, Periods of Stress. Periods of Stress grew from a feminist writing group Seven Women Poets and carried the colophon Out & Out Books. Out & Out Books was an independent feminist press that offered an umbrella for a few members of the writing group to publish their first books, including Irena, Joan Larkin, and Jan Clausen. In 1975, Out & Out Books also published Amazon Poetry, edited by collective members Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin, a collection of lesbian poems. Like many small presses, it was a labor of love, each book funded by the poet, printed at The Print Center in New York City, and promoted by the poet herself within the beloved and growing community of feminist readers.

These feminist readers embraced Irena. In 1982, another feminist press, Persephone Press, published Irena’s second collection Keeper of Accounts. In the seven years between the two books, the feminist print movement had grown. Keeper of Accounts reflects that a new sense of assuredness, even swagger among feminist presses. The book features a collage as the cover art with a typewriter, clock, monkeys, and Hebrew (or Yiddish) lettering. Designed and typeset to be like all the “random houses” publishing in New York, Keeper of Accounts was the last book that Persephone published. When the press imploded, the editor of Sinister Wisdom Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz acquired the remaining copies in print and distributed it through “Sinister Wisdom Books.”

Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena during this time collaborated on the special issue of Sinister Wisdom The Tribe of Dina which, after publication as a journal issue, became a trade book with Beacon Press during the late 1980s. Irena’s words and her editorial visions were traveling through the worlds of feminist and lesbian readers, enthralling them.

The Eighth Mountain Press, run by Ruth Gundle in Portland, Oregon, published Irena’s third book, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New in 1990 and her first prose collection: Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes.

In the mid-1990s, Irena was one of the planners of a conference Di Froyen focusing on Yiddish women writers. Di Froyen published conference proceedings that include Irena’s keynote speech, another example of Irena’s impressive record of publishing activism. There are many other examples of Irena’s work and publishing; time prevents me from a complete recital. I hope the previous examples suffice.

While publishing in 2022 with Wesleyan University Press may seem like a departure—and more than once Irena said, I cannot believe this is happening with a university press, my work has always been with the feminist press—I’d like to argue that it is not. Rather the presence of Irena’s book on the Wesleyan list, alongside Minnie Bruce Pratt’s most recent book, Magnified, as well as other books by lesbian-feminist authors on university press lists, reflects a realization of lesbian-feminist visions. Recognition of lesbian-feminist voices in the academy in a range of disciplines—women’s studies, certainly, and also English, translation studies, Jewish Studies, and more—is an achievement of multiple forms of activism to transform knowledge canonization.

In addition to an academic presence, lesbian-feminist writers who first published with independent feminist and lesbian presses now find themselves on the New York Times best seller lists, in stages on broadway, on theater screens, and on television screens. Lesbian-feminism has traveled from the pages of niche and banned books to a whole range of public culture-making practices. These developments would, I think, thrill early lesbian-feminist writers and publishers who are no longer with us—June Arnold, Parke Bowman, Catherine Nicholson, Pat Parker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jean Swallow—as they do the trailblazers who continue their work—Joan Pinkvoss, Cherríe Moraga, Cheryl Clarke, among others. And I would expect, in addition to their appreciation, all of them would have accompanying critiques, which is of course how our work continues to reach for new modes of understandings, new forms of expressions.

And now we have Irena’s wonderful collection, Her Birth and Later Years. The new poems amplify her earlier collected work. Irena’s poems remain urgent and important for us to read today. The book is a beautiful invitation to reengage with her poems. Behind all the poems is an invisible scaffolding of what brought them first into the world: a collection of hardy and hale feminist presses that published exciting new voices. If you look closely, you can see the outlines of their past work; if you look even more closely, you can see how the work continues today.

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NWSA Presentation on Onyx

With a fabulous group of colleagues, I am presenting at the NWSA conference today in Minneapolis, MN on the black lesbian newsletter, Onyx. My comments are below. If you are interested in exploring further, you can read the full archives of Onyx here: https://archive.org/details/glbthistoricalsociety?and%5B%5D=creator%3A%22onyx%22&sort=date

A formatted copy of the presentation is below.

“We are ONYX…an elegant crystal, a treasure on earth, a thing to be desired:” Onyx and the Emergence of a National Black Lesbian NetworkBy Julie R. EnszerIn the fifth issue of Black Lesbian Newsletter dated November 1982, Joyce Penalver describes “Coming Out in ’61” going to a Lesbian club in Harlem that “was named for, and run by, a Black lesbian named Tubby.” There she met friends “entered into lover relationships (one at a time, that is, monogamy was the ‘norm’ in 1961) and developed close ties with people I could depend on.” Penalver concludes, “it was wonderful being out in 1961.” In the same issue Paula Ross writes about “Black Lesbian Theatre” and a group of nine black lesbians interested in exploring how to organize a theatre company. Ross notes, “We all, in one way or another, expressed dissatisfaction with the Bay Area’s women’s community, for all its talk of political consciousness and political progressiveness: It’s still a lonely, isolated world if you’re Black.”In the sixth issue of Black Lesbian Newsletter, Marlene Bonner, one of the editors, wrote about an “Encounter at Ollie’s,” a lesbian bar in Oakland, California that operated from 1980 until 1986. On November 10, 1982 six black women were asked for IDs to enter the bar while two white women were not. The African American women protested and the bouncer at Ollie’s called the police. Bonner concludes the detailed account with these notes: “This same type of harassment has happened many times before to women of color at Ollie’s, and it has never been documented.” She notes that the bouncer, the bartender, and the management of the bar “who did not deem the situation important enough to come and mediate” are all racist as well as the other bar clientele “who were not concerned about the harassment of six black women in their midst.” Six demands of Ollie’s also accompany the account.These three articles from the early issues of the Black Lesbian Newsletter provide a window into the content of the Newsletter which became, in the first issue of 1983, Onyx. The editors explained the name as “a beautifully layered and multicolored precious stone…one of the oldest and darkest gems found in the world [and] an elegant crystal, a treasure on earth, a thing to be desired.” As editors they pledged with the newsletter “to maintain the strength of the stone, the beauty of the gem, and the determination of this crystal.” (February 1983, vol 2, issue 1, p 2.).Onyx is an important component of Black lesbian-feminist print culture from the early 1980s. The period between 1978 and 1983 is a vibrant one for black lesbian thought, and I am interested in mapping it more robustly. Notable recent scholarship engages black lesbian print culture, particularly iconic texts. The Feminist Studies forty year retrospective issue on This Bridge Called My Back as well as work by by Proctor and Bliss in Feminist Formations that explores their encounters with Conditions: Five and Home Girls, work by Adair and Nakamura tracing the publishing history of This Bridge and how different modes of distribution, particularly print and electronic, implicate uncompensated labor, LeRud’s exploration of self-revision and replication of Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem” as well as the anthology in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Mallette on Beverly Smith’s piece in Conditions: Five “The Wedding” published in WSQ demonstrates the vitality of a handful of publications now at forty and fifty year milestones. My interest is in what created the conditions for books like This Bridge, Home Girls, and Conditions: Five to become bestsellers with enduring cultural power in feminist circles. As always, forgotten and overlooked print culture objects and projects intrigue me. Chapbooks like Top Ranking and the periodical Onyx have not received the same scholarly attention, but I think they tilled the ground for these important anthologies. In this short presentation, I am going to describe the Onyx archive. Then I sketch important contributions Onyx made to broader activist formations. Finally, I think more broadly about the five years from 1978 until 1983 and gesture to other elements of lesbian of color print culture to invite more people to investigate it.The GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco digitized sixteen issues of Onyx published between August 1982 and the final issue October/November of 1984. There was a seventeenth issue, the first issue, published in June 1982; it is not included in the digital archive, and I have not seen a copy. A handful of African American women in the San Francisco Bay Area published Onyx for just over two years before it folded. To invoke the women who worked on Onyx, I read the names of women listed in the staff box: A. C. Barber, Marlene Bonner, Vivienne Walker-Crawford, Anita Countee, Lindsay Elam, Joyce Penalver, Sarita Johnson, Janet Wallace, Deborah Steele, Gwen Bishop, Carole Cole, Anne Sandifer, Midgett, Nubian Woman, K.D.F. Reynolds, Pandora Carpenter, Pam King, Lynn Scott, Gerri Ewart, Paula Ross, Maryann Turner, Camille Barber, Roz Darensbourg, Monifa Ajanaku, Marge Green, and Janet Wallace. Onyx first published with the name “Black Lesbian Newsletter,” and in fact it is a community newsletter for Black lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of the issues featured a black and white drawing on the cover by Sarita Johnson as well as interior artwork. Issues generally include a calendar, events listings, and classified advertisements. They also include a masthead, submissions calls, and distribution outlets. In many ways Onyx is an organizational newsletter without an organization, though the women involved in published it forged a relationship with the San Francisco Women’s Center that allowed them to receive tax-deductible donations to support the work.Beyond the items that appear in each issue, Onyx mixes articles and announcements of interest to readers. Publicizing conferences of interest to African-American women and reports from conferences are important in the pages of Onyx. Conference reports as a genre appear in a number of feminist and lesbian magazines, newsletters, and newspapers (famously I think of conference reports in off our backs). They served a crucial activist function: helping communities know about what happened at conferences and providing critical reflection and follow up for planning future gatherings. The contemplative time of conference reports, often they appeared two weeks to two or three months after the conference and were still relevant for six months to a year to the communities of concern, feels significant today when conference reports appear on Twitter or other social media and are gone within twenty-four hours. In addition to conference material, Onyx featured other articles, including notably two reprinted articles by Cheryl Clarke, a call by Lenn Keller for unity, and a wonderful piece “Spoken from the Heart” on lesbian separatism which documents voices of Black women engaged in separatism as a politic, something that is generally overlooked in scholarly conversations. Onyx also contains dialogues with people responding to a single question, a format often found in Lesbian Connection. And of course there is poetry, one currency of lesbian-feminism.Compared to other lesbian periodicals, the Onyx archive is modest in size, but it is rich as a document of black lesbian experience and it highlights key elements of black lesbian thought in the influential San Francisco Bay Area. In my reading of the archive, I identify five revolutionary assertions made by the creators of Onyx. These assertions are: • We (black lesbians) need to meet together in our own spaces to know one another• We (black lesbians) need to communicate with one another• We (black lesbians) need to build bridges with other allies• We (black lesbians) need to articulate and extend our identities and connections with one another in significant ways• We (black lesbians) need to support one another and lift up each other’s work.Onyx supports the leadership of local lesbians of color regularly in its pages including politician Pat Norman, musician Linda Tillery, the musical duo Casselbury-Dupree, and local author Alice Walker. Onyx’s coverage of The Color Purple is extensive. Onyx made things happen; it animated activist networks, built writer’s profiles and galvanized activism.Each issue of Onyx emphasizes a communal nature of its creation, publication, and distribution. This communal approach is different from publishing projects today which emphasize personality and singular voices (think of substack and other online newsletters). The collectivity of Onyx is crucial to its work.During the period when Onyx published, African-American lesbians were highly networked nationally and in local communities. Onyx is neither unusual nor isolated. It joined a vibrant network of local, regional, and national newsletters and magazines being published by lesbians, and a cadre of periodicals organized by black lesbians. This years of Onyx publishing corresponds with the emergence of the racial formation “women of color.” African American lesbians are deeply invested in that work. Significantly, Onyx joined Azalea, a more literary periodical based in New York City but with national attentions and distribution. Onyx overlaps with BLK, a periodical of black lesbians and gay men connected with the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum. On the pages of Onyx an emergent national network of black lesbians and gay men emerges networking and organizing for action. Multiple other Black lesbian periodicals publish after Onyx. Ache, another San Francisco bay area publication founded by Pippa Fleming and Lisbet Tellefsen, situates itself as an heir to Onyx. Other lesbian of color periodicals include Women in the Life from Washington, DC, Kick Magazine, a black gay and lesbian journal published in Detroit, Michigan, and Blacklines, a periodical published by Tracy Baim in Chicago.As I page through the work of Onyx, I continued to mull the question, Is there something special for lesbian-feminism, particularly black lesbian-feminism, about the years between 1978 and 1983? This period marks a specific shift economically and culturally in the United States with a much more regressive approach to race and the social safety net, a description that also fits our contemporary moment. What emerges from this period is a powerful critique of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and other systems of oppression articulated by black lesbians. The collective voice of Onyx, its insistence on creating space, lifting up voices, and supporting one another provides a model for how we might live and work today. onyx-presentationDownload

Poem in APR

APR, American Poetry Review, is a dream publication of mine. I have been excited all year about this poem being published. It landed however amid a new excitement of my life, the little Saint Bernard puppy we call Alice. So I am late in posting this, but still delighted by this publication and filled with glee. Just sharing it with a wee pup.

Listen in at OutWrite

Every since OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture published back in March, I’ve been carrying a task in my notebooks to put up a speech or two for folks to listen in on the conference. This project is a case of better late than never. Today I have finally succeeded in putting two speeches online for interested folks to have a listen.

The links will take you to dropbox where you can stream the audio file. I imagine that there are more efficient ways to do this, but for now, this is how I have the files configured. And they are worth a listen! The first file is a conversation between Minnie Bruce Pratt and Leslie Feinberg at OutWrite 95. Both of them read from the new books out at the time.

The second file is the speech by Melvin Dixon. I think I love this speech almost more than anything else in the world. I recommend having a handkerchief or box of tissue nearby when you listen to it.

Here is a link to a reading by Minnie Bruce Pratt and Leslie Feinberg at OutWrite 95.

Here is a link to Melvin Dixon’s extraordinary speech at OutWrite 92.

This Started As Something Else

In my mind, one of the aspects of writing that this blog makes visible is failure. I am not sure if that is actually true or if it is just a fantasy of mine. Failure is a tough thing to write about, though honestly it surrounds us all every day. When I step into my office I look around and see all of the things that I have failed to do, all of the projects that I am working on but that may never reach the light of day. In each book in my bookshelf, I see the idea I once had but never furthered. All of these feel to me on the daily like little failures, or in some cases, big failures.

Even the things that other people see as successes, books finished and published, awards, etc. I look at them and think of the typo that I know lurks within, of the factual error or the failure of nuance in a sentence. Yes, even success as the whisper of imperfection, of disappointment, of failure.

Honestly, I quite like it. Or at least I appreciate it. That sense of this wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be fuels the next thing and the next. It keeps the work going. At some point, the work will stop, not out of failure, but out of exhaustion, or an end of resources, an end of time, some kind of ending. Holding on to the failures, the not quite there, is a way to hold on to life.

All of this is quite philosophical and not where I began this post. I wanted to start it with a small crow about an article that Bitter Southerner published of mine. Bitter Southerner has been a dream publication of mine. I admire their work, the content of what the online magazine publishes, and their gorgeous visual sense. They made a beautiful image to go with the article. I encourage you to go and check it out.

And the starting as something else? That was not a reference to the blog post, though it became that. This article just published by Bitter Southerner started as something else. A writing project during the pandemic. It started and stalled. It was a lousy first draft. It was too big and about too many things. I loved it until I hated it. Then I set it aside. Then I resurrected it in a frenzy of cleaning my office, and I thought, oh, I know what this could be. And I pitched Bitter Southerner and they said yes and today it went into the world.

It started as something else.

Now this is what it is.

Queer Nature Review

Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology edited by Michael Walsh

This weekend I was thrilled by a review of Queer Nature in the Gay and Lesbian Review which calls out my poem “Pervert.” The reviewer writes, “One of the best poems is Julie R. Enszer’s “Pervert,” in which a lesbian imagines how her sexual experience with a particular woman would go, with a wrenching change of subject in the second half. . . It’s so erotic in the best sense and so impeccably constructed that it deserves inclusion.” I was delighted to read this and am grateful to Michael for including the poem and to Bryan Borland and Seth Pennington for publishing it in Avowed.

Review of Queer Nature by Alan Contreras.

Lesbian Legacies Workshop

I had the pleasure a week ago of doing a workshop on writing obituaries for the Lesbians Write On group. The request for the workshop was prompted by this blog post. I have been thinking since then about things to do when writing obituaries – and not just things NOT to do. Some of that thinking is encapsulated in the workshop and in the attached slides. Enjoy them – and send along thoughts that YOU have about obituaries!

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