Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 30
December 8, 2015
Tiberius on the lam:* Random Thoughts Part 2
I hate patterns. Everywhere. Give me solid colors, no prints. No muted patterns, no gradations of color. Just solid colors. In the house I am living in now, which is also the house I grew up in, there are patterns everywhere. My mother loved them. I do not.
The dogs love carpeting. I hate it, but wonder if our next house should have some carpeted rooms because they seem to love it.
I have been to three post offices in the area. I love the postal service. I love the different ways postal employees help people. I love the connection that the post makes to local communities. I think my regular post office will be the downtown Saginaw one on Water Street, but the women at the township one are lovely as well.
There is an old, brick Victorian on Court Street. For sale. A good size lot. Only $87,000. I think about what life would be if I bought it.
I don’t love that none of our mail has reached us using the Premium Forwarding Service. I like to imagine that there are really important letters out there in the ether waiting for me.
Twice a day, Vita comes up to sit on my shoulder and have me rub her. She purrs into my ear. If I try to stop petting her before she is ready, she hisses. When she is done, she walks away.
Tomorrow, December 9th, 2015, is the twentieth anniversary of my sister’s death. I never thought that I would be living again in the house we grew up in. I like to imagine small bits of her skin and hair still dwelling in the house. I never thought she would die. Sometimes, when I am sitting quietly downstairs, I can hear her teenaged voice in the bedroom upstairs. Sometimes, I think I see her. I never thought we would not be grown ups together. But here I am all grown, and she is gone.
When the beloved is out of town, Tiberius curls up right next to me, pressing his warm, strong body against my leg. Sometimes he dreams and thrashes about a bit, but he always returns to me, to nuzzle against my warm body. He does not know, and I will not tell him, that people want to see him killed.
*With a respectful and heartfelt nod to Barbara Neely’s extraordinary Blanche on the Lam.
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December 5, 2015
Tiberius on the Lam:* Random Thoughts
Cosseted away in our undisclosed location in mid-Michigan in my childhood home, we are all happy to be together again: me, Emma, Vita, Tiberius and Kim (on long weekends). The long arm of the law still hangs over Tiberius, but for now we are enjoying long morning walks, restful days (albeit short! Sun doesn’t rise until 7:45 am and sets around 4:45 pm right now), and so far mild weather.
Today, at Kim’s request, we went to Frankenmuth for a delicious chicken dinner. Then we walked around the town shopping and picking up bibs and bobs for winter holiday gifts. After that flurry of activities, I read more of the Sarah Waters book that has my attention at the moment and napped. Yes. A good day. We need more of those.
So here are the random observations from living on the lam.
We take the dogs to Ojibwe Island every morning, usually arriving before dawn and enjoying how the park gets lighter as we walk. We do not see an actual sunrise, but suddenly we are bathed in light. The holiday lights of the Saginaw Water Works are still on when we arrive in the morning. They are gorgeous. This morning, we were serenaded by church bells around 7:30. Both dogs perked up as if asking us, what is that beautiful sound? I told Tibe, do not ask for whom the bell tolls.
Men in Saginaw are different than men in Maryland. Larger, rougher, less shaven, less shapely. There is a particular type of masculinity that is not derived from intellectualism here. Gender operates differently as well. I cannot explain it all yet.
An extraordinary number of women wear makeup here, including more foundation than I have seen in the last fifteen years of my life. If I return to our new life and location with liquid foundation, please organize an intervention.
Hunting is a really big deal in mid-Michigan; therefore guns and defenses of the rights of gun owners are prominent. That reality, the terrible events of the past ten days, and the virulence of my Facebook page against guns and for radical forms of gun control creates an extraordinary amount of psychic dissonance. I am thinking on it.
There is great ethnic food here, which I do not remember from my childhood. We had an excellent Mediterranean lunch the other day and I have my eye on a few Mexican restaurants for take out. It is not all delicious fried food from Tony’s.
Vita is the best travel cat ever, and she rules the roost. We are all grateful for her calm but imperious demeanor. Daily.
Even though it is unseasonably warm here, I am cold. All of the time. I am wrapped in all sorts of wool, thick denim, fleece. I am still cold. All the time.
Kim says we will look back on the time on the lam and laugh, wondering why we were willing to upset the apple cart of our lives for a dog. Perhaps. But for right now, I feel an extraordinary certainty that a part of my work in the world is to take responsibility for this dog’s life. I do not know how the story will end, but I do know that I refuse to be bullied and intimidated by small-minded and small-hearted homophobes. It may be better to cast my lot with hunters than east coast liberals. I also know that I have a choice about how to cast my lot. I choose Tibe.
*With a respectful and heartfelt nod to Barbara Neely’s extraordinary Blanche on the Lam.
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November 23, 2015
Working Class Women Poets Prior to 1970
At the SSAWW Conference, I heard a great paper about Judy Grahn, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Cheryl Clarke. It is great hearing these poets, and other feminist poets from the 1970s, getting the attention they deserve. Yet I was struck by how they were not situated in a broader tradition of women poets, and particularly working class women poets. That prompted me to ask on Facebook for working class women poets prior to 1970. I have my favorites: Genevieve Taggard, Lola Ridge. Though honestly I do not know if they were working class, but I do know that they were interested in poems that expressed experiences of working class people.
For me part of the genealogy here is knowing women poets who had political concerns and considered the lives and experiences of working people as a part of their poetic aesthetic. Muriel Rukeyser being one of the important poets I consider in my own genealogy. Taggard another important poets. Meridel LeSueur is another one.
My dear friend Lawrence Schimel pointed me to Anna Margolin, a poet whose work I do not know. I’ll be exploring her work. You can see from the Facebook posts below that lots of people suggested great working class poets, though most of them working during the 1970s and later.
I have been thinking about this exercise for the past few weeks. It is important to me for a few reasons. First, I am always interested in women’s writing and particular women’s writing that has been lost, erased, forgotten. That exercise always prompts me to ask how can we prevent these erasures in the future?
Second, I am also interested in the genealogical process. How do we create ancestors? How do we invoke those who have worked before us? How to we create long historical relationships in which to situate our own work?
As much as poetry reaches forward into the spaces we have not imagined and into the places we want to travel, it also reaches backward. For me, understanding the roads it has traveled bolsters how we imagine new futures.
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November 18, 2015
Readers Create Economic Possibilities for Writers: A Presentation at SSAWW
[Note: I planned this post two weeks ago during the SSAWW conference but life intervened so I am posting my presentation later than anticipated.]
I’ve not been to the SSAWW conference before–one of the few academic conferences I did not attend as a graduate student. This year it was in Philadelphia and I was honored to attend it as a part of a panel with two great colleagues Yung-hsing Wu and Cecilia Conchar Farr. We did a panel on women and reading practices. It was wonderful as was the opportunity to spend one day with people who care about reading and writing. I wish I had time to attend the full conference.
For anyone interested, the link below is a copy of my presentation.
ReadersCreateEconomicPossibilities
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: conferences, presentations, reading practices, ssaww
November 3, 2015
Editing and Gendered Binaries
I struggle with how to think about editorial work in relationship to an analysis of sex and gender. One of the women editors from my dissertation research wrote passionately about editorial work as the housework of the literary world. Unappreciated, unpaid, often invisible. She felt that editorial work kept her from her true writing and that for women to take on editorial work, particularly editing journals to publish other women was folly. It did not strengthen or improve their literary careers and it invariably burned them out. I am not su that I agree but after a few weeks reading her letters and papers at the New York Public Library, I can understand her reasoning and appreciate the passion of her conviction.
Recently, I read this piece at the LARB. These editors make similar passionate arguments and I appreciate them. At the same time, I am not sure that I agree.
To begin, and perhaps obviously, editing is not historically gendered female. In fact, in our sexist world, the editors that are most idolized and revered are male. Think Paris Review. The New Yorker. Keep thinking. I do not need to elaborate. There are examples of powerfully influential editors, so the work itself is not inherently work relegated to the dustbins of history.
Second, the have been some extraordinary women writers who have done influential and important editorial work. Think Gilbert and Gubar. Think Lillian Faderman. Think Terry Castle. Keep thinking. I do not need to elaborate. Editorial work can be combined with scholarly work and creative work to build power and authority.
Third, editorial work is stimulating, thoughtful, and challenging work. In the best possible world, editorial work increases one’s capacity as a writer and as a reader. It also shapes and refashions the world into which one publishes. I think of Marilyn Hacker’s editorship of The Kenyon Review during which she created space for an extraordinary array of women writers, people of color–both men and women, and international writers.
Fourth, for most writers, scholars, poets, people engaged with wordcraft, we cannot write all day every day, filling our time with only our writing. Exhaustion sets in. Turning ones attention to writing by others, to reading and understanding their work, to thinking about how to present it to the world, is a way of refilling the well for the next day of one’s own writing.
Of course, editing can become time consuming. Writers can obsess on the editorial work and on the work of others and not attend to one’s own work. I am just not convinced that that trap is gendered. Certainly, gender influences it. I know I have been trained to be kind and responsive and to care what people think about me. I know I spend more time on occasion with someone else’s work to satisfy my own needs to nurture, to support, to be liked. On balance, however, I get more out of it than I put into it.
The article from the LARB has been in the back of my mind for a week or so. I feel peevish about it. I want a more nuanced analysis of editing and gender. I want a more holistic view of what a writing life looks like over a long period of time. What role does editing play in shaping writer’s lives at different points in our development? How can we think critically about sex and gender roles in the world and in our material conditions as writers without falling into easy, though often inaccurate, modes of analysis?
Finally, I wonder sometimes if editorial work is like hedging a bet on writing. If one’s own writing work is not recognized or in fact if one’s own writing work is good, serviceable, but not excellent, transcendent, does editing give us another crack at posterity?
What do you think about editing and gender? What do you dream of editing? How have editors influenced your work?
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October 23, 2015
On Award Nominations
Photo Credit: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Melk_-_Abbey_-_Library.jpg
One of the accomplishments of this week was completing some nominations from Sinister Wisdom for different prizes. It seems like a minor accomplishment; select a few pieces, complete a bit of paperwork, submit to prizes. Yet, this work is significant beyond the small time investment. I will explain but first a story.
The lesbian-feminist print movement on one hand envisioned creating a whole new and alternative world for lesbians and feminists. In fact, to a large degree, these women did. They created various publishing houses, two distribution networks, professional newsletter, independent conferences and various networks for promotion and marketing. Simultaneously, women wanted lesbian-feminist work to be simultaneously recognized by the mainstream. They reveled in recognition by the New York Times, they advocated for women’s bookstores through ABA, they organized feminist contingents at various mainstream conventions and trade shows. Not always the same people, but these two visions for social change happened in tandem. Occasionally at odds, but often at evens. They wanted to create an alternate world and transform the contemporary scene.
Sinister Wisdom operates in that tradition. Sinister Wisdom creates a space dedicated to lesbian writing, art, and culture. It is one of the few spaces remaining committed to this simple and radical notion. At the same time, Sinister Wisdom helps to transform mainstream spaces. One way I do that is by nominating work from the jousrnal for mainstream prizes and recognition. This week, Sinister Wisdom announced our six nominees for the Pushcart Prize and our three nominees for the Independent Best American Poetry. Our selections may not be finalists or winners, but they recognize excellence within Sinister Wisdom and they invite further mainstream recognition of independent lesbian publishing.
The revolution continues.
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October 15, 2015
How I Moved Deeper
As the editor of Sinister Wisdom, I get the greatest emails. One that came earlier this week, posed this question:
Might I ask how you moved deeper into art / publishing / literature / your creative life? I’m at a real crux in my artistic development and, just reading Tee Corinne’s biography, I have the feeling “I WANT THAT now.”
I have been thinking about the question for a few days and thought that I would organize my thinking here first.
Tee Corinne’s biography is amazing. She produced creative work consistently over a lifetime. I did not know her, but I would imagine she was incredibly disciplined. I imagine that she worked every day, in some way, on her creative work. I would also imagine she had small and large goals that she was always pursuing. A large body of work like hers only comes from hard work and a sustained commitment to one’s work and one’s vision.
That said, it is easy to see a life told in retrospect and think, I want that. It is more difficult negotiating the daily realities of living: making a bit of money, having good relationships, and producing creative work. In other words, the life narrative, written at the end of one’s life, does not reflect the day to day struggles, insecurities, and quandaries. Biographies tell the triumphal narrative without dwelling on the cul de sacs that lead to nowhere, the defeats, and the failures. So it seems to me along with the hard work and goals, we as creators have to embrace the daily messiness of uncertainty and the realities of failure.
Holding on to all of that at once is life work itself. Yet to create, there is even more. To speak directly to my interlocutor, here are five things that have helped me move into my creative life more deeply.
Work that is meaningful, provides material support, but is not all consuming. That in itself is a big challenge. Most of us do not have inherited wealth and so we need to work and make money. Yet that isn’t enough. We have to not only make money to materially support us, but that work cannot consume all of our energy, intellectual, emotional, creative, and psychic. We need at least 70% of our energy for the creative work.
Core relationships that are nurturing and drama-free. I will admit this is not true for everyone, but for me, I need the stable home life to create. I recently read this piece about Andrea Dworkin; she had the stable partner and home to create. She also has quite a impressive oeuvre. I am lucky that points one and two come together for me in my beloved companion.
Friendships that support and challenge you creatively. Friends, comrades, collaborators are so important. Nurturing an circle of friends who both support and challenge you creatively is an important way that I move deeper into my creative work.
At least one big and hairy project, and preferably two or three. We all need a big project. One that feels difficult, even at times unattainable. I try to work on one of mine at least an hour a day. The great thing about our big, hairy projects is that when we need a break from them we do smaller projects. This means more work produced.
A thousand words a day. I am Dickensian in my approach to writing; I write as though I am being paid by the word. Sometimes they are a thousand really shitty words, oh, who am I kidding, they usually are, but I take those words and edit them in subsequent days and over time, this process of writing and editing produces final products.
These are the things I know about moving deeper into my creative life. How would you respond?
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October 11, 2015
October 8, 2015
October 1, 2015
Lilith’s Demons and Other Updates
Yesterday on Facebook I announced my next book: Lilith’s Demons, which will be published by A Midsummer Night’s Press in December 2015. I am just thrilled that this book is coming out into the world. These poems started two years ago during a terrible bout of summer insomnia. While I was awake between three and five am for many days that July and August, I started composing poems in the voice of Lilith’s Demons. Being awake in tehe dark led me to ponder those demons. That and our cat Liza, now of blessed memory, prompted me to think about who is awake in the middle of the night and what activities do they engage. At first, I thought it would be just one or two poems. It turned out to morph into a whole collection. You can place an advance order directly from the publisher here. I am excited to share this weird and wonderful book with people.
Lilith’s Demons by Julie R. Enszer (A Midsummer Night’s Press 2015)
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and writing this fall. If you are not following me on Goodreads, please feel free. I’m reading my way through books by British lesbians this year. Perhaps I will write something about the experience, or maybe just complete it.
I did write about a favorite poet of mine, Betsy Warland, over at the Brick Books blog, where they are celebrating Canadian poetry. If you do not know Warland’s work, get acquainted with it. I am a fan.
Queer Books, Diverse Books is the subject of my most recent piece at Huffington Post. I am cooking up a few new ones right now, so do stay tuned to my channel there.
A brief piece of mine ran over at the University of Venus blog at Inside Higher Ed. One thing is missing – the link for the ring of keys reference.
I’ll be traveling a bit in November including down to Miami to read at Reading Queer in conjunction with the Miami Book Fair. I’ll post more information, but if you are in the area, please join me for their great events.
Those are tricks recently. I’ve been writing a bunch and have other new exciting things to announce soon. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, what have you been reading? What have you been writing? What sets your heart on fire? Tell me. I always want to know.
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