Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 38

New Journal: Adrienne A Poetry Journal of Queer Women

Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women

Last July, I announced the first reading period for the new journal, Adrienne, from Sibling Rivalry Press, at the Sinister Wisdom blog. Since then, I have been waiting to hold the first issue in my hands. The waiting has ended.

The first issue of Adrienne, edited by Valerie Wetlaufer, is a treat. Valerie delivers on all of my hopes and expectations. Adrienne opens with five poems by Judith Barrington, all of them are just wonderful. In addition to Judith’s work, this first issue features work by Ela Barton, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Elizabeth Bradfield, Ching-In Chen, Meg Day, Laura Hershey (now of blessed memory; I met her at a wompo breakfast at AWP), JP Howard, Joy Ladin, M. Mack, Leslea Newman, Kristen Stone, and Franciszka Voeltz. Leslea’s poems about losing her mother were very moving to me. And a poem for Adrienne Rich by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is just fabulous. It concludes:

sister come, put your ear to my heart
hear the roar of that river called Adrienne.

The cover art by Cindy Baker, which you can see above, is provocative. I have seen it a number of times on the screen and was thrilled to examine it in print. Most revealing is the artist statement published in the journal. It is a great read to think about and engage with the art work. For me, the artist’s statement alone was worth (the very reasonable) cover price.

Finally, one of my reasons for delighting in Adrienne so much may be selfish. It thrills me as the editor of Sinister Wisdom to welcome another journal for lesbians/queer women. I have this fantasy of sitting around the table in the near future with a group of editors who are all producing lesbian journals. I imagine how we will talk together, sharing publishing tips, frustrations as editors, joys in the final product. I imagine how it will be very similar to conversations that have happened repeatedly over the past forty years. I imagine how satisfying it will be to be part of these conversations moving into the future. Support Adrienne. For the beauty of the work. For the vision of Valerie Wetlaufer and Bryan Borland. For the hope of renewing lesbian print culture, now and always.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Adrienne, lesbian, poetry

How Are You Paying for Graduate School?

I know, I know, you may be thinking: what a nosy question! I wrote a bit here about student loans and that blog post gives you some context for why I ask you to tell me how you are paying for graduate school.

Providing me this information is really quite simple. Write a paragraph that explains the total cost of tuition for your graduate program, your anticipated living expenses during your graduate program, and the total amount you think you will need to pay for graduate school. If you do not know this information already, the research necessary to provide this information to me is crucial for financial planning purposes for you and your family. Then tell me how you will pay for graduate school.

Basically, there are four ways people pay for graduate degrees:

Students receive a full scholarship package from the university that provides support for all expenses that the student will incur during the graduate program. (Note: this is increasingly rare as evidenced by this article here. In my graduate program, I received extraordinary support from my department and my university, but financial support from my wife was crucial to being able to complete without student loans.)
Students work while attending school part-time and pay their tuition in full from their salary as it comes due.
Someone else in their family works, or worked, to provide the money to pay tuition and expenses while in school. This can be a partner, a spouse, a parent, a grandparent, or some other kind benefactor that supports the student.
Students take out loans.

Often students do a combination of all four.

I do not ask you to provide this information to be nosy. Rather, I believe it is crucial that we all have conversations about how people pay for graduate education and in particular what role student loan debt plays in graduate education. Often, I find students do not consider student loans thoughtfully and examine how people end up with large student loan balances and what these balances can mean for the rest of their lives. To that end, I ask, how will you pay for your education? And I offer some of my own stories.

I do not think student loan debt is bad. To the contrary. I am a consumer of student loans; student loans played a role in my professional success. When I was twenty-two, I enrolled in social work school to earn a MSW. I was working at a part time job then and so I paid my living expenses from my income, but I needed money to cover tuition. It was easy for me to secure student loans for the tuition. All in all, I took out about $27,000 in student loans for the MSW, but I left social work school without finishing the degree. I decided that I really did not want to be a social worker—these things happen, especially when we are young. What seemed like a great idea to me at the age of twenty-two lost much of its luster a year and a half later. I still had taken the loans and needed to pay back the loans. I left social work school in 1995; I paid off those loans in 2009. The monthly payment was just under $300 a month. The payment was a manageable amount, but every month I did think about the fact that I was paying a good portion of my salary for a degree that I did not even have.

My wife is more disciplined than I am. She finished her graduate degree: a juris doctor. She is a lawyer. She, too, took out student loans. We were not together when she was in law school. The loans she took out though covered primarily tuition and living expenses in her last year of school—as well as some living expenses while she was studying for the bar examination. She graduated with her JD in 1993. Her student loan balance was $45,000 with monthly payments of about $450 a month. We paid off her student loans in 2010. (Yes, we are blessedly student loan free now!)

In some ways, we are a success story. We took out student loans, got professional jobs, made more money than before we went to graduate school, and paid off our student loans with our future earnings. This is how student loan debt is supposed to work.

I want to provide two caveats, however, some additional facts for you to consider. My wife is a corporate attorney. She knew from the beginning that she wanted to work in the corporate sector. That’s great for her (and for me – remember her income helped me to get the PhD). It means that she was able to afford the student loan payments—and, in fact, we paid off our student loans in advance of their final due date with extra payments each month. Between 2000 and 2009, we paid around $1,000 a month to student loan payments. Remember, she is a corporate attorney. The truth is most of my students from women’s studies classes who want to go to law school, do not want to be corporate attorneys (though maybe you do!). Most of my students want to be attorneys who change the world, defend the indigent, expand civil rights. If you want to do that type of work, which is awesome, gratifying work, then you need to limit your student loan debt. Attend a state school (my wife did!), consider night school, work for a few years and save every penny you can. I want you to be a lawyer that changes the world, and I don’t want you to feel crushed by debt while you do that.

My second caveat is this: we did not have children. When we first got together, we were like most young couples: stressed about money. We owned a house which periodically needed work (dead air conditioners, leaking roofs, etc.), and we needed cars to get to and from work; sometimes those cars broke down or needed new brakes or new transmissions after one fell out driving down the road. We had the pressure of house payments, repairs, broken down cars, and needing to save for retirement, but we did not have the added pressure of needing to feed and clothe children, pay for music lessons and dance lessons for them, pay for team sports, and save for their college educations. I know that the decision to not have children economically provided us with a more stable life—and made the $1,000 payments for student loans much more manageable.

You probably already have a vision for what your life will include—an awesome job that you enjoy and is intellectually challenging, a loving partner, a home somewhere cool, maybe a weekend house at the beach, long trips to places like Bali, Vietnam, Budapest, and Bangkok, a child or two, the ability to download music you love, buy awesome new books, and purchase new clothes and shoes every year or two. Whatever you want from your life, I want for you.

That is really the reason that I ask the question: how are you going to pay for graduate school? I want to know that you have thought about money questions and how money will affect your wild dreams and schemes.

So I ask, tell me how you are paying for your graduate education. You may not have it all worked out, but I want to know that you are thinking about the cost of education and about your future happiness.

I will never withhold a letter of recommendation because of this question and how you answer it, but I would like you to consider it and provide an answer to me. I am also happy to discuss how to fund graduate education with you. I am happy to tell you more about my story and think about potential options for you based on your story.

What I really want is for you to have a wonderful life that fills you with happiness and satisfaction. I want for you a life that allows you to make a positive difference in the world. I worry that a life like that is not possible if you have $100,000, $150,000, or more in student loan debt. I ask you about money and graduate school and I tell my own story so that together we can be more conscious of what is happening in the United States in relationship to the costs of higher education and look for ways to change it that benefit us all.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: graduate school, money, student loans

Student Loans: Why I Ask About and Talk About Money

I am concerned profoundly about student loan debt in the United States and its effects on the current generation of college students. Like many people, I have been reading about student loan debt on the financial pages of major newspapers, where some analysts portend that student loans are the next sub-prime mortgage scandal. I do not know if that is the case, but I know first hand from my peers and from teaching at the university that serious concerns about student loans are warranted. But, what can an individual do? Particularly an individual like me, who is paid in part by student loans? (I feel like it is crucial to acknowledge my own complicity in the system and the benefits I receive from the ease of financial aid in the form of loans to students and their families for college education.)

After mulling these questions for a number of months, I have committed to the following strategies to address the current state of how individuals and families pay for education in the United States. These are not strategies designed to topple the system; they do not address the fundamental challenges facing us financially in the United States. Rather, they are a set of individual commitments that invite examination and awareness about the current state of the costs and expenses of higher education.

My three strategies are these:

In individual, one-on-one meetings with students, I ask students about their future plans and how they imagine paying for their future lives. These conversations are always interesting and engaging to me. I recall very clearly my own anxieties about being self-supporting when I graduated from college; no one discussed it with me and I think speaking about the issue would have been helpful to me.
In my classes, I talk about money and financing education publicly and forthrightly with students. Last semester, I asked students to disclose in small groups how much money they earned last year; it was a jarring and challenging exercise, but it allowed students to think about different values and taboos about money. Similarly, last semester, one of my students was accepted to medical school; we talked about how she would pay for it—including student loans, quantifying the amounts. Keeping this information shielded from others does not help us all to understand the costs of life in the United States today.
Finally, I ask everyone who requests a letter of recommendation from me for graduate school to tell me how they will pay for graduate school.

These are my three commitments to act on the issue of student debt. As I said, they are small commitments, but they are my action to highlight increasing social stratification in the United States with the hope that through awareness, action may emerge to challenge it.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: graduate school, money, student loans

Call for Papers//Special Issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies//Pat Parker and Judy Grahn: Where Would I Be Without You?

2016 will mark the fortieth anniversary of the only spoken word album produced by Olivia Records, Where Would I Be Without You? Featuring the poems of Judy Grahn and Pat Parker, Where Would I Be Without You? introduced Grahn and Parker to a wide array of women making the two beloved poet/troubadours during the 1970s. While both enjoyed enormous popularity, scholarly treatments of their work and its lasting significance have been sparse. This special issue of *The Journal of Lesbian Studies* will continue to redress the lack of critical engagement with these two important and iconic lesbian-feminist poets.

*The Journal of Lesbian Studies* is an interdisciplinary journal, thus, multi- and inter-disciplinary approaches are encouraged. What is the importance of the work of Pat Parker and Judy Grahn? What is the significance of the San Francisco/Bay Area in their work–and how does their work speak to the work of east coast poets? How can we read their work in relationship to political and social formations of feminism and lesbianism during the 1970s and 1980s? How can their work speak to contemporary audiences? While we welcome articles about single poems or comparisons of Parker and Grahn’s work with one another or with other poets, we also welcome proposals that explore Parker and Grahn and the intersections of lesbian literary history, the lesbian feminist movement, feminist presses, lesbian feminist publishing. Delight and surprise us with exciting engagements in the challenging, provocative, and beautiful work of Pat Parker and Judy Grahn.

Cheryl Clarke, Julie R. Enszer, and Lisa M. Hogeland are the guest editors for this special issue. Please direct inquiries or submit a proposal of 500 words with a brief CV to the guest editors in care of Julie R. Enszer (JulieREnszer@gmail.com) by April 1, 2014 (no joke!). Please put JLS Special Issue: YOUR NAME in the subject line.

The guest editors will respond to proposals by May 1st. Complete manuscripts of approximately 5,000-7,500 words will be due September 15, 2014.

Do share this CFP widely. Thank you!

For more information about the album: http://www.queermusicheritage.us/olivia-ppjg.html

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More on Lesbians, Scholars, and History

When I was working at the gay and lesbian community center in the early 1990s, at one point the board of directors considered changing the tag line. The tag line was “Gay is good. / You are not alone.” For a spell some of us called it gig and yana, poking gentle fun at the tag line. The thought about changing the tag line was about making it a little less dour, less desperate. One of our board members suggested that we adopt the tag line, “Into the mainstream.” At twenty-two years old, this suggestion mortified me. Who wants to be in the mainstream? Not me. I was so appalled by the possibility of “Into the mainstream,” that I was relieved when the idea of change was abandoned.

Now, nearly twenty-five years later, I have a more vexed relationship with the mainstream. Part of this current vexation, of course, is that the past twenty-five years are by some accounts a march to the mainstream. Yes, the world has changed since those early years in the 1990s. Some gay and lesbian people are staunchly in the mainstream, and I am not in my early twenties and appalled and mortified by this idea. In fact, I am interested in how gay and lesbian lives become a part of the mainstream, more specifically in how lesbian ideas, lesbian theories, lesbian literature, and lesbian histories can enter the mainstream and be valued by communities outside of lesbians.

This post received lots of comments and part of what I want to write here is that, yes, there is a specific organization for women historians. The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians meets regular as a huge convocation of women historians. In addition, the Coordinating Council on Women in History, which just celebrated its forty-fifth anniversary, is another vital voice for women’s history. Moreover, there is a wonderful and vibrant Committee on LGBT History that has been a powerful force for organizing LGBT historians and advocating for inclusion in my variety of ways. I do not want my previous post to be misconstrued as not recognizing the vital contributions these organizations (and others!) have made and continue to make.

And yet. As someone commented on my wall at Facebook, it is difficult to think that there is not an organization dedicated to lesbian historians, or herstorians. There is, of course, the Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn, NY which is the oldest lesbian archive and a vital force for lesbian history as well as the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive in Los Angeles, CA. Both of these organizations are wonderful institutions and resources, but they do not and perhaps cannot provide the same sort of connective glue for lesbian history that I think is necessary, that I think could amplify our work and help it explode in a variety of Important ways. Perhaps it is right that people should labor individually; perhaps like the stars our work will be revealed as a magical constellation in the night sky. Perhaps what is needed is not another organizations or any sort of formal structure, but rather a web, our own wickedary that we may spin. I do not know the answer. I am just thinking about and mapping the terrain of where we (lesbian studies, lesbian scholars, lesbian history, lesbian literature) are now as a way to imagine a new future that simultaneously embraces the mainstream and stokes the refusal of the mainstream, affirming that we have something so special, so revolutionary, so vital, we should just preserve it for ourselves.

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Two Wonderful Literary Events in Washington, DC

Two exciting literary events are coming to Washington, DC this year – and information is beginning to come out about both of them so mark your calendars.

The first event is the wonderful Split This Rock conference. This conference, held every other year is a wonderful gathering of poets speaking truth to power. The schedule was just posted today and you can check it out here.

The first weekend of August, the DC LGBT Center hosts OutWrite. Save the dates! I will be working on the planning and host committee for this event and look forward to it being an incredible weekend. You can stay up to date on plans here.

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Lesbian Scholars, Lesbian Studies

This weekend, a group of historians (also known, affectionately, as white men with elbow patches) descended on Washington, D.C. for the American Historical Association annual conference. After last year’s conference in New Orleans, I cooked up the idea of doing a gathering for lesbians in conjunction with the conference when it was held in Washington this year. That gathering, which is titled Lesbian Studies, Lesbian Scholars, happened last Thursday, and, immodestly, it was a great success. Only a few days afterward, my mind wanders to what is next for this group and for the idea of building and strengthening scholarship that is focused on lesbians as a subject and object of study. I am not entirely sure what my next steps will be, but I am committed to thinking with others about how to support, nurture, and build scholarship by, for, and about lesbians.

Ironically, my commitment to this work was bolstered by a session at AHA sponsored by the Committee of Women Historians on Saturday afternoon. It was a distinguished panel–Crystal Feimster from Yale, Darlene Hines-Clark, Alice Kessler-Harris, Susan Ferber, and others–and Claire Potter’s tweets were lively and thoughtful. Potter also quickly wrote a blog post about the session.

The issue with the panel is the erasure and ignorance of lesbian history and contributions. The panelists primarily focused on a heterosexual narratives of women in history with a complete absence of thought about lesbian lives. When Potter raised this issue and asked how the conversation might have been different with historians like Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Blanche Weisen Cook, Estelle Freedman, and others on it, there was little willingness to engage in these questions. What might the conversation have been if it focused equally on sexism and homophobia. Finally, I asked on Twitter, @JulieREnszer: #aha2014 how can we stop assuming all women have a stake in pregnancy, childbearing and parenting? These are important conversations and questions to enter the formal deliberations of the Committee on Women Historians. I hope that people invested in the organization move these conversations forward.

In the meantime, while I am shocked and awed by the speed and alacrity with which lesbian lives, lesbian contributions, and lesbian perspectives are erased, dismissed, minimized, and marginalized, I am committed to working to stop these elisions. I am committed to creating both work and structures that preserve and celebrate lesbians.

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Sisterhood: Reader’s Guide

One of the delights of this fall, which was generally higher on the scale of busy and overwhelming than delightful, was creating a Reader’s Guide for my new collection of poetry, Sisterhood. The idea came from the incredible publishers behind Sibling Rivalry Press, Bryan Borland and Seth Pennington. In the email, it seemed quite simple; Bryan wrote: it’s always really cool when an author does a reader’s guide. I replied quickly, “Sure that sounds like a good idea.” Then proceeded to do what I always do when I make a commitment like that: made a little project plan in my workflow management software, Nirvana. Now, I love Nirvana; it keeps me on task and helps me always to be productive and manage my multiple commitments, but often on projects like this one, things seem simple on the bright screen of my computer, then, in the daily muck of life trying to execute such plans to give them a little check mark on the screen, is much more complex. By which I mean to say, writing a reader’s guide was hard–harder than I thought it would be.

Bryan or Seth helpfully provided me with a model and being a researcher, I found five or six other Reader’s Guides to use a models. Yet, even with a model, creating the Reader’s Guide required work, intellectual work, over a number of days. Even with this labor, my Reader’s Guide is relatively brief; a simple execution of the idea behind it with five small parts. The really substantive portions of it are the Questions and Answers with the Author (or, you know, me), the Discussion Questions, and the Books the Influenced the Author.

Early on in writing my questions and answers I realized that I was becoming a little crazy as an interlocutor with myself, so I decided to channel my writing buddy and the ultimate interviewer of queer poets, Christopher Hennessy. He then graciously stepped into the project as an actual interlocutor, cleaning up questions, suggesting revisions, and lending his name and image to the project. We were so happy with the question and answer portion of the Reader’s Guide that we published it over at the Huffington Post.

The “Discussion Questions” for reading groups were fun to think about, but truthfully it has been so long that I was in a reading group (outside of university classes) that I am not sure what kinds of questions are useful and interesting to reading groups these days. If you are a part of a reading group and want to use Sisterhood, I’d love your feedback about this (and I’ll even do a special discount of the book for your reading group if you give me a little bit of feedback!)

The most fun to think about and write was the section on influences. This is also the part of the Reader’s Guide that was most edited for length. I could have gone on for many many days about influences and drawing a web of reading that influenced this book, but realize that this may not be broadly interesting to people, so I tried to make it more contained and directly representative (the stories of reading William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings as a child were cut, for example, and my lifetime obsession with Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton also didn’t make the cut. I consoled myself by saying there will be other books, other Reader’s Guides.)

When I was all done, some other great folks stepped in to help out with editing, proofreading, and general cooing about the project. I am grateful for their guidance.

So there you have it, go check out the Reader’s Guide for Sisterhood. Pick up a copy of the book here, Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: publishing, reader's guide, Sisterhood

Reviews and Two New Poems

A few weeks ago, I wrote about some of the labor of publishing a book. I care deeply about this topic because the work of publishing books is part of the subject of my dissertation. I am deeply interested in knowing how books get out into the world and into the hands of readers, known and unknown. Part of knowing how this happens is engaging with making it happen, as a writer and as a publisher. While I savor this work in many ways (and am currently laboring as a publisher to promote the second Sapphic Classic from Sinister Wisdom and A Midsummer Night’s Press–Cheryl Clarke’s Living as a Lesbian), it is also labor that is uncomfortable and anxiety-provoking. The outcome of this labor, the outcome of brief notes, packages of books, pitch emails, and a myriad of other forms of communication is reviews. Book reviews, attention to the book and along with that appraisals of its value. As I said, uncomfortable and anxiety-provoking.

Two reviews came in quickly. Both good reviews, with gentle praise. Then I was thrilled to have Amos Lassen name Sisterhood as one of the best books of 2013 by his estimation. These are all good things. One of the most exciting developments over the past few days, however, has been getting feedback about the book from people who purchased a copy at the book party this weekend. It resonates with readers, and they tell me so on email. Gratifying.

So the work was productive and brought the desired outcome. Good work invites more work. That is what I am doing now. Writing new poems. Thinking about the next book of poems. Some of the new poems are being published, gently entering the world. Two are in the journal, Skin 2 Skin. I encourage you to buy a copy and explore this great journal.

That is the news for the moment. And you?

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: new poems, reviews

What Constitutes Kink?

Forgive me. It has been a long day of grading, so this blog entry is a short diversion. Yesterday at lunch with a comrade, we were talking about Gayle Rubin. (This begins highbrow, but trust me, it devolves.) Gayle Rubin and kink. I said to my compatriot, I think of kink as anything that I haven’t done yet.

I remember saying this in my twenties and being aware of the wide berth it presented. There was so much I had not done sexually. Things I had read about, imagined, heard from other, but not had a willing partner to try. The world of kink and twenty, twenty-three, twenty-five by that definition seemed vast. A world filled with anticipation and possibility.

Yesterday, I realized, after this pithy quip, that with that definition, the realm of kink is much smaller now, at my age (somewhere in the mid-forties), than it was when I was, say twenty-two. I realized with a start, even with a shock, there at Jason’s Deli in College Park, that the realm of kink as I imagined it, the first time I read Gayle Rubin, was now much smaller.

The world of sex, of course, has not actually changed that much in the past twenty-odd years. The mechanics, the desires, the goals, the outcomes, the techniques, the operations, are generally similar today in the ‘teens than they were in the late eighties and early nineties. Sure a millennial change happened, but it did not change the technology of sex. Sex has not changed, my perspective on sex has changed. And the realm of kink, by my perception, has narrowed, has become smaller, more circumscribed. This made me sad, but my second realization was more alarming.

In addition to realizing that what constituted kink in my world is now smaller and narrower, simultaneously, I realized that the things that remain in the realm of kink by my definition, are, how shall I put this, less accessible to my potential experiences as a forty-something, married lesbian than they were to me as a single, fancy-free twenty-something lesbian. Is there any kink left for me? Any sort of possibility for a kinky future? The kind of kink to hope for? To imagine? To engage?

Let me be plain, the real thing that I thought about is how one experience, lacking from my kinky world, is a threesome. Seriously, I read about so many threesomes and polyamorous relationships in my research that it is an experience I covet. Yet here we find ourselves, forty-something, married (who would have thought THAT would happen?) and frankly busy. There are jobs to do, papers to write, households to maintain, animals to attend to, families and platonic relationships to nurture. So there, sitting in the College Park Jason’s Deli, I was thinking about kink and a threesome and how kink was now smaller but somehow slightly more inaccessible than ever before in my life.

And I wondered, what would Gayle Rubin say? I wondered, what do we do in our forties to affirm kink and expand its possibilities in our lives? What do we do to widen the possibilities of kink and sex radicalism? How do we keep kink alive even when our lives are middle-aged, married, suburban, settled? Surely there is kink for us, too?

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