Sassafras Patterdale's Blog, page 11

2013 Year In Review!

Hard to believe that 2013 is almost over. It’s been an incredible year for and in so many ways i feel like 2013 was a year so much came together for me in terms of both getting my work out into the world,  and understanding the directions that I’m moving in with  my writing. Kicked Out and Roving Pack both had amazing years and  I am ending the year looking back at 12 incredible months so much of was made possible because of the amazing community support I’ve received from all of you!

2013 Highlights! 

 

* The release of Leather Ever After: an anthology of kinky fairy tales!  This anthology is simply FUN. It was a project that came together really suddenly when the publisher approached me after a leather storytelling event I curated and Leather Ever After was a total blast to put together! The book features some of the best leather writers out there, and includes a foreword by the one and only Laura Antoniou!  It just got another great review and am so excited it’s out in the world!

* In 2013 my writing appeared in several other people’s projects! I have stories in Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey where I give my queer leather response to the kink book mainstream culture has decided represents us, and No Safewords: A Marketplace Fan Anthology  where I got the chance to play in Laura Antoniou’s sandbox and write a story based on The Marketplace – one of my favorite series! I had several of my tweets about gender  published in Kate Bornstein’s updated “My New Gender Workbook”  the first version of this book set me off on my big gender journeys about 11 years ago and so it was a tremendous honor to be part of Auntie Kate’s update to the book! I also have a story about creating queer family in Stay Solid! A Radical Handbook For Youth — this is a fantastic collection of perspectives ideal for giving to teens you know

* Keynoting the 10th annual Oregon Queer Youth Summit – 10 years ago I was a queer youth organizer in Portland, Oregon and was part of creating the programming at the very first Oregon Queer Youth Summit! It was a tremendous honor that this year the organizers came to me and asked me to deliver the keynote for the 10th annual Summit!!!

* NYC Pride Rally  -I was one of the performers at NYC’s Pride Kickoff Rally on the Pier the Friday of Pride weekend. It was an incredible opportunity to be able to take the stage and read a story about building family and homeless queer youth on that giant stage – I also had Lady GaGa open for me! (how often does anyone get to say that??)

* In May I traveled to New Orleans for the annual Saints & Sinners queer literary conference. I’ve heard such amazing things about the conference over the years it was an incredible opportunity to not only attend but sit on several panels about writing and publishing (read more about it here). The highlight of the weekend for sure  and having the chance to meet and learn from the incredible Dorothy Allison who has been my biggest role model in writing.

* The literary highlight of my year was attending the 25th annual Lambda Literary Awards and walking across that stage to accept a Berzon Emerging Writer Award!!! This award means more to me than just about any award I could achieve- to be recognized by my community of queer writers was beyond magical.

* Traveling to Atlanta with Roving Pack as part of the literary events sponsored by Atlanta Pride happening at Charis  my favorite feminist bookstore. I got to finally meet Alysia Angel one of my favorite femme writers and share a fun weekend of queer storytelling at the bookstore and kickoff pride week in Atlanta!

* finishing the first draft, and the initial edit for my next novel Lost Boi – a queer and punk retelling of the peter pan story. Last New Years I set the goal that by NYE 2013 I would finish the first draft of the book – I exceeded that goal finishing the draft in October, editing it in November and sending it off to beta readers for December!

*All of the amazing letters/notes/emails/tweets/comments I’ve gotten from readers all over the world telling me about how you liked or connected with one of my books or stories.

I’m really excited for 2014 and can’t believe it’s almost here! In 2014 I’ll be turning 30, my partner and I will be celebrating our 10th anniversary together and hopefully I’ll be getting lots of writing and revising done! I have some exciting literary projects in the works for 2014 and can’t wait to begin sharing them with all of you! Happy New Year!!!

xoxoxoxoxo

2013, what i’m working on, and a sneak peek at Lost Boi art!

It’s hard to believe that 2013 is almost over! Every year for the past few years I’ve been honored to be included in the Band of Thebes queer book roundup where a bunch of queer authors get the chance to say what our favorite book of the last year was! This year my choice was Ragdoll House – click to see why and what books other queer authors selected!  it’s really overwhelming for me to think about what an incredible 12 months I was so excited this week to see the 25th annual Lambda Literary Awards having been included in the Slate Queer Event year in review – I know that accepting the Berzon Emerging Writer Award was THE highlight of my queer year! I’ve been a little behind in my regular blog updates here, something I hope to get back into the habit of now that my writing schedule has calmed down a bit – yes writing schedule. This year in addition to my solid focus on getting the word out about Roving Pack and Leather Ever After (and of course Kicked Out still) I’ve been writing a LOT.

In the last few months I was working on preparing Roving Pack for publication the plot ideas for my next book, Lost Boi  began to really solidify for me. Starting on January 1st I started writing with the intention of having a completed first draft by this New Years Eve.  Much to my own excitement things fell into place more smoothly than I anticipated they would and By October I had a completed first draft. I made the decision to spend a month working on editing the draft not with the intention of going in and fixing

everything, but cleaning up some of the glairing issues with structure, pronoun and name inconsistency, and other  basic readability issues with the draft. I spent the month of November doing that first round of touchups and then December 1st sent the book off to a close group of beta readers

is my favorite time of year, it’s the most sacred of reclaimed holidays for me, a time for recharging and recentering and so

mostly I’m taking the month of December off from novel writing concentrating on relaxing a little since this year has been so much writing, but also working on some shorter form pieces for anthologies – more exciting news about that coming soon, along with news about some other literary projects I have in the works!  As you might have noticed, I’m not all that great at taking time off so it hasn’t *just * been Christmas trees and playing in the snow with my dogs. I’m also starting to really make some plans about Lost Boi’s future which included an exciting dinner meeting last week with the incredible illustrator Katie Diamond who did the cover art for Roving Pack, and will be not only be doing the same for Lost Boi, but will also be doing a series of illustrations that will appear within the novel!  Here’s some quick doodles she did at the restaurant as I quickly walked her through all the main plot points in the book and we brainstormed about illustrations.

I’m so excited to be getting my beta reader’s  feedback on this initial draft of Lost Boi and to spend next year getting myself back to work  polishing and reworking this new novel!

Thanksgiving and a gift for you, the kicked out

This time of year I talk a lot about my own experiences with chosen family and reclaimed holiday magic, in so many ways this is my most favorite time of the year, but it’s also not always easy. I have never regretted my decision to runaway, to save myself, but I’ve also never forgotten that first thanksgiving when I had no family, when my beloved queer family hadn’t yet solidified into something I knew I could depend on. I know what it’s like to have nowhere to go, and what it’s like to be someone’s pity invite. Sitting with someone else’s family, trying not to take up too much space, and trying to disassociate into the gravy bowl. For me being a queer writer means capturing those hard moments with as much intensity as I write about the beautiful moments of us coming together and creating queer families. For me this is true in both my fiction and nonfiction writing and in my novel Roving Pack that meant I wanted to capture that feeling of chaos, rejection, abandonment, and anger that Click experiences when ze grapples with Thanksgiving:

From Roving Pack

“Date: November 28, 2002

Security: Friends

Subject: Thanksgiving

I called Mrs. Snow back after all the crazy shit at the hotel. I had to apologize because when I hung up the phone I said I would be calling right back, and then of course I didn’t. She said it was ok and that since she had heard a bunch of yelling in the background she was just glad to hear I was ok. It was only a couple days ago that I called her, and when I filled her in a little bit on where I’ve been the last year or so, she asked if I had thanksgiving plans. I said no. She said I had to come to her house and have thanksgiving with her family. I didn’t really want to go, but I said ok after she told me I should bring Orbit.

I woke up late this morning, it was hard to sleep knowing this stupid holiday was going to be there in the morning. Billy was gone. He spent the night with Hope at her squat because they had agreed to try to see their parents together today. I didn’t even want to come over to Mrs. Snow’s place but I’d said I would, so I had to. I asked if I should bring anything and she said no so I didn’t have to do any cooking, just get myself cleaned up. I took a shower and re-shaved my mohawk. I thought about dying it again but I was out of green dye and of course everything was fucking closed today for the holiday. My work pants were mostly clean and I put on a black button down that I snagged for fifty cents at the thrift store a couple days ago.

Dinner was awkward. Orbit and I got there right as everyone was sitting down to eat. It was Mrs. Snow and her husband, their two little kids, and another grownup couple with their three kids. I sat at a table with all these parents and little kids and I realized that there was pretty much nothing about my life that was safe to talk about. I ate turkey. The kids couldn’t sit still for very long and kept running around the room trying to get Orbit to play with them. They asked a lot of questions about my hair, piercings and tattoos but then their parents would shush them. I wonder what Mrs. Snow told her friends about me. After dinner they were all going to wander around looking at Christmas lights.

Mrs. Snow’s youngest kid was cold and had to go to bed so I came back to the house with them. On the way back, Mrs. Snow said she’d run into my birth mom again and mentioned that I’d be coming for Thanksgiving. I know Mrs. Snow probably meant well but I was really angry that she’d say anything about me to my birth mom! She said my mom got really weird and told her to be careful because I was a drug addict. I was so mad. Orbit came and sat in my lap, and I tried to explain to Mrs. Snow what XXX means but she said she had to put the baby to bed. I saw a computer in the living room. I asked if I could check my email before I left and she said of course which is how I’m online right now. I’m getting out of here in a few minutes. I don’t know why I tried to get back in touch with her in the first place. I really hope that Billy’s around when I get back to the apartment.”

This is a complicated time of year for so many of us. I’m so blessed with my chosen queer family and the way our connection has turned the holidays from something that I dreaded into my most favorite time of year. That said, I would be lying if I said I didn’t cringe every time someone asks/assumes I’m going “home” for the holidays. This is probably my biggest pet peeve this time of year made more frustrating because it’s such a blanket assumption that seems to permeate every area of our society from television commercials and casual checkout line conversations, and even all to often our own LGBT community. One really easy way to be an ally is to strike that line from your conversations and replace it with a more open question like asking what someone’s plans are.

I know that this time of year is really hard for a lot of us. If you’re someone whose struggling with the holidays a lot right now.

You are not alone. Let me repeat that again. You are not alone. If you are in the states you know that tomorrow is a rough day for many of us. It’s a day when society tells us that we should feel ashamed of who we are because our family doesn’t look this iconic image of what family “should” be. Take care of yourself. If you’re struggling, I suggest staying away from television and radio (they will just be full of ads that will make you feel worse), go to a park, take yourself to a movie, take a bath, write a story, talk to a friend, or counselor, or hotline, eat cupcakes, draw pictures, workout. Essentially make time even if it’s just five or ten minutes to honor that this is a rough day and that you deserve to do something that makes you feel good about who you are. There are thousands of us for whom to varying degrees today is rough. Take care of yourself, and each other, and remember that you’re not alone.

Here’s the thing- if you are lonely or struggling with family rejection this thanksgiving weekend I’m not going to try to minimize how you’re feeling, but what I can tell you is that you’re not alone. To help you feel less alone, email me at KickedOutAnthology AT gmail.com and I will send you a ebook copy of Kicked Out. The whole point of that anthology was to build community, to foster kicked out families. This time of year can be hard, and sometimes reading the stories of other folks who have had similar experiences.

Holiday Sale! Order now and get FREE buttons!

Are you starting your holiday shopping?  Hanukkah is just one week away, and Christmas in less than five! You know what makes a great gift? BOOKS!  Know what makes an even better gift?  Books purchased from indie bookstores or direct from authors and signed/dedicated to your friend/partner/crush/ex, your old GSA, former youth center or whoever else you’re holiday shopping for!

This year for the holidays please consider the gift of Roving Pack- the novel Lambda Literary calls “Political, raucous, dark, and totally engrossing” and the Huffington Post says  is “a guiding light in the darkness of the false binary illusion of gender we’ve been too lazy to address” and click here to see all the amazing things some of your favorite Queer authors have said about the novel 

Order Roving Pack between now and December 10th  you’ll get this special set of one inch buttons featuring the original artwork by KD Diamond!!!! ::hint:: they make great stocking stuffers OR you can keep them for yourself!

 

The kids in Roving Pack even get into all kinds of mischief on Christmas – see what I mean:

To find out what happens you’ll just have to read the book!  

 

national coming out day…

I can never ever forget how powerful it was for me to see out queer folks when I was a  closeted teen. They were risking safety and livelihood  to be out in that conservative county I was raised in. I fed on their bravery.  I remember how I would count the long weekend hours until Monday morning when I would see the dyke teacher at my high school. Just seeing her swagger down the hallway in doc martins and faded jeans gave me hope enough to make it through another day even though she was forbidden by the school administration from actually being “out.”

Coming out for me, like so many others was dangerous. The initial price for queerness was extremely high – it cost me my home, family, and the community i’d grown up in.  And yet, queerness has given me more than I ever could have imagined in those dark closeted days.  Being out has afforded me a loving chosen family, work that I truly feel called to do, and so much more.  For me, there has been no greater freedom than being out, but I say that knowing that  I have and continue to be incredibly lucky. For far too many, coming out means falling through another set of cracks of  systems not designed to support our kids, and a community not ready to take them in.

In 2010 for the month of October connected to the release of the Kicked Out anthology, we started an online storytelling campaign called ‘Come Out, Kicked Out’ designed to provide an opportunity for folks in the community to write, draw, take a picture, or make a video coming out about their experiences with queer teen homelessness, and for allies within our community to stand up in solidarity with current and former homeless LGBTQ youth to talk about how they have seen this epidemic impacting their community.   Every day of October a different story was shared on our website with the idea of putting more faces and stories to this epidemic and to break down the profound stigma that still exists within the LGBTQ community about owning a history of teen homelessness or biological family disownment.  You can find all of those  incredible stories here. If you find yourself inspired by the incredible stories shared last year we’re always looking for guest posts. Email your stories to kickedoutanthology@gmail.com  Also, if you are able, consider purchasing a copy of Kicked Out this groundbreaking anthology brought together the voices of current and former homeless LGBTQ youth in the pages of a book for the very first time — and contributors share in the royalties!

The thought I’d like to end with on Coming Out Day is the hope that when we as queer folks shout COME OUT! COME OUT!  we must be sure that we as a community are prepared not just pay lip service to welcoming those youth into our “family”  we must truly be prepared to open our  homes, wallets, ears and hearts to ensure that the youth who pay a heavy price for heeding our call are not abandoned by the very community they have lost everything to be part of.

atlanta

I’m starting to write this somewhere high in the air inside a robotic pterodactyl on my way home to Brooklyn after being lucky enough to spend the weekend in Atlanta as part of the literary programming at Charis Bookstore connected to this years Atlanta Pride Festival. I had the chance to go to Charis with Kicked Out when it released about three years ago, and without a doubt it’s one of my favorite bookstores.  I got my start as a zinester at a feminist bookstore, and they have always felt like my most important literary homes.  I get really excited anytime I have the opportunity to visit one, especially a dear friend like Charis.

While I was sitting at the airport on my way from NYC to Atlanta on Friday morning, I got word that Charis had been vandalized the night before. Thursday night had been the kickoff pride literary event an amazing evening of 20 local Atlanta writers and sometime after the store closed that night some homophobes decided to leave some vulgar graffiti on the bookstore. It was ugly and hateful and made me so excited for Saturday night because I believe one of the best ways to respond to that kind of homophobia is to stand firm in queerness, and to not let the bigots win. Additionally it highlighted for me all over again the importance of queer and feminist bookstores, how people feel threatened by them, andwhy in the year 2013 they are still so needed by our community.

Click here to learn more about Charis, and if you can please donate to them – they are working on painting a beautiful mural on the wall that was vandalized and your donation will help them not only with that mural but all the incredible programming and events they have.

I had an amazing and super busy weekend in Atlanta hanging out with queer literary buddies. Alysia Angel and I have been

friends online for a really longtime and collaborated on several different projects (don’t miss her fantastic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in Leather Ever After!) but had never actually met in person! We went to Elizabeth’s gay softball game right after I got into town. It was so much fun being queerleaders for all the dykes out on the field and Alysia and I bonded over our matching sandals.After that was delicious dinner – which involved  a detour when we were turned away and refused service at a restaurant for being queers!!!!!!!

 I feel so lucky to have  an incredible literary community, but it’s not that often that my people and I are in the same place, at the same time. Getting to spend time with some of my writer buddies  is definitely part of what made the weekend so special. Saturday morning Elizabeth, Alysia and her partner Dante picked me up at my hotel bright and early and we spent the whole day having fun! We started with a delicious breakfast at Ria’s Bluebird omg veggie sausage!!! (where we got a Riot Gurrrrrl discount written onto the receipt by the ADORABLE waitress) and then spent the afternoon exploring thrift stores all over the city and even checked out a lakeside neighborhood art festival full of dogs which you know made me super happy! Having a queer literary community physically together (aka off the internet) isn’t something I experience very often so it was incredibly delightful to get to talk shop with folks but also just have some silly fun together. We spent the whole day playing all over Atlanta (HUGE thanks to Elizabeth who drove us around all day) and then it was time to get ready to head to the bookstore!

Alysia and I were reading with Julie Marie Wade a great author based in Florida. The event was called “The Tears On Her Face Are From Laughter” a reference to a tattoo on Alysia’s for an evening of storytelling, poetry, and tales of queer triumph.

It was so fun to get to bring Roving Pack to Atlanta – and I was especially excited that I found a passage of the book that included a (brief) reference to Atlanta and it was so fun to read from the book at Charis next to these other fun and intense authors.  We closed the event with a really great Q&A facilitated by Elizabeth who asked us some really smart and challenging questions about craft, form, and identity as queer writers and activists.  After that was a big group dinner with new friends from the audience  Writing is such a solitary art form, and I’m really introverted so the solitary aspect of writing works really well for me, yet, there is something extremely special about the chances I have to spend in the company of queer writers who inspire and challenge me.

I’ve talked carefully before here on my blog about how editing Kicked Out was an incredible and utterly life changing experience for me as a writer, as an activist, and as an individual. Editing that anthology was some of the most important work I have ever done, and at the same time, it was also personally challenging and limiting in some ways. There were times where when I was touring Kicked Out I felt like I was only being seen as part of myself. I was the formerly homeless youth, the survivor, community builder and trauma writer, and I saw my role as being responsible  to hold that space. Those characteristics are part of me, but they aren’t the full pictures of who I am, or a complete view of how I want to be seen and understood in the world. With the release of Roving Pack, and then Leather Ever After it feels like I’ve really  turned a corner with my work, where my writing and I are seen more fully with all the paradox and complication. Every time I’m on the road now, it sinks in a little bit deeper how lucky I feel to have grown as a writer, and to have the opportunity to be fully seen and present.

This was such an amazingly FUN weekend and definitely not an experience that I’m going to forget anytime soon! HUGE thanks to Atlanta Pride and Charis for making my visit possible!!!

RWAR!!!!!! this was Sunday morning very very very early at the airport

LOVE THIS. i wish that my grandparents had reacted this way instead of believing my mother #KickedOut

via BuzzFeed

Rainbow Awards!

 

Roving Pack

This morning I got the news that Roving Pack has been selected as a finalist in the Rainbow Awards – very very exciting! Roving Pack was an incredibly fun and challenging book to write and not only stretched me as an author and storyteller, but has opened so many doors. Above all, I’m thrilled that readers have connected to Roving Pack. This novel has far surpassed the hopes I had for it in really exciting ways, and being a finalist for this award is just one piece of that. Regardless of which book ends up winning the Rainbow Award to have it selected as a Finalist is absolutely thrilling! Get your own signed copy of Roving Pack (or ebook) here 

Leather Ever After

Leather Ever After which also released this year has received an Honorable Mention in the Rainbow Awards! In talking about the anthology, they said of the stories “some were truly erotic and very sexy…. others were complete kink.”  I didn’t know what I was doing when I began editing Leather Ever After in that I’d never done an erotic book before, and I only marginally consider myself to be an erotica writer. I’m not interested in weather my readers “get off,” I’m interested in the storytelling possibilities of the erotic world, and in particular BDSM. With Leather Ever After when I was compiling the stories, I was especially interested in the ways that as queers we build relationships and connections which sometimes draw upon erotic exchanges, and how those stories can be overlaid onto traditional fairy tales. This was a really fun book to put together, and I’m thrilled that it was honored in the Rainbow Awards! Want your own copy? Order here

Storytelling, Social Change the Center For American Progress report

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that this fall I had the opportunity to partner with The Center For American Progress. They are a brilliant research institute in DC that have given us some of the best and most nuanced statistical understanding of LGBTQ youth homelessness as an epidemic in this country. This month CAP released a new report “Seeking Shelter The Experiences and Unmet Needs of LGBT Homeless Youth” and I was honored when I was contacted by the writers and asked if I would be willing to contribute to it from a personal perspective.

I immediately said yes and then had to give some thought to what I wanted to say. They wanted me to tell my story of having been kicked out and what it was like to be a teenager.  I wanted my contribution to this report to take things a step further, to not just talk about what it was like to be kicked out, but to give voice to the ways in which as queer homeless youth we built our own families, grow each other up, save each other in ways that no one else could.

“I rode busses for two hours to get to the city of Portland. I held my breath and walked into the queer youth center for the first time. It was all concrete, spray paint, bike parts, glitter, and BO, but for the first time I knew that I wasn’t alone. I learned the beginnings of trust from other kids who had lost everything. We swore allegiances to one another, built families in the back rooms of that youth center, in parks, under bridges, in punk houses. We kept the promises we made. We grew each other up, saving one another in ways no adults, no social workers or agencies ever could.”

I take every writing opportunity I’m given seriously, especially ones like this where I’m given the chance to speak to a group of readers who might not otherwise come across a story being told not from the perspective of a researcher, but from actually having lived this experience, and I’m so grateful that  COP prioritized the inclusion of current/former homeless LGBTQ youth within this new report.

The Center For American Progress released their report at an event in DC last Thursday and I was shocked and honored when I turned on the live video streaming to hear the event open with my words being read aloud. “Listen when we tell you our stories”

You can learn more about the report and for free download a full PDF, which includes my story here

Roving Pack book group at SMYRC!

This weekend I had one of the most unique and special experiences of my career; I had the chance to SKYPE with a book group and talk about Roving Pack. Now this wasn’t just any book group, this was a youth book group at SMYRC – the Sexual minority Youth Resource Center in Portland Oregon, the same queer youth center where I grew up as a queer teen. To have this kind of partnership with the agency where I was an alumni was incredible.

This summer, the youth at SMYRC and an LGBTQ group at Outside In – an amazing homeless youth serving agency and clinic (where I got medical care for years as a teenager) read Roving Pack.  I was so excited that the youth and staff at SMYRC wanted to read Roving Pack! Roving Pack is fiction though pieces of it definitely are based on who I was as a youth in Portland, and QYRC the fictional Queer Youth Recreation Center definitely bears a strong resemblance to the SMYRC I knew in the early 2000′s.  I was so curious what the SMYRC youth of today would think about the novel, its themes and what kind of questions they would have for me!

The youth at SMYRC asked some of the best and hardest hitting questions I’ve ever gotten about the novel.  They wanted to know about so many things including:

Gender portrayals

How much of the book is based on truth

If I had been concerned about writing a book with so much BDSM content

How I felt about the Daddy/boy relationships in the book not always being healthy or positive portrayals

What the writing process had looked like

How people I’d known as a youth in Portland had responded to Roving Pack

Why I ended the book the way that I had- what happens to Click

If I’d been concerned straight people wouldn’t understand the queer language/themes

I also learned about what their favorite scenes from the book were, or scenes that had otherwise stayed with them in some way and was interested to se that some of them were some of my own favorites.

SMYRC has moved twice since I was a youth, the space is completely different, and I was so grateful to be welcomed back into the new SMYRC and to have the chance to answer questions about Roving Pack and to talk with the current generation of youth who call SMYRC home. I’ve been so blessed that in the last year I’ve had a number of opportunities to connect with youth in Portland from keynoting the Oregon Queer Youth Summit in the late Spring to now getting to have a much more intimate conversation with youth.

Before getting on SKYPE Saturday night I was more nervous than I normally am before I talk to readers. I’m always nervous before I meet readers, but this was different, it felt like such a tremendous full circle to be visiting SMYRC the place where I wrote my first stories, where I built my first queer families and honestly I was terrified that the youth might hate the book, or not have related to it. It was so exciting to have such an engaging conversation with the folks at SMYRC, to have the chance to go back and visit them, to talk to youth who had read Roving Pack was an incredibly special experience for me not only as an author, but also personally. I owe my life to SMYRC in so many ways and it’s a tremendous honor to now be able to connect with the SMYRC youth of today.

Has your book group read Roving Pack? If so please get in touch I’d love to join your group via SKYPE!