Sassafras Patterdale's Blog, page 15

The Next Big Thing

Ok so I’ve been seeing this TNBT (The Next Big Thing) making its rounds in the blogosphere and since I’ve been procrastinating actually getting significant writing done on my next big thing today, I thought I’d play along and tell all of you a little bit about what I’m working on next

What is your working title of your book (or story)?



Lost Boi

Where did the idea come from for the book?

This  book has been formulating in my head for the last year or so. Right as I was beginning to wrap things up with Roving Pack and preparing to send it to press, the ideas for this new book started to come to me. I’m really interested in what it means to grow up, all the ways that can look, and the costs associated with doing so. Over the past few months the characters and plot have really solidified for me, and it’s been a delightful challenge to begin bringing them to life on paper.

What genre does your book fall under?



Fiction, really really queer fiction

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?



Oh goodness! I have NO IDEA.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?



A gutterpunk retelling of Peter Pan that is dark, gritty and full of unexpected discoveries.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? (if this  applies – otherwise, make up another question to answer!) 

This is a very good question.  Two of my books have been released through small presses, and one through my own imprint. I’m very open to working with the right publisher so long as the content of the novel doesn’t have to be tamed down to meet marketing concerns, and if the right publisher doesn’t come along?  I’ve got my own imprint and will gladly birth this book into the world myself.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

I have set the goal of having a first full draft of the manuscript by New Years Eve 2013…. wish me luck, and bring me bubble tea, please!

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?



This novel will be a very logical book to follow Roving Pack. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?



bois, femmes, storybooks, dykes, berlin, portland,  pigeons, protocol, D/s, boots.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Neverland might be closer than you think, but will it be as wonderful as you imagined it? What will it cost to stay? Or leave?

Leather Ever After – NYC Release!

It’s hard to believe that the NYC release of Leather Ever After was almost a week ago!  Last Wednesday definitely goes down on the list of best gigs I’ve had the honor to organize, and I couldn’t have asked for a better night to bring this anthology out into the world! Leading up to the event I decided I wanted to do something nice for the contributors who were participating, and I embroidered handkerchiefs for each of the readers that connected to their story.  Can you figure out what stories they correspond to?  You’ll have to read the book to figure it all out!  Thankfully the contributors all thought my crafting was sweet – Lee Harrington even started flagging with his new hanky! 

The reading itself was absolutely fantastic. Bluestockings bookstore was PACKED PACKED PACKED which was especially amazing since it was a wednesday night!  We had a great audience who were ready to hear some great stories.  The NYC release event which was sponsored by Lesbian Sex Mafia  featured readings from Laura Antiniou, Karen Taylor, Mollena Williams, Lee Harrington, DL King and Hosha- talk about a KNOCK OUT LINEUP!  I feel so lucky as an editor that these folks are amongst the contributors and that they were willing to come out and do a release event.  Finding a date this crew could all be together was tricky (which is how we ended up with a release event on a Wednesday night) but the NYC release event  really was (ready for it? ) a fairy tale come true

 

11 years.

I’m sick on my couch with a fever trying to beat this nasty bug that has laid me flat for most of the weekend. I debated if I would write this blog post at all, but I can’t allow myself to let today pass without mentioning what it means to me, especially as outside a cold cold pacific northwest kind of rain is falling. I think most of us kicked out folks, most of us who have runaway, been thrown away, or escaped in someway have a date that sticks in our mind, one that we watch creep closer on the calendar each year. For me it’s February 11th.  There are other days, one in September when I left my birth mother’s home, but that one tends to impact me less.

On Monday February 11th 2002 my entire world changed. My dog trainer who was my first attempt at building my own family, and who I had been living with for six months since leaving my birth mother’s home called me at school and told me never to come back to her home. She had read my carefully hidden journal and discovered that I was queer. I never had a chance to explain myself, though really I don’t think there was anything I could have said. She gave me 72 hour to rehome my dogs, I was homeless, no job, no car, 17 years old.

I had no options. Within 24 hours I went from Sunday at an agility trial – the last time I would compete, to Monday where I was

homeless and worst of all dog less.  I have a few pictures from those years and amongst the few bits of my past that moved from a leaking storage barn and then with me from punk house to punk house was a VHS tape of some recorded runs – mostly from very early competitions. A couple years ago a dear friend who’s also a filmmaker offered to try to digitize the VHS- and it worked (I’d been afraid it was too damaged to save).  Here is a short clip from some early novice runs of Snickers and I – this is the first time I’ve ever publicly shown any of this footage:

 

 

“Did you know that a pack will fight to the death to protect one of its own? They will forgo escape routes to stay behind. They do not leave, no matter the pain. The ultimate trust. They will never give up until their bodies fail. Perhaps I was human after all. I’d saved myself, but failed my pack….” – Kicked Out

 I have a strange relationship to February 11th. It’s both the day that the rural dog agility trainer girl that I was died, and the day that the queer activist was born. Within days I would find my mission to work in queer communities that I hadn’t even known existed. This year, as every year on this day I take stock of how far I’ve come what I have made of myself and what I hope to accomplish in the year to come. This year has brought the release of Roving Pack which in so many feels like the ideal follow-up to my first book Kicked Out and the perfect book to release as my first solo title, there is of course too the release of Leather Ever After. This year brought touring Roving Pack through Europe-something sitting alone and broken a decade ago I never could have imagined would be something I would have accomplished.

This year has also brought with it some special full circle kinds of growth. In the last few months I have “come out” about the work that I am doing with dogs, owning again that working with them is one of my oldest passions, and that I’m ready to take it back after having it ripped from me a decade ago.  Charlotte has been a HUGE inspiration, and I’ve written before how I believe that Snickers brought her into my life for this very purpose, and now as always I’m determined to do that little guy right, to make him proud.

Since the beginning of the year I have been assisting with a local dog agility class, taught by the kind of world-class trainer my agility

obsessed teenage self could never have imagined I would ever have the opportunity to meet, let alone work with. I’m beyond thrilled that I had this kind of opportunity come into my life, and am excited to continue this path. Since adopting Charlotte a year and a half ago I’ve been upping my training game, getting really into teaching her tricks, completing Trick Dog Titles and owning to myself, friends, and chosen family that long term I’m interested in training. I’ve also in the past few months taken the first steps to bring that old dream to life. As mentioned above I’m assisting with local classes and I’m also working to complete my Trick Dog Instructor certification. I’m not sure where this path will lead me, but it feels good to be putting effort and energy in the direction and to be recapturing stolen dreams.

A few months after I lost my dogs I tattooed a paw print for each of them onto my right bicep. A few months after that on the back of my left calf I had inked into me an elite level course map surrounded by the words “I could have missed the pain, but I’d of had to miss the dance” a Garth Brooks quote that has taken 11 years to feel completely true. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t still hard, but I also have made peace with the loss. There were years where thinking of training was simply too painful, and as much as I hate to admit it there are some wounds that for me time has been able to if not heal then solidly scar over.

February 11th is a day that I doubt will ever pass without my noticing. It’s a day where I am perhaps a bit more tender, where I am more gentle with myself, where I hold my dogs a little tighter, tell each member of my chosen family that I love them one extra time.  It is because of dogs that I learned how to build chosen families in the first place, and a more than a decade later what I know most of all is that I am not alone.  It’s been 11 years since I ran at my last trial, 11 years since I lost my boys, 11 years since I sat more alone than I had ever been in the dark on a strange couch too afraid to sleep not knowing if I could survive the night, or the day that would follow without them. 11 years since I promised myself, promised them that if we couldn’t be together that I would tell our story, that I would survive, that I would do whatever I could to do work in the world that would make it right so that others wouldn’t be separated the way we had been.  I’m my own biggest critic, but even I believe that I’ve done those dogs proud, that I’m doing right by their memories

Leather Ever After’s first review!

It’s been a great few days for Leather Ever After!  The anthology had its first reading at the West Coast Bound conference on Sunday (hoping to get one of the authors who was part of the reading to do a little blog post about it!), the NYC release is now only a week away (2/13 at Bluestockings – sponsored by Lesbian Sex Mafia) AND AND AND last night the very first review of Leather Ever After came out!!! Check it out!

“Rather than dressing an old story up in new trappings, we feel as though we have returned to the heart of the myth…”

February 17th – Roving Pack & Kicked Out reading

One of the first things that stands out to people about Kicked Out are the hauntingly gorgeous photographs by Samantha Box that are scattered through the anthology. Sam is based in NYC and has continued to photograph LGBTQ homeless youth building a body of work she calls the “Invisible Project.”  I am thrilled to announce that she and I in partnership with BGSQD (a new popup queer bookstore) will be joining forces for an event this month!

Sam’s work is up in a gallery show at the bookstore this month, and on February 17th I’ll be there talking about Kicked Out and doing a reading from my new novel Roving Pack which is about homeless queer youth. I’m so thrilled to have the opportunity to partner with Sam, and to help highlight her incredible photography. This event is also a particularly exciting opportunity for me to be able to combine my work with Kicked Out and Roving Pack , to in some ways put them in conversation with eachother, and most importantly utilize them to continue dialogue and awareness raising within queer community about the epidemic of LGBTQ youth homelessness!

Sunday February 17th – 7pm
BGSQD 27 Orchard St. NYC

 

my mini-poly interview!

“I  live the kind of queer life I’ve always dreamed of…We are able to hone and focus our relationship on what is best about who we are to each other.”

Some of you might have seen that Sinclair Sexsmith has been doing a series of interviews on their site Sugar Butch about different perspectives and experiences with poly relationships.  I participated, and my mini interview went up this weekend.  check it out!

 

the power of Roving Pack being seen as a book for queer youth

The life of an author is incredibly glamorous. The night before the annual Rainbow Book List- created by the American Library Association to honor recommended LGBTQ books for youth had released I was cleaning up puke and diarrhea from my very old and incredibly beloved little dog (who may or may not be the visual inspiration for the dog on the cover of Roving Pack). I was up again with him at 4am  and so was somewhat groggy when morning actually came and I turned on my computer. I had to rub my eyes a few times when I saw that the annual Rainbow Book List was up….and Roving Pack was on it.

When I first saw the list was up, I was sure that my book wouldn’t be on it.  I say that not out of some kind of self-deprecating lack of confidence in myself, or my writing, but simply because of what sort of list it is, and what kind of book Roving Pack became. Very early in the writing process I was told Roving Pack would not a book for youth. As I was writing I thought a lot about the kind of books I so desperately needed as a queer youth struggling with homelessness, community, gender, and creating family etc. Staying present in that space I endeavored in part, to write the book I would have wanted and needed then. At the same time, I understood that the rules that govern appropriate content for YA fiction and knew they likely could not be bent enough to include a book like this… until they were.

When I was approaching publishers I didn’t pitch Roving Pack as a YA book – both because I wanted to market Roving Pack to an adult readership, and in part because its content especially around gender and leather is more than a little edgy. Thus perhaps you can imagine my surprise when about 5 months ago I was notified that Roving Pack had been nominated by a librarian, for inclusion on The Rainbow Book List. Even as I sent off the requested number of books to the review, I was certain it was for nothing. I think I’m still in shock that we made the list.

A couple of years ago Sherman Alexi wrote an essay Why The Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood and I found myself so drawn to as I was working on finishing Roving Pack. I was thinking a lot at that time about the need for tender brutality in the story, and how important that gritty palpable pain was to the characters I was writing into being, and how important it was to me too. My favorite line from his essay was:

“I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”

Goddamn if that line didn’t slay me. I write because I have to because there are stories that won’t let me do anything but write them. But I also write in an attempt at creating the books I needed when I was a messy youth trying to make sense of myself and the world I found myself in. it’s fucking hard to be a youth. Roving Pack isn’t a sweet community of age book– it’s brutal and raw, and everything I remember about being a teenager. I write raw and dirty stories with messy protagonists, because that’s the reality of the worlds that raised me up. Youth don’t need us as queer adults, as queer authors to sugar coat the brutality of the world that they try to survive in. Never once have I told a youth “it gets better.” That now popular line makes me think back to being a seventeen-year-old homeless queer teenager who on top of loosing my family was verbally and physical assaulted in my high school on a regular basis. It was the “It will get better once you graduate’ messages that made me want to kill myself. I was working on trying to figure out how I was going to get through that day, then I would go to sleep, wake up and try to figure out how I was going to get through the next day. Tell me that months, or years down the line ‘it would get better’ hit every one of my bullshit detectors. For me, and every other queer kid I knew, seeing that far into the future was a privilege we didn’t have.

I would never call myself a YA author in that I don’t write only for youth, however as I write it is my hope that somehow something I write will help hope is that somehow something I write will help at least one queer youth or adult to feel less alone.   I write the stories that I needed, the stories that reflect the worlds that as a youth I called home. Me and my people, weren’t clean, polite, or pretty to look at and * that’s * the world I want to bring to life on the page.

When the news hit yesterday that Roving Pack had made the rainbow book list an old friend (who I’ve known since I was a teenager) shared the exciting news in her facebook and said:

“I can’t imagine how different things might have been if a book like Roving Pack had been in my HS’ library… I wish we could send copies back to younger selves and be like “there will even be literature that is both recognized AND honest about all of this”

Roving Pack is my gift back. A kind of memorial to a gutter punk queer youth world that in some way comes live every time someone opens one of its 358 pages. When I was in high school started my high schools first GSA and was threatened with violence daily in the halls of my hs. I was kicked out of home; I lost my family and community and read a hidden battered copy of Am I Blue? hiding it under my mattress and them shoved it into my backpack when I left home that final time. That book was important to me simply because it existed and was the first time I’d seen anything “gay” in print, but still I couldn’t see myself or the queer world I was starting to find  in those pages. Kicked Out and now Roving Pack are my attempt at giving back- to reflect the world I knew in hopes that somehow these stories get into the hands of folks who need them most.

Three days after I was kicked out I went to my public library looking at every book shelved under “homosexual ” looking for advice on how to live through the experience of loosing home/family/everything in order to be queer. I didn’t find the answers I was looking for, what I left that day with was a commitment to make those answers for those that would follow. To have Roving Pack appear on the Rainbow Book list means so much to me in part because I know that it will help it get onto the shelves of libraries and somewhere someone

 

Roving Pack makes the Rainbow Book List!!!!

I’m working on a more indepth blog post talking about what this honor means to me, but I couldn’t help but share the news with all of you now.  This morning I got the news that Roving Pack has been included in the American Library Association’s Rainbow Book List!!! This is a list created annually, that puts forth what the committee suggests as the best LGBTQ books for youth! I am overjoyed and incredibly honored that Roving Pack made this list- and thrilled that it will help get this novel into the hands of more people!

Check out the full list here

Kicked Out available on Kindle!

Kicked Out will always be my first baby – it’s the book that I cut my teeth on, it will always be the first book that I pushed out into the world. Beyond that it became something so much bigger than me, truly a community project. I wake up everyday and am so grateful that I had the opportunity to help bring this book to life.

This is one of my favorite times of year – royalties time. One of the things that I remain the most proud of about Kicked Out is the way that I was able to work with the books publisher to ensure that all the contributors receive a share of the royalties. The reality is that books don’t make anyone a lot of money, but it’s never been about financial return for me, or any of the contributors. My excitement about the Kicked Out contributors being paid isn’t because I think the small checks are making a dramatic difference in their financial security, but because it’s a symbol of their ownership of this project.

The power of Kicked Out has nothing to do with the awards and honors it has received. Kicked Out is a book that readers have written me letters saying they carried with them as they ran away from abusive parents, it is a book that has helped formerly homeless youth who have hidden their past feel seen for the first time, and it has begun a now international community dialogue about the epidemic of LGBTQ youth homelessness.

This year royalty time also brings an unrelated and exciting announcement. Kicked Out is now available for purchase in Amazon Kindle edition! I am thrilled because although I’m a dinosaur and prefer my books in print form, I know that for many kindle is the most accessible (for many reasons) way to read a book. My hope is that Kicked Out being available in this new format will ensure it gets into even more hands who can learn, grow, or be healed through its pages! Please load Kicked Out on your kindle and then help spread the word about the new format, and about the anthology itself. If you’ve read Kicked Out please consider leaving a review on amazon or good reads – support from readers makes a HUGE difference to small press titles like Kicked Out and help us to get it into the hands of more readers.

Sassafras & Roving Pack at Saints and Sinners!

One of the things I am most excited about this spring is having the chance to not only attend but actually be part of the programming at the 10th Annual Saints and Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival!  I’ve heard incredible things about Saints and Sinners for yaears and am thrilled to have the opportunity to go down to New Orleans this year.  At the festival I’ll be reading from Roving Pack and speaking about the power of anthologies to provide a space for marginalized queer voices to be heard.  While at the conference I’m also getting the chance to participate in two different master classes – one by Justin Toreres and another by one of the authors who has most influenced me both personally and as a writer – Dorothy Allison!

I sat down with the folks of Saints and Sinners festival to talk about Roving Pack, writing advice, the transformative power of storytelling, and the books that have most inspired me.  Click here to check out the interview!