Sassafras Patterdale's Blog, page 17

Learning to take it in

People love Roving Pack. I think sometimes friends are surprised by how shocked I am at this news, but I really am – and not in a self deprecating fishing for compliments sort of way. I wrote Roving Pack because I needed to, because these were the characters that I couldn’t get out of my mind, the story that didn’t let me focus on anything else until I had it on paper. One of the things that has been my private work with the help of those closest to me in the last three months since Roving Pack released (OMG how has it already been 3 months?!?!) has been learning to take in the compliments, learning to not just listen but truly hear the ways in which this book has impacted readers.

I didn’t expect such a steep learning curve in this department, but the experience with Kicked Out was so radically different because it wasn’t my book.  Kicked Out  truly in everyway belongs to each of the contributors, the family of writers who came together and partnered with me to make this book, this dream real. Every brilliant review, every honor we received belongs to us collectively. Learning to shift my language, my understanding to take in the praise that has already come for Roving Pack has been an intense one for me. I don’t have it all figured out yet, but am getting there. A pivotal point for me came waiting with Toni Amato for his bus to take him back to Boston after Roving Pack’s NYC release. I was being dismissive about something connected to the book, and he turned to me and said “There is a difference between being humble, and dismissing a readers experience.”  His comment shook me because before that moment I’d never thought of it that way.

A core component of my work is very much about creating books that tell a story that I needed (maybe still do) to read. The books that I am most drawn to, the ones that I have carried in my backpack and read over and over again, are the books that depict other worlds and experiences that in someway mirror my own. I think a big part of what touched me so intensely about what Toni said, was thinking about how I would feel if the author of a book that really intimately touched me, the kind of book where I was able to see myself reflected, especially a part of me or my life that I’d felt alone with, or had struggled and found tricky to understand or express to the world. If one of the authors who wrote a book that touched me so deeply then dismissed their work, dismissed the book, I know that I would be crushed, silenced. It never really hit me, even as the initial positive reviews and the brilliant endorsement blurbs came in, it hadn’t really hit me that a reader would feel that way about Roving Pack, about my book. The idea of dismissing my work and silencing someone who only moments before felt connected to my work is essentially the opposite of what I actually hope to accomplish in the world through my work.

I remember really vividly about this time last year when I was going into serious edits with Roving Pack still in the final bits of communication with a few publishers and finalizing the decision to go it on my own with this book that I had some panic about the amount f leather that was written into the book.  Toni who edited the book every step of the way and really helped to guide and direct my writing process gave me some of the best writing advice I could have been given: “This is your time to edge play. Write the most dangerous story you can.”   I followed that advice and didn’t censor myself or my vision for this book even though I feared the result might be a text too edgy, too much that would be off-putting to readers and reviewers. Much to my own surprise the themes I was most nervous about putting out in this novel – leather, the really complicated portrayals of gender are exactly the aspects of the book that it seems readers have been most drawn to, that they were the most hungry for.

Speaking of learning to take it in, this past week or so has been an exciting time as I look at the response to the novel – I appeared on Tristan Taormino’s “Sex Out Loud” radio show and we had a great conversation about gender and creativity and really dove into the novel – the show is now up for podcast streaming here.   Roving Pack also received an incredible review from trans author Everett Maroon on his blog – where Roving Pack  is compared to being a contemporary reminiscent of a Stone Butch Blues. Not sure I could get a better review than that.

In the midst of these great reviews this I also got some of the most touching reader letters I could imagine.  As an author I am humbled by people feeling so drawn in by the book, by the story that they took the time to write me a letter, drop me a private facebook message, or send me an email to talk about what the book has meant to them. I wrote Roving Pack  most of all for the genderfuckers, the leather folk, the punks, and the queers who are building their own families and figuring out how to survive. These are the very kinds of folks who are messaging me, telling me how in the pages of Roving Pack for the first time they have seen themselves, their families, and their lives. There is no higher honor I could receive than knowing in the pages of this novel I helped someone to feel that they were not alone, that there are others like them, that there is a home out there somewhere.

I am coming to understand that my job is not only to write these stories, but also to give the space for people to experience them. I’ve been so braced for the fight – I expected such backlash to Roving Pack that I never planned for what would happen when people liked it. Readers are connecting to Roving Pack in ways I couldn’t even let myself dream of. I’m proud of that, scared, but proud and incredibly humbled. Roving Pack matters to someone, to more someone’s than I ever thought possible. I’ve come to learn that it is my responsibility to move beyond my discomfort and own that, and honor the experience that my readers are having.

 

Femme: Gender vs. Sexuality

modified Lisa Frank to look like me

At times I struggle with being everything, with the integration of all of who I am, and all the ways I exist in the world: leather boy (in some ways first and foremost), author, dog person (been doing a lot of growth, healing, thinking about that and hope to write more about it really soon), transgender/genderqueer, femme. FEMME.

I’m feeling really amazed at everything so much of my life right now, how I feel as though I’ve fallen into place and make sense in the world. In the past few years there were significant chunks of time where I’ve struggled with connecting to “femme” as being part of my identity. I had started to see femme as something I did – a gender presentation that worked for me, but allowed myself to skirt (ha!) around how I’d consciously chosen femme as a gender, and how that made it part of how I see myself in the world.

Yesterday I was home being sick and slug like on the couch I began putting into words for myself the importance of practicing what I’ve preached for over a decade around gender and sexuality existing on different axis points. For me a big part of continuing to claim and feel hailed by femme has been experiencing it as a gender, as my gender, without it having to be about sex, sexuality or anything on that spectrum. Ultimately at this point in my life I’m pretty uninterested in sex and that’s made femme a bit of a struggle for me because I’d come to see femme as being a lot about attraction both the object of, and being focused on the seduction of others. Those are both themes that I’m pretty intentionally divorced from in my life, and as such there were points where I questioned my claim to owning femme a gender.

In the last two years, but especially in the last year I’ve really come into myself. I no longer carry hear the constant voice of  “I wish I was XYZ kind of a fancy/pinup/grownup femme,” even the gender dysphoria that always left me questioning the decisions I’d made around going off T the last time (over 5 years ago now) has been silent in ways I never anticipated. Once I’d pretty substantially made my way through those self judgments and embraced the ways I actually exist in the world I was left feeling more comfortable in my life, and in my body than I ever have been in my entire life. I’d never go so far as to say that I’m embodied, but I do feel like I’m…. I was going to say at peace, but I think truce is a more accurate word, but it’s a solid truce with treaties signed and where soldiers have dropped their weapons in order to build. While all of this has gone on, I’ve in some ways let the gender stories get quiet and just kept doing gender in this way that leaves me feeling as close to embodied as I think I can get – rocking my strange little leather boy, crusty femme aesthetic that I chose, claimed, transitioned into when I left FTM/transfag/etc.

There is a way in which for me femme (right or wrong) at points has become conflated with attraction, sex appeal, seduction etc which is where a rub has felt particularly tricky for me because those are all things that beyond not being important to me, are actually something I’m entirely uninterested in. When I came out as femme eight years ago, when I began growing my hair, wearing dresses and stockings and lipstick it had nothing to do with being seen as attractive – quite the contrary it was about feeling as close to right as possible in my body, which quite frankly has rarely been about sex!  When I was butch/boi/visibly gedernonconforming, I knew how to work seduction- how to get someone to fuck me. I knew I was hot, or rather even if I didn’t believe it I knew other people thought I was hot – and really that was the most important thing to me at the time sex was a bit of a stopgap. I didn’t have to be in my body (and usually wasn’t) and yet it was a way of getting as close to surrender as I could, a way of getting close to someone else, when really what I was craving more than anything was D/s, as pack, was leather focused family.

I’ve done a fair amount of writing about coming to terms with being leather focused vs. sex focused – some here on the blog but also fictional pieces where characters are grappling with some of these themes – one of which will appear in Laura Antinious’s upcoming fanfiction Marketplace anthology titled No Safewords. I think the newer challenge for me has been to find ways that feel authentic, that feel right to start talking about gender, and specifically my gender again, and to do so in a way that puts femme back in conversation with my life. I’m excited to begin again talking about the way femme actually works for me and the way I’ve always expressed it- big stompy boots, weird children’s t-shirts and a playfulness that is far deeper than aesthetic wrappings and exists outside the sex-centric pressures both on a broader societal level, but also within our queer communities. I’m looking forward to writing more about the way femme works for me, but also about bringing these conversations into my creative writing. In January I begin seriously working on writing my new novel Lost Boi which I already know will be grappling with themes of queer femininity!

 

Slaying Fear, Being Out & Rise Of The Guardians

It’s not often that I talk about mainstream media artifacts on my blog, but sometimes something catches me so intensely I can’t help it.   Kestryl and I first saw the ads for the Dreamworks movie “Rise of the Guardians” when we were on our Europe Tour – I think it was London or Paris where the tube stations were COVERED in ads for the film (one of these days I’ll do more blogging about how incredible the tour was and all the things that keep flooding through my mind). ANYWAY I was more than a little enamored by the image of a Santa clause with “Naughty” and “Nice” forearm tattoos – perhaps enamored isn’t quite the right word, lets just say that hit just about every one of my kinks, and I knew that it was a film I wanted to see.

Daddy surprised me by taking me to the film on the Friday after Thanksgiving. We’d headed into Manhattan to take a peek at a holiday craft market and were about to head home when we walked past a theater and ze suggested we see if the film was playing, and it was, and we went, and my world was changed.  Ok I know that sounds dramatic, and I know it’s only a cartoon but seriously this film hit all of my buttons in the very best of ways. It was centered around everything that I truly believe in, and was brilliantly crafted without one thing I would have changed.

I don’t want to give too much away because I really think it’s a film worth experiencing in the theater (I skipped the 3D version because that shit gives me a headache). For me the core of the film was about the power of belief, how damaging it can be for you not to be believed in, but also the power of belief itself, and finding and staying true to one’s center- that thing about you that is core and consuming and defines you.  Needless to say, the timing of this film’s release and my watching it couldn’t have been more ideal. I’ve blogged before how I wrote Roving Pack all through what I think were the brutalist waves of my Saturn Return, it was an interesting experience and also a profoundly powerful one and I can’t think of a better time for me to have been writing that book. It was the book I needed to write at that particular moment and  I’m painfully proud not only of it, but of myself and the self-work I did to be able to write the sort of novel I knew Roving Pack had the potential to become.

Related, I’ve been thinking a lot about littleness, the decisions that I’ve made around how public I have or haven’t been about leather in the broadest sense, but then too about what it means for me to identify as little. For a long time there were all these arbitrary lines I drew – saying that I identify as a leather person, but not saying that I was little, all the while posting on my social networking pictures of all kinds of “little things.”  Somewhere along the way (about the time I finished the first major edit of Roving Pack) I stopped being so afraid and came back out of the little closet (what drove me into it again in the first place is a whole different story) and began living more openly. Also central to the plot of Rise of the Guardians is the recognition that fear is the darkest enemy we will ever fight, but that we must fight  - see again, incredibly timely movie. Ultimately, there is no way that I could have moved forward with hiding this piece of who I am – so I stopped trying to and I started talking more openly about my life, my world and that led me to this place of realizing the power and value in naming exactly who and what I am. Although the novel is about so much more than this, I think on a personal level I needed to write Roving Pack in order to claim a public leather identity. By the same hand, I think I needed to edit Leather Ever After to reclaim a public little identity. I don’t believe in accidents. I know that I’m drawn to create certain work that pushes me in the ways I need to be challenged even if I don’t realize it until after the book is finished.

A week ago some dear friends who consider themselves my fairy godmothers mentioned to me a conversation they had with their child.  She’s six and asked her moms why I was “grownup and still played with toys” and “why Santa came to visit” me (they shared these things with her from my facebook).  When I first read that part of their message I panicked a little bit, worried and unsure of what was coming next.  Then,  my fairy godmother told me that she replied that “Sassafras wasn’t really been able to be a kid when ze was growing up, so ze gets to be one now. “ Her daughter – who I think clearly is very wise thought about what her mom had said, and then replied “that it seems fair” to her.

I almost started crying when I read that message because it felt like the most intensely appropriate way for someone to describe me.  Now of course before anyone starts writing an angry comment, I have (and do) offer more complicated analysis about how I don’t see being little as a direct product of abuse. Littleness feels like the most consistent and present part of me, I believe it’s who I would have been no matter what. However, it was a remarkable moment to watch someone outside the leather community really get me, and truly and completely embody what it means to be an ally.

The aspect of the interaction with my Fairy Godmothers was so intense because there was for me the realization that I was truly being seen, without the fetishized assumptions. For me being little isn’t a fetish, nor is it a kink. I bristle at those terms being ascribed to my littleness not because I think there would be something wrong if it was but because for me it isn’t. It’s my core, my center. The Rise Of The Guardians is all about finding who you really are and then understanding and claiming your center – what guides you. Most of all at my core I’m guided by whimsy. In my life that translates into the ability to look at broken glass on the sidewalk and see fairy dust, to believe that all around me is magic, and to constantly seek adventure

I find it so funny when people think living in a 24/7 power dynamic must be some kind of sexual fantasy playground. For me, leather is about many many things – packs, pacts, commitments, community, growth, and magic but rarely sex. I’m in a non-sexual primary relationship. I know that I have the most sexual compatibility with other leather boys, but even that isn’t a regular part of my life (something I never thought would be something that felt good). For me littleness is a way of life, the most authentic part of myself and where I’m most at peace. A couple of weeks ago I wrote on my facebook  “remarkable, is the feeling of being confident in my creative work: past, present, and future. to not just say but know that I’m on the right path- doing what I’m supposed to be doing, and have that coincide with unprecedented silence in the dysphoria department #gender #queer #writing #SaturnReturn”

The last decade + of queerness and leather has been an incredible journey. I don’t pretend I’ve got it all figured out but I really feel that in the past couple of years I’ve done substantial growth and so many puzzle pieces have fallen together, and perhaps even most importantly I’ve stopped being ashamed of my center, stopped wishing I could also want a different (read: boring grownup) kind of relationship stopped wishing I could somehow be different. I can’t wait to keep growing, and seeing what books I’m drawn to create

Also  – you should check out this video where I share my new favorite Christmas book (that we found in Europe on tour) with you:  THE DINOSAUR THAT POOPS CHRISTMAS!

 

 

Roving Pack a best LGBT book of 2012 !

It’s hard to believe that we’re already nearing the end of 2012!  It’s been an amazing year, and I’m thrilled that again this year I got the chance to participate in the annual Band of Thebes best books of the year report where queer authors pick what were our favorite books of the previous year.  This year I picked Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal”  seriously seriously tremendous book and incase you missed it I even had the chance to interview her this year for Lambda Literary.

There are tons of incredible books that made this years list picked by 87 queer authors!  I was thrilled and super honored to see Roving Pack made the list!  It was picked by the  spectacular Mattilda Berstein Sycamore!!! She said:

“Lowrey deftly explores the intoxication and viciousness of peer pressure in young queer lives, showing how the pack mentality required for belonging in our new communities often leaves us stranded.”

Friday Nov. 30th Sassafras will be a guest on Tristan Taormino’s Sex Out Loud Radio Show!

Listen LIVE Friday

at 5:00 pm PST/8:00 pm EST

Tristan interviews queer storyteller, author, and educator Sassafras Lowrey about hir novel, Roving Pack, set in an underground world of homeless queer teens. Lowrey will discuss the process of writing the book, responses from the community, as well as give a sneak peek to hir next collection, Leather Ever After, an anthology of kinky fairy tales. Tune in this Friday, November 30th at 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT and find out all the ways to listen here!

Give the gift of Roving Pack! order Before December 10 and get FREE buttons!

 

 Are you starting your holiday shopping?  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”

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

“Date: December 25, 2002

It’s so weird not to be able to go to QYRC. I get why they have to be closed and shit, but for those of us without fucking family it really would be nice to have somewhere to go. Last night a new dyke moved in down the hall. I was surprised to see anyone moving in the day before Christmas! She was hella cute in her overalls and thermal shirt and bright red hair…..”

 

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

 

Give the gift of Roving Pack! order Before December 1 and get FREE buttons!

 

 Are you starting your holiday shopping?  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”

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

“Date: December 25, 2002

It’s so weird not to be able to go to QYRC. I get why they have to be closed and shit, but for those of us without fucking family it really would be nice to have somewhere to go. Last night a new dyke moved in down the hall. I was surprised to see anyone moving in the day before Christmas! She was hella cute in her overalls and thermal shirt and bright red hair…..”

To find out what happens you’ll just have to read the book!  Order Roving Pack between now and December 1st 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  

with

I want to put a special message for the current and former homeless LGBTQ youth reading this and struggling today, it’s the same message I’ve sent out before on holidays that are all about “family”

You are not alone. Let me repeat that again. You are not alone. If you are in the states you know that today 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 eachother, reclaim the holiday with chosen family if you can, and remember that you’re not alone.

I made this video a few years ago and feel the need to repost every year. All the current and former homeless queer youth I know (myself included) get pretty sick of EVERYONE – person at the grocery store, neighbors, co-workers and even other queer folks who should know better asking this question…

Are you going home for Thanksgiving?
by: kickedout

COMING SOON: Leather Ever After!

As you might have figured out by now, I tend to always be busy with one thing or another and although Roving Pack has released I haven’t really slowed down at all. One of the projects that has been keeping me incredibly busy has been my newest anthology Leather Ever After which is a collection of BDSM focused retellings of fairy tales!

I started working on it in the late winter and it’s been a lot of fun. The book contains the stories of some of my favorite kink writers and together the book is really smart, dirty and really organically showcases a lot of the diversity in Leather communities.  I’m also downright giddy that Laura Antoniou wrote the foreword for the book! I came up in leather reading The Marketplace and to think over a decade later that she’s someone I consider a buddy and that she was willing to introduce the anthology is incredibly special to me.

Thanks to the hard work of the contributors (and some tetras with my own schedule) I was able to get the manuscript completed early and sent off to Ravenous Romance right before I left for my Europe Tour nearly a full month ahead of the planned publication schedule!  This means that now as I’m just starting to actually recover from jet lag I’ve had exciting bits of news and pieces of the anthology appearing in my inbox back from the publisher! It’s a little bit hard to believe how smoothly things have gone, and how quickly the book will be with us! We’re looking at an ebook release before the end of the year and the print edition very early in 2013!  Don’t worry I’ll keep you all updated as I have more solid dates about when you can get your copy!

Over the long weekend I get to be curled up in my cozy little office going through the copy edited manuscript! I love this part of the book process where everything really comes together and solidifies into something that looks like a *real * book! I also got to have my very first peek at the cover art!  I shared it with all of the contributors last night, and I’m really excited that now I can share it with all of you!!!!!

Roving Pack Nominated for the Rainbow Book List!

Of all the praise, support, and honors that Kicked Out has received one of the things I’m most proud of was it having been listed as a top 10 book on the American Library Association Rainbow Book List (top LGBTQ books for youth) and the Over The Rainbow Book List (top LGBTQ books for adults).  Libraries have played a pivotal role in my life as a queer person, and more specifically as a queer author. They are a place of safety, knowledge and access – for many the first and safest way of finding LGBTQ books.

This week I’m THRILLED, honored,  and humbled to be able to tell you that Roving Pack has made the nominations list for the American LIbrary Association’s Rainbow Book List - LGBTQ focused books for children and teens!!!!  We won’t know until the end of January during the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting when they debate the merit of the nominated books and finalize the list of titles to be included but regardless of what gets decided,  just to have had Roving Pack be externally nominated for inclusion is a tremendous honor for me as an author!