Sassafras Patterdale's Blog, page 21
August 29, 2012
pre-order Roving Pack- don’t miss out on these special one-inch buttons!
Folks have been asking about the one-inch button set that you will get when you pre-order your copies Roving Pack so I wanted to be sure to get them up here on the website so that everyone could see. They are made by hand, by me with my button making machine left over from my zinester days and using the amazing cover art that KD Diamond designed for Roving Pack. Everyone who gets their order in this week – did I mention that pre-orders end on September 1st? will get this little triad of buttons featuring boots, our narrator’s dog Orbit, and some genderf*ck art from the fictional youth center wall !
I’ve been walking around with a set on my messenger bag for the last couple of months, and they definitely are a conversation starter — especially those wee little boots! 
August 27, 2012
Roving Pack and my Saturn Return
In the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of introspective work, thinking about the novel, my writing career (a phrase I still am shocked applies to me), the amazing experiences I’ve been blessed to have and trying to envision what the future holds as I realize just how soon Roving Pack will be released in the world! In so many ways Roving Pack has truly become the book of my Saturn Return. I’m not the biggest astrology buff and don’t buy into this kinda stuff 100% but enough of it rings true for me that I can’t fully write it off as carryover from my woo woo lesbian days. The quick and dirty version on the Saturn Return in case you’re not familiar (thanks Wikipedia)
Now I would say that when I sit down and really take an inventory of my life, I feel that I made that transition from youth to adulthood years ago long before the start of my Saturn Return, and because of circumstances much earlier than many people do. Yet, there are ways in which this astrological phenomenon and the meanings behind it have coincided with the writing/publishing/release of Roving Pack and knocked me for a little bit of a loop – in the best of ways because well, that’s the kind of introspective edge play that I grow the most from and somewhat get off on.
In a lot of ways, Roving Pack is about honoring where I came from – the queer punk worlds of my late teens that really held me and raised me up. It’s about documenting those worlds and communities and a period of time that doesn’t exist anymore. In this book I wanted to ensure that who and what we were would never be forgotten and be memorialized in the only way I know how – through words and stories. Unintentionally, and unexpectedly (thanks Saturn!) Roving Pack also became my private and very personal goodbye to those times/places as well as to who I was—the lost, lonely, searching, angry punk boi who wanted nothing more than to be loved and was willing to compromise himself in just about anyway imaginable to get that.
It’s funny – I’m a little hesitant to be public about this for fear of it being misunderstood and misinterpreted, but in the last few months I contended with some of the most intense bouts of dysphoria I’ve experienced in probably eight years. I think there are a variety of factors that combined, but the primary one was my own internal processing of completing Roving Pack and preparing for it to go out into the community. I’ve had a very complicated gender history, certain pieces of which mirror the gender path of Roving Pack’s main character/narrator. There was a point in the late spring/early summer where I was finishing the book while riding the waves of some bitter nostalgia as I remembered the intensity of that time/place where literally everything we were doing was new, risky and uncertain. As I finished Roving Pack I found myself looking through old photographs, both as research as I polished and finished the novel, but it went deeper than that.
It sounds funny that seven+ years after I intentionally and thoughtfully claimed femme as a gender presentation (a more conscious and intentional gender than any of the previous identities that came before) and yet there is always a piece of me that will miss the trans man/butch-ish/boi (boi = gender as apposed to boy = leather that I still identify as) that was so central to who I was. There will probably always be days where I miss shooting T, though thankfully those days are fewer than the number of days when I was on T that I wished for a different path, that I longed to feel safe enough to be pretty. I surf these waves of gender nostalgia periodically. I know that they tend to be their strongest when I feel invisible in my community- like when I remember how few people here in NYC remember that boi that I was, or when despite the trans sign tattooed on my arm I remain closeted about the gender paths I’ve walked. Early this summer was different and more intense than those normal waves. I had just finished the final edit of the novel and moved into production and the nostalgia and dysphoria became much more tangible, and I’ve come to since come to understand it as a subconscious fight against the goodbyes I finally needed to say to those worlds, and to who I’d been.
Click the main character in Roving Pack and I are not one in the same. It’s true that he has what was my boi/transman/butch name, but we are not the same person. The book is definitely not a memoir, and yet, the line between fact and fiction is always blurry, especially as the years pass and we become different people. Roving Pack is fiction, and yet for me on a personal level it is more than that. This is an intimate book, a painful one, but also a beautiful story that doesn’t wrap up neatly or cleanly. I’m immensely proud of this novel, and both thrilled and humbled by the ways in which people have already begun connecting with it. Roving Pack is so much bigger than my past, my story, and me. Yet, at the immense risk of being misinterpreted as self-indulgent it is also my gift to Click – not just the very scared lost boi I once was, but the character he became in this book, and all the lost bois like him.
The thing that Click wants more than anything is to be wanted, loved, cherished, and protected. I spent my late teens desperately seeking family and wanting above all else a home. It took me a long time to get those things, to have that life that I would fantasize about in crumbling basement rooms. I couldn’t find this kind of love and family then, it’s something I’ve been lucky enough to build over the years- it’s that family/home/foundation that made it possible for me to write Roving Pack in the first place, and now because of that through the pages of this book I can give it to him. In the pages of Roving Pack I wrote that little lost boi a world as bitterly confusing and dangerous as the world I’d known. I resisted all temptations to wrap his story up neatly in a happy ending. I couldn’t write a good book and also keep him safe from the painful things he needed to experience, but through the book itself I could finally and forever give him a home.
I unintentionally began writing the stories that would become Roving Pack as I first edged into my Saturn Return. Now as I prepare for the release of Roving Pack at the peak of Saturn’s Return, I think I got the message. For me, the Saturn return isn’t about becoming an adult – I did that in my own Peter Pan ‘Never grow up’ sort of way years ago. For me this transition (ha!) is about actually saying goodbye to that boi, to that world, and once I fully realized that, owned and celebrated it, the weight of dysphoria lifted. Roving Pack is in so many ways the product/manifestation/embodiment of my Saturn Return. My Saturn Return is about forgiving myself for making the choices, and forgiving myself for having been lucky enough to have the opportunities that brought me to the life I have now, and it is about finally (I hope) being able to say goodbye to the guilt about having survived.
Welcome home Click.
August 25, 2012
LIT! – NYC
LIT! is an evening of queer writers giving you their best fiction, poetry, and embarrassing life stories, while most of us drink in the name of art.
Hosted by Allison Moon.
Featuring readings by Mollena Williams, Sassafras Lowrey, Jennie Gruber, Brandon Lacy Campos, kd diamond, Brandon Bartling, and more to come!
Doors open at 8pm. Show starts at 8:30pm
Pre-order tickets now! http://litnyc.eventbrite.com/
** This event is open to all 21+ folks: drinkers, non-drinkers, queers, non-queers, writers, non-writers and anyone in between. Come enjoy great literature and great company! **
August 20, 2012
happy 10th birthday Mercury!!!
the day we met
It’s hard for me to believe but this weekend my little angel turned 10 years old this past weekend. Mercury is the little dog who literally saved my life. As a puppy he gave me a reason to wake up, keep a roof over my head, and took care of me. He’s been with me through my numerous gender changes; pre-T, on T, off T, back on, and then finally off and so many more complicated nuances. This little dog moved with me from basement to shack again and again and we spent everyday together at the queer youth drop in center where he got the best socialization imaginable. We came into each others life as I was grappling with trying to figure out
Mercury has seen me through some of the most turbulent years of my life, watched as I flitted in and out of bad relationships, and was there as I built a life with my partner 8 years ago. I adopted Mercury at six weeks old and he’s been my constant companion and little shadow ever since. This little dog has seen me from lost punk boy to the life of a stable queer author with a close chosen family that when he and I came together I couldn’t even dream of. When my little angel and I met I was so lost, wounded and raw. In the year leading up to us finding each other I’d lost my parents, home, birth family, most of my friends, become homeless, had my heart broken and ground into the pavement by my first lover and most significantly lost the dogs who meant the most to me in the entire world. When I met Mercury I wasn’t sure that I could love a dog again, truth be told I wasn’t even sure if I was capable of
baby punks
loving anyone. I definitely didn’t believe I was worthy of being loved, nor did I know how to let my armor down enough to let anyone love me. Then I met this little (at the time) three pound dog who was intensely focused on keeping me safe. Mercury taught me how to love, and trust, and he put me back together and built me up.
Mercury’s been my constant companion, my little shadow through so much. Now at ten he’s pretty grey around the edges, and moves a little slower but we’re as inseparable as we’ve ever been. When I began writing Roving Pack – which is somewhat (not so) loosely based on the punk boi I was in the early 2000’s I initially wrote the book without the main character having a canine sidekick, but there was just something missing. This last year during the most radical revision to the novel I finally stopped fighting, and included the character of Orbit a dog whose face now graces the front cover and who is based on little Mercury. With the edition of one little dog the book came together, my characters leapt from the page. It feels extra special to have memorialized him as a character in Roving Pack just in time for his 10th birthday.
Here’s to another decade little man, lets see how many adventures we can have…..
p.s. Mercury says: “please celebrate my birthday by pre-ordering Roving Pack– my face is on the cover AND is one of the special edition pre-order buttons”www.RovingPack.com
August 16, 2012
writing the dangerous stuff….
A couple of years ago, early in the process of having realized that these funny little embellished/altered/shifted memory based stories I’d been playing with for a months was going to be a book I got some of the best advice I’ve ever received as a writer. I was meeting with Toni Amato my writing editor who pushed me HARD in the ways I needed to be pushed as I wrote Roving Pack (seriously writing buddies – got a project you’re working on? Hire him). Anyway, I was crashing hard having a lot of fears and concerns about what the response to a book like Roving Pack would be. Kicked Out is a hard book to follow, and the novel is very very different. I was worried about some of the stories I wanted to tell – the really queer shit, the perverted stuff, the way gender works (and doesn’t) and I was nervous that those stories would be too much….. too much for publishers, and maybe even too much for readers. He told me:
“Write the most dangerous stories you can imagine.”
I remember really vividly that moment when Toni told me to forget about the anticipated judgments and just write, but to write dangerously. It was early in the writing process for what would eventually become this book. It was at a point where I was trying to get my voice back, a voice that had been controlled and molded by publishers and editors I’d been working with on previous projects who had a vision for who I was as a writer, where I was going, and how my work should/would/could sound—— I hated it. I’m an edge player by nature, and Toni knew that. I thrive on intensity; I’m best when being pushed (by myself and others). My writing is at its best it edgeplays, when it’s intense and hits the sweet spot of evenly matched grit and glitter. I honestly feel that Roving Pack is simultaneously the most edgy thing I’ve written to date, and also the best.
Toni telling me to forget the self-censorship and to write the most dangerous stories I could was a huge wake-up call for me. He said that there would be time for editing, that I could shift and edit and remove stories that felt too dangerous later, but for the moment the most important thing was to get them onto the page. I wrote his message on a post-it note and kept it hung above my writing desk. By the time Roving Pack was finished, edited, edited again, reworked, and edited further I had made the decision to keep every single dangerous story. In the end, Roving Pack is a far edgier novel than I could even have anticipated when I began working on it, and it’s a far better book because of the risks I took around style, and form, but especially around content.
Yesterday an old friend told me “some people birth babies, you birth books.” It’s true. Writing a book and seeing it through publication feels very much like giving birth, and is no less intense the second time around. Roving Pack is it’s own book, made possible in so many ways because of the experience I’ve had with Kicked Out but unique and distinct with a voice and life all its own. I’m so excited to watch and see where it goes in the world!
P.S. Earlier this week I went public on this blog about how important pre-orders are to me as an indie author who’s invested a lot of money in this project. I’m humbled and thrilled that the week the number of pre-orders has literally doubled! There is still a long way to go for me to break even on this project and if you’re thinking you’ll be purchasing Roving Pack at some point, now would be a great time to do it! I see more profit from pre-orders than I will once the book hits the retail channels, not to mention you’ll get to have it on your bookshelf before it hits the stores! It will come signed/dedicated right to your door with special edition one-inch buttons based on the cover art!
August 13, 2012
Please Pre-Order!!!!
I’m so excited about the release of Roving Pack it’s not even funny!!!
When I made the decision to publish Roving Pack out of our own imprint I also made the decision to go out of pocket to do so. I was committed to doing right by this book, to not allow it to be fundamentally altered by publishers who wanted me to tone down the leather/gender content. Part of doing it right also meant putting out a professional product. I might be a strong writer, but I knew there were many things I couldn’t do. I was committed to hiring the best artists/editors etc. in the community that I could find to work with me on this book. I had an editorial team of beta readers, a editor who pushed me hard me through the entire writing process, a pro copyeditor, an artist who created the art for the cover, a layout person etc. It was important to me to hire queers in our community and to actually pay them for their services.
Authors, especially indie queer authors don’t make a lot of money from the books that we write. Once the book hits Amazon and other outlets, the amount of money per-book I make will be somewhat minimal. That’s part of why the pre-orders are so important. I had a picnic yesterday with some friends who encouraged me to be transparent with my readers/community about why the pre-orders are so important and as awkward as I feel about it, I know that they are right. I am beyond grateful for all of the support that the community has been giving me surrounding Roving Pack. I’m still in shock at the amazing blurbs the book has been getting from the best of the best in the queer literature world – check them out: http://www.rovingpack.com/blurbs/ I can’t wait for y’all to have the book in your hands!
If you’re planning to purchase a copy of Roving Pack for yourself, as a gift, for your old GSA, etc etc. etc.. I’m asking for you to do it now directly from me, because these pre-orders are really my time to recoup the money that I put into publishing the book. When you purchase books as part of the pre-orders not only are you going to get a signed copy of Roving Pack before hit hits the shelves, and special release edition one inch buttons based on the cover art by KD Diamond, you’ll also be supporting me as an indie author!
Pre-order directly from me online at: www.RovingPack.com
xoxo
Sassafras
August 3, 2012
not ashamed to admit the internet can make me cry.
Tonight I stumbled up onto the “Book Recommendations” at In Other Words Feminist Bookstore – my first home bookstore, the place that gave me my first writing award (i’ve written a bit about them before when I got to tour there a year and a half ago with Kicked Out). The posted recommendations come from local Portland book clubs, and organizations — one of which is SMYRC the local queer youth center– the organization that raised me up, back in my (and its) crustier days. When I hit the page the first thing I noticed was that SMYRC had selected Kicked Out as one of their four recommended books. I don’t want to sound so dramatic, but I started crying. Damn. Were it not for SMYRC I wouldn’t be here, and were it not for In Other Words I wouldn’t be an author. There’s nothing quite like having my work recommended by the folks that saved me, raised me, taught me how to build family, make art, and organize. SMYRC in so many ways made me who I am and to have them now recommending my book?! Damn. ::cue major happy tears::
Kicked Out, Roving Pack, Leather Ever After & new workshops!
It’s been a nice quiet week for me filled with lots of trips to the park with my dogs – though perhaps quiet is more than a little relative. Early in the week I learned that Kicked Out will likely be sited in an upcoming report looking at the epidemic of LGBTQ youth homeless as a way to personalize and allow current/former homeless youth to speak for ourselves (can’t wait to share details about this as they become public). Otherwise, the week the week has primarily revolved around media planning for the release of Roving Pack (very exciting things in the works) as well as the closing of the submission period for Leather Ever After….
After approving final proofs of Roving Pack I’ve been busy beginning to get reviews and interviews set up for the October release. One of the things I’ve been focused on this week is starting to get the blog tour together — If you’re a queer/leather/gender blogger and are interested in publishing a review on your blog please get in touch! I think it’s really starting to sink in for me just how close the Roving Pack release is. I’ve been working on this book for the past several years and to be so close to it being in the world is really thrilling. The NYC release event is set for October 12th at my home bookstore Bluestockings right before Kestryl and I head out for our Europe tour (more details coming soon).
Somehow August is already here and on Wednesday the call for submissions for Leather Ever After closed. It’s been a really interesting process to be editing another anthology – one very very different than Kicked Out but has definitely reminded me about how much I enjoy creating these kinds of spaces. Already just in the submission process I’ve had great conversations and connections with writers who have been genuinely called to and excited about this theme which makes the process of editing all the more fun. Needless to say I’m a very very happy editor as I’m making my way through 50+ kinky fairytale retellings. Leather Ever After is a project that has been unlike anything I’ve ever worked on – very different from my other two books and has so far just been a lot of fun to work on and while I’m not going to give anything away – lets just say it’s bringing together some incredible Leather voices in delightfully playful ways. The stories are all really awesome, and I’m really looking forward to 2013 and being able to share it with all of you.
For the last year I slowed way down on touring to focus on finishing Roving Pack, but with the two books coming out in the next few months I’m planning on increasing my touring schedule again and have been revamping my writing workshop offerings – including taking a leap and expanding my kink based offerings beyond my beloved ‘Leather Storytelling’ to include some D/s relationship based workshops!
It’s been exciting to watch my late 2012 and 2013 schedule is starting to come together — if you’d like to see me at your book club, conference, bookstore, community organization, or university in the next year this would be a great time to get in touch so we can start talking details!!!
July 25, 2012
reflections on Touched By An Angels’s street kids 15 years later and the power of seeing ourselves reflected
Touched By An Angel “Children of the Night”
Ok, confession – I was remarkably uncool as a kid. I also as I’ve talked about before grew up in an incredibly controlling environment. Pretty much everything I did, watched, and read was monitored. I remember sneaking a copy of “A Child Called It” probably my freshman year in High School and for the first time realized that I was being abused –but that’s a whole different story about the power books have always played in my ability to see and understand myself and the world around me. But this post isn’t about that – it’s about confessing to the kinda embarrassing television I watched. There was a period of time in the early mid 90’s where I was obsessed with ‘Touched By An Angel’ and I watched it every Sunday night. I don’t remember much about the show at this point other than one episode that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It was about street kids and was the very first time I’d ever seen homeless youth in the media, it was the first time I’d ever heard anyone even talk about homeless youth.
I remember when it aired I taped it on my family’s VCR and would watch the show over and over again. It sounds silly now, but by the time that show aired I’d already been fantasizing for years about running away and building a home and family with other kids – I’m not sure where the idea came from but it was the fantasy I rocked myself to sleep with every night. Seeing this episode was a really pivotal moment where for only an instant I believed that maybe it could happen, that I could get away, that maybe I’d find other kids, that maybe someday I’d be ok. This afternoon out of nowhere I got to thinking about the show and sure enough thanks to the magic of the internet was able to rewatch it for the first time in 15 years and a half dozen lifetimes.
I was in tears within the first three minutes where one of the angels Tess says that these “runaway, throwaway” kids are actually a family schooling Monica one of the other angels who had just made a comment about how she thought their “assignment” was to work with a family and she didn’t see one. This is are talking mainstream 90’s Christian television we’re talking about so I went into watching it tonight prepared to shatter the memory of what the show had meant to me. These kinds of media artifacts don’t tend to age well, and my expectations were pretty low. The episode was not without flaws – there was the anticipated awkward/cheesy/uncomfortable God moments which if I’m being honest were a struggle for me because of my numerous unresolved God issues as much as anything else. My biggest critique is that China the young sex worker was killed by a client—this of course is an all too common reality, but it doesn’t mean I want to see one more media representation of a sex worker being murdered.
The premise of the show is about a street family of kids who each have their own path and struggle and the angels are there to gain their trust – again not without flaws. But they do interesting things that I rarely see in mainstream media portrayals of homelessness, not one of the kids is vilified, when Monica makes fun of the hair/piercings etc. of the kids she’s chastised and told that doesn’t matter, and they spend time talking about the ways in which the kids name themselves, and the depth and meaning behind the chosen names which on the surface seem strange and random but actually carry great meaning. For example, China the youth mentioned above as she begins to build a friendship with Monica explains that she picked her name because of the fancy china dishes people use on special occasions, that someday she will have some of her own and that she plans to use it everyday. She goes onto say that when people say her name it makes her feel special. Sure in the midst of cheesy 90’s television the story is a bit trite- and yet on some level for me it worked because of how many people I know/have known whose chosen names carry similar stories.
In the end two kids die, Ally the youngest and newest to the street goes home to her parents and the “family that was shattered when she left.” But the episode was not the unexamined reunification propaganda that I was anticipating. The one very young girl does go home, and that is a bit of an overpowering theme BUT it’s not the only story-taking place. Doc the street father avoids death by leaving the streets/squats entering the hospital to treat TB – but only once he’s insured his surviving street family has been taken care of. Although the initial doctor he sees seems to be making reference to some kind of forced family reunification, but the angels make clear that when he’s healthy he will be going to the youth shelter.
Perhaps the most powerful moment of the episode for me came within the first three minutes in an exchange between Monica and Tess:
Monica- “so our assignment is to get them back home?”
Tess – “ Oh no, that’s how the world has failed them so far, they just want to get rid of them and send them back where they came from. We’ve got to do better than that. We’ve got to give them what they need, not what we think they need.”
That’s when the tears started. The episode was not without substantial flaws and yet imbedded in it was more harm reduction and trauma informed approach language than I hear 15 years later from many homeless youth direct service providers!!!
I love that * this* this was a message I heard even for an instant all those years ago. I love that I heard someone say – the family those kids built is real, that I heard someone say the answer is not to get them “back home,” and that what actually is needed is exactly what they say they/we say is needed not someone else’s version of what their/our lives could be. Of course I remembered nothing about having seen that episode when I was kicked out, all I knew in that moment and those moments that immediately followed was how alone I felt- but then something happened—I found community, I found packs of kids like me and we built families so much stronger than anything I’d ever been told was “family” in my childhood.
Consistently repeated through the episode was the message that these kids had been burned, that they didn’t trust because they had not reason to, that they were used to being given up on and it was legitimate for them to expect similar treatment in the future. I really appreciated that message. Like most of us with this past trust still, all these years later is difficult for me. I can name on less than one hand the number of people I *actually * trust and you can be damn sure they are all folks who I’ve built family with. I’m a little embarrassed writing a whole blog post about an episode of Touched By An Angel, after all the show itself is not without immense complication and I know I’ve not even scratched the surface of that, and yet I can’t deny how incredibly touched (pun intentional) by this first/only representation of homeless teens I was as a pre-teen who dreamed of successfully running away and escaping.
As complicated as it is media is a profoundly powerful force in our lives. The initial idea for Kicked Out came at 17 when newly homeless I went to the public library and realized there were no books I could find about queer homeless youth – I felt unbearably alone in that moment and promised myself that if I survived I would make a book so no one else would feel like I did in that moment. I didn’t yet understand that queer youth homelessness was an epidemic, I had no idea how unreasonable it was to think that I would be able to create something that would touch *every * other current/former homeless queer kid. In the last couple of years since our release I’ve gotten messages from former homeless youth who’ve expressed that in the pages of Kicked Out for the very first time they felt like they saw their experience reflected back at them. I’ve received messages from currently homeless youth who told me they ranway/were kicked out with only their backpack and stuffed inside under clothes and toiletries was their copy of the Kicked Out anthology, that carrying it with them made them feel less alone.
July 23, 2012
proofs approved and Charles Rice-González blurbs Roving Pack!
Late last week I finished reading the print and bound copy of Roving Pack for the very first time. I am, without a doubt my own worst critic – I am far more demanding of myself than I would be of anyone else, and yet as I finished reading the final page and closed the book I was satisfied, no more than satisfied I was pleased and could actually see and believe that I’d done a good job. Thanks to the hard work of my editorial team, I actually feel like I truly nailed this book. Roving Pack does everything that I’d hoped it would do and more when while on the road with Kicked Out I started playing with these little starts of stories. This weekend I was also able to approve the print proofs – and then my wonderfully supportive partner took me out for a date of ice cream and vintage pac man. As hard as it is for me to actually believe, there really is no denying that we’ve now officially gone to press!
In the midst of all the book excitement this weekend got the incredibly exciting news that the amazing Charles Rice- González blurbed Roving Pack! Check out the wonderful things he had to say about the novel!!!
“Sassafras Lowrey is an urgent and vital voice in contemporary queer literature and with Roving Pack, a harrowing, hilarious and hip page-turner, ze takes the reader along for a wild and wonderful ride through a blossoming young queer culture that’s expanding how we experience gender, express love and create community. “
– Charles Rice-González
CHULITO, FROM MACHO TO MARIPOSA: NEW GAY LATINO LITERATURE
I’m beyond humbled by how authors in the community who I have really admired and have looked up to for years have come forward and blurbed the novel. This was a pet project of mine, one that struggled to find a publishing home and to be sitting here two months before the official release with so much community support behind it/me is truly overwhelming.
p.s. you can still pre-order Roving Pack. Folks who order the book will receive one of the first copies ever printed signed/dedicated and delivered right to your door complete with special release edition one-inch buttons featuring KD Diamond’s brilliant cover art
