R.B. Lemberg's Blog, page 35

The Moment of Change – Reading

So, the Moment of Change is almost here. It will be released at Wiscon, and I am organizing an open-mic reading to celebrate the anthology. You do not have to be a MoC contributor to participate in the open-mic reading! Everyone is welcome! Here is the description:

Come join the authors of the "The Moment of Change" for an open mic evening in celebration of the first-ever anthology of feminist speculative poetry! "The Moment of Change" is edited by Rose Lemberg and forthcoming from Aqueduct press, and includes poems by Ursula K. Le Guin, Nisi Shawl, Amal El-Mohtar, Delia Sherman, Vandana Singh. Bring your own feminist speculative poems to read, and join Rose Lemberg, Shira Lipkin, Sofia Samatar, and Alex Dally MacFarlene for an open mic extravaganza to celebrate the release of the anthology and feminist speculative poetry in general.

The reading will take place on Friday, May 25th, at 9:00–10:15 pm at Michelangelo's near the Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information about Wiscon, visit their website.

If you are attending Wiscon and are a fan of speculative poetry, or are curious about it, please consider participating – and if you are so inclined, please spread the word!

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

Signal boost

Cat Valente ( yuki_onna ) has an excellent post on gender and speaking out, over at Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees: Gender and the Fallout Over Christopher Priest. Mostly people are being supportive in the comments, but some already have contributed the expected "you hate me just because I am a maaaaaan" and the slightly less expected " your argument is invalid because I like the Game of Thrones, and anyway, I've never heard of you so you need better PR."

Male-bodied friends, it helps in these cases when men swing the cluebat. In addition to jimhines , who's already on it.

Giant

It is April 4th. Always I am late with those things, but their significance is not lessened by my tardiness.

Seven years ago, on March 30th, Alan Dundes passed away while teaching his graduate folklore seminar. I wrote a flash piece, "Giant," shortly after I started writing fiction, in March 2008, because I needed to talk about him. Selling the piece was another matter. In 2011 I was finally ready, and the story found a home at Not One of Us, where it was published in the 46th issue.

Today I am making Giant publicly available. It is very short, and my only 2nd person narrative so far. It is a bit different from most of my other work, though I have some other short pieces (such as Kifli, Teffeu, and perhaps Seven Losses) that seem to belong to a series.

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

inkscrawl #3

*grin*

Originally posted by samhenderson at inkscrawl #3The third issue of inkscrawl , and the first one I have edited, is now up! i nkscrawl 3 features short speculative poems by Ann K. Schwader, Regina Green, Kristine Ong Muslim, Melissa Frederick, Howard V. Hendrix, Merav Hoffman, Greg Beatty, Alexandra Seidel, Howie Good, Rebekah Curry, Banks Miller, Mike Allen, N.E. Taylor, Dominik Parisien and Mari Ness. 

inkscrawl is now open to submissions of speculative poems ten lines or under. How speculative is speculative? We'll know it when we see it.

Thank you to everyone who sent their work, and to dormouse_in_tea and rose_lemberg for coding and making everything look nice!

"we come together we fall apart" recording

Originally posted by rose_lemberg at "we come together we fall apart" recording

...is here! It's epic! it's 25 minutes long! 

With time_shark as Abe, art_ungulate as Micah, Judah Sher as Connor, alexa_seidel as Marguerite, samhenderson as Adelita, and shadesong as Camille - and Martin Kauper mixed the thing! Thank you all very much for making it happen.

http://stonetelling.com/issue7-mar2012/bradley-together.html

Note that this poem also broke our submissions guidelines - we are now paying 20$ for poems of epic length (120 lines and longer).

Aaaand we are open to submissions as of now - please send us your best work! Theme is open.

Suddenly, a sale!

My genderqueer poem about Bulgarian dragons, "Plucked from the Horo," will appear in Mythic Delirium 27.

*lopsided grin*

The Moment of Change – cover!

Behold the cover in all its glory! So tremendously happy about this. The painting is by the wonderful Terri Windling.

The table of contents is here!

The anthology would be released at Wiscon; I have organized an open-mic reading (everyone is welcome to read!) – and will announce the details here when I have them.

So. Excited.

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

Stone Telling 7 (the Queer Issue) is here!

And it is glorious! In addition to the poetry, don't miss the roundtable, B.'s article on translating queer poetry, the second installment of Brit Mandelo's article on the poetry of Joanna Russ… in fact, I hope you won't miss anything!

Special thanks to Julia Rios on her work on the roundtable, and Jennifer Smith for tirelessly reading, coding, proofreading, and doing hundreds of other things without which this issue would not now be in front of you. Huzzah!

Aaaand congratulations to the following poets on their Rhysling Award nominations for the year 2011:

Erik Amundsen, "The Lend," Stone Telling 5, Sept. 2011.

Mary Turzillo, "Moving to Enceladus," Stone Telling 3, Mar. 2011.

C. S. E. Cooney, "Postcards from Mars," Stone Telling 6, Dec. 2011.

Shira Lipkin, "The Changeling's Lament," Stone Telling 5, Sept. 2011.

Sofia Samatar, "Girl Hours," Stone Telling 6, Dec. 2011.

Alexandra Seidel,"A Masquerade in Four Voices," Stone Telling 5, Sept. 2011.

Catherynne M. Valente, "The Secret of Being a Cowboy," Stone Telling 3, Mar. 2011.

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

No Coming out Narrative, or Growing up Queer in the Soviet Union.

In April 2011, I had a discussion about my participation in an online queer space with a person who ran it, with whom I had casually interacted with before. She said, among many things, "Look, I have no idea what "coming out" even means to you, frankly, if you're in a heterosexual marriage." I no longer come to that space, or speak to that person.

But I am finally ready to talk about this in public, to you – about what "coming out" means for me, as a person in whose language there is no word for "queer", no words for "coming out", whose reality did not include a "coming out narrative." I am finally ready to talk about growing up queer in the Soviet Union; and what it did to me, to my life. This is a coming-out story that is only enabled by my liminal status as an immigrant (multiple times) now living in a country where coming out stories exist as a genre – and can be told.

A caveat. This is an emotionally difficult and triggery thing for me. I am speaking out because I must. But I am speaking out of pain. I tried to make a neat narrative out of this, but I cannot. It is too raw. It is not scholarly either.

Reading this, you do not owe me anything – not respect, not compassion, not even politeness. Nevertheless, I will not allow rude or derogatory comments here.

***

I am 35 years old. I was born in the Soviet Union, lived in Western Ukraine and subarctic Russia before immigrating to Israel when I was fourteen. I live in the States now. Of my generation of ex-Soviets (people in their mid-30s to mid-40s), I do not personally know a single person who came out as queer, though I have heard of one other person who did so after immigrating to the US.*

I came out on January 1st, 2011. This happened because of my participation in the SFF community, thanks to allies and their stories that taught me – in long, painful, triggery lessons – that what I am is not shameful or despicable; and so my queer identity at last became – by degrees, painfully – something I could talk about. But it hasn't always been so.

I knew I was different since I was – six? earlier? Some people know very early on. I knew. But I did not know what I knew. I had my first same-sex experience during a summer pioneers' camp; I was 11. I remember the first time I was bullied for being a lesbian; that was in the fall, after I returned to school from the summer camp. I wasn't new to bullying; I had experienced physical violence/bullying since I was 7, for being Jewish. But my parents have explained to me how the Jewish thing worked, what to expect; my family was very Jewish and in a sea of anti-Semitism I was proud of my Jewishness and anti-Semitism did not crush my spirit. That time, I…. I remember the feeling of amazement sweeping over me. The kids who bullied me before, for being Jewish, they were sure. That time there was a lot of hesitation. They were not sure, and that had somehow made it worse.

I knew the slang/derogatory word for gay ('goluboj' – blue), but I learned the word for 'lesbian' from being bullied. My mother had the most horrible fear of me being queer, since I was very young, but she did not have a word for it either. In the beginning she tried to frame it in terms of male homosexuality, for which there were (derogatory) words; it has always been very perplexing for me, since I could not figure out how this applied. Then she talked about "that" -that is what she calls horrible things, disastrous things, like my father's stroke. Things too bad to name. Later, when we immigrated to Israel and some concepts surfaced on her cultural horizon, she told me lesbians were the most disgusting thing in the world; "worse than gays," she said. I do not blame my mother – she is a product of her upbringing.

My feelings now are too often those of anguish and envy. Recently Russian legislation outlawed LGBTQI identities/expressions in Russia (again). My first reaction was, "wow, they are talking about it." Being queer is illegal, but to me – to me- it is a step up from not even being acknowledged to exist. (From the article I just linked to: "Open discussion of homosexuality was almost unheard of in Russia until just a few years ago. A Soviet-era law that punished same-sex relations between men with prison time was repealed in 1993, but the subject has long remained taboo outside a smattering of bars and clubs in major Russian cities." – and this only refers to the G identity).

Since moving to the US, I cannot shake the envy of the coming-out narrative. Coming out here is hard, heartbreaking, too often dangerous, and requires great courage; but it is a thing. It is a story. You get to hear it. "How I came out." There are queer people in the media, even if those are negative portrayals. There are books, role models – not enough, but they exist here and there. There are words. Of course, the US is not uniform and not everyone had the same experience; so much depends on location, ethnicity/race, class, the parameters of one's queer identity. But I don't think these gradations existed in the Soviet Union.* There was no "coming out narrative".

Coming out was not a possibility for me, not even because of the price to pay, but because, growing up in the Soviet Union, I didn't know what I was. I had no points of reference.

No books, no TV personas (negative or positive), no movies, no newspapers. NO WORDS. I had no WORDS in which to describe myself, I had no LANGUAGE to help me understand who I was.

Thinking about what it meant to be *me*, I often experienced a feeling of unspeakable shame, disgust, and despair that I could not put into words. I later came up with "monster".

I turned to my imaginary worlds, which were populated by queer people (but they were the default so I did not need to invent words) – which is how I often got bullied and beaten, because I would stupidly tell these stories to a few "friends" in school, who then banded up with others and beat me for these and for being attracted to girls. It would have been perhaps easier for me if I'd never been attracted to boys. I was. Just not very often, and not until much later in life.

Of course, there wasn't even a derogatory word for 'bisexual', or any word for bisexual. There were no words for the non-binary gender configurations which have at last explained me to myself and with which I have come to identify in the recent years, once I learned the names for them.

As a result of the homophobia, bullying, and confusion, in my early teens I invented a near-religious system of strictures focusing on the concept of 'unfreedom' (nevolya) and the need to control and police oneself very tightly lest any shamefully monstrous urges, thoughts, and needs escape. By my late teens I managed a great degree of success in this. I no longer was accused of queerness. Neither did I date. I was, of course, pressured to date men, but I found out I could lie about that. So I did. If I talked to you about my late teens and early twenties at any point, there is a high chance that I lied to you. Ask me again and I will lie to you again.

Lisa Bradley wrote, in a roundtable of the Queer issue of Stone Telling, ""all my life I've struggled with a vain yearning, now mostly put to rest, that I could shave off unwanted aspects of myself." This is absolutely true for me. My gender/sexuality was something that I locked out of my life. Like words, it did not exist. I married early and am still married to a friend who is and has always been very compassionate, and supported me though many, many years in which I desperately hated myself. This is where my life is right now.

I am preoccupied with silence in my work. Silence is not about choosing not to speak out, silence is the lack of language in which to speak out, the impossibility of even rudimentary understanding of the self – understanding that must come before action, before reconciliation, before everything. The first issue of Stone Telling, Silence to Speech, was addressing that in part – a recognition that not just me, but many other people move in silences, are erased, are gathering courage to speak – and poetry is such a powerful vehicle for this.

We need words. Narratives. To guide us out of the terrible unspoken silences.

Coming out –for me – is not about who you sleep with, or do not sleep with. Coming out means naming yourself – and words have power. Coming out means no longer participating in the erasure of one's identity, self, dignity, existence. Coming out means – a voice.

I am reveling in the existence of the words 'queer' and 'genderqueer' in my life. I rejoice in the possibility for all of me to exist and be named and come into light. When I had no words for myself, when I could not call myself queer – I wasn't, somehow, straight and cisgendered. No. I was just silenced. I was erased. But I was still – that.

My struggle is within myself, to find the strength to speak despite – and because of – my lived experience. I must keep flailing for identity and dignity despite the realities of my life. Publishing Stone Telling has been a tremendous gift – supporting the brave and painful, raw and triumphant voices that find their words and their stories despite dangers and demons has empowered me to do likewise.

And yet I often think about all those who cannot do so, who cannot begin to do so, who do not have the words, or who have the words but cannot pay the price of speaking out. Not every road leads to freedom. But perhaps my story will be useful for someone out there.

Thank you for reading.

——————————-

*reading about this, I know that awareness of G and L identities started to surface during the Perestroika period in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but I cannot tell you anything about it. I do not know.

**Again, Moscow and St. Petersburg probably had more awareness of at least the G (and maybe L?) in the underground; here is a Wikipedia entry. I don't know anything about this.

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

Stone Telling 7 TOC and update!

shweta_narayan  posted about this yesterday at Stone Telling 7 TOC and update! and at stonetellingmag - but I feel it could stand a reposting!

You guys, this issue is going to be tremendous (though, sadly, late).



Poems:

- Seamstress, Michele Bannister ( selidor )
- Rain and Sound, Sergio Ortiz
- Inner Workings, Nancy Sheng
- Lunectomy, Jack H. Marr
- The Clock House, Sonya Taaffe ( sovay )
- The Earth Has Rings, Peter Milne Greiner
- Ardat-lilî, Jeannelle Ferreira ( strange_selkie )
- Hair, Hel Gurney
- Parallax, Adrienne J. Odasso ( ajodasso )
- In His Eighty-Second Year, Dominik Parisien ( domparisien )
- we come together we fall apart, Lisa M. Bradley ( cafenowhere )
- Asteres Planetai, Amal El-Mohtar ( tithenai )
- The Handcrafted Motions of Flight, Bogi Takács ( prezzey_public )
- Sister Dragons, Peer G. Dudda ( pgdudda )

Non-fiction:
- What "queer" could look like in Hindi: translated poetry and queerness in regional tongues
- The Poetry of Joanna Russ, Part 2: Poems 1954-1957, Brit Mandelo ( britmandelo )
- Roundtable (title forthcoming), Julia Rios ( skogkatt )

Lots and lots and lots of amazing things here. I am so proud of every single one of these poems and articles. And I will post more news about the queer chapbook once the issue goes live.

Yippeeeeee!