Are YOU a part of the Sinister Wisdom Conversation?

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Are YOU a part of the Sinister Wisdom Conversation?

Over the next few weeks, postal carriers across the United States and around the world will deliver Sinister Wisdom 92 to subscribers. These small packages with the glossy-covered journal inside will bring joy and intellectual engagement to the hundreds of women who subscribe.

Sinister Wisdom 92 has both a theme, Lesbian Healthcare Workers, and a guest editor, Elizabeth Hansen. Themes and guest editors are two time-honored traditions at Sinister Wisdom. Some issues, like Sinister Wisdom 90: Catch, Quench and Sinister Wisdom 89: Once and Later, are assembled from general submissions, which I am always reading through the Sinister Wisdom website. Other issues imagine new areas of lesbian life and lesbian creativity; they have a particular theme and often an individual guest editor or team of guest editors who works to find the very best lesbian writing. Themed issues invite us to imagine new understandings of lesbian and generate new platforms to bring meaning to lesbian identities in the world.

Elizabeth Hansen, the guest editor of Sinister Wisdom 92, is a recently retired nurse and public health educator. In addition to being a healthcare worker herself, she is a reader, editor, and copyeditor. Hansen brought her array of skills to this special issue of Sinister Wisdom and the results are extraordinary. She released a call for submission for Sinister Wisdom 92 over two years ago. Yes, you read that correctly: preparing an issue of Sinister Wisdom can take two years–or more! The editorial process (finding good submissions, selecting work, and editing it), the design and production process, the mail process, it all adds up. It takes time to craft a beautiful and provocative journal of lesbian art and literature, but when we hear good feedback about an issue, it makes it worth all of the time and effort.

Hansen assembled an excellent collection of writings by, for, and about healthcare workers who are lesbians. In addition to some writers who have appeared before in Sinister Wisdom, including Jean Taylor (an Australian lesbian who recently launched her own publishing house, Dyke Books), Joan Cofrancesco, and Sharon Deevey, Hansen brings new voices to Lesbian Healthcare Workers. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of this issue of Sinister Wisdom is the way it speaks in multiple voices across and through many generations.

When I began editing Sinister Wisdom in 2009, one of my goals was to ensure the continued meaning and relevance of Sinister Wisdom to the founders’ generation and to new generations. I believe that it is only by building bridges across lesbian generations that we can ensure the continued vitality of Sinister Wisdom as a lesbian cultural institution. In Sinister Wisdom 92: Lesbians Healthcare Workers, Hansen takes up this vision and assembles an extraordinary issue of the journal. I am enormously grateful to Hansen for all of her work.

The guest editor tradition dates back to the earliest years of Sinister Wisdom. Beth Hodges was the first Sinister Wisdom guest editor; she edited the second issue of Sinister Wisdom, published in the fall of 1976 (Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Desmoines published the first issue on July 4, 1976). Hodges put together a special issue on Lesbian Writing and Publishing, and dedicated it to Barbara Grier. The tradition of having guest editors has continued through the variety of editors and publishers who have nurtured and sustained Sinister Wisdom.

Would you like to guest edit an issue of Sinister Wisdom? I am always open to pitches for themed issues of Sinister Wisdom from potential guest editors. You can email me or Sinister Wisdom to pitch an idea. Remember, though, it is a long timeline. My next openings for guest-edited issues are in 2017 and 2018. Yes, the pages of Sinister Wisdom for this year and next are completely full (and I am so excited to share the great issues that we have in the pipeline!)

Are you among the hundreds who will receive this new issue of Sinister Wisdom directly in the mail at your home? If so, take a photo of yourselves with the issue when it arrives and post it on our Facebook page or email it to us. If you are not a subscriber currently, I would love of have you take out a subscription today. For just $30 a year, you can wait by your mailbox four times a year with our subscribers and be awed and amazed when Sinister Wisdom arrives. We are trying to add thirty-eight new subscribers by May 31st and we still need thirty-one more to reach our goal. I hope you can join us as a subscriber.

Sinister Wisdom is a space where lesbians have conversations about literature and arts; a space where lesbians talk about work and politics, life and love, pain and glory; a space where we learn and share, celebrate and mourn, sing and listen. I hope you will join the conversation.