Sandra Gail Lambert

The Hard Work Part of Creativity

Sexism at Work

 
Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jayne Anne Phillips, Amanda C. Gable, Mary Gaitskill, Lauren Groff, Paula J. Giddings, Barbara Kingsolver, Laura Van den Berg, and Rita Dove are all authors with books out in 2009.  However, none of them made the "top ten books of 2009" from Publishers Weekly.  Actually, no women at all made the list. Hmmmm. 

WILLA (Women and Letters in Literary Arts), among others, noticed this problematic oversight, and they've set up a Wikipedia page that will accept any of our choices for a "best of" list.  Check it out. Some I've read, some I'm adding to my list.      

Gainesville, FL - Chock Full of Literary Events

 
The Florida Writer's Festival offers Chris Tusa (author of Dirty Little Secrets) on November 12th, Chris Bachelder and C.D. Wright on the 13th, and Chris Adrian on the 14th.  Everything is free.  Check out the links for times and venues. 

And the very next week, on Monday, November 16th, Sarah Manguso, memoirist and poet, will be at the downtown library.  I'll post more about this event later. 

Dear Ursula Le Guin, A Belated Happy Birthday

Last month was Ursula Le Guin's eightieth birthday (and the fortieth anniversary of the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness).  I've read science fiction ever since I was a little girl.  From the heart-breaking tenderness of Rocannon's World, to the gender-bending Left Hand of Darkness, through the personally politically transforming The Dispossessed (the part where she pees on the statue still inspires me), all the way up to just last year with Lavinia - one of the best books I've ever read - Le Guin has been with me most of my reading life.  

Happy birthday, Ms. Le Guin, and thank you.   

It went well, very well.

I'm back from my camping trip/writing retreat.  Oh, I love those days that start with waking up at 3am to write and feel good about writing until you fall asleep over the yellow pad and so you take your first nap of the day at 5am, but wake just in time to stroll over to the beach and watch the sunrise (accompanied by no-see-ums) and visit with a ghost crab before returning to the campsite to greet your writer and editor friends who are just getting up and so you have a morning discussion about foreshadowing, rejections, and writer arrogance (our own) before you go back to the van, stretch out over the bed, and peel a grapefruit and half write and half watch a fisherman pull in a flounder from the dock.  And it's only 9am. 

 

Make your own writers retreat

I'm off to Little Talbot Island State Park with my yellow pads, computer, butterfly field guide, kayak, and camera.  The best writing I've ever done, especially the beginning parts of a project, has been done propped up by pillows in my van's bed.  At this park, the view is of salt marsh.  But across the road, where I'll probably stroll most dawns, sometimes, hopefully, after writing since four in the morning, the view is of the sunrise over the ocean. 

And this trip, I've enhanced my do-it-yourself writing retreat by bringing in one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite editors.  And best of all, besides all that writing stuff, they've promised to cook a dinner.  Yum. 

All these photos are from previous trips to Little Talbot. 

   

On being a happy reader with Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood

 A few pages in I know it's going to be good, very good.  My body sighs deep into the mattress with a gust of pleasure.  The book is balanced open on one breast.  My hands fluff the pillow until my head is the perfect distance from the page and the print comes into focus.  I am so happy.  In my youth, this was when I would call in sick until I had finished the book.  

Perhaps it will all fall apart.  Perhaps I won't stay in
love.  I doubt it.  Margaret Atwood and I have a long, close reader-to-writer relationship.  But it doesn't matter.  This first brush of words, rush of reading is enough.     

Something to Declare - Reading and Book Signing

 Wild Iris Books, Friday October 23rd, 7pm - I'll be reading from my contribution to the anthology Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing.  There are all sorts of good parts to the writing life, but this part, the part where I get to perhaps make a little money for an independent bookstore, thrills my old bookseller's heart. 

Anyway, I promise you a tale of churning rapids, naked women, the sweet gorgeousness of a Florida landscape, and, not least of all, gingerbread with hot lemon sauce. (There will be no actual gingerbread - only a story about it.)

Back to the Yellow Pads

 
The dog, much to my annoyance, can't just go pee.  Even after she finds the right spot, she jerks in frantic darts back and forth over the grass, she circles here and there, she changes her mind and rushes to the next mysteriously (to me) acceptable place and repeats the darts and circles until she stops and squats.  I ready her post-pee treat. 

It all reminds me of how I get started on a new writing project.  And this morning I squatted.  Which means the yellow pad is filling up.  Pages are flipped back on themselves.  It's that just-put-it-down-don't-worry-that-it's-crap beginning part of writing.  For a revision lover such as myself, it's a both wild and unnerving time. 

Now, what shall I have for my post-squat treat? 

The Crutch Master - Bill Shannon

 

"Relating to your environment as it comes to you on an improvisational, freestyle basis."  Yes, this is how I want to and sometimes do move through the world.   

(And no, when I used crutches, I did not look like this - not that I didn't have my moments.) 

Everglades National Park

 
Okay, this is a more-than-usual self-serving post.  Every January I used to spend at least 10 days at the Flamingo Campground in Everglades National Park.  For all sorts of reasons, I haven't been in awhile.  I miss it.  I haven't even seen it since Hurricane Wilma blew through. 

Perhaps if I extol its wonders to ya'll then I'll get myself back down there.  Here we go.

First off, oh my god, the sunrises make you forget that there ever was even a single mosquito the night before.  Sometimes, just lounging against the pile of pillows on my van bed, I've seen a Great White Heron and a Reddish Egret poking around at the edge of the Bay.  One thing I always do is figure out the tides so that I can ride them up to Snake Bight on my kayak and float among the Roseate Spoonbills roosting in the mangroves.  Oh, and then there was that year when dead center in the midst of the scores of White Pelicans crowded onto a sand bar, there was one Pink Flamingo.  Do not get me started on the butterflies.  Or the snakes. Or the mysteries of a coastal salt marsh. Or sitting on the marina dock, eating a yogurt, and watching manatees and a crocodile.   

So, see you in January? 

Greg Walloch - F**k the Disabled

"May I ask you something?" Let me tell you, nothing good hardly ever follows this question - except for when Greg Walloch takes hold of it.   

Gainesville Pride Weekend

It's LGBT Pride time in Gainesville.  I know, other places hold theirs in June, but after one too many incidences of heat stroke during the march/parade, we moved it to October.

Here's a link to all the events courtesy of the Pride Community Center.  Me, I'm going to the pre-Pride kick off at Kickin' Devil Cafe this evening.  Tomorrow is the downtown party, and after wards I'm driving out to the lesbian hotbed of Melrose for a friend's seventieth birthday party. 

I'll just have to take more anti-inflammatories and go have fun.  I remember when I used to go to a party and use drugs.  Now I use drugs to get myself to the party.    

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

My people are not from Russia.  I've never been there. And I can't stop thinking about these color photos from a hundred years ago.  Each one is a story.  The photographer invented his own way of taking color images and traveled throughout Russia with his dark room rail car.  The Library of Congress has these photos and Newsweek has a recent article about them. 

I'm a quitter.

Gravity's Rainbow is going back to the library.  I reached page eighty-five, felt the heft of the next gillion pages, and said "no." 

Now, I like sexually and emotionally creepy characters as much as the next person, but even the brilliant, make-me-gasp-in-delight descriptions were not going to get me through all those pages of unrelenting nastiness. 

Sometimes, an exhausted, overwhelmed a bit in her life, woman just wants to drop into bed and reread the Mavin Manyshaped series.  Which I am doing now. Perfect.

 

Lavanderia - A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word

Yippee.  Lavanderia - A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word is an anthology of written/spoken word and photography from City Works Press, and it includes a piece of my writing.    

Although I haven't actually seen a copy yet, anything that "highlights the universal ritual and common interaction of people, places, and things found between loads of laundry" and has chapter headings such as "Hose Stroll," "Dirty Deeds," and "Rocks and Rivers" has much promise.  

Here's a mini-excerpt from my contribution to the anthology:

Two arms snaked around her neck, overlapped on her chest, and tightened.  "Jesus loves you" was a whisper in her ear, and the moistness of the woman's breath dripped onto Ivy's neck.  Controlling the urge to bite the woman's flesh down to the bone, Ivy sunk only her nails into the soft forearms and held on as the woman tried to escape.  Ivy turned her head to bring their faces close. 

"Fuck you bitch, and fuck Jesus.  Touch me again and I'll call the cops. 

P.S. I can't make this blog editor put an accent over the "i" in Lavenderia.  Sorry.

  

Dancing With the Stars

Dancing With the Stars premiers tomorrow night!  Here's my fantasy.  A novel of mine is published and does well enough that I get to be a sort of has-been celebrity and thus become not only the first wheelchair-using contestant on the show, but also the first same-sex paired dancer.  

Unfortunately, even though I enjoy it very much, I'm not such a good dancer.  Along with the ability to carry a tune, a sense of rhythm didn't quite make it through into this lifetime.  

But I'm counting on the misplaced sympathy vote to get me through the first cut.  I really want to get to wear at least two of those outfits.  Oh la la.    

Native Plant Sale This Weekend

Please, stop having these water-sucking, groundwater polluting yards.  Plant native plants.  And if you live in North Central Florida, come to this next weekend's Native Plant Sale at the Morningside Nature Center in Gainesville.  I'll be there to take your money and Grace will load your plants. 

These photos are of plants that grow in my yard and thrive on neglect. 

   

Exploring Lake Shore Buffers

Practical, here's-how-you-do-it-and-why, and where to go for help information from Alachua County's Environmental Protection Department

The City and the City by China Mieville

Oh, my, China Mieville makes his novel do all the fine things that science fiction is supposed to do.  It takes some hard, not-often-spoken truth of our own everyday world and twists it into a fantastical and fantastic story that changes our perceptions.  The City and the City is about borders between people and what is seen and not seen. And there's a murder mystery.  I'm almost to the end and still not sure whodunit

 

 

The Same Love - Lesbian Relationships

And this is just Part One of a documentary by Bernadette.

Novel update

 

As you know, I wrote the novel, I wrote the query letter, I wrote the friggin' synopsis.  There is a lovely chart of the agents that have received some combination of the above. 

And there has been some "interest."  (Yes, I know I'm using the passive voice all over the place here, but it helps to put a little distance between me and this weird emotional existence.  

So.  Now, I wait.  And write.  And wait.  And walk the dog, visit friends, and wait.  

P.S.  The photo is lifted from Moonrat's blog.     

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

 

Seven hundred and sixty pages.  "Unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene" is how it was described by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize comittee. 

But today's the day.  I and many other internet connected readers (and maybe you?) are going to read Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.  Like we did for Middlemarch, we'll read a chunk each week (70 pages), chat with each other about it, and maybe make it all the way through.  

Why?  Yeah, I wasn't sure at first, but then I read a one liner description of the novel - "centers on the design, production, and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military."  It was that word "dispatch."  My mother, at seventeen, was a person on whom those bombs were dispatched.  

Pippin - My new writing aide

 It was just yesterday that I adopted her from Gainesville Pet Rescue, but already she's curled between me and the pillows on my writing bed and offering excellent low back support as I type.  

The Southern Women Writers Conference

Here's a reminder.  September 24-26.  Berry College.  Rome, Georgia.  There's still time to sign up.

 

 

More "Something to Declare" news.

For all of us Gainesvillians, Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing is now available at Wild Iris Books.  And if my having an essay included isn't enough, here's more incentive to go get it - Booklist is giving the anthology a starred (meaning it is outstanding in its genre) review.  Whoo hoo.   

The Confederate General Rides North - Amanda C. Gable

Twenty years ago Amanda Gable used to read her stories to us at Charis Books in Atlanta.  They were about Kat, a sturdy, intrepid, smart, passionate little girl growing up amidst the complexities of the 1960's South.  I was starting to write a bit myself and had such a writer's crush on Amanda, on her writing.  I wished that I could write like that. 

And now, halfway through The Confederate General Rides North, Amanda's just-released novel, and discovering what has become of the Kat stories, I still wish that I could write like this.      

Paynes Prairie as writing aide

La Chua Trail is only five miles from my house.  It's open most days, all day.  Each visit the place is stunning, always in a different way.  Today's trek was midsummer lush and lotus.  And purple spears of pickerel weed.  Immature night herons.  Fluff-necked adolescent gallinules. 

It took a couple of miles before the twisted-up, has-anyone-responded-to-my-queries-yet, I-could-check-my-email-on-the-phone-right-here anxiety unraveled.  But it did.  I felt it.  Right in that place behind my stomach and in front of my spine.  Whew.  

I think I'll leave a few notes around my house to remind me to get out there more often.  Feel free to nag me about it.     

The Mickee Faust Club - Now Playing in Tallahassee

Mickee Faust (aka Terry Galloway) is the disaffected sewer rat brother of Florida's more well-known mouse.  His club, as paraphrased from their website, rallies around this rebellious rat bastard and peacefully converge to write, direct and perform the raucous and wily cabarets that have become Faust's hallmark. In every Faust show you’ll find a mix of political and socio-sexual satire, literary and cinematic parodies, old vaudeville, new vaudeville, original and adapted songs and some fully-staged bad jokes thrown in for good measure.

Here's a promo from Mickee Faust's Gimp Parade -

Writing While Waiting

Here's an update on my writing life. 

I am having one, moving forward from the recently finished novel, doing all those things you're supposed to do.  But mostly I'm waiting.  A batch of query letters are out.  There has been some interest.  Which means a flurry of sending out what has been requested and now - more waiting. 

Each time the computer dings that a new message has arrived, I scurry to open it.  If the internet connection is wonky, I scream things.  Bad things.  Today my cell phone rang.  It was an area code I didn't recognize.  I thought, this might be it.  It wasn't.  

Does anxious heart racing count as aerobic exercise?

   

Kseniya Simonova - Ukrainian Sand Artist

 

With wide sweeps of her arms, finger flicks, and the grand casting down of handfuls of sand, Kseniya Simonova recreates her country's destruction during WWII. 

Gwen, Tukufu, Wes, and Elyse - The History Detectives

Tukufu Zuberi from The History Detectives (my favorite television show) has filmed a show from the Living History Farm at (my much beloved and three miles from my home) Morningside Nature Center about old letters that might indicate a family's participation in the post-slavery exodus to Liberia. (writing! hidden history!)

The program airs this Monday, August 17th at 9pm on PBS.  

 

Something to Declare - Tooting My Own Horn

The anthology Something to Declare is available from any of your local, independent bookstores.  And on page 72 (not that I have it memorized) is an essay by me about a kayak trip on the Withlacoochee (North) River.  There is just no way it's not fun to see my name in the table of contents. 

I've started reading the other pieces.  Whew, there are some good writers in this anthology.  

And here's an important thing to know if you're a writer sending things out, getting rejected, all that.  This piece was turned down by TWENTY-ONE journals and anthologies before finding a home.  Now, I did revise it a couple of times over the years, but please, keep sending things out there into the world.    

 

Mean Little deaf Queer - by Terry Galloway

Wild Iris Books, this Thursday, August 13th, 6pm - I'll be there for a reading by Terry Galloway of her new memoir Mean Little deaf Queer.

Dorothy Allison says, "This story is true and passionate and fearless and funny as hell when it is not heartbreaking.  I expect this book to charm the hell out of great numbers of people, piss off a few, and give hope to many more."  

 

Oh yeah, this is going to be a great evening.  

Su Blackwell - Three Dimensional Literature

 

Su Blackwell uses old books about to be tossed and revives their stories by forming the pages in sculpture. Cliche alert, but really, these take my breath away.  She says "the landscapes speak of a bleak mystery, a rising, an awareness of the air."  

  

Read this article about her process.  Go to her website.  Watching the video of her merry-go-round sculpture did something lovely for my heart. 

Gaining Perspective

 

Six hundred fifty million years of tectonic drift in 1.2 minutes!

A Disability Rights Take on Obama

Josie Byzek, as she puts it, "is as sarcastic as hell, has a egg-head streak a mile wide, and has called the disability community her home since 1990."  And she's a kick-ass writer. 

Here's her take on President Obama's take on disability, especially in light of his recent reversal of support for the Community Choice Act.  

Josie begins "President Obama used his speech on the 19th anniversary of the ADA to outline his disability policies — about time. And as strong an Obama admirer as I am, I think we’re in trouble."  

 

Anhinga Writers' Studio

This upcoming week, right here in Gainesville, is the Anhinga Writers' Studio.  Four days of workshops - a small sample of which include Poetry of Human Speech, How to Sell a Romance Novel, Stumbling over Dead Bodies in Search of Enlightenment, Graphic Memoirs, and, the one I'm doing, a short story intensive with Lauren Groff.

Charlaine Harris of Sookie Stackhouse (True Blood) fame is the keynote speaker. 

The Query Letter

So.  I have one.  Every night, just before bed, I look at it and change a word, change the word back, move a sentence to another paragraph, twist a clause,  

However - and in a few weeks I might be mortified about this - various versions are off to four agents.  I've already noticed that in one of them I did the "it's" "its" thing wrong.  The agents' names were checked over and over so probably only one out of the four is spelled wrong.  

Wouldn't it be great to say how I'm reveling in this lesson in letting go, of moving forward, how I'm celebrating this new stage, that in my head there's a big party going on? Yeah.  For me, it's mostly that after the party feeling - nausea and lethargy. 

Here's a snippet from the query.

"For most of these women it is the last day of their lives.  They are not famous.  None of them have children.  Instead, their stories rise out of the shadowed history of a river in Florida where sweet water billows to the surface from caverns of silent lakes."  

 

She Writes

(No, not me, not yet.)  She Writes is a new social network site for "women writers working in every genre."  It looks good.  So far I've joined the groups Fiction Writers, Feminist Bloggers, Disability Writers, Watcha Readin'?, Memoir Writers, and Queer Issues.  Maybe someday I'll be able to join the March 2011 Book Release group.   

Limbo

So, you know, that writing thing.  It seems I don't do that anymore,  

This is not the complete truth.  I do stare at my query letter drafts and sometimes change an indefinite article to a definite one.  Sometimes I change it back.  

 

Writing Below Sea Level - The Cedar Key Project

I've posted about Connie May Fowler's upcoming writing workshops before, but I want to again.  For one thing, the deadline for them is soon.  But also, as the days build up since the novel was declared done, I'm figuring out things.  Like, that you can watch too many episodes of Dexter on too many days in a row, that it's really exhausting not to be writing, and that the workshop I did with Connie May and the connections I made there over a year ago are a big deal.   

Long Past Any Memory - An Excerpt

 

I've posted a piece of the novel here.  Or just click on the tab in the header. 

Enjoy. 

Long Past Any Memory

 

I am finished.  The novel, Long Past Any Memory, is done.  Really.  Done, done.  It's printed out, wrapped in a pink and an orange rubber band, and flopped at the end of my writing bed.  I pat it from time to time.  Three years of work and there it is.  Oh my, I feel like I'm wandering around outside of myself. 

Despite the weirdness of it all, the work on the agent query letter proceeds.  The drafts have progressed from horrid through moderately awful to moderately okay.  Not that I have any perspective.     

 

Nostalgia

It's odd, but listening to Pandora on my new I-Touch is making me remember a road trip I took in 1976 (7?).  It was me, barely out, and the only two other lesbians that I knew.  We drove from Augusta, Georgia through back roads for hours.  They knew two more lesbians who lived in a single wide in the middle of a patch of North Florida pine woods.  We arrived.  And then the five of us listened to two albums - Chris Williamson's Changer and the Changed and Meg Christian's I Know You Know.  Then we drove all the way back.  It was a huge deal.   

Soon after, a lover gave me Linda Tillery's album Womanly Way.  And now, here I am with my I-Touch.  Somehow, today, it all seems so connected. 

Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund - there is still time

Are you a lesbian-identified poet or fiction writer?  Have you had at least one piece of writing published somewhere but no more than one book?  Could you use an award ranging from $1500 to $10,000?  Astraea Foundation has extended their deadline to July 15th.  Check out the other requirements and apply now.  

Here's some info about Astraea from their website:

"Astraea is a dynamic global foundation providing critically needed financial support to lesbian-led, trans, LGBTI and progressive organizations. Separated by continents, language and culture, Astraea grantees are seizing opportunities, and laying the groundwork necessary for women and LGBTI people to claim their human rights. Astraea staff, board, members and grantees all share a deep commitment to feminist principles, racial and economic justice and human rights."

 

Alligator Princess of America's Nile - the St. Johns River

 

And this is just the preview Michelle Thatcher's still in production film of her solo kayak trip along the St. Johns River!  

The beginning makes me cry.  There is so much joy in me when I'm loading my kayak in the "early half-dream of dawn."  

Apropos of Nothing - Baby Armadillos

This is sort of related to writing.  The poet Renee Ashley fell in love with the armadillos that snuffled around our lodgings at Atlantic Center for the Arts.  This post is for her. 

The photo credits go to Lee and Taylor Savage.  These babies live under their house.  

 

 

 

How to revise a novel

 

Wander your kayak around mangrove islets.  Watch for crabs skittering along prop roots.  Surprise a burst of night herons.  Be ignored by an eagle.  Push against a rising afternoon wind to reach home. 

And in the middle of the post-kayak eating of shrimp and crab (caught in the same Gulf waters you just left) you will know what is important and how to begin. 

"My fingers press into clay.  I balance at the edge of my mind.  The excitement rises and wants to spill into bright colors and glare.  It whispers out of my bones and demands that I continue.  It says that I will not fail, that I know enough, everything."

Tayari Jones on finishing the first draft

I don't often do the touchy feely thing, but the truth is my heart just spread all the way out of my body as I listened to this. 

Any day now, after letting my novel rest for a few weeks, I'm starting the next revision .  Inside my head I've been doing the tough love thing - you must be unrelenting, you must have no mercy with extraneous minor characters, you must cut all that part about the young Seminole girl who charms snakes and wants to know how to sew bathing suits.  There's been more tough than love.

So when Tayari spoke of finding that "other kind of love," I sort of started crying.  And now I think I'm ready to begin this ending of three years of work.