Sandra Gail Lambert

Below Sea Level with Connie May Fowler and Dorothy Allison

This is why it's good to go to conferences - the booklet of manuscripts for the Connie May Fowler/Dorothy Allison workshop in June arrived, I printed them out, stacked them at the end of my writing bed, and without even reading the first word, I wrote the best so far on the new chapter. 

I'm going to use them as my "good girl" reward.  I show up every morning to write at the chapter and that night I get to do a snuggled-in-bed, no-pen-in-my-hand first reading of at least one of them.  I've already earned my first story.    

"Overcoming"

Overcoming inertia to begin this new chapter - this is how I almost started the post.  Me, who has a since-a-child long, nasty relationship with the word "overcoming."  I have a long rant about the how the word is nearly always insulting and disrespectful.  "Overcoming" your disability - please.  How rude.

But here I am, using the word about writing.  The weeks of research and agonizing and hours of playing Wordy on the computer and starting and stopping and writing in circles of cliches and unmoving plots and saying "I'll never write again" in a joking way to friends but really I'm stomach hurts worried - is this all something to be "overcome?"

My analysis of the word says it's wrong to throw any of yourself away, to say it isn't part of all of who you are.  So, if I plug writing into this theory then the skin creeping despair and surety that I'm a useless person that come before the writing is the writing.  Crap.

Overcoming sure would be easier - if only I believed in it.      

Earth Day and the Silver River

This building used to be the Florida Industrial School for Girls - a reformatory.  These days it's the home of the Marion County Museum of History.  Yesterday I sat and talked with the couple responsible for its existence, and their own memories and their generosity, as much as the exhibits, have me writing again.

Part of the writing of this current novel is to show how earth and water and plants and bone can pass memory forward through the ages.  Yesterday, I listened as a man told me that, since he was young, he could go into the woods and be able to know what to eat and how to start a fire and make a shelter.  No one showed him, but he knew.

Tomorrow I'm going kayaking on this river that I'm writing about.  My Earth Day resolution is to listen to it the best I can.      

 

Ursula K. Leguin

Here's a link to an interview with Ursula Leguin. She talks about war and learning to write as a woman and the stupidity (my word, her's are much more elegant) of genre labels. 

Either you're a fan of Leguin's or you should be.  I've been reading her for - ohmygod, I have just added it up - forty years.  My first was Rocannon's World.  I can't quite remember it all, but just writing the title brings enough plot memory that I have a remnant grip of sadness.  Now, that's a writer.

More recently, I've been rereading her book on writing -  Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. I wish I knew her for real rather than just feeling like I do.   

Loren Cameron

In the early seventies, in Georgia, at my college, in a basement room, I and other just-barely-women listened to a lecture about our bodies.  At the end of it, these radical women from California pulled down their pants and underwear, hopped onto a study table, spread their legs, slipped in specula, and invited us all to file by and see what a cervix looked like.

Yesterday, I sat in a student center ballroom, in the dark, and watched Loren Cameron's photographs of transsexual people project onto the screen.  Dramatic, complex, shy, set through with happiness, lonely, sensual, and mostly naked - these men and women offered their bodies, of so many variations, in order for me to look closely. 

Loren, using his red laser pointer to circle chests and genitals, gave me permission to stare and learn. For every portrait, Loren told us something about the person, and he included his body and story no less than theirs.   

It was just one of those moments.

The Internet Community - Wow!

Recently, I read Martha Southgate's novel, Third Girl from the Left.  Then I checked out her webpage.  From there I linked to Tayari Jones (author of Leaving Atlanta, among other books) and read this post about the tragedy in Dunbar Village near West Palm Beach and Tayari's call for an e-bay auction of writerly talents as a fundraiser. 

To wrap this all up, I am now the winner of a story critique by Martha Southgate.  The auction is over, but here's a direct link for donations.

There's been a slump in my writing life as I've negotiated between a procrastinating tax preparer and my mother's anxiety. I'm using this critique as the the carrot to the get-a-draft-done-of-the-new-chapter stick. 

The rule was that I had to spend at least an hour at my yellow pages this morning.  I did, and now I get to package up my story for Martha.  Yikes.  Now I'm anxious. Mother's daughters, aren't we all.       

 

Online and print

The emotional contentment of rubbing a finger over my name, the smell of new cover, the heft bending my wrist back - the thrill is irreplaceable. No matter what I professed in public about the equal validity of online journals, the physical happiness of a print publication has always meant more to me.

Then, this month, two of my previously-in-print pieces were published in online journals and here was an opportunity for a direct comparison of the two mediums. (First Person Queer and Babel Fruit; Gertrude and Khimairal Ink)

It's not the same.  And it's not less.  I've received more feedback, more response, more dialog about the online versions than ever about the print ones.  There's an immediacy of reactions and exchange of thoughts that is new to me. 

It's not the brush of twenty weight stock under my finger pads exciting and, so far, you can't have a deeply ego-bolstering reading in a bookstore, but it satisfies and encourages and compels my writing.  It makes me feel a part of this new something.    

Barbara A. Purdy

It was another Sunday afternoon reading at Goerings Bookstore - this one with an author whose books I've actually used for research on the current novel.  I'm so lucky to live here in Gainesville. 

Barbara Purdy is a professor emerita of Anthropology at the University of Florida.  She says at her, as she put it, "advanced age," she only wants to study what she wants to.  Which, besides bog bodies (of course), is the question of when humans first came to the Americas. 

It was a packed room, full of knowledge of all types, and I handled the cast of an atlatl hook and learned about the difference in durability between bone and ivory - which means it is possible that my 1528 character might still have an ivory pin from 10,000 years ago.  Whew. 

Beth Ann Fennelly Reads Her Work

These days there are more and more promotional videos for books.  This is the best one I've ever seen, probably because it is a lovely thing in and of itself. 

Beth Ann Fennelly was the poetry part of the faculty at this year's Writers in Paradise Conference.  I so enjoyed her reading and now, with this video, I get to share a bit of it with you.  Just click on the arrow.

The week of reprints - Khimairal Ink does Lemon on the Side

What a week.  Now Khimairal Ink, an online journal, has reprinted my short story "Lemon on the Side."  Isn't the cover art they provided for the piece great?

This whole issue of Khimairal is about lesbian love - very fun (even when it's not).  I encourage you to read each and every submission, and then you'll understand when I say that I'm going to find a scary amusement park ride or two. 

Babel Fruit and Theories About Bodies and Truth

  The new issue of Babel Fruit is out, and they've reprinted my essay "Theories About Bodies and Truth."  It was originally published in First Person Queer from Arsenal Pulp Press.

Babel Fruit is a beautiful online journal that publishes an international array of authors.  As they say in their masthead - "Writers are history's storytellers, and each story must be told, heard, and retold until each becomes our own story of human experience." It's an honor to be included. 

I especially like that for one of the poets, Leslie F. Miller, you are able to listen to her reading of her work.  Here's an example of technology offering back an old form of intimacy - the pleasure of being read to.