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The 20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards have been announced, and First Person Queer won for the best anthology. Whoo Hoo!
Which means that my essay "Theories about Bodies and Truth" is part of an award-winning book. (Can you tell that I'm practicing how to bring it up in a cover letter?) I hope that my few pages added a little, but the big congratulations go to Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel, the editors, and to Arsenal Pulp Press for being independent and wonderful.
This evening I snatched up my mall savvy friend and we went bra shopping. Yes, this does have something to do with writing.
On Monday, for more than an hour, a room full of writers will be critiquing my chapter. That evening I read my work to Connie May Fowler, Dorothy Allison, and twenty others. Then they will say things about it.
Now, I'm fairly tough. This means that I can appear calm while my skin is prickling with the shame that I ever thought I was a writer, and that I can keep reading even as I notice, with increasing horror, that every word is stupid, stupid, stupid.
Some writers have a touchstone that soothes - a locket of their mother's, a mental image of something like a waterfall, or maybe a meditative chant. But let me tell you that, for me, nothing works as well as a new bra.
Just knowing it's under there, all plunging and pretty, and I'm the rock star of writing.
Sometimes, when I'm still in the spell of a novel, I think "this is the best thing I've ever read." Then the enchantment wisps away and the book takes its place with all the other beloved writing in my life of reading.
Earlier this week I finished Lavinia. It is the story of 
a minor character in Virgil's Aeneid - "the unfolding of a hint" as LeGuin calls it. Ohmygod, the book, and there's no way out of using this cliche, took my breath away.
The best thing a novel can do, I think, is connect you to the intimate heart of the world. It always makes me cry. It's what I want to accomplish in my own writing. And now, days after closing the book, waiting for the enchantment to lessen, Lavinia still holds me to her world.
I wanted the book to never end. I wish I hadn't read it so I could be reading it for the first time. I want everyone I know to read it. I want to read the book again - I must study the sentence structure more thoroughly. I might have to actually buy it so it can live in my house, always. (I traded the library copy to my poet friend for her copy of Virgil's Georgics.) It made me wish I had learned Latin.
What can I say? Read this novel.
Dang, I sure am tired of the rejections. I know, I was complaining about not getting any. What was I thinking? At least my poppy mallows are blooming.
So, I wallowed for two days. Then I thought, "hah, you're not getting rid of me" and prepared another submission. And I've finished the upcoming conference critiques. And I've prepared and timed my selections for the nightly readings. And tomorrow I take my van in for a tune-up.
And I've also actually written a bit on the new chapter. It's strange. My character dies of the Spanish Flu, and I have my first bout of the flu in over thirty years. At least I now have some relevant body experience to work with as I write - like the way sound burrs in your ears when you get a high fever.
Friday night in Gainesville, and I was at Wild Iris Books to hear Joan Larkin read from My Body: New and Selected poems. She finished with a narrative told in sonnets, some so fresh that they were still handwritten in a palm-fitting notebook. The audience was filled with us "OL's," as a friend of mine's child calls us old lesbians. (As in, "sure Mom, we'll be at your party. We like hanging with the OL's.")
Us gray-headed ones (with a few proudly clinging to bottled red and blond) hummed along with Joan as she read, as the swirl of past decades rose up among us and connected us, and I clutched my faded, 1975 copy of Amazon Poetry edited by Joan and Elly Bulkin.
Joan lives here now, beside our spring-fed lakes and tannic rivers, where stories and poems, like cottonmouths looking for sun, wrap themselves around branches that bend over the water.
"Set in the Florida tourists don’t see, from the cheap motels of Tampa to the steamy small towns of central Florida , these stories take us into the kind of lives not usually documented in fiction. These are men who know what it’s like to betray a lover—and to trust one. Full of emotional insight as well as hot, steamy sex, these are the best kind of stories, the ones that draw us in and show us a slice of life—and in the process tell us something about our own lives as well." - Neil Plakcy
I know. Another half-naked man on my weblog. But the above blurb is from the back cover of the just released today Rough Cut: Vincent Diamond Collected.
Yes, a dear writer friend, writing as Vincent Diamond, has a long overdue gathering of the wildly popular and widely anthologized Vincent Diamond stories (plus new ones). In a today only offer - leave a comment on the Vincent Diamond live journal and you may win a copy. "Mushy butt romantic smut" is the author's own fond term for for these stories.
My own fond terms for the author and her work and her generosity to other writers is "fabulous" and "thank you."
