Sandra Gail Lambert

Sabal: Writers in Paradise

At the Writers in Paradise Conference I won an honorable mention.  This meant that I would receive a "notation" in the upcoming Sabal, a journal with all the "best of" pieces from the conference. 

I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but today my copy arrived.  It is fun to read everyone's pieces since during the conference you don't have access to any of the other workshops' writings.  And I got to reread "Itch" by Lorin Oberweger from my own group.  It is just so good. 

And here's my "notation" by Thisbe Nissen (our workshop leader).  "Ambitious in voice, scope and power, Sandra Lambert's novel immerses us in a world so rich with detail that reading is a visceral experience."  

Just to balance things out, in the same trip to the mailbox, I received a rejection from a journal that said my submission to them "lacked momentum." Ahhh, the writer's life.  

 

Del Martin has died.

Co-founder of The Daughters of Bilitis, The Ladder, and the Alice B. Tolklas Democratic Club, instrumental in the fight to get homosexuality delisted as a psychiatric illness, the mother of a daughter, part of the first out lesbian couple to join NOW, author of Lesbian/Woman, Lesbian Love and Liberation, and Battered Wives, and finally, two months ago, wife to her love of fifty-five years - Del Martin was eighty-seven years old when she died this Wednesday.  

Pat Spears

Every night at the Below Sea Level Conference we had readings.  There was this moment on the second night when Pat Spears got up to read.  Mouths dropped.  No one coughed or shifted in their seat or ruffled any papers.  When she ended, when her character had shot the horse, there was a long sigh.  Maybe it was just from me, but I don't think so.

 

Pat is sixth generation Floridian, and her writing has our sand and pine sap all over it.  Usually you would have to wait until her book is published to know what I'm talking about, but Pat has just put up a website.  Click on over so you can say that you were reading her when.   

Post Fay

Tree tops twirled and things thumped on the roof, but nothing bad happened on this particular half acre in North Central Florida.  We ended up with a respectable and much needed 5.55 inches of rain, but writer friends in other parts of Florida are flooded.  

I've had days of staying inside and having time to work on this new chapter.  Mostly, of course, I wasted it, but today my research ranged from finding out who was elected governor in 1932 to what a speedboat of that time looked like to watching the DVD of "Freaks." 

It was such a good movie. (Except for the parts that weren't.)  I loved seeing so many disabled and just different people in one story and two of them were even main characters. And it was made in 1931 so there, during the depression, were a bearded woman, a legless man, armless women, an intersexed person, little people, conjoined twins, Prince Randian the human torso, and Zip, Pip and Schlitzie, the "pinheads," all with good paying jobs.  One of them got around the same way my new character does.  I zoomed and slow motioned the screen to see how he moved his body.  The gloves he wore, their thickness, when he would take them off gave me a whole scene between my character and her mother. 

Sometimes this writing thing is way fun.     

The Lesbian Novel

Here's a link to "From the Ban to the Booker," a BBC radio broadcast of Val McDermid's exploration of the development of the lesbian novel.  This is the second part of a series, but I can't find a workable link to the first part.  Anyway, listen to Ali Smith, Jeannette Winterson, Sarah Waters, and other lesbians talk about their own writing and earlier works by authors such as Valerie Taylor, Patricia Highsmith (writing as Clare Morgan), Maureen Duffy, and Ann Bannon.  This episode takes us from pulp, through the explosion of lesbian feminist presses in the 80's, and to the present day.  My only additions would be Ann Allen Shockley, Paula Gunn Allen, and Jewelle Gomez just to drop a little color into the list. 

Now, things are different in Great Britain than in the U.S.  There, the novel by a lesbian with lesbian characters is considered mainstream, not genre.  For an exploration of why this might be true, see Nicola Griffith's blog.  

Besides the content, my favorite part was to hear Val McDermid's voice speak to me.  She sounds just like I always imagine whenever I gaze at her picture.  Sigh. 

A Pie Worthy Chapter

So.  Okay, here we go. The new novel time line means that I will have this next chapter finished in two months.  You heard it here.  I've got the year (1932), a main character, and a first page.  That's a start.  I wish this beginning part was easier. 

I have had two readers of the just finished chapter.  They had some good suggestions.  They say they liked it.  One of them will be baking me an apple pie very soon.

    

Women's Wonderlands

Last November, I saw a call for submissions for Women's Wonderlands, a proposed anthology of lesbian travel writing, from the University of Wisconsin Press.  I sent off an essay about kayaking.  The very next day one of the editors, Gillian Kendall, sent an e-mail saying that she liked the piece.

She had some suggestions, we worked back in forth in this lovely way, and the piece got better.  Then I waited.

This morning, nine months later, I woke up to an e-mail saying that it's on.  And I'm in it.  This is such good news and perfect timing.   

Wild Iris Books

It's been two days of revision at the sentence level.  It had gotten so that whenever someone said something to me, I'd see their words as if they were a strip of closed captioning.  Then I'd add commas and rearrange phrases.  It had to stop.  I had to clear my brain.

And now, after a night of dancing and lovely flirting at Wild Iris Books, I don't care if you run your sentences on it won't even make me blink.  To seriously dance will remove all my worries about split infinitives, and upon arriving home, even dangling modifiers left my mind. 

Well, I and those dangling modifiers I brought home with me are going to bed.  Sweet Dreams, all.      

 

Writer friends

Belea had to be in Gainesville yesterday, so that meant I had an evening of dinner, gelato, and bookstores, all wound through with writer talk.  We met at ACA a few years ago and have been sharing our successes and rejections ever since.  She showed me how to format my first submissions list.  She told me how to send a full ms. off to an agent that time one was requested.  Her mother made me a patchwork bag to hang off my wheelchair that is just the right size for file folders and yellow pads.  Writers (and their mothers) are so generous.   

Check out Belea's websites here and here.  And if you like the gay male romantic smut - buy this.  

Kelly Cherry

"What does the act of writing signify?  That you, the writer, have an inner life, that you are more than what you appear to be, regardless of what that may be, that you possess spirit, imagination, thought, that the world of the immaterial is housed in you.  And that you believe others - others who might, in an ideal world, be readers - possess these attributes as well.  The act of writing is an act of faith." Kelly Cherry, Writing the World.

And this is the writer that I get to spend time with at ACA in October. 

I'm twittering

I think I'm the first of my crowd (mostly over forty, some of whom don't even own a television) to Twitter.  It's fun and would be even more fun if I had more company.  I promise, it only wastes a little bit of time. 

For a writer who sits alone in her room for most of the day, it works.  I get to announce every small accomplishment in a quick (140 characters or less) blurb out to the world.  It is satisfying even if hardly any one reads it.  Is that pathetic?  I don't care. 

Already, I have one follower, and our exchange of writerly moments makes me feel like part of a team.  Go Tayari.