Sandra Gail Lambert

Bacopa: A Literary Review - Another Reason to be Glad You Live in Gainesville

Were you at this weekend's unveiling of the latest Bacopa?  If not, you missed something quite grand.  Each year the Writers Alliance of Gainesville's Editorial Team produces Bacopa: A Literary Review, and it is fast gaining a reputation for excellence.  Last year's volume was well-reviewed in New Pages ("Strong first lines.  That's the enviable trait . . . ")  The 2012 issue is also beautifully produced and chock-full of talented writers.   

WAG has monthly meetings and this one was given over to a celebration of the newest issue.  The editors shared selections from an international array of authors and local contributors like Stephanie Seguin, Mary Bast, Bruce Hoch, Mary Bridgman, and Tad Karmazyn read to us.  We responded with the deserved celebratory applause.  

Afterwards I tried to go tell each and every one of the editors what a good job they'd done, but I missed a few.  So Denise Ahlberg, Jani Sherrard, Pranada Comtois, Gen Aris, Kaye Linden, Dorothy Staley, and Eldon Turner - thank you. 

Next month's WAG meeting (Sunday, June 24th, 2:30pm at the Millhopper Library), which is open to non-members, will present Sidney Wade - one of my favorite poets.    

VIDA - Women in Literary Arts

VIDA is most famous for "The Count" - their annual pie charts showing the rates of publication between women and men in literary journals.  For example.

They've also put together an "anti-list of under-acknowledged authors."  They include Gina Berriault, Kamala Das, Jennifer Tamayo, Nikki Grimes, and the never under-appreciated by me, Judy Grahn.  Right now I'm reading their recommendation The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, and Alexandra David-Neel's My Journey to Lhasa is waiting on the bedside table.  

How about ya'll?  Any suggestions for the list?      

Banning the I-Touch From the Bedroom

For the first time in my life since I was six, I wasn't reading anymore - all because of my bedroom relationship with an I-Touch.  There was self-delusion (one more game of Scramble and then I'll pick up that novel), justification (I've had a hard day and deserve to relax and surf the Huffington Post articles.), rationalization (I have to see what's new on Media Bistro.  It's important for my writing.)  I was doing better and had even deleted all the games, but then one night I checked my e-mail just one more time and there was that acceptance from North American Review.  It set my recovery way back. 

Two weeks ago I willed myself into a cold turkey docking of the temptation every night in its charger in the kitchen.  For awhile I woke up in the dark lonely and lost, but now I've made new friends to play with in bed.  Like Carol Anshaw's brilliant novel Carry the One.  Or Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?  Really, it's a party every night. 

And last night I woke up at three, pulled the always-waiting, long-patient yellow pad over, perched it on a pillow on my lap, and scribbled down what might be the first scene of a novel.  This was so much more than a just a good time.  It's too soon to say, but there might be a relationship developing. 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed - I Can't Wait to Read This Book.

Cheryl Strayed's mother dies and she takes her grief on an eleven-hundred-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail.  You know this video had me crying with that first photo of her mother.  Cheryl says "Everything I am is born of everything I gathered back to myself on that trip." 

Here's the promo video for Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Crime Fiction Read-Along

I've "internet known" Juliet Grames for many years, and she's always coming up with ways to form community around books and reading.  Her newest idea is a read-along crime fiction project.  I'm thrilled since the read-along she organized for Middlemarch was pretty much the most fun you can have in an online bookclub.  And now, as a senior editor at Soho Press, she's decided she needs to understand more about the origins of crime fiction and its modern influences.  She's inviting us all to spend a year with her doing just this.  Juliet has read fifty of the classic crime novels to prepare, and she'll choose ten of them for this project.   Here's a Books On the Night Stand podcast interview with her about it all. 

The first read is a short story - Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue."  The discussion will be on March 20th, but before that, also on the Soho Press Blog, Juliet will post some, probably juicy, backstory on the story.  

I'm sure we'll have a great discussion of what it is in mysteries that satisfies us as readers.  But also, for me, a writer who doesn't always have the strongest plots (Hah!  I'm being way kind to myself here.), I'm hoping to have some of the craft rub off and into my next novel.      

  

Lesbian, queer, dyke - all that.

Sometimes, something makes you look at your website with "fresh eyes."  I did that today and, yikes, I had a panic that it wasn't lesbian enough.  It's great that these days we don't have to proclaim "lesbian here, right here" all over the place just to keep the world from closeting us, but maybe I've become too casual.  And it doesn't help that I'm single and so don't have all those homey couple pictures to post.  And that as of late I'm not the type to write much about sexcapades.  (Although I appreciate those who do.  Ummm, maybe I should think about that.)  

So, here you go.  A little bit of "lesbian visibility."  And the image above is by Tamara de Lempicka.  Ellis Avery has written a grand novel about, sort of, this artist's life called The Last Nude. 

Tales of the New World by Sabina Murray

How do you have a collection of "page-turning" short stories chock-full of mystery, murder, and mayhem that are also deep explorations of philosophy, history, and politics?  Oh, and often the words come one after another in those smooth strands of enchantment reminiscent of a prose poem. 

Really, how did Sabina Murray do this in her Tales of the New World?  I'm re-reading sections to figure that out.  If you see the collection somewhere, just pick it up and turn to the Balboa story.  It's short.  You can read it through right there.  It will mess up your mind - in that good way.  

I always like to say how I heard about a book - its provenance, sort of.  On her Facebook status Susan Stinson just outright ordered us to read Tales of the New World.  I found that our fabulous library had a copy.  And that was that. Although I might go buy a copy so I'm able to loan it out myself.       

My Last Read of the Year

"Everything is root and mud and twist."  This is how Janisse Ray describes the deep swamp in Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River.  This is a perfect description of a southern swamp, told with a perfect construction of a sentence, and it made me crawl out of my warm bed and go write. 

And tonight I'll read further into her tale of kayaking the length of a river, a river protected by Riverkeepers, her home river, a river, formed by the joining of the Ocmulgee and Oconee, that is the largest free-flowing, intact water system on the Atlantic coast. 

And this will be the last book I put on my "What I've Read - 2011" list.  Adding the 2012 heading, seeing it here on the side of the blog with nothing, as yet, underneath it, thinking about the books still in their final edits that might end up listed, the books waiting, well-worn, on library shelves - well, it's a Happy New Year for all.      

Coming Out in Antarctica

Searching for dinosaurs, trapped by ice pack, and possibly homophobic paleontologists are all part of Lucy Jane Bledsoe's essay, Finding Myself in Antarctica in The Gay and Lesbian Review.  At the same time (or really) she tells us of the importance of writing fiction, of imagination, of transgression.  All this she says "is why I’ve always defended the coming out narrative as enduringly important."

This is such a good essay.  This is how I try to write.  Once again I tell you, ever since I read Lucy's The Ice Cave, I've hoped one day to write essays that a reviewer describes as the love children of the writings of Lucy Jane Bledsoe and Kenny Fries. 

Amanda Kyle William's The Stranger You Seek

 
Another writer friend has a newly released novel!  Amanda's The Stranger You Seek is the first in a mystery series set not just in Atlanta, but in the Decatur neighborhood I used to live in.  In fact, here's an article by a Decatur resident about Amanda - "The Secret Life of My Pet Sitter."

A fine thing about Facebook and Twitter is that we've been able to follow along as Random House got smart and signed Amanda up, then we heard about the first editors meeting and saw pictures of the cover, and now we've squealed together via the internet about great pre-publication reviews. 

Below is the trailer for The Stranger You Seek.  I haven't watched it yet since I never want to know much about the plot before I read.  Plus, I might get scared. 

Sally Bellerose's The Girls Club

Sally Bellerose is a fabulous writer and human being.  She's insightful, tender, funny, and unafraid as she writes about "lesbian identity, sexuality, illness, and class."  Her novel The Girls Club is just out.  I've ordered it from Bywater Books.  Publishers Weekly loved it.  Joan Nestle loves it - "Bellerose knows what to do with history—give it a body, desires, the wonder, fun, lust and longings of the human heart."  I can't wait.  

The Top Science Fiction/Fantasy Titles Ever - You Get to Vote

NPR has pulled together a list of a hundred titles, and we get to choose our favorite ten.  It's a decent list.  At least it had Joanna Russ'sThe Female Man  and Kindred by Octavia Butler.  Others I voted for were Dreamsnake, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Faded Sun Trilogy  by Cherryh, and,of course,The Handmaid's Tale. 

Titles I think they missed were The Women of Wonder anthologies and anything by Elizabeth A. Lynn, especially A Different Light (and that short story of hers "The Woman Who Loved the Moon" still makes me sob).  And come to think of it - where was James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)? Okay, I've got to stop.  I keep thinking of more.  From the Legend of Biel, does anyone remember this one?  I think I still have a copy on my shelf - yellowing, crumbly pages and all. 

T4 by Ann Clare LeZotte

T4 was the name for the Nazi program charged with the killing of disabled children and adults.  Hundreds of thousands of German citizens labeled "useless eaters" were rounded up into hospitals where doctors and nurses starved, poisoned, or gassed them in the first of the fake showers. 

I've known about this.  It's part of my cached pool of nightmare images.  So it makes sense that I was up all night after reading Ann Clare LeZotte's young adult novel in free verse about a German girl of those times who is deaf and hiding from the authorities.  But the novel is lyrical and lovely and healing.  There is no minimizing of the horror, but the girl is young and, as young people will, finds love and adventure and delight even in the hardest of situations. 

Now, here's how I found this book.  I have a friend Mary who lives in the same retirement community that my mother used to live in.  Besides telling tales of each of our wheelchair-using adventures, we always share our current reads.  Mary had just finished this book which had been passed on to her by another resident because the author lives right here in Gainesville. (I've just sent a Facebook friend request to her.) I wrote down the title, ordered it from my public library, and was reading it within the week.  Yay to friends.  Yay to public libraries.  Yay to this world of internet connection.                 

Books That Change Your Life

 
It all depends, doesn't it?  The books that shake you up change over the years.  They reveal something about your life in that particular moment.  So what does it mean that Robert Rodi's Dogged Pursuit: My Year of Competing Dusty, the World's Least Likely Agility Dog is rocking my world?  

I know it has something to do with the willingness to not be perfect, to go out there into certain humiliation and smile about it, and to find community in unlikely places.  Plus, the book is wicked funny.      

Jackie Kay - Why Didn't I Know About This Author?

Red Dust Road is Jackie Kay's memoir.  I've read it.  It's just so good.  Really, that plural-voiced, interwoven stream of consciousness sort of thing about everywhere her family vacationed put me in writer's awe. And then, coming to the end, I was flipping pages like you do for a suspense novel.  What was going to happen? 

Jackie Kay writes memoir, poetry, and novels.  She's a lesbian.  You'd think I'd know about her, have read her writing, maybe be friends, at least know an ex of hers, but no.  She's Scottish.  That's probably why.  We Americans have to work not to be insular in our reading, and I clearly have not been trying hard enough. 

But those of us "across the pond" are catching up.  Lambda Literary just published an interview with Jackie Kay and I'm about to go track down a copy of her novel, Trumpet.   

      

Now, This is a Book Club!

 
A book club where actors stage a pivotal scene from the novel, tables are set with theme-decorated goblets, and prizes are awarded for the fanciest hat.  Now, I do have a decent imagination and with it I've prepared for my imaginary radio interview with Diane Rehms, sometimes the podcast with Nancy Pearl.  And for sure, sometimes, I imagine my not-as-yet-published novel chosen for book clubs.  But it took a much wilder imagination than mine in a devoted supporter of the written word to come up with Mama Fancina's Fancy Hat Literary Luncheon.  Really, as Tayari Jones put it, the best book club ever. 

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

 
I wish English had an imperative tense so this could be more emphatic, but - READ TAYARI JONES' NOVEL SILVER SPARROW  NOW.  

The plot, the twists, the characters - I'm not going to say anything about all that good stuff.  I, myself, never want to know details before I read.  But maybe what you want to know is that the author is brilliant at grabbing my heart, that I fear and hope for her characters right away and throughout, that I'm not quite finished yet because as I get closer to the end I read more slowly, already sad that it'll be over.  But when it is, I'm going back to study how she uses the moving back and forth in time, sometimes with just one sentence, to create an almost unbearable, high-wire hum of tension.   

Really.  Right now.  Go on.  Get to your library or independent bookstore.  Sure you can download it onto some sort of reader, but the book itself is a lovely thing - great cover, excellent type, paper that feels good under your fingertips.  Hurrah to the publisher Algonquin Books.     

May Sarton's 99th Birthday

Those of us who were Feminist Bookstore women in the 80's remember the thrill.  We carried authors no one else did or if they did there was one copy way in the back rather than on the front shelf right as you walked in. To name only a few -  Alice Walker, Rita Mae Brown, Toni Cade Bambara, Lee Lynch, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Dorothy Allison, Ellen Bass, Pat Parker, Mary Daly, Judy Grahn, and, of course, May Sarton. 

Best I can tell, May Sarton published sixteen books of poetry, twenty-one novels, and eleven journals.  A young crop of feminists (well, we were young then) "rediscovered" her work, and in our store, Journal of a Solitude and Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing were, at times, our bestsellers.  It was the fostering of a mutual celebration between author and audience that is an independent bookstore at it's best.     

Today would have been May Sarton's 99th birthday. 

Silver Sparrow - Tayari Jones Has a New Novel. Soon.

Tayari Jones, a fine and generous writer, is launching her new novel Silver Sparrow in May.  For those of us who've followed her blog, there's a way that the novel is a little bit ours as well.  At least the excitement of it's upcoming release is, for sure. 

So why am I talking about this now?  Even though May is a ways away, here's an excerpt from Silver Sparrow.  And remember, these days, pre-ordering is what gets a book buzz going for an author.    

Lambda Literary Awards - Read Any Good Queers Lately?

 
If you look at this list of Lambda Literary Award Finalists and are appalled by how few of them you've read, you are not alone.  I've read The Big Bang Symphony (oh, so good) and Just Kids, and that's it. 

This must be rectified.  For me, since I hope one day to be listed in the category, Lesbian Debut Fiction is a good place to start.  My choices are Alcetis by Katherine Beutner, Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard, The More I Owe You by Michael Sledge, One More Stop by Lois Walden, or Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn. 

P.S.  One of these novels, it seems, is by a man, Michael Sledge.  Now I'm sure it's a lovely piece of fiction, but I thought the purpose of a Lesbian Debut Category was to support and promote lesbian writers.