Tag: publishing

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Queer + Catholic NYC Readings

I’ll be reading with other Queer + Catholic authors on September 4th & 5th in NY. Do come!

Queer and Catholic is an essay collection that examines the culture of how being raised Catholic informs and influences, positively or negatively, our queerness and how our queerness affects our Catholicism, our vestigial Catholic nature or even our flight from and continued struggle with the ʽthe Church of Rome.ʼ  Whether we embrace or reject our Catholic upbringings, they affect and shape who we are and bump up against our queer identities. Examining the culture of Catholicism, rather than the dogma or letter of it, these essays and short stories do not seek to address whether or not queers and the Catholic Church can reconcile or how and why the church should change, but instead explore the impact that growing up Catholic and queer has on us as individuals, writers, and political agents.

Join editor Amie M. Evans and contributors Helen Boyd, Joseph de Marco, Anthony Easton, Stephen Greco, Vince Sgambati, Charlie Vazquez and Emanuel Xavier as they read from their contributions to the anthology.

  • Thursday, September 4 at 6:30PM, CUNY Grad Center, 365 5th Avenue, Skylight Room, (Rm 9100, T. 212-817-7000)
  • Friday, September 5th at 7PM, Bluestockings, 172 Allen St (btwn Rivington and Stanton Street).

edited to add: the San Francisco reading is tonight at SF’s Main Library, 100 Larkin Street, 6PM.

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Siesta

I’ve been a little off with blogging lately; I think my brain has decided it needs a summer vacation, because I can’t seem to put a sentence together even when I want to.

Mostly I’ve been going to work, and coming home, & playing computer games, & being, well, a regular person. It’s kind of nice, playing with the cats & not worrying about a book I’m supposed to be writing.

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To Erma Bombeck, With Love

As many of you know, I’ve been struggling with my weight & fitness for the past couple of years. I was in pretty great shape when I met Betty, & got lazy, for starters, which was then exacerbated by (1) pretty extreme depression after 9/11; (2) quitting a job that was very active for writing, which is not; and (3) getting older and having my metabolism slow. Effectively it’s been a decade since I worked out at a gym regularly, which is embarassing to admit, though I have almost always walked regularly, and some distances, do some yoga, work out with free weights & calisthenics, & of course try to watch what I eat.

Recently, I joined a gym again because watching what I eat and walking a lot and doing at-home workouts wasn’t helping.

But – I know this is going to be a shocking revelation – I am totally out of shape. I go to the gym in my baggy sweats and t-shirt, and get on the Precor elliptical machine, which is kind to my flat foot and bad knees, and start pedaling. In minutes, I notice how much slower I am going than anyone near me, and yet – and yet – my heart rate shoots straight out of any health zone, weight loss or cardiovascular. I slow down a little more, take breaks, watch my heart rate respond, and then notice I have become the literal tortoise to the hares pedaling around me. Continue reading “To Erma Bombeck, With Love”

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Neil Gaiman Fan Club

Reason #428 why I love Neil Gaiman.

Despite his self-doubt, he’s given me two of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever gotten:

  1. Finish what you start.
  2. You can only get up to make more tea.

After that, it’s just a bitter fight to turn your brain off so that you can not think well enough to write.

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Fuck Seal Press?

I came back from visiting Betty upstate to find out that there is a huge mess involving Seal Press (my publishers) which came right on the heels of BFP’s departure last week.

So without pointing out every phrase and person involved, I’ll just say a few things as a white feminist who really only consciously became a feminist after reading Michele Wallace, and who, for nearly 10 years, worked for author Walter Mosley, who has written and talked about the absence of POC in the publishing industry, specifically.

The under representation of WOC in publishing has been a problem for a long time. The under representation of POC has been as well, in general. It’s not just chronic; it’s really fucking awful. Continue reading “Fuck Seal Press?”

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Lambda Lit Transgender Finalists

But despite the absence of Whipping Girl, I do want to congratulate the finalists:

  • Transparent, Cris Beam (Harcourt)
  • Male Bodies, Women’s Souls, LeeRay M. Costa, PhD, (Haworth)
  • The Marrow’s Telling, Eli Clare (Homofactus Press)
  • What Becomes You, Aaron Raz Link & Hilda Raz (University of Nebraska Press)
  • Nobody Passes, Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore (Seal Press)

I have an essay in Mattilda’s Nobody Passes of course, but I especially wanted to congratulate Eli Clare and thank him for all the work he’s done in/for the trans community.

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Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself

I was going to write a column about why, as a feminist, I’d rather be voting for Barack Obama and why, precisely, I’d rather not vote for Hillary Clinton, but one of my students beat me to it.

As smart as she is, however, Hillary is a seriously repugnant actress. Anyone who has sat through a community theater rendition of Shakespeare might know how I feel when I watch Hillary on TV. You are literally crawling out of your skin by the time intermission rolls around. Hillary is like Lady Macbeth and Ophelia rolled into one, and that, my friends, is a very unfortunate combination of ambition, madness, victimization, and desperation.

Do read the whole of the article, since it expresses so much of what feminists who don’t like Clinton don’t like about her.

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Translations

Recently, someone from Brazil inquired as to whether or not a Portuguese translation of My Husband Betty existed. Sadly, the answer is no. Neither is there a Spanish or Japanese version — which are the ones I’m most often asked about.

Seal Press owns the translation rights for My Husband Betty, but I’m pretty sure I own them for She’s Not the Man I Married. Not 100% sure, but nearly. So if you – or someone you know – is interested in publishing a different translation of either, do let me know, or contact Seal Press. Likewise for Audio versions. Personally I’d like to see all of these happen, but so far, no luck.