 Thank you for joining us. We'll be starting in just one minute. Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for our online program at Mechanics Institute in San Francisco. I'm Laura Shepherd, director of events. And today I'm very pleased to bring together author Selby when shorts who's joining us from Paris. In conversation with Professor Loretta Steck from San Francisco State University to be in conversation about Selby's new book after Sappho in her new book fragments of Sappho's life and her poetry. Imagine. Give way to reflection and inspiration for the lives of women through the ages. They profess their agency. They give their voice. They redefine their lives and their livelihoods. Now, for those of you who are new to the mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our general interest library and international chess club and ongoing author and literary literary events throughout the year. And on Friday nights are cinema live film series. So please visit our website at my library.org. And by the way, we have felt we have programs online and also in person. If you're here in San Francisco, please join us for a free tour of mechanics Institute on Wednesday at noon. So I'd like to introduce our guests. Selby when shorts holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of bodies of others drag dances, and their after lives. She is a finalist for the Lambda literary reward, and also has a new novella, a life of chameleons and Loretta stack is professor in in the English department at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses on modernist literature with a focus on women animal studies and literature. Southern African literature in English and literature of exile and migration. One of my favorite courses is to teach an intensive study of Virginia Wolf's works, and she's published articles on wolf, as well as Gertrude Stein, Junna Barnes, DH Lawrence Bessie head, and other 20th century writers. So please to welcome both of our guests Selby when shorts and Loretta stack. Also, after our conversation will engage you our audience in a Q amp a so please put your questions in the Q amp a or chat. So please welcome Loretta stack and Selby when shorts. Thank you so much. And thank you to all the guests who are here who we can't see but we know you're there and we're delighted that you are with us. And I am very much delighted and honored to be here with Selby when shorts to talk about her wonderful book. After Sappho after Sappho is a beautifully constructed lyrical meditation on creative women who have loved other women during the modernist period from the late 19th century through the 1920s. And the attempt to break free of the limitations of gender in myriad ways. And for many their guiding light was Sappho, the ancient Greek poet whose work has survived only in fragments. Selby weaves, Sappho's poetic fragments translated by Ann Carson, throughout the vignettes of women's lives from Italy, England, the United States, France, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. And that's a riveting and lyrical account of often forgotten histories. Ann Carson says in her introduction to her translation of Sappho that she tries to translate in a way to allow the reader quote a free space of imaginal adventure. I got this phrase this phrase was echoing in my mind as I was rereading Selby's wonderful book and I enjoyed it even more the second time. So I was delighted to do so. This fragmented narrative presents writers and artists who may be familiar to many of us, such as Virginia Wolf, Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney Colette, Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt and Vita Sackville West, but also includes figures who are less well known, including Lena Poletti from Italy, the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray and Anna Kulisky off from the Ukraine. And after Sappho, Selby interweaves the biographical facts and words of many of these women in short titled sections that allow this free space of imaginal adventure to the reader, allowing us to fill in the historical record with the astonishing novel and collective narratives of women artists, activists, lesbians and sapphists who imagined new identities in the modernist era. So we're just going to have a little conversation I'll ask a few questions asks I'll be to read a couple of passages for us, and then we will take your questions. I don't know how 40 minutes something like that, the audience questions. I just wanted to call attention to the fact that in addition to this book being beautiful and lyrical it illustrates great erudition. The bibliographic note to the novel is 17 pages long. And Selby I wondered if you would speak a little bit about your study of languages, the research for this book required you to know Italian Greek French English obviously and perhaps other languages as well. You have a PhD in comparative literature so I wondered if you might talk about your study of languages your study of comparative literature, and how this book arrived out of that study or whether you were inspired in some completely different way to write this. Well thank you for this extremely generous introduction and I'm delighted and honored to be here and to be in conversation with you. And I think I can say that this book is very much a product of my time studying comparative literature. You mentioned that it's got a very long bibliographic note and as as, you know, when we're trained as graduate students in comparative literature. I think we're taught ethically to acknowledge the, the debts that we have to scholars and archivists and to thinkers who've come before us and, you know, among my many debts to two people who come before me I think a lot about the feminist writer Sarah Ahmed, who says that citations can be feminist bricks. So they're, they're ways of building lineages of thinking and they're how we say how we arrived at the, at the places we arrive at in our own writing and thinking and so I feel I try to, I try to do that as well even though it's not very conventional for for a novel to have such a long bibliography. But I think in particular comparative literature, you know, is a kind of, it's kind of place where they put people who want to do too many things at once. And so I'm one of those people and I maybe have never really gotten over that and I, I not only loved being able to do many things at once at that time but I was also doing different things that I'm doing now I wasn't to. I was reading modernism literature at that time I was a medievalist actually. And so I did study Italian, but I also was reading a lot of, you know, medieval poetry in all oxytan and go Portuguese and things like that, and studying the a little poems by and about women or that were performed in in parts of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. So I was still interested in women in gender and performance in poetry, but in a quite different time. But I think even that, even though those studies were so different at the same time you know that I was studying these, these medieval languages, you know somebody in my department was gathering all of the Arabic apathets for lions at that time and someone else was studying the history of Cuban radio. And so I think I retained not only my own peculiar, you know, curiosities but also the sense of being enriched by touching other other fields and other people are learning. And so this, this book very much comes not only from what I was allowed and encouraged to do in graduate school with that kind of curiosity but also the, that I think the whole field allows you to follow these somewhat errant paths into your own curiosity into the deepest reaches of whatever your research brings you and also into these outermost branches where you can't know what you'll learn. Well, you bring together many of the fruits of your curiosity in a very impressive way so your edition is very evidence in this in this volume even though it's you know, not an academic work per se. So, very pleasurable work to read. So let me pick up on what you just said about Sarah Ahmed I mean the idea of creating citations only of women critics and theorists and writers is part of her methodology and I would connect her back to Virginia wolf and the idea of thinking back through our mothers if we are women that she talks about in a room of one's own and I see after Sappho very much in that vein as well in that in that lineage. You say in after Sappho our lives are the missing lines from the fragments of Sappho's poems, women's lives and particularly the lives of women who desire women lesbian queer activist women are often ignored in traditional photography and so your work is in part to build that lineage to create that set of connections that are often obscured. So I wondered if I might ask you to read on page 43 in the American edition, the short passage called Sappho fragment 16 to give us a sense of how you handle, you know, some of the material about women's lives but also the sort of tone that you said in the kind of style that you create for this wonderful book. I would be, I would be happy to read yes. So yes, this is Sappho fragment 16. Whenever we could leave these marriages, we fled those of us who had nothing in our pockets but our own badly stitched handkerchiefs scraped together what we could. Some of us gave piano lessons on dull afternoons, and others dusted the parlours of ladies until we could buy our passage. There were those like William Seymour, industrious lads in the trousers of their brothers. And there were those who might have idled their lives away on estates had they wished, but none of us wished to live over mastered. Always. However, we left the verb impadronirsi. We went with no return. Thus we embarked, each in her own way on the voyage out. We arrived in unknown cities in the ports of southern islands at the houses of anyone appearing to be a sister. We shuttered and throughout our names. We began to find each other slowly at first because we were so new. You would see someone in the street, someone like X and wonder and no at the same time, or there would be a glance like ours, wondering and knowing rising to meet you on the balcony where you were standing because it was the farthest limit of your father's house. Then we would write our first uncertain letters to each other, hesitant to ask to tell with what words stretched over silences. We took a little false courage and seeing our lines torn and gasping on the page like saffos to pray for a share towards out of the unexpected. Afterwards, we sat very still waiting for a response, hoping for a correspondence of fragments. Just lovely. Thank you so much for that. This passage, you know, begins with this idea that whenever we, we could leave these marriages we fled right and the book includes a lot of material about patriarchal violence right in the history of the horrible things that were done to women and also the book includes information about various laws and structures that oppressed women right so it's not simply individual men but structures as well and one example is article 544 of the penal code of Italy that transferred women who were raped to their attackers as brides and to my astonishment that penal code article was not repealed until 1981. I learned from you and sorry to say yes, that is true. Quite shocking. And I, and I was thinking as I was reading these kinds of passages, how difficult the task was that you set for yourself, because you were trying to reveal this history of violence, but you were also writing a book that is very lyrical, very imagistic, very, you know, full of poetry. And I wondered if you would like to speak to that challenge of bringing those two realms together and what that meant for you as a writer. Well, I do think. I suppose it does make me feel at the same time, both both furious and in a way like full of a poetic longing for something that is not that like it fills me with a longing to imagine that it could be otherwise. Other than other than histories of, of, of cis hetero patriarchy as you said not not so much individual but really systems and structures of violence and oppression. And so I think perhaps it comes from, from that kind of desire to imagine otherwise and to, to be enraged in a way that is not just confined to to a sort of internal burning with rage but also seeks to beyond to create other visions of how of how things could be. And maybe also has some sarcasm in it like some of these things are patently and darkly absurd it is absurd it is insane and absurd that that anyone could say to themselves, do you know what I think half of the people are not really equal to the other half of the people just because they were born that way. And that's, I mean, when you when you say that out loud, whether that's about gender whether that's about race whether that's about any of these other identity categories. It's, it's clearly an insane thing to think. So there's that kind of, I think it provokes a kind of sarcasm like that that is also perhaps both furious and maybe kind of has a kind of wit that comes with it because you can say if you can poke at the absurdity of that kind of statement then something comes out of it that must not be that it must be something else. And I think, you know, my, my aim in, in, in taking I did, I did take almost all of the men out of this time out of this history Oscar Wilde is there, and it's in as well as stayed in, but I did. And it wasn't, it wasn't to essentialize in some way the category of women and you know these are people who at the time identified as women and we don't know how they would identify now. They lived different words than they had in different categories for identities, but, but without, you know, essentializing that that category or without saying in some way all that category must be better than other categories was just the reverse of what was done, you know, to women. Anyway, I wanted to try, imaginatively to, to sort of to push what had been always at the center, always canonical always honored always cherished in the archive to just push it out of the center for a minute. Some of these characters, you know, I thought of it as like having a minute to think for yourself, and having thoughts, and those feelings and those forms of creative work. Just, just take up the center for a bit. It's enough to be forever doesn't have to be better than everything else just to have a little interviewed really, where we could imagine what that would be like and in that way I feel, you know, very indebted to Eleanor Farante who talks a lot about about this. I'm just imagining that is, that is gendered. Again, without trying, you know, without essentializing or, or recategorizing people in ways that limit them as well. Great, thank you. I think it works I mean I think your, your project to do that works very well, very well. And I was very interested in how many reviewers remark on the fact that the men are absent. And, you know, some of them seem to be perfectly fine with it and others seem to be a little, little puzzled like where are the men, which, you know, I don't really understand since they're everywhere else. There are so many. I mean the first one I took out and this is because I have a chip in my shoulder about Gabriele Danuncio, who's just constantly striding across literary and military history. He was a, he was a proto fascist he's got enough history written about him from in my opinion and you know he existed in time we can read about him but I just didn't want to be another person writing more things about Gabriele Danuncio once I took him out. Just really take him out. Well it's, it's refreshing. Thank you. Thank you for that. And I think when you were talking about, you know, creating something alternate right thinking about what could be other than this history of patriarchy and, you know, sexist absurdity. You use Sappho well to help you do that right like that that realm of the sapphic imagination becomes really crucial to to that alternate realm. And I think, you know, one of the things that I noticed more in the second reading of this book is how well you structured it. One of the ways that you create a structure is by repeating images across the text in very modernist fashion. So the book moves back and forth in time, right we kind of start in the 1890s, early 1890s, the book ends in 1928. Meanwhile, the sections go back and forth in time and so it has a sweep of the modernist period but we're not strictly chronological so part of what structures the book. Instead of chronology is this series of images and those of course are very connected to Sappho and her her method and her poetic style. So I wondered if you might read one more passage for us, which is early in the book. It's on our page 14 in the American edition. It's titled Sappho fragment to be happy to thank you. A classic poem is a calling, both a hymn and a plea. It bends in obeisance to the divine ever dabbled in shining. And at the same time, it calls out to ask, When will you arrive? Why is your radiance distant from my eyes? You walk through the branches while I sleep when I sleep at the roots. You pour yourself out like the light of an afternoon and yet somewhere you linger outside the day. It is while invoking the one who abides and yet must be called urgently from a great distance, but Sappho writes of I through somanon, the bright trembling of leaves in the moment of anticipation. She is living in a cletic time, whatever her century. She is calling out. She is waiting. She lies down in the shade of the future and drowses among its roots. Her case is the genitive of remembering. Thank you so much. That that image of the trembling of leagues appears numerous times in different contexts throughout the book and it's a very beautiful image and it has many different meanings. And I wondered if you would like to speak a little bit about either that image or the how you chose the images that you chose to to hold the book together and particularly something I know very little about the the connections to the Greek grammar that you're making. Yeah, I'd be glad to I'd be glad to because this allows me to talk about and Carson which I'm a kind of an and Carson addict I think it's fair to say so. I should say so among the like I have studied various romance and Germanic languages but I've never studied Greek so I actually entirely almost depend on other people to to understand you know how how how cases work in Greek how grammar works in Greek and that's been fascinating me to sort of, you know, to be such an amateur and apprentice in this and I feel lucky to be, you know, to kind of sit at the feet of and Carson in this in this way who she's a poet or she is a poet, as well as a translator as well as a scholar, as well as someone who reads a lot of Virginia Woolf herself so I think this image, you know, of the, what how to translate this word, I'm entirely indebted to her for the the beauty of that of that language and she's, you know, I hope indebted to Sapa for that as well how to how to convey this kind of movement that is, is not a movement that is caused by physical force but rather by some kind of infusion of light or some kind of, you know, enigma of time, and maybe that goes back to what you said about the book that I wrote doesn't really operate on straight time it operates in these kind of ellipses or circles like gradually do move forward over time but not not in a straight way and on a straightforward way linear temporal. But I was also thinking you know about about this passage so when I was when I was quite young I started reading Virginia Woolf and I think it's I'm still very much under the spell of that. That image when you when you reminded me made me think I just admit this of my favorite line into the lighthouse which I will read you and then you'll see how indebted I am doubly to both of them so this is this is Virginia Woolf from to the lighthouse. And it says, it's about Mrs. Ramsay. It could not last. She knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seem to go around the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings without effort like a light stealing underwater, so that it's ripples and the reads in it and the minnows balancing themselves and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging trembling. So I feel like it's so obvious that I'm just you know I never got over that maybe just that line and then when and Carson came along. I have it was really a lost cause on my part and so I think that's what makes. That's what makes that image for me is is remaining under the spell of maybe of only that line. So that's beautiful and it gets at the idea that this image has so many resonances right it indicates that mystical experience as well as, you know just a physical trembling. It's sexual desire. It's you know many things throughout the book so I think you do very beautiful things with that image so you take it beyond. Your mentors, your literary mentors. Um, I don't know, did you want to say anything more about the other images you chose or should we go on to. Yeah, like we could go on to dark material that I guess I should say you know because I did. I did refragment the fragments of Sappho and that was a choice and maybe that's questionable you know so I mean we only have to Sappho I assume as all as all poets, you know wanted her poets to come down her poems to come down but they didn't they were they were you know lost and then really only recovered mostly in these shreds. So we have only fragments of her work that that are left to us, and then I was reading you know in this facing page translation if not winter by and Carson. And so, I, on top of that I, I took little pieces of those fragments and I, I did with what some of the historical figures who are characters in my book did which is to use them in my own ways and I, I do, I do think there's there are questions that could be raised about you're seeing the allure of the fragment this kind of romantic idea of all the fragment is just waiting for you to complete it to finish it to wrap your, your idea, your interpretation the rest of your line around it. The, the women like, like, like Natalie Barney like Renee Vivienne who are very invested in the poetry of Sappho, you know picked up both her poetry and her as a as a figure and reanimated her for their own purposes what they wanted and I think, in some ways I, I did that, not only with the fragments of allure but also with the women I was writing about around the turn of the century who were doing that with Sappho as well. So there is a, there is something about the way that I used fragments they're not me I made choices about that. Wonderful. It's very romantic, right. The danger, the allure and the danger of the fragments. Well, let's, let's shift gears into a slightly darker territory and that is how I noticed in rereading the book, even more so how much the tone shifts when you get to World War one, which of course is true and many historical accounts of Europe, right the war is a dividing line. I was also thinking about how the tone in Stein's autobiography of Alice B. Toklis gets much, much darker during the chapters about the war years. But I was also struck by how that shift in your narrative about the war also is coupled with this shift in how the figures in the book relate to Sappho. The early parts of the book, the collective voice asserts, we were going to be Sappho. And you show how the study of Greek and, you know, other sort of imaginative realms like Natalie Barney's garden and performances in the garden. Yeah, all of those imaginative feats helped, helped, helped this collection of women to build new lives to think about themselves differently to create new identities for themselves. But then in the World War one section of the book, the voice shifts and says, now Sappho was going to become us, we were going to happen to Sappho, and Sappho would never be the same. And I wondered if you could talk about that shift in terms of the war, but also in terms of this change in relation to Sappho and the part of women in the 20th century. Yeah, I think your reading is so insightful, absolutely. And I think Sappho absolutely is very influenced by the, as you exactly as you said in the autobiography of Alice B. toklass how for Gertrude Stein you know the the war after during the war after the war it's never the golden time of, you know, omelets and art discussions that it was before it's different and so that and the writings of Virginia Woolf as well she was a pacifist and you know the way that the war was seen at that time it wasn't the first World War it was it was it was the war it was the great war. It was the great war so trying to sort of understand that I think from their perspective that's part of it but as you said also I imagined it as you know in the first part of this book. There's so much looking backwards there's so much nostalgia there's an idealizing of this, this idol that is imagined as an island of Sappho and and poetry and what women could be if they were, if they were let be for a bit. And there's I think, I think there are some risks in that way of thinking it can be quite colonialist, and it can be a way of freezing something in a hardened past of antiquity where it can serve. There are quite quite dark ends you know like making that time in in Greek history let's say serve as the prehistory of the British Empire or something that's a that's a problem and so I imagined that at a certain time there would be a rapture in how much how useful it can be to look back and say, we just want to go back how it used to be and be nostalgic and that there has to be an end to pure nostalgia before it becomes dangerous. And instead, I imagined my, my characters the voice of the we the sort of the chorus saying at some point you know, we have to invent forms that fit the shape of our lives now we can't always look backwards we also have to make something that fits as we are becoming. The form maybe hasn't been invented yet. It's, it's part of our work to make new forms so that new experiences and ways of being have a have a form that they can flow into without being constrained into something that has already been hardened. So I did think about that I think it's also probably a very modernist concern to think, how do we get a form of literary form and artistic form to fit the time that is happening now the experience this newness. So I'm probably also pray to that to that concern. Well, but they, yes, they were obsessed with that right steins whole idea of contemporaneous and wolf trying to ask for a new kind of fiction that, you know, a new kind of biography. Exactly. Yeah, I thought that was fascinating that the, the relation to Sappho shifts in this historical shift. So, thank you for talking about that. The book as a whole is quite inspiring and upbeat and optimistic about the creativity of women, and it ends in your story you tell ends in 1928, which of course is a banner year for women's achievements. This is the year women gain equal franchise in England. This is the year that Virginia Wolf gave lectures to women university students that became a room of one's own the year of the publication of Wolfs Orlando. And of course the year of publication of Radcliffe halls the well of loneliness as well as many other texts by women writers. So this is a very triumphant year to end this alternative history this alternative narrative that your book presents. And I think that that as, as we, as we glimpse in many of the references to Sappho throughout the volume. The history, you know, the future isn't necessarily going to be all positive. You know, even though there is this lineage of creativity that we can draw upon. I'm a little bit reluctant to use the word villains but I'm going to, I'm going to use it anyway. And I kept noticing toward the end, some of the figures turned a little darker turned a little bit more into villains, which we really didn't see in the except for the male figures who are oppressive. So one of the figures who becomes a little bit like a villain is Radcliffe Hall, and the objectionable qualities in in your book include her politics and her aesthetic choices. So I wondered if you might speak a little bit about Radcliffe Hall and anything else you want to say about villains. Well, what about stopping in 1928 actually is that many complicated things in the, in the political choices made by some of these, some of these historical figures who are my characters happen afterwards. So I didn't, I chose not to deal with many of those things. Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, I guess, among them. You know, Sabilla Alaramo also who was who was such an important figure early on in Italian feminism and Italian literature at the beginning of the century. Did and I did mention this anyway, you know it did end up signing her name to to a fascist organization association in Italy so there are there are some dark things that happen even in the time I'm writing about. Yeah, so Radcliffe also it's difficult to have a year in which the comparison is between Virginia Woolf and anyone else, I think, and that's my bias. And Radcliffe Hall, you know, has been very important for many people, particularly for, for lesbians or trans people. And I'm, I'm bisexual so you know it could be that Radcliffe Hall is just maybe not my thing. And I do appreciate all of like there's a great analysis of, of the well of loneliness by Heather Love who's thinking about the importance of is in feeling backwards about you know these kind of bad feelings and so I appreciate that a whole volume called palatable poison which is taken from the, the review that sort of famous bad review of the well of loneliness from 1928. So I appreciate very much appreciate all the scholarship about Radcliffe Hall I appreciate that Radcliffe Hall has been important for people. Virginia Woolf in public defended Radcliffe Hall Radcliffe Hall's right to write this book Radcliffe Halls, but no one should ever ban this book that no one should tell Radcliffe Hall what to write. And then in private Virginia Woolf said that it was, you know, kind of a gloopy melodramatic self serious moralizing mess and I am hopelessly on the side of Virginia Woolf and I find that if the comparison is between Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which is such an adventure and gender and sexuality so playful is so, you know, it's, it's not that Virginia Woolf didn't, couldn't be critiqued on political grounds I think particularly about class and race. But if the comparisons between the absolute doom that dogs the heels of all, you know queer trans lives from the very beginning of the well of loneliness even before Stephen Gordon is bred into the world of the manner, and Orlando who's going to go off and have all these adventures and be a writer and fall in love and change gender and, you know, amuse themselves. It's not a fair comparison and I very much come down on the side of Orlando. Me too. My favorite catty comment of Virginia Woolf is about the well of loneliness. I could not keep my eyes on the page. I can't reveal to my students until they've actually read it. An important book, let's just say the well of loneliness is an important book. It's not very important but aesthetically with, you know, one foot in the 19th century, not as not as modernist and innovative, and also, yeah, terribly gloomy. And bad class politics anyway, that's my that's my bias. Paul also was another one of these figures who already kind of started out with conservative politics and move toward fascism and became even a little bit more than a soft fascist as she's been called sometimes. Yes. Yes. So yes, that's. That's kind of why she becomes a villain. So, one of the more inspiring figures who is definitely not a villain is Lena Poletti and one of the reviewers of the book calls Poletti your great discovery. And she was certainly a revelation to me I had never heard of Poletti I don't know a lot about Italian politics or literature. Could you speak just a little bit about her because I bet some of the audience members have not heard of her either. Yes, well it's not you. I mean, almost no one has heard of Lena Poletti. And I see that as someone you know I, I, one of my languages and graduate school was Italian I took a seminar in 20th century Italians women literature we read civilization. Nobody ever talked to me about Lena Poletti. So it's not you. It's the canon or the archive or history, whatever it's, there's one book. That's partly about her by it's not been translated by an Italian scholar called Alessandra Chinese, the book is called Yorkie a rocci. And there's, I mean there's some articles there's like some of her letters have been published. There's a poem that survives. There's so little. And I learned this year of last year I can't remember. There's a website and it's an Italian website. That's a group of people they say about themselves a group of women authors committed to discovering forgotten women artists deforming the canon, and Jesse Simone and you wrote a beautiful article about Lena Poletti for this website as a as part of the of recovering and recuperating and bringing into the light so anyway, not knowing about Lena Poletti I think is the is the norm. And when I, when I finally did discover her which was I think much later than I should have. I really, I really fell in love I really, I really wanted there to be more about her I wanted to find things in the archives I wanted there to be a history of her life or not a biography or. I mean anything you know and there wasn't and I think in a way. The selfish part of this book is that I made what I wanted to have found about Lena Poletti I wanted. I wanted her to be celebrated I wanted her to have. Not only her life but but a chorus who would want to write her life and all of the circles around her of people she might have known or who are in her time or who were thinking about what she was thinking about. And, you know, I so I made not only sort of a history for her out of this, what what little there was. But also like a world that I would have wanted to give her and for me that world goes right up into our world and is quite contemporary so in the end of this book and also in the middle I put in some things that are from contemporary trans feminist group in Italy called no no no no no which is fighting for gender rights and reproductive justice and against racism and and for an end to sexual violence and. And I, I took their, I took some of their chance so they're in the streets now saying these things and I took some of those chance and made them in with the poems of Lena Poletti because I think that she would. I think that she would be in the streets with us saying exactly these things that we're still saying you know that we're still fighting for many of the things that they were fighting. Which is part of my being furious and maybe poetic but also just furious. The images that is attached to Poletti is this great image of her up on the crest of a wave to see the future able to see where we need to go, but not no one else behind her can see to the top. And that's just yet another one of those images that really holds the book together and the voice kind of radical voice of Poletti holds the book together. And she, you know, I looked up the biography we do know when she died in the 70s, but in your narrative she disappears right that she's hounded by the fascists and disappears and so she almost becomes this Sappho like figure this mystical radical woman who just is elsewhere. And I wanted you wanted to speak to that or would just let that be. I think your I think your reading was was quite was quite beautiful. Yes, yes, in real in his in historical, as far as we know, Lena Poletti died in the small town in Liguria 1971. I would like that just as you said I would like that not to not to be the only history that there is I would like to think what is the spirit of Lena Poletti that stayed on with us. And what ways can she, I don't know maybe only for me but maybe not only you know be be inspiring be part of of other of other lineages of that are available to people to say I am not the first I am not the only. Not only this time that we have begun having these fights it is also coming down to me and there are beacons before me and there will be, and I will maybe be a beacon for someone and someone will come after me and be a beacon, you know, so that, so that some of us are less alone. I wanted that to be part of anyway it's part of how I imagine Lena Poletti, as you say being on the crest of the wave seeing ahead of what I can see being with us still. Beautiful. Let me ask one more question before we go to any questions from the audience. And that is just about the genre of the book, right the after SAFO is being marketed as a novel. I already mentioned that it has a 17 page bibliography which is not typical of fiction. So I wonder if you wanted to speak to that question of genre and you know just this vexed problem of categories. Some of the, some of the reviewers I understand I didn't, I didn't read a lot of those comments but I guess some people are questioning your use of the words of the writers without quotation marks. Yeah. So I, you know, there's a lot of genre questions here and I wondered if you wanted to speak about what you saw that you were doing and related to genre. Well certainly when I, when I used things, I mean, part of the reason that there's a 17 page bibliography and not only that if you're, if you're interested, there's also, there's I don't know how many probably 20 pages of just straight bibliography online, which my editors, my wonderful editors, Ellie and Sam at Galli Baker were like, Okay, maybe not also the 20 pages of just bibliography that let's put this online. So I did try to be in that sense ethical when I borrowed something. When I borrowed a phrase or I translated very closely I said this is where it's coming from so that it wasn't just taking wasn't just, you know, appropriation it was an acknowledgement. But the thing about the novel. Yeah, so when I, when I first wrote the manuscript, I didn't know what to call. Well, I mean I knew what it was called as a title from the beginning but I didn't know how to describe it very well and I really, I had sort of got to this form by trying to imitate a form that and Carson uses that she called short talks, and I wanted I just wanted to be able to write short talks like and Carson could but sadly for me. I'm not a poet, and I'm also not in Carson, evidently, so I really fail. But none of us is in Carson. It was so sad for me in that moment when I thought, Oh, this isn't this is not a short talk at all though what it mean my failure to be able to to write a short talk I wrote this other form and then I didn't know how to call this form. Because it was different it was interlinked and there were a lot of them and anyway, and it was interwoven with these other. Yeah, as you said these these quotes and excerpts and bits of things and so I started trying to describe it by just like piling a lot of words together like it's a, it's a kind of, you know, feminist queer collective portraiture pseudo or fees semi historical but not really but also semi hybrid genre experimental. And that was, that was a disastrous pitch leather have to say it's really totally. Publishers don't like that. Well I just didn't know how to. I did not explain and part of when I was sending it out to presses I was thinking, nobody's going to publish this but they might say, we're not going to publish this because it's a. And I would at least know what it was but actually that didn't happen and people just said, no. It was less informative but when I sent it to Ellie and Sam at Galli beggar. They, they wrote back to me, and they said, I think we might like to publish your novel. And I thought, it's one word. And also, when I reflected on it. It's such a generous and expansive idea of what is a not I mean coming from a press that also published you know Lucy Elman's duck snubbery board so really. They have very, they're very broad minded about what could go in the category of novel, but I didn't. Yeah, they get credit for for calling it a novel I didn't know what to call it. And I feel, you know, I'm honored to be included in the category but I wouldn't have claimed it for myself because I just didn't. I just didn't know exactly what what's what to name the forum or whether there was already a name that I didn't know. But you're comfortable with it you you you're happy to be called and not into the novel party you know even though maybe I don't I didn't really get an invitation until Ellie and Sam. So yes, I feel I feel honored. You're making me think of the Russian critic buck teen who, you know, privileges the novel form because it can include anything. Yes. I feel more like buck teen that it can be expanded and some people are like that's not really a novel so you know it depends which side you come down on perhaps. Wonderful. Well, thank you for that reflection and let's see if we have some questions from the audience. I do think one of our wonderful mechanics Institute folks is going to read some of them for us. Actually, I'll read it out. And so I'll be asked our first question, something we were talking about before. You know, with the vignettes that you've created, I call them the characters in in your book but they're actually real historical people women live. But you, they, you have such amazing floating connections between all of these persona, persona. You know, whether it's Sarah Bernhardt actress Vita West, Sackville West writer Romain Brooks a painter is it or Duncan dancer, but somehow you found this connective tissue or their meetings or something that influenced one to the other. It kind of gives us this kind of like a three dimensional time place of all these different people that lived in the same time or not in the same time. So I wondered if you could talk about how you made those connections where you found the connections and also that were that were surprising to you that you discovered along the way or shocking or something that just opened up a whole relationship between two women. Yes. That's a lovely question. Well, as you said, you know, I mean, everyone who is a named character in this book is a real is a real person. I suppose we could talk about whether Cassandra is a real person or not but apart apart that everyone is and the and the we the chorus is my invention it's a kind of amalgamation of identities. And that you know, as you say, Gertrude Stein is very much a real person and right. And so, so some of the suggestions came from the actual ways in which these circles overlapped and that was not accidental in particular I mean Gertrude Stein but also Natalie Barney who maybe above all gathered made it her job to gather around her in her salon and and through you know her, her sort of various projects circles of women who, you know, then met each other, and a cucumber sandwiches together in her, you know, in her in her salon and so there there was a way in which I didn't have to invent these things. They were orchestrated by by the people themselves and and also, as you said, in more glancing ways you know, not everybody came into the salon or Natalie Barney but people read other people or they cross paths with or they heard about or they were thinking about the same kinds of questions at the same time where they knew someone who knew someone and so there were other less direct interconnections that that caused these circles to overlap. I think. And then, and then to you know today today I was I was fortunate to have a talk with someone who works on Natalie Barney was called Susette will be shown this year in Paris and she, for example, has has edited some of the letters of Natalie Barney with, with Leanne de Pougi and, and we were talking about how are notebooks, how are note how the console notebooks have constellations in them, like little drawings like, and the constellations go off the page and how at some point you have to figure out like how many, how many stars, can you cram into a page and how to, you know, how to configure them how to understand how much information is very 3D anyway we're laughing about how messy our, our notebooks get and how much they look alike, how, I mean, my handwriting is worse than Susette's but other than that there's like, you know, little, these little sort of almost geodesic tessellations of, of names and figures together. So I think that was an attempt to keep track of that feeling of overlapping circles. Do you have other questions in the Q&A that you'd like to read off. Yes, and I do welcome all of our attendees to, to put any questions for Selby or Loretta in the Q&A. I do have a question here from one of our audience members for Selby that asks, what are the topics you're drawn to that you haven't had an opportunity to write about yet. Wow, I could go on for another hour about this. I'm always falling in love with some new thing and then, and then, and then, yeah, and then it's another year of learning about things. I guess I don't know if this is a question about like what would I have put in the book but didn't but fell off the page of constellations or whether it's like, what am I into, what weird new thing am I into now. I'll try to answer briefly both of them. So one thing that I, that I love that fell off the page of this of this book was a story about the story about the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who lived in Paris and at the time when she was she was she was very famous height of her fame and quite wealthy at that, at that point and had a very diva like life you know she had a alligator she walked on the leash in the, in the gardens of Paris and she, she went out with a friend a painter friend to an island on the Brittany one summer day to the very north point of the island and there was a ruined fort there, and she said, I'll buy it, and she bought the fort. And all the island people on, on the island were like, great, another, you know, yeah, another diva who's got away for the day, but every summer or 29 summer she went back to the summer house on on belila and she became very attached to the place. And one, one winter when she was in Paris, there was a terrible storm in the sea around belila. And I think it's 1911 and the Fisher people couldn't go out to sea. And there was a great worry that, you know, if you can't go to sea and you can't fish your family can't eat. And they said Sarah Bernhardt in Paris and they said, can you please help us because this is quite dire. And she in Paris she made a big gala, she made everyone come, she made everyone donate she took all the money. She sent it back to belil she bought a patch of land. She made a cooperative bakery for the Fisher people. And no one, no one starved in the winter in 1911 in the great storms because of the cooperative bakery of the Fisher people of Sarah Bernhardt. It's a beautiful story. Anyway, that's all off the page. I want strange curiosities. Yeah. Well, one of the things I've got very, I've got very into now is reading about the mic about micro benthic community which is like the undersea. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know anything about the micro benthic community yet, but I'm learning a lot about macro algeas. And I have to say it's quite fascinating. Yeah. I, you know, I'm a I'm an amateur and an apprentice at this moment I'm kind of like the intern of macro algeas. And, but I, but I love learning about it and I, you know, hope it will become something. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's about the sea about the sea floor. Terrific as someone newly interested in lizards. I, I really Oh, I'm glad. Yeah, lizards. Oh, maybe we should have an off camera talk about it. And the other questions for Loretta and Selby. I have a question from one of our audience members that just came in. And this is for Selby and he says I'd be interested to learn if she, as in Selby has felt her studies of ancient Greek and Sappho have changed her in any way, such as the way that she looks at the world. And well, you know, I mean, as someone who is who is sort of external to ancient Greek is not a language of properly studied so I'm really studying other people who have studied it in a way I'm, I'm, you know, learning at a secondhand distance. But I, I do, I have loved learning about the various kinds of How can I say, so I did learn, you know, I've studied other case languages like I studied German and Latin and those have have cases in them. So like ways of configuring relations between nouns, let's say. And when I was reading about how how those cases work in Greek, for example, in the languages that I've studied the genitive is mostly a thing of possession so it's like how we use apostrophe s in English a lot you know like it belongs to someone, it's someone's house or whatever. But in Greek from what I understand you can also use it for all of these other, these other things it's not only about possession it's not only about what belongs. And the word genitive you know is very connected to genealogy to genital to do to generation to Genesis so some words that have their own very strong charges about about what belongs and what is inherited and how the lines come down. And I really love the idea that you could have a genitive that you use for describing how things are remembered, so that it's a different idea than a possession. It's a, it's something that seems more like a tribute or a celebration or a way of cherishing. That's a romantic idea of, of what the genitive of remembering is because I'm not a proper classicist, but I also think it's a beautiful way of looking at the world to think oh there's a, there's a way of using a case that's about how to cherish something so that you're not possessing it but you're, but you're holding it it's a it's a kind of honor. If that's the end of our questions. Then I want to thank author Selby when shorts for her incredible novel after Sappho and thank you to Professor Loretta stack for your wonderful questions and guiding us through this conversation and I want to thank you both for such a celebratory and illuminating conversation about the lives and agency of women past present and future. So once again, after Sappho please pick up a book at your independent bookstore also or read it here at the mechanics Institute, and we're going to welcome you back for a next program and we do hope to see both of you. Selby and Loretta back again, hopefully in person at mechanics Institute and thank you to our audience as well, and join us again soon. Thank you so much for your wonderful questions and thank you for having me. It's been, it's been delightful. Great pleasure. Thank you.