 Welcome to our interview show in which we interview LGBTQ guests who are important contributors to our community. We want to acknowledge that all things LGBTQ is produced at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded Indigenous land. Enjoy the show. Hi, I'd like to introduce Martha Shelley to all things LGBTQ. Hi, Martha, how are you doing? Okay, how are you? I'm pretty well, thank you. How's life in Portland? Quiet, and spite of all of the news stories that say that the town is being burned down by Antifa people, that's a bunch of BS. You're doing fine, yeah? Yeah, it's all quiet here. Yeah, most of the writing has stopped, though, hasn't it? Or most of the demonstrations have stopped? There's continuing sort of low grade marches, but no violence. Occasionally, you get some provocateurs who do something, you know, downtown, but the rest of the city just goes about its business. That's the way it seems, you know, the news always wants to make it bigger than it actually is much of the time. So I'm going to read a little blurb about you. So our audience has some, you know, if they don't know, which I can't imagine they don't know who you are. So about Martha Shelley. Martha. Martha Shelley is one of the authors and owners of a BSU publications. She's a longtime political activist from Brooklyn. After the Stonewall riot, she organized a protest march that morphed into today's Gay Pride Parades and was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front. Her essays, poetry, and short stories have appeared in many anthologies. She has published three books of poetry, Crossing the DMZ, Lovers and Mothers, and Hegadah, as well as two novels, The Throne in the Heat of the Sea and the Stars in Their Forces. She now lives in Portland, Oregon and is passionate about social justice, dancing, and mango most cake. So you have a third book that came out recently, which is part of a trilogy, correct? Right. So the trilogy is and now includes a media shower. This is a trilogy about Jezebel, who was Queen of Israel, during the ninth century BC, and who gets, whose name has become synonymous in popular culture with an immoral woman. In fact, she was very loyal to her husband and her religion that she brought with her from her country. And that's what the Jews and Christians couldn't stand. It was a complete conflicting religion. So she was not immoral. In fact, if she had cheated on her husband, she would have been killed. My grandmother used to call me a trolloping Jezebel once in a while. So it has that connotation, right? So okay, there's three novels. And then there's four books of poetry now. The new one is released from The Wheel, which I'll read from later. Yes. So I wanted to talk about your childhood a little, I know that you grew up in Brooklyn. And so what were your early influences in your family? Were your parents writers or? My mother hardly had any education. She was taken out of school at an early age and put to work. Her family came from Poland after World War II, sorry, after World War I. They moved to Havana because they couldn't get into the United States. And they were desperately poor. Those members of their family that did not leave Poland were killed in the Holocaust. My mother, when she was living in Havana, used to go to these dances. She loved to dance. So there was the Jewish Community Center and the Communist Youth Center. And she went to both dances. She told me later on, oh, I'm not a communist, but she's going to tell me these ideas that essentially come from the left. She said, I only know what every mother knows, that every child should have enough to eat. And the second one was Never Cross a Picket Line, which is definitely a socialist communist, etc. She was afraid for me getting involved politically because she wanted to protect me. And she'd seen people, this young man that she really liked, who went to Russia to help support the revolution, and was killed for being Jewish in one of Stalin's purges. My father had been quite a radical during the Depression when he was out of work all the time our jobs here and there. But then he took a job in a defense plant during the Second World War, and it was the first steady work he had in years. From that he got a government job. So he didn't teach me anything politically, but it was just knowing where he was coming from kind of by osmosis that I became, as you'd call it, radicalized. Did they meet in the United States or in Cuba? They met in the United States. My mother came here as an illegal immigrant. She came, got on a boat from Havana, came to Florida, got to New York, worked in a garment factory sewing. Wow. Met my father at some kind of a party, and they got married. And she liked to dance, so it might have been a dance party. I have no idea. My father had two left feet, so he didn't dance with everybody else, but he was her husband. So in your long career of writing, did you have any early influences or even during your writing as an adult? Who were your influences? How did they work in your life and your writing? I just read voraciously everything I could get my hands on. So I can't say who my influences were really as a writer. Everything from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to, you know, all of the women writers of the 19th century, Jane Austen and so on. I just read. And when did you know you wanted to be a writer? When I was a kid. I also wanted to be an astronomer, a pilot of a spacecraft, and a visual artist like Van Gogh. That one to my sister, she said she was afraid for me. She thought I would end up going crazy and cutting my ear off. Do you have a writing routine now? Oh, I forgot one. Yes. A biologist. Oh, a biologist. Okay. That was very important too. And you settled on the writing and kind of? It required the least. Okay. I tried when I worked in high school to get into the space program. The Air Force came around to our high school. It was the Bronx High School of Science. So they were interested in getting some bright kids. And they were recruiting. So I went to them and I said, you'll teach me how to fly, won't you? And they said, no, we don't teach girls how to fly. I said, what do you teach girls how to do? And they said, these secretaries are weather girls. I walked away. I didn't need them to teach me that. So I was too early in life for the space program. Right. As far as the other options, they required more investment financially. I mean, I didn't have the money to take flying lessons. Right. A pilot anyway. Painting and stuff like that. You need more than more money. I was pretty poor than being a writer. Yeah. And with a writer rule, I needed was a typewriter at that point. Yeah. Or a pen and paper even. Right. Exactly. So you are retired now or you're retiring shortly? I will be retired in one week. So do you expect that your writing schedule will change? All of them, all of the time that I now spend working for money, I'll put into writing the next book. Okay. And were you teaching out in, no, what were you doing? What are you doing, Portland? Well, let me explain. Over the years, I've done many things, including teaching at college level. I gave that up because it was taking too much time and creative energy. Yeah. And I didn't have anything left over for writing. What I've been doing most recently, really, actually for the last almost quarter century, is research in medical legal cases. For instance, if you get in an accident, you're paralyzed, some drunk driver hit you, you've got brain damage, whatever. My job was to find out the costs to take care of you. Nursing with new wheelchairs, surgeries that you're going to need, appointments with doctors, someone to clean your house because you can't do that from a wheelchair, mow the lawn if you've got one, and so on. And I would present whatever research I did to the woman I worked for who is an expert witness in these cases. She would go to court or have or be deposed, and they need to settle the case or go to trial. And I'd be juggling different cases all the time. That sounds really interesting. I don't think I've ever heard of anybody who had that job. Some of it was really interesting. Some of it was repetitious after a while. Sometimes I got to research new equipment, like if you're paralyzed, I would find out the cost of some device that would help you move your arm or do the work for you, or some cutting edge surgeries that have been developed. Sometimes I'd call overseas to find out what they were doing over there, and then eventually the FDA would approve them over here. Interesting. You probably helped a lot of people too doing that. I was reading your blog and I thought, this could be a memoir. Are you thinking of turning your blog into a memoir at some point? Yes, parts of it. Occasionally I'll write an article that's about what's going on in current politics and stuff, which is not going to be in the memoir. But a lot of it is stuff that happened when I was a kid or happened during gay liberation front times, things like that. All right. One thing I'm planning on writing now is I finally bring my teeth and saying, okay, I'm going to stick my foot in it and write about the current situation with Israel and the Palestinians, because I spent some time over there. I'm just going to write about what I saw, not reporting on what everybody else is saying and doing, but what I personally saw. I hope you have a place to hide. That's very touchy. When you're running poetry, are you running prose? Do you get a different headspace? Do you do different things like sometimes I read other poets or I walk around the room singing? How do you get into the spirit of writing? Do you have anything special you do to do that? Okay, if I'm writing prose, what I'll do is I'll think about the thing that I need to say and then I'll write an outline and keep the outline sort of on one side and then start writing things in kind of an order of what happened or how I want to say it. And that goes for fiction as well as nonfiction. If I'm writing poetry, there's no outline involved. Just something bubbles up in me and I start thinking and the words start coming into my head and then I write a first draft and then I continue with the next draft and so on until I've got what I feel was a polished poem. And when do you think now that you're retired you're going to start working on your memoirs? Your memoir? About a week after retirement because the first thing I'm going to do is clean up my office. It really does look like a tornado hit it. Well, that might help your headspace, right, to be able to settle down something. Okay, and I think for the last, I think our audience would love to hear a poem for you from your new collection and we will put across the screen where you can purchase author's writing. So please read us a poem. Okay. All right, this one, I just opened the book into this page. This is called The Woman in Artichoke Green. A late August afternoon, the sun wallows in the breakers like an old ball rolling in something that smells real good. Happy as the sea lions on the beach barking. Here on holiday, we stand on the sidewalk, watch the slick beasts and pretend this day is forever until a brick red SUV pulls up and parks. A woman in artichoke green steps out, a floppy hat, a summer dress, and matching sling backs. Offset by lipstick, the color of the car. And of course, a coach bag. I almost forgot. Gold drips from lobes and fingers that shimmer with rage. She points at the pinnipeds. They ignore her. I pay plenty to rent here, but those things are spoiling my summer. They're noisy. They stink and they're lazy. Somebody ought to shoot them. Someone who once shot humans overseas tells her off. She turns on her little heels, leaves, and leaves me wondering what would it take to make her wish to coexist? Elocution lessons to modulate those joyous honks? Deodorant under the flippers? Jobs at a marine show? Or even better, carrying trays in the cafe near her hotel? Friely little aprons round the thick necks hustling for tips. And perhaps, I imagine, the woman in green will try the sea lion's trade, will strip, drop hat and sandals on a strand, and dive into the chill Pacific, and learn to catch fish with her teeth. That's great. I love that. So that's a great note to leave on. Thank you so, so much. I love your work. I read it online and anywhere else, and I hope other people will just dive in there and get your work. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. You have a great day. Hi, everybody. I'm here with Alana Dyke-Wulman, lesbian, pioneer, activist, and writer. I'm delighted to have you here. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It's a great pleasure. I've been following your work for many years. But let's start with a little bio, if I may. And I'd like to deliver it in the second person. You were born in New York City to middle-class Jewish parents, and you and your family moved to Puerto Rico when you were eight, correct? That's right. You studied fine art at Reed College in Portland. You got a BFA in creative writing from California Institute of the Arts, and later you got an MFA from San Francisco State, where you taught for many years. Yes. You live in Oakland, and your publications are many. You wrote River Finger Woman, a novel under Alana Nockman published by Daughters, Inc., in 1974. You wrote it when you were 24? I actually started it when I was 21, and that went through a bunch of phases, but the bulk of it was written when I was 21. Very impressive. Short stories and poetry, they will know me by my teeth, was published in 1976 by Majira Press. Fragments from Lesbos, Poetry, Diaspora Distribution in 1981, so you have a steady output here. Nothing will be as sweet as the taste selected poems published by Only Woman Press in 1995. That's a very interesting press. It's British, right? Yeah, it's in London, based in London. Yeah, it was based in London. The woman who was the publisher and the force behind that, Lillian Mowen, died about two years ago, so it's gone into history. I'm sorry, I didn't realize that. I had some contact with that, some slight time. Remember they published those gossip publications? Yeah, that was a wonderful press. Yeah, yeah, that's a shame. Beyond the Pale, 1997 Press Gang Publishers, that's an award-winning fabulous novel. It's so moving and profound. Thank you. Moon Creek Road, Spincers, Inc. 2003, I had the pleasure of just finishing that yesterday. It's a great collection of stories. I really enjoyed it tremendously. And finally, Wrist, published in 2009 by Bywater Books. I also finished that yesterday. And that is your Oakland novel, pretty cool. Yeah. What else you've been doing? Oh, I had a collection of poems that came out in 2015. What can I ask? It's a sapphic classic that came out from Julie Enzer's publishing of Sinister Wisdom and the Midsummer Night's Dream Press. Yeah, they have a whole collection of what they call sapphic classics and Pat Parker, Cheryl Clark, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Tatiana de la Tierra, and me and I don't know who else, I don't remember who else is in the series. Well, speaking of Julie Enzer, another activity you've engaged in recently is you have co-edited with Judith Katz to be a Jewish dyke in the 21st century, this issue of Sinister Wisdom. Yeah. And if I may, I don't want to jump ahead, but I love people's biographies. And your biography in this speaks to one of your current projects. You're currently working on a full-length play about your spouse, Susan Levinkind, Love, Dementia, and Death, incorporating issues around the right to die while in residency with Altar Theater in San Rafael. You're grateful to all the lesbian connections that have led to your useful old age. That's my aspiration to have a useful old age. Looks like you're doing just fine. Well, I'm working on it. How did you, let's go back to a little biography, how did you end up in Oakland? You've lived there many years. I have, I've lived here since 1983. When I was going to read, I spent some time on the coast of Oregon and I thought Oregon was the most beautiful coastline that I had ever seen. And I still think that after having seen coastlines in Europe and Scandinavia doesn't match the fjords of Norway, but it is a beautiful coastline. So I determined I was going to live on the coast of Oregon. And I don't remember the year 1980, 1970, 1978 or nine. I moved from Northampton where I had been living to the coast of Oregon, which is a whole long complicated story about how we got there. But I lived there for four years and we started commuting from the coast of Oregon down to the Bay Area because that's where things were happening. There was a Jewish lesbian writers group. There was a fat woman swimming group. There were all kinds of things happening and women from the Bay Area would come up and stay with us in Oregon, you know, like for vacations and stuff. So at some point, I felt like it was just too racist to live there on the coast of Oregon. It was the only place in the United States where besides traveling through the South, but you know, that was briefly, but I felt much more in danger as a Jew than as a lesbian. And there were active groups of the Klan nearby and of the very various militias. And it seemed a very dangerous place for people of color and Jews and Native people to live. And for a while, we had a lovely group of lesbians who lived there, Native women and Black women and Jews and few white women. And we all just felt it was too difficult to to feel safe there. And so we left until naturally I came to Oakland and I've just stayed here ever since. There is no other place to go from here. Well, in those years, I moved from Indiana where I came out to Boston. And so I was in Boston during that flowering of lesbian print culture between 78 and 84, where all those vibrant women were coming to read and Persephone press and all that excitement was happening on the East Coast too. Then I moved back to the Midwest in 84. So let's talk about your writing. Have you always wanted to be a writer? It's not a question of wanting. I always was a writer. I mean, my mother told me that when I was in first grade, I wrote a poem about, you see that blue Chinese sculpture that's behind me that my parents got his wedding presents. They were very popular back in the 40s when my parents got married. But anyway, I wrote a poem about it when I was in first grade and the teacher called her in and said, why did you write this poem for your daughter? And she said, what poem? She had never seen it. So she brought me the sculpture of the lion to have at some point because of that. So it just, it wasn't really a choice. It was the only really avenue I could follow. Was it related to activism? It certainly wasn't later life. Well, it became related to activism. I mean, I was always a lesbian. I knew I was a lesbian as soon as I heard the word. And before I heard the word, I just thought I was peculiar for loving women instead of being attracted to men in any way. This is when I was between the ages of three and eight. I just, I already knew. And that was that. So a lot of my writing in college was coded until I wrote Riverfinger Women. And my impulse in writing Riverfinger Women was to write a lesbian novel with a happy ending, which there were none at that time. I mean, there was the price of salt, if you could call that a happy ending. It was kind of the woman loses her child in order to have this lesbian life that we never see. But then I wrote it before Ruby for Jungle came out or any of those other books that Daughters published and some of the other people published right then. And I tried to sell it in New York. And there was a, when I was graduating from California Institute of the Arts, somebody had a connection with Maurice Dorodius who had published Henry Miller and they were starting a series of feminist pornography for women. So I sent it to him and they decided that it wasn't really a novel and they rejected it after about a year. And then right about that time Daughters opened and one of my lovers said, you should send it to Daughters. So I did. And they wrote me back and said, come see us. We want to publish your book. Well, I have a personal anecdote about that. I think I mentioned I came out in 1975 in Indiana at the time, got hold of that book. And we were discovering lesbian feminism. I mean, you know, I met lesbian feminism in Boston, but we were immersed in lesbian feminism and she came home and she said, you got to read this book. It's wonderful. So I'm glad to hear that. I think of it as a children's book in a certain kind of way, you know, not a children's book, but a book for late adolescents and people in their 20s. It's all full of sex drugs and a little tiny bit of rock and roll, a lot of road tripping and stuff. So yeah, that's how I think about it. But I had a lot of fun writing it. And ever after I wished I could write a novel that quickly. I mean, it went through a number of revisions, and it did take a number of years. It was published three years after I started it. But that was pretty quick. Later books have taken me much longer time to write. Your I just your next book, you did 10 years of research for the next novel. Yeah, right. And I did a good 10 years of research. I have to confess, I spent 10 years writing my dissertation. It wasn't half as compelling as beyond the pale, which was a fabulous, wonderful groundbreaking volume in my view. Let me ask you about influences, though, before we proceed through your writing career. Who are your early influences? Well, I was always writing poetry. And first I was influenced by all those male poets of the middle 20th century, who were very famous. But and then I was influenced, fortunately, by Muriel Rockiser, who I just revere as a writer, I have to say. And in writing beyond the pale, I was really influenced by Audre Lorde-Zami. And the the thing that struck me about it was how she took her time to let the story unfold. And I felt like, at the time, I felt everybody was writing in this kind of postmodern and very rapid fire way of writing. And I was and realism was not appreciated. And I appreciated Zami for its realism. And it's a mythobiography, as she calls it, and and beyond the pale is not, but nothing like that. But but the way that she let her her story and the life that she was living and how she imagined the life she was living at unfold was was a tremendous influence on my ability to say, well, I'm going to write this book, and I'm going to let it unfold in its own in its own form. And then, you know, when I was doing the research, I was reading Emma Goldman's early newspapers, Mother Earth, and I was really impressed by how much poetry was incorporated in in that and how they saw poetry as part of the movement for social justice, as it was not called then, but socialism, anarcho, socialism, syndicalism. And I incorporated that and beyond the pale, because I wanted also to be true to that time period, when people's when poetry was part of the way that people related to in the early 20th century in the in the progressive era, when, which which is what I was writing about in the second half of Beyond the Pale, poetry was a way that people talked to each other, not they didn't talk in verse, they, but they would read poems at meetings, and they would include poetry and all their publications. And that was a way of stirring the people's feelings. I mean, they didn't have recorded music the way we have, not to mention, they didn't have the internet and they were just beginning to have telephones. So, you know, they spent their their evenings when they had any free time, which was very minimal, going to meetings and debating things, but they also read poetry at those meetings and they included it in all of their publications. It's so interesting, because don't you think that anticipates the second wave, where poetry was central in our political movement, in a way that I don't think it has been since. Member Jean Clausen wrote that wonderful essay, Movement of Poets, Edrin Rich and Lord, they all galvanized us. That's right. I think that that's true again. I mean, I think the Black Lives Matter movement is full of poets, and there's slam poets and there's hip hop poets and it's very, I may not not seem familiar to us who are older, but but I do think that poetry is on the rise again as a medium for expressing concerns around social justice. I've seen a lot of it on the internet. A lot of different people embracing different clauses in poetry. That's very encouraging. I love poetry and it's such an enhancement to our lives and also our activism. It's a right spin for me. So I mentioned the community of writers in the second wave. You probably had writing groups and when you were writing, is that true or a group of friends who supported you? I always had a community and I felt part of that community. In Northampton, well actually, Judith Katz and I, we tried to form a writer's collective and I was working distributing women's films, which are different than writing, but we did have a women's film co-op and we were distributing films around the country. But I didn't have like a formal writing group at that time, but I had a community of people. We opened a building. We called it The Egg and there was a lesbian garage and a film co-op and a lesbian jeweler and a printing press. All of those things we had in a place and we had a place called Lesbian Gardens and on the third floor of the women's center where we would have coffee shops and invite people to come up on Friday nights or Saturday nights and do readings coming from New York and Boston and so it was a very fertile time and there was a lot of activism and political fighting. In a lot of ways, it mirrored what I later saw in the Progressive Era. In the Progressive Era, women fought about whether the women they were organizing into labor unions should join the male labor unions, whether they should be pushing for that or whether they should have a female labor movement that was totally woman-based and they had all of those kinds of arguments that really mirrored the kinds of arguments that we had in the 70s. And how would you compare that to our current community of writers moment? It's hard to compare it. I mean, as populations have grown and as the internet has grown, it creates a platform for a lot of voices and there are so many more voices that it's hard to really focus on any particular one. You have to really choose which social justice causes you're going to be paying attention to because there's no way that you can pay attention to every cause around the world anymore because they're all in front of you. I mean, my email every morning is like 40 emails asking for money or support or to sign a petition and, you know, I have to choose where I'm going to put my attention. And I'm sure every activist feels that way that they have to choose how to best put their energy into various causes. And so each particular part of the movement has its infighting. It's, you know, you're not pure enough moment or you're not, you know, why are you forcing me to be so pure, you know, reaction. So I think that's going on and it continues to go on. I mean, it happened in the economic revolutions of the late 18th, late 19th century in Russia and around the world. And it happens today on a much more kind of grandiose scale. There's every single, I see that I have friends who are friends on Facebook and real life friends who are deeply involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. And there's a lot of infighting that goes on there. And there's a lot of infighting that goes on. And that, I mean, not just infighting, there's a lot of really productive, amazing work coming out of all of these movements. There's a lot of difficulty among Jewish women talking about about Zionism and the Palestinian occupation and how best to support the Palestinians and what our understanding of that is as Jews. So it's very common everywhere. Well, believe it or not, we're getting to the end of our conversation. I was wondering, you have a couple of poems you are willing to share with us. Would you mind doing that? Yeah. And before we before you introduce them, I want to thank you for coming and invite you to come back again any time. You are always welcome. Okay. So lately, I have been living with death in a much more intimate way. And by living with death, I don't mean that I am fearful or personally depressed in any particular way. I'm not. I just have, I see that death is around me and I have conversations with it in different forms. My partner had a Lewy body dementia and died of a seizure disorder that seemed to be part of that whole syndrome for her. A good friend of mine recently died of cancer. Several good friends of mine recently died of cancer. So it's something that I have to be in conversation with. So this first one is called death is a school. It's actually called a full course load. A full course load. Death is the school and all the teachers in it. Isn't that enough to say? I am too tired to copy the class lists, the syllabi, the sections and different locations on death's vast campus. Though I've been at it more than 50 years, used to fall asleep in my 8am class of Attic Greek, a language no one alive exactly speaks. Dead Tongues, Room 205. Let's see what I mean. No one knows what the course reading will be or where until death summons you to her office says, now look again at your grandmother's burns, your mother's oxygen, your lover's seizures. What did you learn? What did I learn? Death hurts, but like a hamster in a dog's mouth, you pass out. That's just the basic course, death scoffs. A student pokes her head in. Genocide 610. Past, present and future. Death remembers all her offerings. End of the quad, fourth floor, colonial building. You will recognize the door. She returns to me. Our oral examination. Okay. Here's what I understood first. What you give thinking, damn, I'm generous. Gee, I'm good. Aren't my gifts just fine? You find turned inside out. Humboldt. For a lifetime. Because off the cuff, close to glib, you gave your grandmother roses, your mother a slice of tongue, your lover that one last trip. Humboldt death says, that's good enough. I'll pass you on to level seven. How many levels? Three dozen or 90, 111 in this cluster. You've seen death grin, haven't you? Her face is in the papers, the camps, rising ethers form her skeleton above streets of corpses and in cartoons. You reach for her bony fingers and find instead the schedule for next semester. Wonderful. Do I have time for a very short one? Sure. Okay. This is in, what can I ask, comes from what can I ask, the 2015 anthology. If you were my home, I would be your garden. I would be your garden. If I was your garden, I would want you to cultivate me to plant water, weed, harvest, and like I promised, I would feed you. You can always eat what straggles up or what's gone to seed, but nothing will be as sweet as the taste of the woman you tended purposefully. Alana Dyke woman, thank you for joining us. Thank you. My deep pleasure. So following along with checking in with those first time LGBTQ plus legislators, we have invited back to all things LGBTQ, Representative Emma Mulvaney-Stanik of Chittington 6-2. Welcome, Emma. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Oh, and we were so excited by your election. Looking at, you know, those 15 out candidates who were running, you were the one who seemed to have the greatest wealth of political knowledge, you know, a strong background. You know, you had done labor organizing, you were part of the Burlington City Council, but still, were there things when you actually became a legislator that were unexpected for you? Oh, yes. I don't think anyone could honestly answer that any other way. I think the other unknown factor that no one could prepare you for was legislating by Zoom for four months. I mean, you know, in some ways it leveled, it leveled the playing field a little bit because everyone was operating for the first time for an entire session by Zoom, meaning returning legislators and new legislators. But, you know, I really thought walking in that I would understand a bit more of the politics, small politics of how to interface with people, build relationships, and all that. But the thing I was completely unprepared for was the fact that it is very hard to do that via Zoom. We can't stop in the halls. We can't, you know, chit chat after a committee meeting is done. So it was very hard. And it felt very isolating, I think is the best word to use it because really the only time you had and the only information you were going off of, at least in committee and certainly on the house floor, was what these little, you know, two by two squares were looking like. And everyone's two dimensional there. You're trying to read body language. It's very easy to misread things and overread things, accurately read things sometimes. So that was, that was kind of, it felt like a graduate course level out of the gate of just how do you interface here? And, and, you know, I think there were certainly some things that I was better prepared for. I stepped right up to be the assistant caucus leader for the progressives, because I thought, hey, I have, I have a little bit more knowledge than everyone else. We've been very new caucus. Most of the folks are newly elected legislators. And I wanted to support Selena Colburn, who was our caucus leader. So I also got a front row seat into some leadership house meetings and whatnot. And that, that definitely felt more intimidating than I anticipated, because, you know, there's such a, there's such a deference to hierarchy and tradition. And some, and some of it I get, and some of that I think is really counter to really an open democracy at times and really allowing sort of, frankly, some modernization of, of how we operate with each other and a healthy questioning of rules and operations. So overall, it was, it was great. It was definitely some major learning lessons along the way, though, as it comes to culture and tradition within the building combined with Zoom. Thank, thank you very much, because you just reaffirmed all of the things that those of us who have been state house groupies, we're also thinking about the session and accessibility and really being able to read what was going on. You were on the house or you are on the house commerce and economic development committee. What are some of the bills? You had 39 bills referred to your committee, both from the house and the Senate, seven of which were voted out. What were some of the significant pieces of legislation that the committee voted out that people should be aware of? Right. Well, I wanted to start by saying of those 39 bills, there are some bills that we never even touched. And I want to say that because there's some really powerful bills on that wall, well, virtual wall, whatever it was this session, if for folks watching at home, I haven't been to the state house, apparently there is a literal wall where there's some old school index cards or something that go up. But we were in virtual land, so it's kind of more of a virtual concept really. People can find that on our website if they're curious. But, you know, and I mentioned that because there was a big push this session to get down to just COVID related stuff, get it out quickly. We don't have a lot of time. We'll bring it up next session. And that rhetoric was used time and time again. So we had some really interesting concepts up on the wall. And some of them were potentially going back from House General to us around BIPOC economic development ideas, BIPOC land ownership stuff. And again, some of these were going back and forth between House General, but also a whole lot of unemployment related bills that would have gotten a lot more into the lack of functionality, but making it a functional department and some good and important pieces. And those were never pulled off the wall to be discussed. So while we did move a small number of bills, there are some some bills that really I felt were just as timely that we didn't we didn't bring off the wall. But what we did move, I'll just mention two slash three, because two of them got merged together. The first one is what is really our omnibus economic development bill. So H159. It started with a Better Places program, but it then became I think there's like 15 different programs in it. The Senate has also made some amendments. It's not quite back from the Senate. But this bill had a range of things like additional funding for folks who are trying to go back to school and access more scholarships within a state college. These are adults trying to get back into the workforce. Remember, that's actually another part of our committee title, which we often drop is workforce development, which I'll come back to and happy to come back and talk about a little bit more, because I don't think we've barely scratched the surface in a coordinated way around workforce development. We did a whole lot on business recovery, economic recovery for businesses in this committee, this session, but the workforce piece was was lightly touched to to put it, put it politely, I guess I think we could do a whole lot more to coordinate that and really help for Monner's upskill and get the resources they need to either finish a degree or get apprenticeship program, you know, program exposure, etc. But 159 has a whole range of stuff. There's some tourism pieces in there for more marketing of Vermont to get tourists back to the state once we start to really reopen from the pandemic. There is, you know, there's some pieces in there. The Better Places program I mentioned is a community development program, which there were some pilot programs towards the end of 2020. Folks might remember in certain communities where parklets and other things were sort of popping up to attract people back to the downtown to really help blighted properties and other areas of town just sort of get us sprucing up. There's a whole community matching funding mechanism with that, which again helps the community have a little bit more buy-in into that, into those projects. But the piece in 159 and people want to geek out on economic development, they can read the whole bill, but the one piece about 159 I had a bit more to do with from the onset was a specific BIPOC business development section. The section didn't renumber now, but it's section, I think it's 14 at this point in the version that's coming back to the Senate. And the short version of that is that after all the economic relief grants to businesses in 2020, and folks might have read this a little bit in the paper, there was some money earmark for BIPOC owned businesses and women owned businesses about one million each, I believe. Don't quote me on that. It's been my memories a little fuzzy after four months of legislation. This is all last year. But the short version is the state didn't know who the BIPOC owned businesses were in the state. And there's no data collected. They had very little information on where to go on. And on top of that, clearly if you don't know who they are, you don't have much of a relationship, obviously. So getting the word out about kind of an emergency related program like business relief dollars during a pandemic is kind of hard to do when you don't even know who to reach out to. So they ended up contracting out with Vermont partnership for fairness and diversity, which is a Brattleboro based long time organization to help do that work last year. And after they were done pushing the grants out, because no shocker, all the money got used. It just took a while to find people about three weeks versus women owned businesses, which are mostly white women owned businesses in Vermont, which got snagged in like three days, I think, or something, the statistics said with those two pots of money. So at the end, the partnership did a great survey and they really asked those businesses what could the state do better, the shorthanded, basically. And the BIPOC businesses said, we're not going to join the chambers of commerce. They're very white to shorthand it again. They're non-inclusive spaces. They aren't responsive to our needs. They barely understand what it's like to be a BIPOC owned business. Why are we joining them? But there's a longing for some sort of comparable organization, not necessarily needing to be a BIPOC chamber of commerce, but one for which does that technical assistance and support and can partner with the state. And there's a whole other slew of possibility. So in 159, we earmarked $150,000 for BIPOC folks to come together and really start to put together sort of analysis and a set of recommendations for us in January. So we can start making better policy and also start, there's a data collection piece of that as well, voluntary, because we don't want to force people. But the secretary of state will finally ask that people have registered businesses in the state before, you know, there's like a business registry program. So that will be a piece of it. So we can finally make like more targeted policy decisions and see how BIPOC businesses are really doing versus, we just don't know who they are. So we can't do anything response. So and I have one bill, sorry, I can let me pause on that and see if you have questions. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, could you talk a little bit about S10, which is a bill for which your name came up about a critical debate about coverage relative to unemployment benefits. And hopefully this was the second bill you plan to talk about. Exactly. Yes, I was just realized I'm going way down the way down this, you know, because 150 now it's like sort of the first half of the session S10 became the second half of the session major bill, I would say my major debated bill in house commerce. So S10 is the only unemployment bill that was sort of moving through the session that that had an opportunity to do something for workers, unemployed workers, as well as businesses. So the short version is when it came out of the Senate, the unemployment trust fund, which funds unemployment claims is funded by an employer tax, and it's all regulated by the federal government. And the short version is if people, if we did nothing, the system based on current law tries to write itself and refill the UI trust fund based on how much gets used. And obviously, everybody knows 2020 was a huge outlier where, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of remanders were unemployment and it drew down the unemployment fund quite a bit. I really want people to know though that the unemployment fund for Vermont in January, February of 2020 was one of the if not the healthiest, meaning most funded, most robust, doing the best out of all the states in the country. So we were we were fine going into the pandemic. And even that big drawdown, it's not like the UI trust funds about to bankrupt by any means. But the system tries to write itself. So July is when the new tax rates go out. And if we did nothing, because it was drawn down so fast in one year, it would be a huge tax rate increase for employers. So the governor really strongly wanted to fix it or put a some sort of temporary fix into into the system. And the Senate said, well, if we do that, we have to do something for workers as well. So as 10 came out of the Senate with a freeze on what employers were paying for one year. So we could figure it all out. And what's called dependent care benefit, which 13 other states have, which will be $50 a week on top of whatever unemployment claim you have, which is based on whatever your your it's individualized. So whatever you were making in your jobs, job or jobs you had prior to be unemployed, that's what calculates your claim. So $50 to splat the for anyone who has kids under 18, pretty modest, because it wasn't per kid, it was just if you have 50 kids or one kid, it's just 50 bucks. And anyone who's like anyone who pays for childcare or diapers knows that does not go very far per week. So this is pretty modest. So that comes over to commerce. And my committee decided that they wanted to do more for employers. So they wanted to go deeper into the formula of that tax rate for employers and yank the 2020 year out, which in the formula, they have to look at 10 years. So if they by yanking that out to fix the sort of like the fix the the employer tax rate, they're making a 10 year permanent change to the employer's tax rate versus just a one year freeze, which the governor initially asked, and they took the dependent care benefit out completely. So I dissented was very nerve wracking, but I dissented I was in the minority, I gave a whole speech to say why this was in balance, and not the right approach. And we really needed to do something for unemployed Vermonters, they have a different path from this recovery, recovering from this recession and employers. But I did not get the win the day, and the bill went on, and then I kept persisting. It's a lesson of persistence. So don't give up. And I went through all the caucuses that are available in the legislature, the social equity caucus, women's caucus, workers caucus, anybody who would listen to me, I started, you know, it's hard with zoom, I started talking to any, you know, sort of Democrat who would hear me. And we were able to get back into the bill, through ways and means, a $25 a week increase for every UI claimant so no longer attached having kids. So 100% of folks on unemployment will be able to get a $25 increase once the federal pandemic relief dollars phase out around Labor Day. So it's a huge win for for workers because that will last at least 13 or 15 years based on the calculation there. So I'm very proud of that that was there were some dark moments where I thought we were going to do nothing for workers and we saved the day. So with that, I need to say thank you so much for your work and looking out for the interest of Labor and the true working people of Vermont. And we're going to need to bring you back to talk about what are you planning for next year? Yes. Thank you, Emma. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you in two weeks. But in the meantime, resist.