 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show, where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hi, friends. I'm here with Julie Enzer, a frequent guest on the show. Welcome, Julie. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Well, we have a special treat today. We have a double billing. I'm going to interview Julie about a recent anthology that she's put together. And Linda, our other co-host, is going to come and talk with Julie about a poetry collection that she's just released. So you've been busy. I have. For viewers who may not know, let me read a short bio. Julie is the editor of Outright, the speeches that shaped LGBTQ literary culture, which is from Rutgers in 1922, 1922, 2022. It was a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award and then it won. So congratulations. I was so happy at one because it was so deserving. I was so fine in volume. Thank you. Elena should be should be proud of it. Elena Grocer, co-editor. You've also edited the complete works of Pat Parker, which won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. And Milk and Honey, a celebration of Jewish lesbian poetry, which was a finalist for the 2012 Lambda Literary Award in lesbian poetry. You have an MFA and PhD from the University of Maryland. And you publish Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal, and most of the audience, I'm sure, knows Sinister Wisdom. That's been an ongoing project for many years that you've been doing that. It has. It's 14 years this year. Oh my gosh. Very impressive. You're indefatigable. I love it. Well, let's go to the collection we wanted to talk about, which is Fire-Rimmed Eden, Selected Poems by Lynn Lanendier. And we'll put the yes. We'll hold it up. It's backwards everywhere, but we'll put a picture up on the screen. Right. And I'd like to ask you from the get go, who is Lynn Lanendier? And how did you happen to become interested in her? So Lynn Lanendier was a poet who worked in the San Francisco Bay Area. She moved there right around the middle 1960s, and she lived there until her death in the early 1990s. I first encountered her in the archives of Barbara Greer. Greer was editing the latter. And I was reading a bunch of her correspondence at the San Francisco Public Library. And Lynn was one of her correspondents. And Barbara raved about Lynn's poetry, thought it was just fantastic. And Barbara Greer was not a big poetry reader or a big raver about poetry. So it really struck me while I was in the archive reading those, how much she enjoyed Lanendier's poetry and how fond she was of Lanendier as a correspondent as well. So after I was done at the San Francisco Public Library, I scoured used book sites to find the books of Lynn Lanendier because I was like, I have to read this. And I think one of the first books I was able to get my hands on was her book, A Lesbian Estate, which is included in the collection and was really like one of these big juicy collections of poetry. And I thought, wow, now I know why Barbara loved it. And then, you know, then it was uncovering all of the different sorts of collections. And I reached out and found Lynn's brother, Fred, and was talking to him about doing another book, another edited collection as I had done with Pat Parker's work. One of the things, you know, when I was working on Pat Parker, everyone who I would say Pat Parker to knew immediately who she was, many people had heard her read. Lynn was a much more obscure character. Many people in the Bay Area knew her. She did not have a national reputation in the same ways. But I found her poetry just electric as I sat down and was reading these used copies of her work that I was able to come up on. And also her brother Fred arranged for all of her papers to be archived at the San Francisco Public Library as well. And so I spent time with her papers and just sort of getting a broader sense of who she was as an artist and thinker, musician and person in the world. Well, you've been interested in her for 10 years. You've been working on this anthology, this collection for about a decade. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, well, well over a decade. I think I first encountered her in 2011 or so. I think that was the first time I was in San Francisco. And I said it aside, I just read the books until I was done with my dissertation. And then, you know, I knew I wanted to do another edited collection of her work. And her output is, you know, these are just selected poems in here. This book is a brick, but it was difficult to make decisions about what to include and what to not include. And I wanted to give, I wanted the first book that reintroduced Lynn to readers of poetry, to readers of work by lesbians, to be really a substantial introduction to her work and a selection of her poetry from across her lifetime of productivity. In addition to the poetry, she also wrote multiple novels. She has multiple completed novel manuscripts, plays, and also photography, lots of other creative output. She was really a creative polymath. Well, I first heard about her. When you gave that talk at the Stonewall Museum in 2020, you gave a wonderful paper about Lynn Lanandir and two other poets, and you read a poem that we're gonna end our interview with, which is one of my favorites, maybe of all time. I just love it. And I love about her work that shows, includes pets and the animals that are an important part of most of our lives. But I digress. Tell us about the Saphic Classics Project and how you happened to put this collection together. Yeah, so the Saphic Classics has been something a sinister wisdom has been doing since 2010 or 2011. We first published, our first Saphic Classics was a reissue of Minnie Bruce Pratt's Crime Against Nature, which I thought was a crime against us all that it was not available after the end of Firebrand Books. So we republished that. And we've done one or two Saphic Classics pretty much every year since then. Some of them are really beloved poets like Minnie Bruce, like Pat Parker. Some of them are poets that are equally beloved, but not as well-known, like Lynn Lanadi or Tatiana de la Tierra is very well-known in particularly among Latina lesbians, but has had a smaller profile, though I think that's really changing. And our commitment with the Saphic Classics is to bring books back that we think are going to be of interest to contemporary lesbians. And I think equally important, and this is part of my affection for Lanadiere, I'm always looking for books that are going to spur lesbians to think about new forms of creativity, new ways of being in the world. So that the books are both a pleasure for people to read and beloved books that have fallen out of print. I think that's one piece of it. But also I think the books are themselves provocations to invite us to not just be engaged in looking back at what happened in lesbian literary life, but also to be thinking about how we continue to be an active conversation with our past and how our past is one of the things nudging spurring us to do new creative works as we move forward. It's not only it's works besides poetry or is it all poetry, these Saphic Classics? It's a works in addition, besides poetry, we've done, we just did, last year, we did Judy Granz the Highest Apple, which is her collection of writing about lesbian poetry, but it's prose. We also published an original new book by Judy, Eruptions of Anana, which is her meditation on thinking about the mythology of Anana and how that sparks creativity as well. So it's an open series with not a lot of hard and fast rules, because when there are a lot of hard and fast rules, I tend to chafe against them and want to break them all. Hi, that's a great attribute. Well, Lynn Lanadier has five collections of poetry and one posthumous collection. Why did you choose to fully reproduce two books and include selections from the others? Because the two books that are fully reproduced, A Lesbian Estate and Cluterus Lost, which I just love that title, I really think of those two books as books that profoundly defined Lanadier as a poet, but also books that I think are profoundly formative in how we think about lesbians, lesbian poetry and lesbian communities in the 1980s. And when, as I was spending time with those two books and thinking about extracting pieces out, there would be ways to do that, but I also wanted readers to have the opportunity to experience those books in their fullness as Lanadier constructed them and put them together, because Lanadier, like lots of other lesbian poets in the 70s and the 80s, was deeply involved not only in writing the poems, but in shaping the books. So just like how Pat Parker was involved in shaping how those early books were published through Women's Press Collective, and Judy Gron and other poets, Lynn Lanadier was engaged with how her books were put together with Jess, and they were published by Man Root Press, which was the independent press that Jess ran, and she was involved with what size are they going to be, what paper is going to be used in them, what images, what the cover will look like. She was involved with the production of those books all the way through. And I think that's an important part of our heritage as lesbians, as lesbian poets, and so that's why I wanted to include them in their completeness in this volume of the book. And you decided to put together the collection because youth and your audience is primarily two questions at once. You decided to put together the collection and your audience, who's your audience? How would you decide to put together the collection and who's your audience, Sarah? Yeah, you know, I mean, my audience, the really beautiful thing about my life right now is my audience is this community that's around sinister wisdom, women who subscribe to sinister wisdom, and now since the pandemic, I also have this amazing experience where almost once a month I gather with this audience on Zoom and we do readings and we dance together and people talk to me all of the time about what they're thinking about, what they think is interesting. And so I feel like the sinister wisdom audience is this incredible gift to me as a writer and as an editor because they're reading and thinking along with me. And so that was the audience that I was thinking about in relationship to putting this book together. Now, of course, the better commercial publishing decision for this book would have been to do a 100, 125 page book that's selected, that's only like the greatest hits for Lynn Lanadiere. And I hope that that will happen in the next, I don't know, 10 or 15 years. But I wanted, I'm also, as you noted, a scholar deeply invested in what's in our archive in telling complex and rich stories about lesbian life and lesbian literature and lesbian culture. And I wanted to have a book with that kind of richness and that kind of texture to begin. And so then people can, I hope, and people are already telling me within the sinister wisdom community, what are the greatest hits? What are the poems that they love? What are the poems that leave them somewhat cold? I mean, I received multiple emails after the book went out to our subscribers with different reports and reactions, including some lovely comments from people who were friends with Lynn at different times of her life and all of that. So I feel like this is a book very much invested in the community. And, you know, of course my greatest hope is that some, I was, I sold a lot of these books at AWP to a lot of young writers. One woman had on her book bag that she was an Anarka feminist. And I said, and I gave her a copy of the book, I said, you have to read this book. So my greatest hope is that the slim, the best of Lynn Lanadier poems will be edited by another young woman who's encountering this right now. And in 15 years, she's gonna say, these are the best ones. And she's gonna come to Sinister Wisdom to publish it. That's wonderful. That's a great plan for the future. So speaking of Anarka feminism, please tell us what it is and how it weaves through Lynn Lanadier's poetry. Well, you know, it's rooted in this idea of being an anarchist, of really chafing against institutions and systems. And, you know, we've all seen different expressions of the anarchy in our world today and this idea of being a feminist as well. And Lanadier strung them together as an Anarka feminist. She explored it in some of the poetry. I think it's, to me, the word really reflects the vibrancy of feminism and lesbianism during the 80s and 90s when people were invested in understanding and assuming, well, of course you're a feminist, but what kind of feminist are you? And then giving its meaning in terms of what issues were there were important, what kind of activism could be expected and what kind of poetry might you write from that? And how I see an Anarka feminism playing out through Lanadier's work is partially these ideas of what feminism means to her, but it's also working at a language level in her work. She's interested in unsettling what language does, unsettling grammar, putting together different types of words, challenging the sort of fundamental structures of language. And I think she does that in lots of interesting ways, sometimes to good effect, sometimes to effect where I was like, I'm not fully sure what that means, but I'm so invested in the journey of what she's thinking about and how she's trying to find meaning through her poetry. Well, one interesting thing for me is I observed that her cousin is Karen Brodeen and I was a member of the second wave collective during that time and all the issues of second wave published her work before I got there. And you mentioned kind of the political infighting, she sort of differed from her cousin about Anarka feminism versus socialist feminism. Could you just talk a minute about that? Cause I find it's very interesting and reflective of the time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so Karen was, and there's a great new book coming up that considers some of Karen's work. Karen was a socialist, was committed to these kind of institutions and formations of socialism. And I think Lynn was a part of her conflict with Karen was about that she didn't want to be a part of that of an organization, of a program that was prescribing what people's behavior or thoughts might be. That I think that's how Lynn saw it. I don't think that's how Karen saw it. I think Karen saw it as like we, I have a system to really share ideas and have collective action. And I think Lynn was less interested in the ideas of collective action in the ways that Karen was. So there's a way that Anarka feminism is deeply to me interested in action but not the collectivity of the action. Interested in nodes of people doing different actions. They may all come to the same end but they're not coordinated. That's how I think of this difference in different sorts of ways. I think that's also very interesting and it does bring back the time and all its interferences and vehemence. Let me ask you, let's go back to the collection. You have a very rich selection of photographs. I mean, you're clear that it's a poetry collection and not a biography. But you have all these wonderful pictures and you end the anthology with a picture of Lynn Lanadiere and the dog, which I love. But tell us how you had to include all these photographs, how you found them, how you had to select them and place them. Yes. Well, Fred Lynn's brother was a great interlocutor and he is a photographer himself. So I think he was also very focused on what are the images that would help tell Lynn's life story and he shared those images with me. Primarily, most of them are from Fred. Some of them are from her archives that he placed at the San Francisco Public Library. And I think in terms of why I wanted to include them is I'm interested in a reading of the work that invites us to imagine her life. It isn't a biography, but her work, the selection of work is across the really productive period of her life until her death. And I wanted people to have images that they could associate with her and understand more of who she was as a person. And I think a part of that is because her death is very tragic, she committed suicide. And I talk about that in the introduction and I didn't wanna shy away from that because I think that's a part of our story as a people. But I also wanted to humanize her as well. And I felt like the photographs were an important part of that humanizing force in telling Lynn's story. Well, speaking of not shying away from things, I have one more question. Would you mind talking about your decision as an editor to include poems that might reflect racism into cementism or cultural appropriation? You say you don't wanna sanitize the collection. Yeah, I don't wanna sanitize the collection. I want, I think that one of the things as we look back and reread people's work from earlier times, we're always bringing our own experience to it. And that includes our own judgments of it. And we're living in a different time. I've lived in an incredibly different world than Lynn Launadier lived in. Well, she was doing most of her work. I was a young child and a teenager. And so I bring my own sense of meaning, my own sense of values and my own judgment to her work. And that includes identifying, there's one poem that feels very racist to me. It also reflects how a lot of people spoke about Vietnamese people during the Vietnam conflict. And I didn't wanna take that out because I think what poetry calls us to do is to grapple with the difficult. That it calls us to understand and think about what is the world that we're in now? What values do we have now? What's shaping those values? And what are different worlds that people lived in? Not only in the past, but in our present. And so I didn't want to take out those, I didn't wanna take out the things that were difficult. And I also didn't want to, I didn't want people to look away from her because she doesn't reflect the current politics or the current best thinking about how to talk about things. So for instance, she spends three or four months in Mexico and a big part of the middle of one of her full collections and a big selection of it is included in this book is about her experiences as a white woman who was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest in Mexico thinking about not only the Mexican people, but also Mexican systems of cosmology and meaning making and how she's thinking through that, what she's finding meaningful herself. There's a lot of people who would look at that and view that as cultural appropriation. Other people would look at it and say, this is a little bit of being a cultural explorer. Feminist scholars have given us different ways to think about this. And I feel like her work reflects that and that we may make judgments about what she did, but in order to do that, we have to encounter the work and think about it and grapple with it. And that's always what I want, that when I'm teaching, that's what I want students to do to be able to get to the difficult things, to be able to grapple with them, to make decisions for themselves about where they come down in questions of morality and judgment. And I think we can only do that if we have access to things that are difficult. That makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Is there anything that you would like to add before we get to our concluding poem? What would you like to tell the audience about, in a nutshell, about fire-rimmed Eden and why they should pick it up? Well, the other thing I'll just note is that we used a couple fonts that are in, that's on the cover of the book and that are in the interior that were created by a young woman who's a font artist and they were adapted from lesbian feminist journals of the 1970s. And so there's a way that our typography, I mean, one of the things I'm, one of the dialogues I'm having with people working on sinister wisdom is how can we use more typefaces that were developed by women? And so that's, so there's a nod within the design of the book to the context in which Lynn Lanagere was working. And I feel like that's a really lovely, a lovely confluence where she was working, writing these poems, publishing them. She published in the letter, Barbara Greer published her poems in the letter and other feminist publications. And some of the, and the typography that comes to this comes from those publications. And so that it's again, part of how I see my work at Sinister Wisdom and in general as understanding the past and using it to remake things that we can use now and that will help drive us forward. And that's an impulse behind the collection also and much of the work, if I may observe. And that's great because I've been struggling a little bit with nostalgia and not settling for nostalgia, sort of how we can apply it and how we can look forward. And I think that's another part of the, I spend a lot of time arguing that lesbian feminism, lesbian separatism, lots of different formations were not racist, we're not backward looking, we're not taking us down a cul-de-sac that caused feminism to fail. And I make all of these arguments in my scholarly work and I don't want to overlook like I feel like we have to take in all the data. There are moments when feminists are racist, there are racism is a part of how we live in the world. And I think we have to hold on to all of those things if we're going to really discover new paths forward. So that kind of resisting nostalgia, I think is also being willing to look at the full record. Well, one thing, as I said, people we take, one thing I love about her poetry is its playfulness. And I've asked you to finish this part of the interview with a little reading from one of my favorite poems in the collection with which you chose to end it, Lesbian Heaven. So would you mind joining the honors? Yes, Lesbian Heaven. All the girlfriends you ever went with are together now and they're all getting along. They're lovers of each other and you're in the middle playing the lyre with Greek attire in the middle of a Maxfield Parish forest. Dough-eyed nymphs fondling pan pipes while the pure note sounds. Purple mountains rise over Aeolian forests and the wind is the pianist for a women's chorus and the longest fingered of all the women plays the lute. Pluck the cord for the wine, the flute chambers, Egypt's of desire and the glimmer bubble gurgles of a brook where each stone is smoothed to the consistency of knee and thighs and the sun, the gigantic pearl livens them. Lesbian Heaven is filled with dogs and cats. All the pets we've ever had are tendered by the hands that kept them and they all behave. A beloved company among pillars uplift and glitter. Where Diana sets down her hunting implements and all the lesbians in heaven clamor to her limbs with tambour touch, the afternoon unfolds its sleeve. The night cadenza's its embrace. The stars become the beaded necklace of mourning with the moon as centerpiece and the gold of the painting shine on me and thee. Julie Enser, thank you for giving us this collection and audience, get it right away and start perusing the work of Lynn Lanadier. Thanks for joining us. Now we're gonna close this part of the interview and turn it over to Linda. Thank you so much, Ann. It's a pleasure. Always. Hi, everybody. I'd like to thank Julie Enser for coming on the show and being my guest and Ann's guest and all on the same day. So she's very adventurous. So Julie Enser is the author of four poetry collections, Avowed, Sibling Rival Repress, 2016. Lilith's Demons, A Midsummer Night's Press, 2015. Sisterhood, Sibling Rival Repress, 2013. And Handmade Love, A Midsummer Night's Press. She is editor of Milk and Honey, a celebration of Jewish lesbian poetry. I mean, Summer Night's Press, 2011. Milk and Honey was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in lesbian poetry. Welcome, Julie. Thank you. Thank you so much, Linda. I'm thrilled to be here. And what's other interesting too is Isabel Claire Paul is her freelance illustrator. She was born and raised in Michigan. It has a BFA degree in illustration from the College of Creative Studies. She likes to draw weird things with a thousand tiny little lines. And the work in this book of her drawings are just really incredible. How did you find her? So this was just like such a kismet. When the chat book of this came out, this is a picture, this is the chat book I'm holding up. My friend Cheryl Clark said to me, this really needs to be illustrated, Julie. And I was really like Cheryl, you know, I can't draw. And but, you know, Cheryl was just like, well, that's what needs to happen. So that was sort of like sitting in the back of my mind. And then a dear friend of mine who we worked together on Michigan's Gay and Lesbian newspaper in the early 1990s, Tim Retzloff, Dr. Tim Retzloff, Tim was working on a history of gay pride in Michigan. He's a Yale trained historian and his book is about a gay history of Michigan, but he was wanting to adapt it for the 50th anniversary of the first Pride celebration in Michigan. And he hit on this idea of doing a comic book as a way to reach a broader group of people. And someone that he went to school with said, oh, you know, our daughter is an illustrator and just graduated. And that was Isabel Claire Hall. And so Isabel did this project with Tim and it was just really beautiful when it came out. And I was chatting with Tim about that. And then when it was done, I said, Tim, could I ask Isabel if she might illustrate some of these poems? And he said, sure. So I emailed her and said, you know, this is what I have, I'd like some illustrations. And we just had the best collaboration. I mean, Isabel was a delight to work with. We were collaborating during the pandemic. She was a recent college grad, had moved back home to live with her parents, was trying to do her artwork. She read the poems and loved them. And I felt like really understood what I was trying to do and came up with these great illustrations. So I know here is one right here. Yeah. Yes, yes. They are really, really good and fun and insightful and really match the poetry beautifully. So many of your poems seem to be about identity both in how we see ourselves and how others label us. Do you think that the majority of your poems work to this question of identity or to reaffirm and embrace it? Do you do it in this book as well as the other books you've done? That's such a great question. I think I, you know, I'm really interested always in the question of how are we in the world and how do we encounter the world and how do we show up in the world for folks? And identity of course has a positive valence in the sense of bringing people together with shared identity characteristics to build a community. And also there is a particularly when we have an insurgency of right-wing thinking, there's like negative valence associated with identity. And people want to not be seen in relationship to an identity group but seen in relationship to other forms of constructed identities. And so I feel like I'm always thinking about that because I've always done work in identity-based communities. For me, it's been primarily gay and lesbian communities, but also I've done work as parts of other identity-based communities. And so I'm interested in exploring those connections and understanding where do we take on identity and embrace it as a category and where do we also chafe against it and say this isn't all that I am or there are things, there are parts about me that go against type for what the identity message is. So all of those things kind of I'm working with and thinking about. And of course, in this collection, there's the lesbian, the dyke identity, but there's also this very political identity of Pinko Kami and the association of Pinko Kami with an extreme left-wing but also there are elements that you see of the Pinko Kami dyke not being exclusively left-wing but moving across multiple ideologies. So those kinds of things are the things, the questions that I'm interested in. And I don't know, but could she be a red diaper baby? Well, so the interesting thing about the Pinko Kami dyke, of course, is like there's parts of the Pinko Kami dyke that are me, but there's also parts that are like other Pinko Kami dykes that I have known, right? So I am not a red diaper baby myself, right? Like my parents, we are true died in the world Democrats. My father would always say to us is when we were kids, he said, you can marry whoever you want, but not a Republican because that would just be the wrong sort of thing. So I was not a red diaper baby, but I'm very interested in red diaper babies and have known a number of them. Me too, it's interesting, isn't it? So that was a question I was gonna ask you, like how much is this like you and how much is sort of this superhero or this person here in the book? So how many of these experiences have you had? I mean, is some of it based on like, oh, I went out and used my shotgun to practice in the yard or, you know, whatever? Are some of these you or are they mostly the superhero archetype? So the kernel of the collection really was me and me, there was a period of time when my partner and I moved back to Michigan where I had grown up and we lived in the house that I lived a good 10 or 15 years of my life in. And so the kernel of the poems was really trying to understand and reconcile that experience of what does it mean to go back? What does it mean to go back to being in Saginaw, Michigan? What's the experience of going home? And especially when you go home and you are now a different person like you've realized and achieved different, some aspirations that you might have had as a teenager but you've also come short on some things that you had hoped for. So that was the beginning of the poems that was thinking about, how does the Pink Hill Commie Dyke go home to this working class Michigan community? But then as I was writing the poems, they grew and grew and I wanted to include things that were outside of my experience that were more imagined because I had, because I was a part of a broader community of really Pink Hill Commie Dykes, right? And that had done a wide range of different things and I wanted to integrate some of them, some of the other experiences that I've observed people having. So there is a mix of my experiences, experiences observed from other people and then there's a couple of poems that are just really lights of creative fantasy. And I kind of meshed them all together in thinking about this archetype of the Pink Hill Commie Dyke. So it's a blend of all of those things. I know when I was thinking of this Commie Dyke as sort of a superhero. I mean, I could see her like on TV with being a superhero for all of us out there who have some identity with this. I mean, it would be a great superhero. Yes, you are saying the same thing Cheryl Clark said when she read the new edition. She said, well, this is good. Now in volume two, the Pink Hill Commie Dyke needs a cape. So yes. Yes. And, you know, like a comic book or a, you know, get it on, get somebody in your wide range of friends to do a movie or a short movie about this Commie Dyke because I think it'd be great. So who is your audience for this? Yeah, it's always such a good question. You know, I talked a little bit about audience with Anne too. You know, I think the first, and Linda, you're a poet. So you know, like the first part of the poem, the first writing of it, your audience, I always feel like my audience is really me, right? Because I'm writing the poem to understand something for myself, to put language to something that's not quite there yet. Like the experience is there and I want the experience to have a greater meaning and texture. And so I bring it to a poem to discover something. And so in that way, I feel like the first audience, the first very tentative audience is myself. And how am I having, what conversation am I having with myself and what am I learning for myself, first of all? Like that's where the first, I feel like transformative moment comes. But then of course, as I'm writing and writing more poems and putting them together in a book, I am thinking about who might read it and how might it find a broader audience. And the beautiful thing that I have, of course, is through Sinister Wisdom, I feel like there's an audience of people that I'm in conversation with on a regular basis. And then I can imagine their reactions and I can share with them, of course, and hear what they have to say. And I'm so grateful to the Sinister Wisdom community because I feel like that's a community that I imagine for the reading of this. And of course, in the creation of this book, Isabel was an audience for the poems after they were written. And as she was putting them together and it was so gratifying that she loved the poems so much and that they inspired her for the artwork because I do want to reach an audience of younger women so that the Pinko Kami Dyke is not just the frumpy age, frumpy middle-aged woman that I am, but that the Pinko Kami Dyke is also a part of the imaginary for young women in their 20s. Yeah, that's a great answer, Julia. But do you ever worry, like sometimes when I'm writing and it doesn't seem to be politically correct or it doesn't seem to be, like using the word dyke these days could be problematic, right? So do you ever think about that and like what, or do you just go ahead and say, oh, be damned, I'm just gonna do what I love and wanna do when things important? So, well, in general, when I do think about it, I always come to that conclusion, oh, be damned, I'm gonna do what I think is important. When, I will say with this book, when I'm composing them, I don't, again, because I'm thinking about myself as the audience, I don't think about that political reception of them, but when I was reading the page proofs for this book earlier this year, I was struck by the guns and the use of the guns, the firing of the guns in these poems. And it gave me pause. I was wondering, like, how are people going to read this? What is the sort of, what is the state of the world around guns right now? Because it's been changing in my lifetime as a result of the school shootings that we've had. And, you know, and of course there's a broad, broad consensus on the left that we're opposed to guns, we don't own guns, guns are things for people on the right, which is not really my experience having grown up in Michigan, where lots of people own guns and lots of people hunt. So, I was aware of that while I was working with the page proofs that there is something that goes against type that is challenging within these pages. And, you know, and I have to say, like I'm aware of that and also I think we are complex people and there's no right way of thinking or writing. Yeah, and I agree with you, although, you know, sometimes we do get pushed back for people about certain things that we write or, you know, but that's okay, you know, it's part of the discourse. Yep, yep. Besides it's not bad discourse, but, you know. See, you have a community among women which seems to be a recurring theme in your earlier work and main focus of your book, Sisterhood. It also seems it had a significant influence on Lilith's demons. So, do you find yourself revisiting this book, this theme? And, because your poem, your poem's in the Pinko Kami Dyke, which is a different book, but it also follows this tradition of women. So, is that right or? Yeah, I think one of the things I've been thinking about lately, so I think you're exactly right, like two big themes in lots of my writing, one is this idea of communities of women, you know, communities of women kind of like, in a certain way in my imaginary, they're the answer to lots of problems. Like if we would just all get together in community, we could solve problems, which I think is a little Pollyanna, right? Like, you know, if really pressed, I'm not sure I totally believe it, but I also do believe it. It's in a lot of my writing and a lot of my thinking. And then, of course, the other thing, like the other sort of magical moment in tons of my poems are orgasms, right? So, sort of like there's sort of like communities of women and explicit sexuality. And one of the questions I've been really mulling after a conversation with a friend is how do we write, how do we write erotics and relationships that are not sort of always at a climax of orgasm but are in the kind of mundane world of sex and sexuality that really is our daily life? Yeah. And so I've been thinking about that lately, but I know that the collections that I put together do not reflect that. They reflect kind of like a magical thinking about community and a transformative moment of orgasm. And that is a big part of what is in my imaginary. And even like with friendships, the sort of erotic women friendships that aren't necessarily, love interests, but really just intimate, very close women friends that we have, that we feel that sort of connection that I wouldn't say it's erotic, but it's more than what people typically call friendship. So I always found that interesting too. Yeah. So I think for the next time that we have, we will hear from some, we'll hear some of your poems. Okay. Is there anything that you would like the audience to know? I really suggest that everybody just go out and get this book. What a read. The illustrations are great. The ideas are sometimes horrifying, sometimes funny, but always insightful. So get your copy. Thank you. Well, I thought that I would read the first poem and the last poem of the book because I think that it's both, like both of these poems think a lot about the imaginary of the Pinko Kamidike and the archetype. I think they're not the most personal of the poems, but I think they start and end the book. So the first poem in the book is the Pinko Kamidike hijacks. And it has this gorgeous illustrations from Isabel. The Pinko Kamidike hijacks the commercial airwaves with a souped up computer, a black digital box and a broken down microphone that sits limp in its stand until she places her hand at its base and presses her lips to its metal mesh. Electrified, the whole contraption broadcasts her words, her voice, her shows over the air and into a thousand tiny radios across the region, across the nation. First, she kidnaps an alt-right talk radio station seizing control to broadcast lesbian folk music, Chris and Holly and Melanie and Bitch and Farron, then old recordings of Leah Delaria and audio tape shows from femurist Kate Clinton. She imagines this music, these stand-up routines, these objects of lesbian culture, transforming racist listeners into peace-loving, woman-loving omrads. When she has exhausted her supply of MP3s and discs and tapes, she takes to the airwaves directly. The Pinko Kamidike speaks and shouts and coos and questions and posits, then takes calls, interlocketing with people angry about queers and bosses and losses of jobs and opportunity. She is startled. They have more in common than she ever imagined. Exactly. And I should say, I assume all of your listeners are going to know that Chris and Holly and Melanie and Bitch and Farron are all women's music performers. Chris Williamson, Holly Neer, Melanie DeMore, Bitch was a group and Farron, of course, just goes by the single name. I always forget that I should say that at the beginning. I don't know any of them personally, but I do love their music so much, I call them by their first names. I know, and it really is like a what, 80s, 70s, 80s kind of a list. And Leah Delaria is another. Yes, yes, yes. And then just one more, does that make sense? Yeah. So then the last book, the last poem of the book also has a beautiful full page illustration by Isabel. And this is called The Pinko Kami Dyke Demonstrates. The Pinko Kami Dyke demonstrates for peace on Monday, welfare rights on Tuesday, economic justice on Wednesday, reproductive rights on Friday. On Thursday, she volunteers at the soup kitchen and Saturday morning, she is out at the abortion clinic helping women safely enter. She shows up at every rally, every demo, when people need a body out on the streets for rights or to redress wrongs. Organizers just think of her and she shows up with her old placard. She stores two in the garage. One says, another Pinko Kami Dyke four with an eight and a half by 11 inch space for a sheet of paper, sometimes white, sometimes neon pink, which she tapes on with handwritten words, equality, justice, peace, Medicare for all, abortion rights, economic equality. She writes the slogans needed for the specific rally. The other placard is nearly the same. Another Pinko Kami Dyke against and space for a sheet of paper, war, nukes, welfare cuts, pricks, though she uses that one rarely. When she lived in San Francisco, she was truly another, but in Kansas City, Iowa City, Kalamazoo, Bar Harbor, Cleveland, Lexington, Denton, Tuscaloosa, Augusta or any of the thousands of towns across America. She is often a Pinko Kami Dyke or the Pinko Kami Dyke, which is fine. Wherever she is, whatever the cause, the Pinko Kami Dyke is there, standing with indignation, standing with righteousness, standing with her sign, standing, she knows another era is rising. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Julie. And everybody run out and get the book. And where can people get this? And do you have a website we can put up for the book or? Yeah, so the book is available from the publisher Indolent Books, which is indolentbooks.com. And it's also available on my website, juliarenzer.com. And there's a link there. You can send, it's a PayPal link. If you send to me, if you want a signed copy, you can do it through my website. Okay, well, thank you very much. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you, Linda. It's been a real pleasure. And I'll talk to you soon. Yep. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.