 Welcome to the National Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference held October 8th through the 10th, 1993 in Boston, Massachusetts. We now join our speakers as the session is just beginning. I think Christos and Cheryl have agreed to share with us about their lives as writers coming to us initially in this bridge called My Back. And taking their lives of very kind of fundamental specificity. Lives as poets, as women of color, as Menominee Indian, as African American. And opening them up to us in this bridge so we could find ourselves at least as women of color and lesbians of color. And this morning they'll talk about their lives now and writing now and what writing and politics and being open about sexuality and about what they believe, how they believe the world should be, what that means to them and how that's changed over time. Thank you and let's take it away. I guess we have to use these, right? Good morning. Thank you for coming. Still early for some of us. Not me. It's very early for me. This is the middle of the night. Christos and I realized that we had known each other's work and we had written quite a bit over the last more than 10 years. And we've been in the same venues where we never really met, so we met this one for the first time. I mean, you know, really formally for the first time. But actually I have forgotten. I never felt like we'd never met in the flesh, you know. So here we are and we're happy to be here. What we had talked about doing is sort of alternating between our own conversation and yours with each other and with us, I suppose. Yeah. And we thought we might start off by talking about what we've been doing since this bridge called my back. Because both of us sort of officially came out as writers in that publication in 1981. Do you want me to go? Before this bridge called my back, I identified myself as a monomony and the term woman of color made me very uncomfortable. I'm still actually a little nervous about that term because it feels to me as though it's a term that has been imposed by the feminist movement rather than a term that we ourselves have developed. I'm not really a woman of color. I am a monomony, a nation's woman. And that identity is primary to me. But the good part about thinking about being a woman of color meant that there were many, many other women that I had community with. And the effect of this bridge called my back has been really profound on my career as a writer and on my sense of identity. I would not have probably gone to a woman of color meeting before this bridge called my back. So it's really, sometimes now I'm not supposed to go because some people define it as black women. But one of the things that this bridge meant in my life as a writer was that I had ground. I had a place to be. Before that I did a lot of oral readings and had a reputation in San Francisco. But it wasn't until I did this bridge called my back that universities started giving me lots of money sometimes to read poetry. Not frequently enough, but some. And what it did besides changing my identity, it also altered my perception of what writing could do. I had felt pretty lonely in terms of my writing. A lot of people call my writing angry. And in this bridge called my back I felt like I had a beautiful matrix of other women's anger. I wasn't just this angry person sort of beating a brick wall by myself. And I came to understand how even though racism works differently in each of our lives, there is a common thread in it. And I suppose that thread that I've unraveled enough to understand that the chief effect of racism is loss of self-esteem. So that when you're under fire from racism constantly, in order to feel like you have the right to write it all, you have this continual battle that you're doing all the time because the society wants to shut you up. Particularly if you want to talk about racism, which is one of the verboten subjects like sex, which I think is very interesting. But it's verboten for anyone powerless to talk about racism or sex. It's not verboten, of course, for the dominant ruling class to talk about it. So for me this bridge called my back was the first time that someone said, you're a writer. And it was the most, one of the most powerful readings I've ever done was at the University of Washington, I don't know, in California. Santa, what was it? Down south. And it was a reading that I did with other members of this bridge called my back. And what we did was appear on stage and read one another's works. So I wasn't necessarily reading my words and someone else wasn't. And it was real, we did a performance actually. And it was really very powerful and moving to see how my words could be read by an Asian American woman and have complete validity. You know, that was a very, really opened up my mind. And helped me understand that when we write about the particular as well as we can, that particular is also the universal. So I think that's enough for me. Weren't you in lesbian poetry? What? Weren't you in lesbian poetry? Ellie. Ellie. Ellie and Jones book. Lesbian poetry. Oh, okay. I don't remember. There were a lot of lesbians in this book. This bridge called my back was the first one. I was in lesbian poetry. But, um, well. Not my lesbian poetry now. I guess I suppose this bridge called my back produced similar experiences for me as a black lesbian as for Christos. It gave me a sense of community. I had a similar reaction I suppose to the term women of color because I felt it collapsed distinctions. But, um, I also was very excited by the idea of being in dialogue with other women, women of color writers. I also felt that sometimes I was critical of, I felt critical that it didn't identify lesbians more in the title. Since many, many, many, many of the women writing in the book were lesbians. That was okay too, since it was a very, very out text in many of the, much of the writing. It also encouraged me. We were talking this morning about how it, how this bridge changed, changed our writing and our writing process. It also encouraged me to write more, to write more poetry. I, none of my poetry at that point was in this bridge. It was that essay lesbianism and active resistance and I must say that some of my, some of the opinions expressed in that particular article, I would definitely change some soften, some mute today. That essay has really sort of dogged me for the last, I didn't say dogged it has like haunted me for the last, oh my coffee. No I didn't. It has haunted me for the last, I'll say 10 or 12 years because as you must know this bridge is still a very, very big seller in, for women's studies courses, for many women's studies courses and many students who read it, you know, because I work at Rutgers, come up to me and many times take me to task for that essay. I mean I've been invited to classes to come in and sort of defend it. It's all rather fun, you know, especially now that bisexual people have more of a voice. They often want to, you know, which is fine. They often want to challenge some of my comments about, well that one comment I made about bisexual people in that article. So it's amazing to me how, it's still amazing to me how much of a community that book still creates and how useful it still is for me as a writer and for younger generations of women, feminists. That's all I want to say about this bridge caught my back. We also wanted to talk about, I'm sorry. Oh I'm sorry. Also, Angela Bowen. We also wanted to talk about writing process. And that's a conversation I suppose we would like to involve anyone in the audience in also. One of the things that I think it's important to say, because I've had some people ask me questions or say things to me here that sort of startled me, the expectation that the minute you start writing you'll get published is crazy. As a matter of fact, I read poetry publicly for 10 years. That means every single women's benefit that happened in the Bay Area, every single jail rally, every single everything, I read and read and read for no money, paid my own transportation. So it's important I think to understand that there's a lot of dues you pay before you get published, particularly if you are a lesbian and particularly if you are a lesbian of color. In case you haven't noticed, reviews of our work don't appear regularly in the New York Times review of books. And to some extent we're not even properly addressed, I believe, in the queer press. That's maybe a nasty comment, but it's true. So I guess that for those of you who are writing now and haven't yet been published, I'd like to say that the way you get published is that you keep writing and keep sending work out and keep reading until you're ready to kill somebody and then it might happen. And I'm not sure how much being published has to do with being a good writer. I think that's very important to understand. There is certainly 100 million people being published in this country who are writing absolute crap and I don't even know why they're cutting down the trees to do it. So that issue of being published can destroy your life as a writer if you focus on it. If your whole focus is getting published, then you're at the mercy of all of the people who have the power to publish you. And it's much healthier. Even myself now, my issue when I'm writing is not who's going to publish this, but what do I need to say? And as long as you keep focused on your own voice and what it is that you need to say, then you sort of stay in a more sane place in terms of writing. There's not very many lesbian publications now that publish out lesbian work. Or I'm not that sure about gay men's writing, although I think the James White Review is a pretty out gay men's magazine. Because there's so few places for you to get published in anthologies and little small magazines, it makes it harder to get a book published. Because generally speaking, when a publisher is looking at your work, they want to know who else has published you, who else has been crazy enough to print what you had to say. And they look at things like how well you are known in the world. So I suggest then that you do readings at rallies and readings every place that you can get a reading. And even organize things yourself. Take it over. Another suggestion I have is to produce broad sides, which are fairly cheap. You can usually get a really nice typeset broad side, which is one poem on a piece of paper for about $250, 500 copies. So if you produce a broad side, you take it to bookstores and it sells for a dollar or whatever. You're not really making money on it, but your name is getting out in the world. The other thing is, I have this suspicion that editors come to know your name because they've seen it before. So this means if you send stuff out and they reject it, send it somewhere else and then send it back again and just keep sending it and pretty soon they'll come across a piece and they'll say, hmm, Christos, I think I've heard that name before. Well, we better look at this. We better read it. So that's one of the ways to kind of manage things to your advantage. I want to make it very clear that I don't make a living as a writer, so keep your day jobs. And probably you'll have to keep your day jobs for the rest of your lives. I have very good royalties on my books. I make about a dollar a book that's actually pretty high for some publishers. So you can imagine how many thousands of books you need to sell in order to live. Unless you're writing Naya romance novels, I would say that you probably can't live off of your writing and I'm actually not sure if anybody writing those does live off their writing. And since I'm a literary snob, I don't really have much to say about those. What are the things that I think it's also important to understand is that rejection is sometimes nothing to do with you. So therefore, people who get submissions have cramps. They break up with their lovers. Their lovers break up with them. Their lovers sleep with their best friends. They have no money to put out the new issue. They have to do a benefit for the new issue. I mean, lots of stuff, just like everything happens in your life, everything happens in theirs. So the day that they're looking at submissions, if you're talking about breaking up with your lover and they don't want to deal with it, you know. I mean, so it's important to remember that rejection isn't necessarily about whether you can write or not. It's also, there's all these human elements that nobody ever cops to. And friendship networks is the other part that nobody cops to. Generally speaking, what happens is your friends are the ones who like your work and they publish you. So I got published in this bridge called My Back because Barbara Cameron took my work to Gloria and Zaldua and she really loved it. So it's kind of like you have to find allies for your work and sort of establish friendship networks. It's kind of like being in a corporation, although I'm sure publishers would deny that. The other part of all of that is that getting to your own voice is extremely difficult in this culture because all of us have received so much brainwashing about who we are, what a lesbian is, what a person of color is, what a white person is. And all of that brainwashing is constant. It doesn't ever stop. So what ends up happening is you really have to spend time alone. That's the bad news about being a writer. If you want to become a good writer, you spend a lot of time by yourself, lonely, crying, coughing, spilling coffee on things, you know, being crabby, walking around in circles, staring out the window, sharpening pencils, hating yourself. It's like the image of a writer who just sits down and reels out this stuff is completely false. I don't know any writers who do that. Everybody I know who writes, everyone I'm close to, will call you at three o'clock in the morning, I can't get this damn book to go. And you know, you meet someone in the hall here and some of the people that I'm friends with, you know, they'll be crying because they're struggling with a book and they can't get it to move. So that's common. That's what it's like. Writing is not an easy birth. It's pretty complicated. Sometimes it takes cesarean sections and lots of drugs, you know, and stuff like that. So I mean, I don't recommend drugs, but some people need drugs in order to write. So there's a lot of myths about writing that I feel completely obliterate what writing is about. It's a very lonely process and it's very scary. Every time I've written something, every time I've published a book, I've been terrified of what the response will be. Are people going to hate it? Are they going to love it? Will this mean I'll never write again? You know, lots of stuff. And generally speaking, when you finish a book, you sort of drop into this hole and feel like shit and like dying is the end of the world and you're not ever going to write again. But you just have to kind of roll with that and realize that it passes. Kind of like cramps or depression, you know. You just have to take a hot bath and wait for it to be over. Because eventually somebody will do something that will irritate you enough to write again. I think of writing very much like the pearl in the oyster, you know. It's like someone gets grit under you and then you write, you know, and sometimes the grit can be beauty. You know, sometimes something will just wipe you out. The main thing I think to do as a writer is to just be still and concentrate on being there in yourself, which is hard to do. This culture teaches us to be constantly distracted. So we have the TV going and the radio going and we're cooking food and talking to a friend on the telephone and ironing a shirt, right? And if you behave like that, you don't get to the writing place. You know, you really have to do sit down and think and feel and all that uncomfortable stuff. I recommend that you write things by hand and not work directly with a computer. Now I know a lot of people disagree with me, but I find that the mind is not set up to the rhythm of a computer and I believe that CRT screens affect your brain waves and that sometimes when people are working on a computer screen and they have writer's block, if they'll just turn away and write with a pen and paper, they won't have writer's block anymore. And sometimes if you go for a walk, you pray. I mean, one of the things that I do a lot when I'm trying to write is pray. Pray that it's going to come out right. Pray that I'll figure out what it is I need to say. See, it's early in the morning, so I'm still in semi-dream state. I think I've said enough, right? I think my process is quite different. I think a big part of my process over the last, I guess since 1981, has been involved being, becoming involved in conditions, conditions magazines. And that also created another real community of writers with whom to communicate. And a real sense of community. And we talked about this yesterday in the workshop called Queer Poetry Past, Present, Future. It was listed as the poetic tradition in your programs. But we talked about mentoring and the creation of the writing community as quite critical to lesbian and gay writing. So that was a big part of my, I think, and still continues to be, a big part of my writing process. Because I made a connection between the kind of writing that I was, that we all were, I was a member of a collective. Actually, one of the founding editors is here right now, Ellen Balken. And I worked with conditions from 81 to 90. And that, as I said, you know, it helped me to, to, it broke down what Christos was talking about is a real isolating, isolating habit of writing on the isolating process of writing, so, and it encouraged me to write, because I had sort of a touchstone. You know, I could see what women, what lesbians were interested in writing about and what we were interested in reading. And it helped me frame my own writing project. I guess one of the big issues for me is kind of contention with, contention and process with the audience. And really attempting or trying to reach for and find out what the lesbians, and I suppose I mean that term in its broadest and narrowest sense, wanted to read, or wants to read. And I think I still pretty much do that. I mean, I can't go over really the particular of my process, because I really don't even know it myself. I just like write. I know there's certain times when I write, you know, certain months when I write certain, certain times when I feel I have to get stuff out. I'm constantly on top of deadlines and extending them and whatnot. I mean, you know, like, you know, I never get anything. Pardon me. I'm a reciprocal kind of gal. So, you know, I'm on top of them. They're on top of me. Yeah, right there on top of me. And I don't think about it. I guess I suppose I don't think about, I don't have, I don't think about it being an isolating process. You know, I just think about it as primarily a service. Something that I got to do. And computer, I like computer. I do. I have a different kind of, particularly with prose types of things. I still do write, but, you know, a lot of times we'll just like really go to that word processor. Because, you know, it's a really, it's a stimulating process for me. You know, for me, as much as I can use music, computer, ironing, cooking, I don't bake bread. I know it's a big thing with less than bread. You know, I use it. But I think I do really feel that community and being in touch with community helped stimulate that process for me. To say nothing of, I mean, you don't even have to really talk about, you know, obviously reading as a poet, obviously meeting is an essential kind of a process for me. Helps a lot. And helps to break down that isolation. Could other people ask questions or start to talk or, you know, reflect or whatnot? You know, if you feel like it, if it's not too early for some of you. Because it's kind of, yeah, sure. I just wanted to, I would just like to be a poet and apologize in a mixed genre and apologize. Because you know, it has importance to me. And I wonder what it would like to do to have your form in conversation with other forms, you know, as kind of both of learning and as finding those forms. I'll go first because I got... I've been having actually some very serious doubts about being in any more anthologies because I have been betrayed so many times in those kinds of situations. For instance, often I'm the only native writer represented in an anthology and I'm not going to accept that anymore. I recently had someone write to me and want to reprint some of my poetry in this anthology and I wrote back and said, if I'm the only Indian woman in this book, I'm not doing it. And because there are other out native lesbian writers now published so there's no excuse for me to be the only one. And I have been in situations where I thought someone was very conscious and agreed to be in their anthology and then discovered that it was primarily white people that not all ethnic groups were represented, that disabled women weren't representative. In other words, that my own politics were not present in the anthology which can be very embarrassing when your best friend says to you, how come you're in this damn thing and there's no Asian women in it? You know, and it's like... So, you know, anthologies are very troublesome particularly because oftentimes someone will write you three months before they're due to print something and say, can we reprint this? And so then you're all wrapped up in their flurry and their pressure and I sometimes have forgotten to ask those very important kind of questions. Who else is in this anthology? What is the political focus behind this? Because it does make you look bad as a writer, I think, if you end up being an eternal token. And there were no other native speakers invited to this conference, for instance, I'm it. And of course I feel very strongly about that and I also understand that there's money and, you know, there's time constraints and there's organizational problems and all the rest of that. But because in my own community, it's like the queer community isn't really my community. I am queer and I participate in it, but very much on the fringes. My community is native people and almost all of my political organizing happens in the native community. When I go to native events, everybody knows I'm queer and it's just a very different experience in this. You know, at this conference I felt very lonely and strange and kind of weird and at odds. And we have a different way of dealing with things in the native community. It's like it's not just that we're a different ethnic group, we have a different world view so that we all eat together. None of us have eaten together at this conference. When you come into town, someone meets you at the station and they say to you, this is your room, this is where you're going here. If you need anything, here's my phone number. We have just a whole different kind of way of dealing with each other because relationship is the core of our way of looking at the world. So I'm often really uncomfortable in the queer world because it's not comfortable. It's kind of alienating and that's sad to me. I would love to be able to figure out a way to bring the way my people treat me into the queer world but there's a lot of resistance to that because of racism and all the rest of it. So anthologies have become really sticky for me. And like Cheryl, there's often times when you've written a poem 20 years ago and someone wants to reprint it now and it's like it embarrasses you now. You kind of say, well, can I please give you something new because maybe you don't agree with what you wrote 20 years ago. That's one of the biggest difficulties of being a writer is that just like a snake, you have dead skins constantly. You're changing all the time. And what you wrote 10 or 20 years ago sometimes is mortifying. And sometimes people come up and say, oh, I love this poem and you go, oh my God, thank you. But there's a lot of problems in anthologies and in terms of awareness or in terms of, for instance, there's been two lesbian magazines, I won't mention names, that recently did class issues. Issues of class, both of those magazines had only white women writing about class. Now as far as I'm concerned, that's criminal in this day and age. And I also understand that I was too lazy to send an article in about class. You know what I'm saying? It's like I had all these other things that I was working on. So I mean, sometimes writers are at fault in that too because certainly people have bugged me for a year and a half sometimes or I think actually someone bugged me for two years to send them something. No, it's really that I'm wearing too many hats is what the problem is. Although I do have lazy moments. So I think that if you're going to be in an anthology, it's really important to ask those kinds of questions. Who else is in it? What is your political focus for this? What's the reason for the anthology? And the other little thing that you should know about an anthology is normally you get paid 50 to 200 and 200 is like rare max once every 10 years or nothing to be in an anthology. So your focus is, I feel much more as a writer to make your own books because then at least you get a dollar a book. I'm sorry to be so, you know, monetary about this in my working class. And so, you know, anthologies, generally speaking, if you're not published at all, it's a way to start because people will then know your name and things like that. But most of the time anthologies don't go deep enough for me. I usually get really frustrated. A prime example is the book Naming the Violence, which is still the only book on lesbian battering unfortunately. Lesbian battering is a very important issue to me and it's very common. And so is emotional abuse and all that kind of stuff and that still remains the only anthology about this very important subject. And from my point of view, that's a very shallow book. It just briefly touches on things. And I'm really interested as a writer and as a person in examining the dynamics of abuse, how internalized homophobia and attitudes of class and race intersect to create abuse among us. Because one of the things that lesbians are doing as a revolutionary force in the world is that we're forging relationships with other people and other classes. That's not happening in the rest of the society. Heterosexual people very rarely step outside of their class backgrounds or their race backgrounds in order to engage with someone. And because we're an oppressed group and thrown all together and it's like we all like pussies. So therefore that is really the only thing we have in common. We don't have anything else in common whatsoever. It's just liking pussies. And so that pushes us into getting into relationships and taking risks that we probably would not take if we were heterosexual. So that's to me like a really revolutionary part of lesbianism in a place where we could really find power if we could examine more closely how those dynamics... We fight with one another a lot because of those aspects too and get into things where you don't talk to somebody for five years and all that rot. And that kind of stuff I think is abuse. So I would like to see ways in which we, in anthologies, go to a much deeper level instead of staying on the surface of things. I wanted to go back to the issue of this bridge. One of the things I neglected to say about one of the lessons I learned from this bridge. For me, it allowed me to see that lesbian feminist communities, at least the one that was, I should like really be more specific, at least the lesbian feminist community where I live, New York, I don't live in New York, I live in New Jersey, but I interacted with in New York, Manhattan and Brooklyn. I think it was one of the few places where there was a discussion, a conversation about race and class, ethnicity. All of those things, all of those issues that get rather fragmented and isolated, rather fragmented in terms of the various communities that most of us are members of or identify with. So that was one of the ways that this bridge opened me up. It allowed me to begin to engage in a conversation about difference in a way that I hadn't before. To the question of anthologies, I have sort of a similar and opposite reaction to Christos. I think that they are extremely important. I mean, I'm not even going to say something. I think that they're extremely important as educational tools. Now, certainly the quality of many of them is uneven and certainly the quality of many that my work has been uneven. But I feel that they're immensely important. And I agree with Christos. I do like to find out what audience the anthology of the work is intended for. Who else is going to be in the anthology? But I often do. In fact, just recently, have the experience of being the only. Whatever. In the anthology, for instance, there's a book that's coming out of Rutledge College called Theorizing Black Feminism. Well, I'm sure. I know that I'm the only lesbian in the anthology. And there are plenty of Afro-American lesbians out here. But I felt it was really important to be in that anthology and be in that conversation. So I suppose that at this point, one of the things I feel that I have to be engaged in in terms of my process of writing, my process of publishing, my process of extending myself is to be in venues. I think we were talking about this yesterday in the poetic tradition. That are different from the ones I've been engaged in over the last, I think since 1981. What was the rest of your question? As poets, you asked a specific question about... I don't distinguish poetry from personal narrative, from leather, from arts, from crafts. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like I feel as though all of those definitions, this is an essay, that's a poem, that's a novel, that it's just fragmentation and a way to categorize something. And to some extent, I believe diminish it. Because what all creative work is is an expression of the spirit. And that's like the central core issue, is what is this spirit expressing that we need to understand. And a lot of times in criticism that's done, the criticism will be not about the content, or respond to the content, which to me is the most important part, but will be things about, oh, this character was one-dimensional. Do you know what I'm saying? Or there was too many adjectives in this. For me, my focus as a writer, although I play with alliteration, I know about all that stuff, and I care about it, my focus is always content first. And I think that differentiates me from a lot of writers, particularly academic writers, whose focus is form first. And I think that, you know, in fact there's a way in which academic writers look down upon content writers, because we're too emotional or confessional, or I don't know, they have a lot of terms that they use to make it seem as though content is not important. But since I believe that if you don't have content, you don't have communication, and writing is communication, then what are you doing? I mean, I've certainly read a million poems in my lifetime, and could not tell what the hell they were saying. It's like, what is she talking about? This is going on for 14 pages, and I still don't know what it's about. And there's lots of obscure images flying through, and interesting stuff going on. From a very form point of view, you can back off and go, that's interesting that she did that. The attitude is kind of so what? I live very much in a very immediate sort of survival place in my culture. There's really no other place to live as an Indian person. Please turn the cassette over to side, too. Place. I came to writing from a political place. It's like, I started writing because I was an activist, not because, I mean, I was always writing, you know, because I didn't have friends in school, but I was a big kid, and I was also the only Indian in my school, so I got beat up by everybody. But writing was like this secret place where I went to sort of take care of all my wounds and write for three pages about what Betty Jo did to me, and then what happened. And I didn't become the writer I am now until I entered politics and started working politically to change the world. And that's when I really started feeling that push to be public about my writing. And I still have a division in my mind not in form, but in that kind of content. It's like there's personal bitching that you do to get through life, and then there's writing that you do for the world. And so I have volumes and volumes of personal bitching that go on for pages and pages about whatever fight I had with so and so. But I never publish that kind of stuff. And so I make my idea of how you separate writing is not about forms so much. Because I'm trying at the moment to write a novel and I have a lot of respect for people who write novels. And I'm also working on a series of essays and all that. So I don't feel like writing needs to be so rigidly defined that you only write poetry or you only write essays or you only write a novel. Because to me, writing is a smorgasbord. Why shouldn't you eat everything on the table and do whatever it is you want to do? And in fact, I'm more interested in work in which form has been it's like one of the things that's really exciting to me as a writer is in the last 10, 15 years, there are fewer and fewer once upon a time novels, which I find extremely boring. It's like describing the furniture, describing this, describing that. Then they go to Boston, then they come home. And I really like the kind of surreal writing that's coming out of South America. There's some very powerful writing coming out of Africa. Some interesting stuff from Cuba. It's like that's what I'm interested in is people who are exploding the forms of western literature and writing essays that are poetic and novels that are poetry and novels that are diaries. Alice Walker is particularly an interesting writer to me because she's I think very much in the forefront of people and Audre Lorde also busting through form and doing something more interesting than standard western lit. I try very hard to read the old dead white boys and I just really can't get through them. They're just tedious. So I'm interested in a form that's not defined yet. I'm trying to write stuff that actually isn't poetry anymore because I find poetry confining too. Did I answer your question? Who knows? Poetry. I have a different reaction. I still believe that poetry as a form is important. Well. I didn't say that. That's true. I guess what I'm saying is I still believe that it's important to define the form or what I'm writing in as poetry. As we were discussing earlier poetry is sort of like and I'll use Christos' metaphor, sort of like homeland for both of us because both of us have worked pretty much. I mean though we have written essays, both of us have worked on our eye and I know I still work very much in poetry. In fact, all the time. That's the form that I like to work in and other things that I write, i.e. essays or articles are labor for me. Back to the issue of poetry and anthologies with other genre or other forms. I think that it has been I think that through lesbian feminist publishing and writing we have seen both the heights and lows of mixed genre production. And I think that that's one of the things that one of the innovative things in our literature. How many of our writers use different forms within a framework and produce anthologies or books in which different forms in and of themselves sort of conflate and come together. Which I think is interesting. It's okay. Being having my poems in as long as they're not filler. I had a poem and sometimes people do that they say let's break up this fiction with a few poems. You don't have control over that. How they're going to actually place your poem in their work. But I mean I like the mixed genre anthologies and I like the ones that are just focusing on poetry. If I'm interested in the perspective of the anthology or the work whether it's it evolves around politics or the form I mean I have some work coming out and hopefully it's going to come out and women have been promising this for the last 10 years. It's called a Formal Feeling Comes and it's an anthology of poems by women who write in traditional forms. You know. And she accepted some of my work. I was interested in that because of the forms because I am interested in formalism. Some of the forms that Dead White Boys use. I am really blessed in my community because I guess it's kind of hard to explain. I come from an oral tradition where being able to speak is very, very important and especially if you can speak for more people than yourself is like that's the goal. So my writing has always had this goal of speaking not just for myself but for more people than myself and one of the things that has happened to me as a writer that people don't know about it's like I don't get reviewed in the New York Times review of books or really in the queer media for that matter and yet when I do a benefit reading for Leonard Peltier and Norma Jean Croy people who are native come up to me in the audience afterwards and say thank you for your book it saved my life and to me that's what I'm writing for. I want to save lives, literally and I've had white women say that, black women Asian women, Chicana women it's like all different kinds of people have told me that my books have saved their lives in one way or another because I would talk about something they didn't think it was okay to talk about or that I would be angry about something that I like to be angry about and for me that's really important that's the best review that I can get and I feel very loved by my native community for instance not too long ago I did a reading and Dennis Banks said to me you know I want to introduce Crisos if we had an Indian Pulitzer Prize she would win it see we don't have Pulitzer Prizes Indian New York Times review of books so and it's like being loved by my people and speaking for a lot of the issues I think of myself as a bridge person because my mother's white and I grew up in a culture learning how to deal with white people and all the stuff I grew up in a city and so I feel as though I have a very grave responsibility as a writer to bring the issues of my people many of whom don't speak English at the very moment into the wider world into what they call the canon of American literature which I find a very amusing phrase I'm going to write a piece about the canon of American literature and I was busy shooting us all the bits so I feel as though the love of my people sustains me through a lot of stuff that's really hard and I think that I'm particularly lucky because I don't get a sense of other communities there's that same kind of love and honor I would say particularly that I don't feel as though white people as a whole, this is a generalization and I don't mean it to be nasty but I don't feel as though they understand how to love one another and that's very sad to me I think a lot of what racism is about is unloved people looking for someone to hate and and that's a very complex kind of interaction so I'm always conscious that racism is as painful for white people as it is for me standing outside of the mainstream literature I mean when you're a woman who is a lesbian and who is native I know that the New York Times Review of Books is never going to review me never am I going to be accepted as a serious poet when I get asked to go to colleges and get paid $2,000 the students are the ones who organize the readings an English department has never invited me to come and read poetry never, it's always the students it's the ethnic studies students it's the black women studies whatever so it's like it's really clear to me that that's my audience my nourishment from and I don't even think about the New York Times Review of Books I mean I'm bringing that up because I see myself as real separated from that world even though I read it because I generally find that whatever they review negatively is a book I will want to read so they trashed the hell out of Alice Walker's new book and it was like I better go get that so they're kind of a good barometer in that way for what's good to read what was the second part of your question I forgot I'm sorry I would say that whatever speaks from the heart not that you don't need craft too, craft is very important it's very important to understand things like alliteration and metaphor and all that kind of stuff but you don't need to go to a creative writing class for that you can pick up there's a couple of handbooks one is a woman named Babette which it's a pretty good little book you know it has all the forms in it you can figure out how to write a Sestina which I particularly love but which was not invented by white men was read by a dead white woman who never married so I'm convinced she was a dyke that was let's see what's her name Victoria Colonna developed a Sestina in Italy long, long time ago in no form and I read other poets voraciously and frequently say damn I wish I had written that line so I think that's a really good way to figure out what quality writing is what speaks to you, what's interesting to you what catches your eye I think everyone in this room would have a different favorite poem to put forward because it's very subjective writing is completely subjective it's like if a person is an incest survivor they could read something that's really poorly written about incest and they get the best thing in the world because it helped them understand something about themselves so writing the academic way of looking at writing is what is the form what does this reference don't they always like to have those little Latin quotes that they never translate so you don't know what the hell it says you know it's like there's this whole footnotes and all that kind of stuff it goes along I feel as though academia has posited that this is writing and I'm saying that we the people are writing this is what it is and if you look back in history you can see originally only very very wealthy aristocracy people knew how to read and write probably none of us in this room 500 years ago would read and write we would not have access to that one of that movie Yentl that Barbara Streisdand did when the scene when she's learning to read and secret and her father is teaching her to read I'm getting chills now thinking about it because because literacy for women is very very recent and literacy for people of color is very very recent you know and you can't have writing until you have literacy you have to be able to read so that you can write and so particularly for native people it's all you know we just last summer had our first ever native writers conference that's how how new all of this is for us so it's so I am a mentor to many many young native writers not just lesbians but young men and it's really important to me to sort of get lots and lots and lots of people writing I mean that's my idea the more people that write the more we change what writing is and and that's really important to me because I don't want to be coming back here as a spirit in 500 years and find that Shakespeare exists and Alice Walker has disappeared and Audre Lorde has disappeared and et cetera you know I really want us to change the face of the world because we still have people there's a guy that wrote a nasty article in the New York Times review of books about multiculturalism and I can't remember that many quotes from it but his whole idea was that culture is the Greek and Roman myths and it is Shakespeare and everything else is just sort of like pickles on the side and to suggest that literature can be anything else than these things is to demean literature so that's a very intense kind of you know position and many many academic people still hold that idea even though they themselves do not speak Greek or Latin pretty much you know V I feel pretty blessed myself I think the reception of my work has been very positive and I've received a lot of positive feedback from community pardon me I'm sorry Mike you can't hear me Jackie so it's been very positive to me and it really keeps me going as Christos said you know what is good writing is a really subjective process I mean I can only talk about what I like you know and I guess I will refer back to my experience on the editorial collective of conditions magazine you know where we did you know place an emphasis not only on writing by lesbians but on what we called good writing and that that meant an attention to the craft and a kind of I suppose authenticity in the projection of the ideas and a certain kind of politics about the presentation so I mean I guess those things are roughly what I consider good writing I mean we could get into my favorite authors which I don't think people want to hear I don't want to get into but my interest in literature I guess is also an interest in particular I'm particularly interested in Afro-American literature historically and currently so I mean that's been my interest for at least 20 years and continues to be continues to be an interest of mine and so I sort of don't look at it in terms of what I like and don't like but in terms of what it tells me about the process and the progress of Afro-Americans through the literature beginning perhaps well not just perhaps beginning with Phyllis Wheatley through the slave narratives that's really you know really where my interest in literature almost begins and ends no that's not doesn't end there but it certainly begins there certainly a very strong place for me and I have to really often struggle to get myself outside of it I think I have to say that in terms of the environment I work in every day the university environment I must say that a lot of what we can you know what that which we can sort of that is changing I mean a lot of it is the same but a lot of it is changing unfortunately what we do get to see in the New York Times are the anti-multiculturalists and the so called anti-PC people you know who you know there were other hands please my father my father is an assimilationist he is very opposed to my writing as is my whole family their belief is that I'm just going to get myself killed why don't I shut up they might be right how I came to that because I'm still at this point struggling with identity I've gone into women of color events where people didn't know me and because I'm light skinned I've been told to get out so all of that pain about being a half breed and about where is your identity and particularly for people who are white and Indian because these aren't just two different races these are colonizer and conquered so when you're a breed you're carrying around almost the history of this country and your body that pain and I deal with that by writing and there's a woman in Seattle who's doing an anthology of breed women and one of the issues for us of course is that often even if we're full blood we're adopted out into white homes so we grow up not knowing our nation no connection not knowing anything at all so there's a way people has made most native people almost like lost children and that's my belief about why we have such an alcohol problem is that the pain that we're carrying around in our bodies is so intense that you can't, almost you can't stand it without doing something I was only able to stop drinking when I was writing, writing, writing, writing all the time that I mean it's like and I still want to drink sometimes so what I think of that pain as is if we can write about that pain and bring it out into the world and examine how our pain reflects this worldwide pain really because it's my belief that's what's happening with the earth is that there's indigenous peoples of all kinds African people are indigenous people and they have been colonized just as we have been colonized and so as we can look at the whole worldwide picture of colonization and what it means how it is impacted every single person and how when you turn the world into a shopping mall so that you go to Costa Rica to go on a vacation and you go to Hawaii to buy a this and it's like when the world becomes a shopping mall then what happens is that we're attacked we're in the way of the world of becoming a more efficient shopping mall if you have if you see that so I try to do a lot of political work because I believe that as a breed person I have an even greater responsibility to do political work than someone who is full blood because I have an access to the dominant culture and I can sort of like get some kind of understanding of what it's up to so that's how I solve my pain I'm very politically active in lots and lots of stuff and it takes me too long to go through the whole list but so and the issue of being light skinned in the world when that's not who you are is one that it's very complicated because being light skinned I didn't get as much in school as my brother did who was darker skin than I am because that's one of the things about mixed race families is some kids are darker, some kids are lighter and so I found that my brother who got beat up more than I doesn't feel comfortable writing or reading or speaking you know there's things that happen to him in his life that have made it impossible for him to be me so I always keep that in mind that there is in this country a very clear to me anyway skin color stuff going on so that the darker a person is the more likely it is that the cab driver will scream at them some obscenity at them the more likely they'll get beaten to death on a Portland street in broad daylight which happened to an Ethiopian man it's like skin color in this country is something nobody wants to talk about and it's what almost everything functions around if you look at the people in this hotel employed here the maids and the maintenance people are brown people the people at the front desk for the most part of white people this is happening this is institutionalized racism right in this very place where we have paid a lot of money to be you know so in some ways we're kind of cooperating with that you know and I don't know of any hotel it's not true so all this kind of stuff about skin color privileges that I feel it's very important for me to acknowledge that I escape a lot of shit in the world because I'm light skinned and so I feel therefore I have a responsibility to name all the stuff and to not let that privilege co-opt me and it's really easy to want to if you can blend into the white world they have more money, they have more privilege they have more stuff, they're safer it's like I remember recently someone said to a friend of mine and Rosie is Puerto Rican Rosie you have such beautiful skin I would give anything to be a woman of color and Rosie's a very sweet person and so she came to me and said what should I say to this person you know and I said well why didn't you punch her out you know I mean I wouldn't have punched her out but I would have with words and so that all that stuff is going on you know where to some extent and I say in the last 10-15 years people of color have become eroticized in the culture and so now it's sort of hip and chic to be a person of color kind of in some circles and I'm very aware that a lot of the times I'm asked to do things simply because I'm a native woman and so I have a whole bunch of conflict am I a good writer am I any good as a writer or am I just a token being plugged into the token machine and that's a very painful question to deal with and I don't know if I'll ever kind of come to an answer about that but I really suggest that you find ways to become involved politically there's stuff going on everywhere I don't know what's happening particularly in Boston but I'm sure that there's a nation fairly close by that is having their fishing rights taken away their land taken away their cemetery turned into a golf course I mean you know it's like it's everywhere and when you become involved in that political work and see the real life and death struggle that native people are involved in it's sort of like your own pain becomes you know it's like why focus on that you know because there's all this real work that needs to be done there's still so much invisibility in this country so many people have said to me oh I thought all Indians were dead you know and they're very sincere they're not mean they're just saying that and that's what they think I mean all of us I mean I grew up watching Indians being killed on TV just like everybody else did and it's about how Columbus discovered America I was 38 years old before I figured out that Columbus did not discover America so you know even though I knew who I was and all of that kind of stuff that junk just embeds itself in your brain and you don't even know how to go into your brain and get it out although I think that kind of excavation process is how we can heal from our pain it's like the more garbage we can get out of our head the less pain we feel about that whole situation and one of the things that I always try to remember is that the African people who are in this country suffer more than the native people from my point of view in the fact that they don't have their languages they don't know who their nations were it's like even though I have all this suffering and all this struggling I still know I'm a nominee I know words in my language I know what we did I know our stories I know how we created the world I know all of those things and for African people who were brought here all of that was stripped away and that's a kind of pain that I think is overwhelming because identity is central to our ability to write differently then you have a voice to speak from so anyway well I do something pretty tricky we we believe in our cultures we believe that you can transform people into whatever you want them to be so when we perform for an audience I just make them all into radical lesbian feminist women of color and I just let it go and sometimes I'll even joke with the audience and say I'm about to read Lesbian Erotica you'll all be lesbians for a little while but don't worry you know it won't stick unless you want it to you know it's like or because for a while I was in a place where I would read erotica to mixed audiences and then I discovered that meant that all the lesbians and the audience would come up to me afterwards and say you didn't read any erotica I'm mad at you and it's like because actually we have never controlled our audiences never never never our audiences have always been whoever shows up whoever has the time whoever doesn't have to do their laundry it's kind of that way so what you have to do is literally in your mind make your audience into who you want them to be right and expect from your audience that they will understand everything you're going to say that there's no problem of communication that you're not a mystery that you're not a weirdo it's like you give the audience the gift of seeing them as your peers and when you make the audience into your peers it's amazing to me how much people will rise to the occasion and most people don't use very much of their brain cells you know and so what I do is I just kind of make everybody into a lesbian or you know and it's helped a lot because there was a point when I was performing when I would get inundated at the end of things with questions like why do you hate white people all that tiresome stuff and since I have started just making them into people that I can talk to it's sort of like they're too embarrassed to not be someone that I can talk to so that's the way that I do it the other thing about performing is that when you come into the performance space you need to center yourself in the four directions so you cast out power lines to the four directions and make sure that you're centered and in that way you aren't making yourself vulnerable to an audience because sometimes they can be kind of dead or you know I mean audiences are so quixotic you know they're kind of like menopause sometimes they're hot and sometimes they're like crabby and sometimes you know and one of the other tricks I use is I often tell a funny story before I begin reading or tell a joke or read a funny poem because what happens is when people laugh from stuff they kind of laugh and then it's like it's okay so it's always good to make up funny stories even if they're not true so is that good? like what? mm-hmm oh yeah right yeah I was just wondering which one I mean you were talking about you know where they're coming from depending upon you know the place, the venue and I do like Christos assume everyone is my peer um but I use my own level of comfort to help me decide what I'm going to read because there are some things I would be uncomfortable reading in front of certain audiences like um I don't read erotica to Native American audiences mm-hmm and people have asked me why I don't read erotica to Native American audiences and I've had to explain we have a very different cultural way of being sexual so that heterosexual Native people don't write erotica it doesn't exist there is no erotica that is heterosexual and we don't hold hands in public and kiss in public it's sort of like sex is considered very private and so like I'm way out there I'm really I have to tone myself way down when I do an Indian event and so it's just not appropriate for me to do erotica in that audience so and sometimes you always need to check an audience out sometimes I don't decide what I'm going to read until I get right up there and look around and see who's there and I mean if it's an audience that's 90% women of color I can have a good time rather than having to do damn not your princess and running and raving because although sometimes that's actually one of the more popular poems with women of color they really like that one so I end up reading it a lot but so your audience is always I mean one of the things I really like about Chinese and Japanese concepts of art is that they talk about that you are only half of the picture and the audience and who views it of the picture so you need in your work and in your performance to leave room for that other half of the picture so I usually try when I'm writing to leave a lot of space for the response from someone else so that you know because it's very easy as a writer to hog the space you know just take it all up and it's hard to keep your ego in check I also try to if I feel that I'm in an audience outside of one that you know outside the lesbian feminist audience I do try to read at least one piece that I might perceive as risky you know just to do it but also I guess to educate also which is I think another important part of our writing over these years has been one of the purposes has been to educate educate audiences about ourselves so are there other questions cause I really need to do my Norma Jean Croy it'll be quick Norma Jean Croy is a lesbian native woman prisoner of war in Chowchilla her brother Hootie was freed on the same charges a while ago has self defense and how the US injustice system works is that if you're on death row you have access to appeals automatically now Hootie was on death row which is why he is free Norma Jean was not on death row access to the same legal framework the other part of it is that people of color and women always do two to three times more time than other prisoners the prison system is extremely sexist they will deny most lesbians parole because they have not reformed because part of the prison system is still the idea that a woman should not be leaving the prison as a lesbian so there is still enforced drugging and putting lesbians in the hole and all kinds of stuff like that Norma Jean has done 14 years of time for slugging a white man clerk in a convenience store Dan White did seven years for killing two politicians so that tells you what the racism that we are dealing with so at the press gang table within the mezzanine I have petitions for Norma Jean Kroy's release because we are trying to embarrass the government into releasing her which is also what we are up to with Leonard Peltier I hope you have all written letters to Clinton about him and there is a donation basket and I am going to go over there now to sign books so I would appreciate it if you would I think there is some pamphlets left I can't see where Barbara is I would be really happy because I am the board of directors person who is supposed to get chapters everywhere we have two people on the board of directors which tells you this concludes the national lesbian and gay writers conference held October 8th through the 10th 1993 in Boston Massachusetts this session was recorded live and on location by conference recording service of Berkeley California for more information on other tapes in this series 1-0-527-3600 Thank you for listening