A stunning new review of Vera's Will

File this one under shameless self-promotion, but sometimes a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do.

One and a half years after publication, long after I stopped expecting any new reviews of my 2015 novel Vera's Will, there is one. And it's a beauty.

Writing for The Lesbrary, a wonderful lesbian book review site from which, honestly, I'd long since given up on hoping for a review, a North Carolina librarian named Tierney offers a deeply thoughtful and gratifyingly positive take on the book. I'm so grateful, not only that Tierney liked the book--though of course that too--but also that she really got it. Really appreciated it for exactly what I'd wish it to be appreciated for. Her one criticism is on target, too, I've got to say.

I'll just tease here with a few choice phrases from the review: "heart-wrenching and heartwarming"..."an entrancing read"..."beautifully bittersweet, both melancholy and heartening"..."filled a void in queer fiction..."

Now please go read the full review! Thank you, Tierney, thank you Lesbrary!

VERA'S WILL by .... me!

I'm thrilled to announce that my novel Vera's Will is set for publication by Hamilton Stone Editions in late 2014/early 2015.

It's been a long hard slog. I started writing this book 15 years ago. I started trying to get it published almost 10 years ago. I got a lot of positive reactions from agents and publishers, but all of it was along the lines of "this is great, I'm sure someone will grab it up, but it's not for us, we wouldn't know how to market it." I held on to the "this is great" bits, told myself the "we can't market it" bits were anti-gay and anti-political-fiction, nursed oceans of resentment and hostility (as one does LOL) toward anyone who did manage to get a book published. Went on to start a second novel, worked on it in fits and starts, grew ever more enervated and discouraged as I approached age 60 and wrestled with encroaching health problems, all the while trundling to work and back endlessly with no prospect of affordable retirement ever in sight.

Now, though, tra-la! My novel will see the light of day, and I couldn't be happier. Of course this entails lots more labor. These recent weeks I've been toiling at some revisions requested by HSE, which terrified me at first but by which I've now become energized. The big thing, gulp, is that I'm writing a new ending. I think it might work! This is a huge relief.
 
The other hard part of the final revisions is dealing with the song lyrics that pop up in many scenes throughout the novel. U.S. law makes it impossible to include any snatch of a song lyric, no matter how brief, and not even a song title either, without the permission of the copyright holder. The way the copyright holder (rarely the actual songwriter, usually one of the big music corporations like BMI) grants permission is basically by selling it. You have to pay for the right to include the bit of lyric. The cost ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Well, guess what, I haven't got hundreds or thousands of dollars and neither does my small-press publisher. And so, with great snarling sadness, I'm having to go through page by page, find each song lyric, and excise it, sometimes altogether, sometimes change it to a sort of reference that is not an actual direct quote of the lyric. I hate hate hate this! It's hard to do without diluting, damaging any given scene. I've been surprised to find out how many lyrics appear throughout the manuscript, though I guess I shouldn't be as it makes sense for my two protagonists that popular music is a part of their lives; I feel like I should apologize to them for yanking it away.

And lyrics from songs performed by what legendary artist show up in my novel more than any other? Why, Aretha Franklin, of course. Ouch! Oy! Last night at her wonderful Radio City concert (see post below), I was surprised, delighted, and, well, thrown into a sob-o-rama, when she sang one of my most beloved of her songs, "Gotta Find Me An Angel," written by her late sister Carolyn Franklin. This song is key to a climactic scene in my novel. It's killing me that I've got to delete the (brief but important) lines from it. But delete them I must. Ah the life of the tortured artist.

OK, yeah, I know, pity me not. My novel's getting published! I'll be back with details as the date approaches.

Good news, mostly

I don't know whether the new year will see an uptick in my postings here. It just may be. We shall see. The silence lately hasn't been because I haven't been reading, or suddenly have stopped having opinions, or think there's any less need for left literary rants. What I've started having, I'm sorry to report, is some health problems. Mechanic and organic. Nothing life-threatening but real enough that I've just been dealing with them, getting by day to day getting to work and back and not much else.

However. I have high hopes that there will soon be an improvement on the health front, and with that renewed energy for Read Red. Meanwhile there are a couple bright spots in my own literary life to report.

One is that I have a story, "The Ellen Burstyn Equation," in the new issue of Newtown Literary. I admire what the Newtown folks are doing to promote writers from my NYC borough, Queens, and am delighted that my work is included in this latest offering. It's issue #3, and you can order it here.

I haven't taken part in a literary event for a long time, but the second bit of good news is that I will be doing so very soon. It's the upcoming New York incarnation of Stories & Queer, a national reading series highlighting LGBTQ poets and writers.

I'm pleased and honored that Ruben Quesada and Brian Kornell, the brains behind S&Q, asked me to take part. I'll be reading an excerpt from the novel I'm currently working on. So if you're in NYC and don't maintain an inside-on-winter-nights policy -- or even if, like me, you do, you can, like me, suspend the policy for this one night and -- come on down to the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division to join us for some good queer fun.

I'll be back here at Read Red soon with my annual list of the best books I read this year.

Liberation Lit!

What's Lib Lit? Library, map, lens, scalpel, compost, chisel, textbook, excavation: voices, images, wrestling, contradicting, confirming, the matter of resistant art and practice.

-Adrienne Rich

This is exciting.

Liberation Lit, just published by Mainstay Press, is a big, bold, unique anthology of voices and visuals from around the world, all united by what editors Tony Christini and Andre Vltchek call a "liberatory" stance. It's gorgeous, too, with a cover collage made up mainly of 1930s-era illustrations from the The Masses magazine and posters from the WPA Federal Theater Project.

In defiance of the conventional view, conventional in this country at least, that true art can't be political, here Christini and Vltchek have gathered the work of an impressive roster of writers and artists all of which takes a clear stand on the great issues of the day. (And of days past, with earlier voices, from Victor Hugo to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to W.E.B. DuBois, weighing in.)

Liberation Lit is 800-plus oversized pages, divided into several sections: Liberatory Fiction, Liberatory Fiction Past, Liberatory Visuals, Liberatory Poetry, Liberatory Focus on the U.S. in Iraq, Liberatory Focus on the Prisons, Liberatory Focus on Kenya, Essays Interviews & Blogs, and Liberatory Literary Criticism. There is so much here, enough to occupy the reader for a long time. This is a collection to hold close and delve into slowly and steadily, I think, which is how I intend to approach it, dipping in and out over the weeks and months ahead. I don't know that I'll love every page; I suspect I won't agree with every word; there will probably be work whose inclusion I'll question; I'll wish other work had been included. Which is to say this anthology is not perfect, nor is it the be-all and end-all of politically conscious literature. Fine. So what? Let it be a start--what a grand start it is. Let others take heart, and follow with more. For in a time and place where left political literature is nearly impossible to find, Liberation Lit is a huge--huge!--contribution to the cultural conversation, bringing to it voices that are usually silenced.

Here is writing from and/or about Nigeria, Mexico, Haiti, Ecuador, Japan, Bangladesh, India, East Timor, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, and the United States. Work written in, from, or about war, invasion, occupation, repression, racism, sexism, oppression, prisons, environmental destruction, labor; work about the terrible wreckage of imperialism, the human toll of colonialism, the experience of exploitation; and work about uniting and organizing and fighting back. Work that will make you cry, laugh, and burn to sign up on the side of human liberation.

Here in these pages there are many writers who are not well known in this country. And here as well are better known names, a range gathered together I suspect for the first time, including Adetokunbo Abiola, Eduardo Galeano, Ishimure Michiko, Doreen Baingana, Marge Piercy, Arundhati Roy, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Dahr Jamail, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Edward Said. (Full disclosure: I'm in here too. There's no question that I'd be trumpeting this book even if I wasn't part of it, but I sure am glad to be a part of it.)

So shake off any remaining notions about the incompatability of political partisanship and literary accomplishment, and dive in to Liberation Lit with me. Here's the website, on which you can read many of the individual pieces. Here's the Amazon page, where you can buy the book.

I expect that I will return to this book and pipe up with blog posts about it again and again as I work my way through it, for there's much in it that's directly relevant to the focus of Read Red. Thank you to Mainstay Press for this unprecedented contribution to the effort to liberate art from the shackles imposed by the gatekeepers of bourgeois-imperialist culture.

Go Justin!

Justin Torres, who's so gifted a writer that it's really unfair, is a 2009 recipient of the United States Artists award. This is a newish award -- I believe it's only the second year it's been given out -- that is funded, according to the website, by several foundations endowed by rich people. Well good. They stole every penny they have, and while handing it out as they choose to individuals they deem worthy isn't exactly the redistribution of wealth the world needs, I know it's a welcome boost to the artists chosen, and it does look like the panels that decide how to hand out this particular prize have a fairly decent approach. Here's this year's list of recipients.

As for Justin, who I've mentioned before on this blog, he's a terrifically talented fiction writer who's just about to burst onto the scene. Well, he's kind of in the process already of bursting onto the scene, as this award indicates. He's been publishing stories for a few years now, and his first book is coming soon, I hope. In a publishing world where such a thing is rare, the occasion when a writer like Justin gets his due recognition is heartening. A gay Latino, a son of the working class, someone who has struggled in life, someone whose writing expresses all this and more. I met Justin two years ago at the Lambda Literary Foundation's first LGBT writers' retreat. I'm very fond of him and although I've only seen him briefly once or twice since I feel as proud as if he were my own younger brother. Oy, such naches!

By way of occupying my attention

Books that talk about books: Last night I finished reading a sweet funny novel, Selfish and Perverse by Bob Smith. This book is a good example of how varied, at least in certain ways, is my literary taste. As I've protested before, I do not require every book I read to conform to some rulebook of communistically correct writing. Even if there were such a rulebook, so few if any of the English-language books available in the U.S. would meet its standards that I'd never have anything to read if I had such a requirement. Yes I prefer class-conscious politically aware literature, literature that advances the revolutionary cause, literature that illuminates the realities of life under capitalism and so on -- but I can also enjoy a well written story that falls short of that standard as long as it does not offend, as long as it does not ally itself with what is to me the enemy camp. Especially if it offers, as this novel about a decisive summer in the life of a 30-something gay would-be novelist, a lovely, lively comedy of manners shot through with a steady supply of bons mots and lots of heart. Selfish and Perverse has one other thing to recommend it: all the characters read, and talk about books and authors. I love it when a novel portrays reading as part of people's lives.

Books that want me to read them: I wondered if it would ever happen, and it did. Read Red seems to have landed on the radar screen of a book publicist, and in the last week or so I've received a couple of promotions offering to send review copies of new books. Funny that this happened at the same time that the government launched its new rule about bloggers having to announce it when the books they're writing about were provided to them free. I can't get worked up about that one way or the other but I will read (or at least start reading) the book I received yesterday and I will comment on it here and, believe me, I would have included in such comment a note that I'd been given a review copy even if it were not legally required. In any case it tickles me that somebody in the book biz thinks somebody out there might care what I have to say about one of their books. Let's not relieve them of this illusion, okay?

Although it's never a good idea to start with 'I haven't read this carefully': I do have to say it, though. I haven't read this carefully enough to be confident that I got the gist of it. But if the gist of it is, as it seems to be, that the state of California is pulling back on its harsh forced-labor workfare regulations in the face of the deepening economic crisis, I've got to say it's about time. Workfare is an abomination. Mandating it as part of the 1996 repeal of welfare--or rather, the 1996 anti-worker assault on one of the key prongs of the protections won by the struggles of the 1930s, an assault so reactionary and heinous that it took a Democratic administration to be able to pull it off--was one of the great crimes of the Clinton presidency, in fact in my opinion its greatest crime, and that's in an administration that can count among its accomplishments the war on and destruction of Yugoslavia, the continuous bombing of and murderous sanctions against Iraq, and the anti-gay twofer Don't Ask Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. Hell, I could go on and on about the horrors this guy foisted on us that his predecessors Reagan/Bush never even tried. Anyway. California. Workfare. Pulling back. Finally. The book I co-authored about the welfare repeal, workfare, and the struggle by workfare workers in New York City is over a decade old now, but if I may be so bold I do think it's still worth reading for a decent orientation on this issue. We Won't Be Slaves, available from leftbooks.com

Do I really have to comment on the big book prizes? Nah, I think not. You've got your Nobel, generally a barometer of bourgeois-liberal trends. This year they gave it to a professional anti-communist, with a 20th-anniversary-of-the-fall dig thrown in for good measure although they never need a special occasion to support the literature that supports imperialism. And you've got your Man Booker Prize, which this time went to Hilary Mantel for her novel about Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, which, um ... oh, sorry, I fell asleep there for a minute. Which seems to answer my own question. No, I don't really have to comment.

Check out instead a small but meaningful prize. The Working People's Poetry Competition recently announced 2009 winners. First place went to Luke Salazar for his poem "Black Friday" about last year's awful crushing to death of a Wal-Mart guard on Long Island. The runner-up was a wonderful poem about the closing down of the coal industry, "The Canaries Go On Living" by Andrew Rihn, a friend of this blog. Also, check out Andrew's blog, Midwestern Sex Talk--and not just for the great title!

Sunday linking to this 'n that

It was one of my best reads of 2008 and now Michael Thomas's very fine novel Man Gone Down has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. This is not only a big giant load of cash--100,000 Euros or about $140,000 -- for a deserving talent. It not only will, I hope, free him up to pursue his art. It's also a meaningful prize, because all the 145 nominations came from librarians around the world, and it is administered by the Dublin public library. I've read five of the eight books, including Thomas's, that made it to the short list. All are good and important works. And the judges chose well. Mr. Thomas doesn't need my congratulations, but he has them. I'm eager to read his next book.

Teresa and I are trying to pull together the ticket price to get to a play during our time off next month. One production that's high on our wish list is Things of Dry Hours, playwright Naomi Wallace's story about an African-American communist worker in 1930s Alabama starring the great actor Delroy Lindo. Reviews have ranged from so-so to full-on pans. Which was of course predictable. A highly political play with a communist protagonist! You know this one is not going to win any awards. One friend has seen it and says it's wonderful. True and deep. I only hope the reviews don't doom it to such a short run that we never get a chance to see it.

His painting of Fannie Lou Hamer hangs at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Change in Atlanta. His "free South Africa" image of two fists breaking chains was the symbol of the worldwide anti-apartheid movement. He was one of the artists whose giant billboard in support of the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War hung over Times Square in 1938. I helped carry his beautiful "Stonewall Means Fight Back" banner down Fifth Avenue at many a Lesbian & Gay Pride march in the 1980s. He was an anti-Zionist Jew, back in the days when such a specimen was exceedingly rare and it took great courage to speak out in support of Palestine. He's not famous. Now that he's died, though, on May 25 at age 94, he ought to be remembered. He was my comrade Irving Fierstein. He considered himself a "people's artist." That he was.

What do white writers have the right to write?

It's a tongue twister, this question--but more important, it's a challenging dilemma. An artistic, cultural, political, even moral dilemma. One that all white writers of conscience come up against, it seems to me, sooner or later. And have to grapple with as seriously and honestly as possible if they care to claim any social relevance for their fiction.

I'm talking about the issue of how, when, whether white writers can/can't/should/shouldn't/must/mustn't create characters of color. I've thought about this a lot. I've read quite a few opinions on the subject. I've spoken to quite a few writers and readers. And I've changed my mind--sort of, maybe, uneasily, worriedly.

This is particularly pertinent to me right now because my story "All the Ashleys in the World" has just been published in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of Nimrod International Journal. This is the first story I've written with people of color as the main characters. It's about a 12-year-old girl in Queens whose mother, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, is arrested in an ICE raid on her work place and is being held in a detention center.When I started writing fiction, 10 years ago now, it seemed to me that for a white writer to write the stories of Black or Latino/a or other people of color characters was an arrogant presumption, even a kind of theft. That it amounted to an expropriation--a taking of something I as a white writer have no right to take, that is, the experience of life as it is lived by people of color in this society, or, and this is really the point, I think, the expression of that experience. The right to tell the story, the stories. Who am I to claim that right? A right that writers from the oppressed communities have fought hard to claim for themselves. And even if it were somehow okay to try, what white writer could even come close to getting it right? How can anyone who grew up white in this country possibly understand the experience of people of color? Experiences, rather, plural--and there's another issue, for the range of experiences and issues is vast and complex, people of color are not some monolithic entity, not some singular Other defined purely in relation to the white majority, no, of course not. For a white writer to skirt the issue of racism, how large it looms in the lives of people of color, would be a cop-out. On the other hand, to define characters of color singularly as creations of racism, solely as oppressed and not as multidimensional people encompassing the whole gamut of human experience, would be terribly wrong, offensive, shallow and insensitive. Yet isn't it enormously presumptuous for a white writer to feel entitled to make just these sorts of creative decisions in crafting characters of color?

So the bottom-line questions for white writers, I think, are: Can we write characters of color who are authentic? Can we write characters of color in a way that is not insensitive? And, even if we think the answers to these two questions are yes, still, are we writing about lives that are not ours to write about?

For a long time I worried that I'd be fooling myself if I thought I could write authentically and sensitively about characters of color. Regardless, it seemed to me that it was not my place to try. I read pieces by Black and Latino writers who made the case strongly that white writers should not write Black or Latino/a lives, and it seemed to me that I ought to defer to their view. Then I began coming across other opinions from other Black and Latino/a writers who had the other view, some who even challenged white writers to demonstrate the reach of their imaginative empathy by creating living, breathing--real, not symbolic, full, not flat--believable and sensitively wrought characters of color. Then, as I moved further into the writing world, attended conferences, made friends, I started meeting more writers of color who held this position very strongly. Do we not exist, they asked. Do we not have a place in your stories? How dare you write a world without us. Sure, it's hard to get it right, but you damned well better try. Now I saw (duh) that there is no uniform view, that people of color have as many nuances of opinion about this topic as about any other. Which meant I'd have to decide for myself.

All my fiction--I have now written one novel, about a dozen short stories, and the first 75 pages of a second novel--is to one extent or another political. Sometimes directly, other times more subtly. In one way or another, all of it addresses social issues, including racism. All of it includes characters of various nationalities, and gay and straight, and women and men. In my first novel there are two important Black characters. Both are close friends of the two protagonists. But in that novel, as in most of my early stories, the protagonists themselves are white. As I read and listened to the divergent viewpoints about this question of who has the right to write what, it dawned on me one day that, oh crap, I was falling into the "gay best friend" trap, only in my case with Black characters. I think the characters were true and real and well written, but they were not the pivot point of the tales. I began to feel that if a story came to me in which people of color were central, that I ought to try to tell it, in a way that would be as true as possible to the lived experience of the characters. Maybe I wasn't a good enough writer. Maybe I was too trapped in my own white experience. But I hoped that wasn't so. And I began to think that I should not shy away from the attempt.

Around the same time I started thinking about the issue in this light, a little girl started stalking my imagination. A kid of about 12, standing alone on the edge of Union Square listening intently to the speakers at an immigrant-rights demonstration. Sad and angry, confused and determined, and all alone. She staked out space in my subconscious and wouldn't leave, emerging more and more frequently up into the realm of conscious thought. Then I started hearing her voice, feeling her pain, worrying about her, dreaming her, until finally, with much trepidation and self-doubt but feeling as if I had no choice, that I couldn't run away from her any longer, I started writing her story.

The writing itself went fast. The story took a few unexpected turns--the scene I'd originally seen, of the child, Ashley, at Union Square, did not end up in the story at all--but they felt right. The editing and revision process was slow and methodical. The consultation was more thorough and complete than any I'd before undertaken. Several people were kind enough to read drafts and help me correct and polish. That includes several Latino/a friends who graciously found and fixed my many errors in the Spanish that is sprinkled throughout the story. And my lover Teresa Gutierrez, who has strong views on cultural appropriation, weighed in and critiqued it. (Note that this last sentence is revised from what I originally wrote here; in that original version I sort of hid behind Teresa or used her approval to kind of cover myself or lend legitimacy to my writing this story, which was wrong and a cop-out.)

Now it's been published, in a special issue about Mexico in which most of the other writing is by Mexicans and people of Mexican ancestry. This is an honor, as well as awfully humbling. I hope I did justice to my characters and their story. I think it was right to try.

April showers shorts

It's a rainy April day here in New York, despite which lots of people, including me, will be rallying on Wall Street and marching on AIG this afternoon to protest the continuing use of our tax dollars to bail out banks while millions of people lose their homes and their jobs--an astonishing 2 million layoffs already in the first three months of 2009.

Next up: May Day.

Speaking of layoffs, outrage at the carnage unleashed by management at the University of New Mexico Press continues to grow. Earlier this week the UNMP announced that three employees were being laid off, with nine more likely to be let go soon, and all of their jobs to be outsourced, which always means somebody else will be exploited more for doing the same work. The UNMP workers, especially angry that all those laid off are women and include the press's only Latina employee, aren't going gracefully, however. They issued a press release excoriating management and vowing to fight the firings.

Meanwhile there's good news from Iowa, a few states up and over. The state supreme court has overturned Iowa's ban on same-sex marriage. Teresa, my lover of 20 years, and I are toying with taking a day trip some time soon to Connecticut, the closest spot available, to get married. Not because we are in any way drawn to that institution born of the patriarchy, but because if we get married we can then sue my employer to demand equal benefits, untaxed as are those that employees' husbands and wives get. By the way--here comes a little plug for my own writing-- a story of mine on this topic was published in Crate literary journal's 2007 issue. Set 800 years in the future, it takes the form of a high school student's term paper about how the right to same-sex marriage was finally established, in the long-ago bad old days before the revolution. Things are barreling along so quickly now that the, er, extreme tactics imagined in this story most likely won't be needed, but I'm still fond of the idea I had for how to win this struggle, which is the focus of the story.

Head back down and left for another bit of good news: a jury has found in favor of Professor Ward Churchill in his lawsuit against the University of Colorado. The jury agreed with Churchill that he was fired for his politics, strongly left of course, not for any supposed academic failing.

Finally, the various big-money book awards are rarely of much interest to me, although I should probably blog at some point about how they're funded and various other aspects of what role they play in the class struggle, literary division. In any case one of them, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, has just announced its 2009 short list, and it does interest me to note that of the eight nominees I've read five, all of which could be classified to varying degrees as political fiction. On the progressive side of the continuum, that is. Checking out the brief descriptions I see that at least two of the other three are also political, on the anti-communist side which no doubt makes them strong contenders. We'll see.

Shameless self-promotion

I've been blogging a lot, and not writing enough, and although the two take up different pieces of my time, energy and creativity, blogging basically being a lunch-hour activity in a way that fiction writing can never be for me, still, things have tipped too far. So I plan to flip the equation over the three-day weekend. There's a story I've been working on for a long time and would very much like to finish. It has to do with the Palestinian struggle. Three days to try to get it done, or at least get it into good enough shape to be able to take to my writing group next week for critique. I almost never meet these sorts of artificial deadlines, but I do want to put in several good writing sessions. If I don't get the thing completely done I will at least move a goodly ways toward that goal. Let's hope.

So until next week, here's this: two stories of mine have just been published in literary magazines.

My story "John and Yoko and Rowena and Me" is in the Fall 2008 issue of Cream City Review. (The website hasn't yet been updated to show the new issue but the info on how to get a copy doesn't change.)

My story "The Typist's Widow" is in the 2009 issue of Stone Canoe. (The website does show the new issue, except in the 'how to purchase' section, but, as with CCR, what's up there is accurate. ... Isn't it cute how I imagine someone reading this blog might want to buy these journals to read my work?)

Good news

Yesterday the grant-making organization USA Artists announced its 2008 fellowship awards to 50 artists in eight different disciplines. They include nine in literature, and from what I can tell it's a pretty worthy group. First and foremost, from my viewpoint, is Tayari Jones. Congratulations Tayari! This is richly, richly deserved, for a fine body of work (I've read both of Tayari's terrific novels, Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling, and look forward to her upcoming one, The Silver Girl) as well as her work as a teacher and supporter of aspiring writers.

Of the other awardees, I've only read work by Jeff Chang and Joy Harjo so I'm not competent to comment more generally. But overall the fellows do look like an interesting--and, thank goodness, not monochromatic--bunch.

In this country where artists are left to fend for themselves and it's so hard for people from the working-class and oppressed communities to break through, this kind of recognition and, let's face it, money, can make all the difference to a cultural worker.