Susan Stinson

10:44 am: Koreanish: Alex Chee
I just created an lj syndicated feed for Koreanish, the blog by Alex Chee, author of novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming Queen of the Night. Alex is a gorgeous, lyrical novelist who captures pain and complexity in ways that literally take my breath away. He was also probably a talk show host in another life, and writes a great, friendly, chatty blog, especially compelling to folks interested in contemporary literature. If you'd like to have it show up on your friendlist, add it here.

Tags: alex chee, writing

03:45 pm: Parker Runs
Parker got the bronze medal at the Texas State cross country meet yesterday. His team placed third as well. I'm so proud of him, and I'm thinking of his whole family with lots of love today.

Tags: parker stinson

08:11 pm: Go Parker!
My nephew Parker is going to compete in the Texas state cross country meet next weekend.

Here's an article about him as a runner.

Tags: parker stinson

06:20 pm: New England November
I've got a poem in the local paper today. The line in italics is from a gravestone in the cemetery. If you'd like to hear me read it, there's a recording up on the paper's site.

( Read more... )

Tags: cemetery, northampton, poem

08:26 am: Loudness Wars
Wow. amarama just introduced me to the Loudness War, defined at the link as "the music industry's tendency to record, produce, and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to attempt to create a sound that stands out from others." amarama, who is working to help folks develop the skills to appreciate both loud and quiet sounds, makes the point that there is something similar going on in the book industry, which greatly reduces the emotional range that's available to readers. I think that this is brilliant, that she's right. It certainly rings true to my experience in trying to get my most recent book published. One editor, in rejecting the book, made this explicit:
"This is among the most carefully, well crafted novels I've read in a long time. But...it's so deliberate and consistently quiet, I think it would be a struggle."



Too quiet. It's so explicit.

01:13 pm: The Fat Studies Reader in Hand
I got my copy of The Fat Studies Reader yesterday. The final essay in the book is: "Are We Ready to Throw Our Weight Around? Fat Studies and Political Activism," by Deb Burgard, Elana Dykewomon, Esther Rothblum and Pattie Thomas. Here are the last three paragraphs:

What does the transition away from oppression based on body size look like?  What forms of art are created that capture both the suffering and liberation of fat people?  In the end, Fat Studies is not just about oppression; it is about the experience of navigating a treacherous and heartbreakingly beautiful world in a body, one that can thrill or ache, be loved or despised, claimed or disowned.  We are beginning to feel entitled to tell our stories, even knowing that there will be jeering.  Too bad for them--they will miss the parade.
 
In her poem "Whole Cloth," Susan Stinson writes, "so much wild fatness, making its own song in motion, making a song in largeness" (p, 13).  So much wild fatness!
 
In deciding to make the world we do live in a world that we can live in, fat people have taken up a long, arduous activism.  We are organizing--but like all people in this militaristic time, it's not always easy to find the evidence of it.  Take us seriously.  Give the fat woman room.  The songs she sings will challenge, surprise, and delight us.

This is unbelievably moving to me. It is such a gorgeous honor to have something I wrote evoked in this way. It's from a lyric essay that I wrote in the eighties, first published in a small lesbian feminist journal (Sinister Wisdom? Common Lives/Lesbian Lives?), and then later in my chapbook, Belly Songs, which writers and friends Sally Bellerose, Janet Aalfs and I published, along with books by each of them and an anthology from our writers' group, as Orogeny Press. No one but us would have published that book. No one but the lesbian feminists published my work about fat, including my novels, over and over in the eighties and nineties. And into this century. It does, it makes me breathe differently to take in this honor, to know that the writers of this essay (one of them, Elana, wrote a beautiful introduction for Belly Songs at the time) , and the editors of the book, Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum, have that piece alive in them in a way that lets it rise like this to help end the book.

This book that looks so important to me. That is so much needed. That also, in Stefanie Snider's work, cites FaT GiRL and Size Queen, complete with covers. That in Charlotte Cooper's work, challenges the U.S. cultural dominance of Fat Studies (which, it seems to me, has been shifted, too, by such efforts as the publication this summer of The Fat Studies Reader in the UK, international conferences, listservs, and events like The Fat of the Land in London. That, in Paul Ernsberger's chapter, explores the question, "Does Social Class Explain the Connection Between Weight and Health?" That includes the Fat Liberation Manifesto from 1973 by Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran, and the text of anti-discrimination laws. There's an essay on burlesque by Heather McAllister, complete with pictures, called "Embodying Fat Liberation." There's an essay by Dylan Vade and Sondra Solovay called, "No Apology: Shared Struggles in Fat and Transgender Law." There's an essay by S. Bear Bergman about the experience that "Whether I'm fat depends on whether the person or people looking at me believe me to be a man or a woman." There are explanations of Health At Any Size, explorations of fat oppression as violence against women, an essay about fat men and their male admirers, and I'm just beginning to scratch the surface.

My contribution, "Fat Girls Need Fiction," is brief and heartfelt. It was shaped by conversation in this journal, which some of you may remember. It includes a beautiful Martha Nussbaum quote that a contributor here introduced me to, and a long quote from a comment by Lesley Kinzel, describing her intense and furtive experience of reading my first novel, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks bit by bit in a store, completely unready for the experience of bringing it to the counter to buy it. I go on to write about what an amazing participant in fat politics and culture I know her to be. This essay was written some years ago now; if you haven't been following Lesley's writing on Fatshionista, you're really missing something. And she was on NPR earlier this week. Podcast: here.

Also, if you missed contributor Amy Farrell's interview on the Colbert Report last week, she really rocked it. I can't wait for her new book, Fat Shame.

That final essay opens like this:

The authors of this volume are a force to be reckoned with. They constitute over fifty writers, researchers, and activists who are thoughtfully critiquing the status quo of fat-related practices. And they are just the tip of the iceberg. There are now over one hundred books written from a fat-affirmative perspective, including many autobiographical pieces and works of fiction for children, adolescents, and adults.

This is happening. It's not easy. It matters. I am a part of it. Welcome to those of you who feel your thinking about fat shifting. Praise and gratitude, such gratitude, for those of you who claim your role as part of it, too.

ETA: Here's a review of the book from MS.

Tags: books, fat, fat studies reader

11:14 am: Mind without Memories
Ruins stand as reminders. Memory is always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruin; but the ruins themselves, like other traces, are treasures: our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time. To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories. Such erasure is the foundation of the amnesiac landscape that is the United States. Because the United States is in so many ways a country without a past, it seems, at first imaginating, to be a country without ruins. But it is rich in ruins, though not always as imagined, but it is without a past only in the sense that it does not own its past, or own up to it. It does not remember officially and in its media and mainstream, though many subsets of Americans remember passionately.

Rebecca Solnit, "The Ruins of Memory" in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

Historical fiction, serious historical fiction, can clear the space to allow memory to recover some of what is lost and what is not acknowledged, to find guides for "situating ourselves in a landscape of time." Again for me, a literal landscape, a small New England city, easily to travel by trike. A cemetery, with its ripples of land, trees, spiders, stories, stones.

Tags: jonathan edwards, northampton, rebecca solnit, writing

09:40 am: Hearing the Podcast
Hey, Francesca Rheannon, the producer and interviewer, sent me a link to a podcast of a a radio interview that I did the other day , but I can't get to it or maybe just can't hear. Can anybody else? Or do you have any suggestions about how I might? It's got the following title: "Are you ready for fire, brimstone, love and writers block?" I'm thinking, "Writer's block? I kind of don't believe in writer's block. Did I talk about writer's block?" It aired on The Writer's Voice on WMUA in Amherst, among other stations.

ETA: I still can't hear the podcast, but others can, so if you'd like to check it out, hit the link.

ETA: Well, okay! slantedtruth gave me this link that worked perfectly. It's a really nice interview. I also read five minutes that is one of my favorite scenes in the book. (The brief story about Mary and Hadley needs a little correction-- she was Jonathan Edwards's daughter, and she didn't exactly flee to Hadley, she just took a boat there every month for communion because she didn't want to do it with the church in Northampton, where she lived.) Francesca, who is really lovely to talk with, led into the interview with Theodore Roethke reading two great poems, and followed with Langston Hughes, which makes me so happy. Plus, the bulk of the show is a good interview with novelist Nicholson Baker. If you want just a little taste, listen to the beginning to hear a little clip of me reading. If you'd like to hear my whole interview, it starts at 42:41, and lasts less than 10 minutues. So great that Francesca was interested enough to have me on before the book is published.

PS The writer's block part wasn't me...

Tags: interview, jonathan edwards, reading

04:24 pm: American Romances by Rebecca Brown
Here's a link to the review I wrote for Lambda Book Report of this brilliant book of essays.

In American Romances, her new book of essays, Rebecca Brown has a voice that is full of pop references, family stories, and the fruits of a lifetime of  -- in her perfect phrase – extreme reading.  The voice is a hoot, and it is dead serious.   This is writing with exquisite control, fully up to the task Brown takes on of playing a fierce game of beach ball with deep problems of American (and personal)  history and identity.

Tags: books, posted writing, rebecca brown, reviews

02:18 pm: Fat Studies Reader: Publishers Weekly, 10/12/2009
The Fat Studies Reader Edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, foreword by Marilyn Wann. New York Univ., $27 (448p) ISBN 978-0-8147-7631-5

With 40 essays that span an impressive array of academic and popular approaches, this book is the first to collect the essential texts of the blossoming discipline known as fat studies, which explores why the oppression of fat people remains acceptable in American culture. As contributor Bianca D.M. Wilson notes in her piece, fat studies is an arena where the personal, political and scientific converge, and with this book, readers can mount an informed challenge to the medical construction of obesity and size, the diet industry, insurance companies, public policy and popular culture. Arranged thematically, the essays survey the “social and historical construction of fatness,” “fatness as social inequality” and even “size-ism in popular culture and literature.” While one essay points out the North American biases of the current state of fat studies, new cross-cultural work would do well to attend to this volume first. It may be too soon for the movement to offer utopian alternatives, but these essays offer a rich supply of tools for the activist and scholar willing to start the revolution, including a “fat liberation manifesto.” (Dec.)

Tags: fat studies reader

11:14 am: Hudson reading video
Drove last night on highways and turnpikes and hilly, populated roads in the rain and then back in the dark to read with the current residents of The Millay Colony at Spotty Dog Ale and Books in Hudson, New York.

Here's a link to the livestream video that WGXC made of the event. I'm not listed in the credits, but I'm up first, after a little crackling and a brief introduction. I read the prologue to Spider in a Tree, which is ten minutes long. It 's grainy and ghostly. There was a blond guy slumped in a chair next to a computer, and he peers worriedly into the monitor a time or two. After the second or two of crackling, the sound is pretty good. The way the camera is positioned, you don't see my face, just a little body, a lot of hair, and one of my hands in constant motion during the reading. It's kind of wild for me to see that. That kind of obscure, strange, arresting imagery always makes me think of you, amarama; talking with you helped me see the beauty in it. I hope your work is going well.

The other writers, Melissa Sandor and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, both read work that was intense, interesting, good. I liked the music from the composer and the filmmaker's supernaturwal self portraits and all. It's all there to see and hear, if you like, although the projected images don't reproduce well here. I couldn't stay to hang out because I had a zipcar -- my first zipcar experience. (It was a Prius, and there was a button to push on the dash for power, instead of a key. Also, I had to get out the manual to figure out how to open the cover on the gas. Once upon a time, they just unscrewed. I concentrated very hard on the driving, which went fine, so I didn't look much at the trees, but they were out there, turning.)

It was kind of lavish of me, given the current circumstances, to rent a car and drive for hours to read for ten minutes, but it was great to do it and to hear everybody's work, so serious and heartfelt and engaged. And, as it happens, yesterday I got a check for in the mail as an early birthday present from a generous friend, and it just about covered the cost of the car. Beautiful, beautiful thing.

Also, I got the great bike tool from alyx! Thank you. It's perfect, and so good to get in my birthday month.

Tags: loveliness, millay colony, readings

02:29 pm: Upcoming Readings and Talks

• Referred by bearsir, the Millay Colony got in touch yesterday, and I agreed to be part of a group performance/reading with their current residents this Friday, October 9, 6 pm, at the Spotty Dog Books and Ale, 440 Warren Street, Hudson, NY. It'll also be webcast on webcast on WGXC, 90.7 FM. I bet it'll be fun, but it was a little bit of me riding the excitement from this weekend's events that made me say yes. For one thing, I think I'll have to use zipcar for the first time, so driving and spending money. Yikes. Still, putting the work out into the world felt so good this weekend, so I'm doing it again.



• I recorded a fifteen minute or so interview and reading for The Writer's Voice, on WMUA and other stations, which will air in the Valley at 4:30 next Monday, Oct 12. 91.1 FM Most of the show will be Nicholson Baker, so I expect I'll be on around 5:15 or so. Francesca, the show's host and producer, will post a podcast later.



• I'm talking next Tuesday to a class at Amherst College about queerness and writing historical fiction. I just sent them a section of the novel to read. That is a lovely thing.



• There has been a suggestion that we do a Jonathan Edwards weekend on his birthday next year, too. I think I'd be up for it.

Tags: jonathan edwards, readings

02:12 pm: Grant for NY state electronic artists
Anyone doing electronic media work in New York State? Grant opportunity here.

Tags: art, grants

11:45 am: Bill would dig up financial legacy of slavery in Mass.
Massachusetts Rep. Byron Rushing, highly regarded around here for his powerful commitment to sponsoring legislation against discrimination based on height and weight, is now sponsoring a bill that would require Massachusetts institutions, like banks, to disclose past financial links to slavery in order to do business with the state.

Bill would dig up financial legacy of slavery in Mass.

Tags: byron rushing, new england

04:32 pm: Among the Stones

The cemetery tour. Photo: Jody Wheat.

09:17 am: Tour and Reading Tomorrow!

• My love drew obelisks and stones and table style markers and trees and a road on my little map of the graves we're to visit on the cememtery tour tomorrow. Her hand as seen in the careful lines of marker is so moving to me. It's folk art!


• She wrote JONATHAN EDWARDS CEMETERY TOUR on a neon green sheet of tagboard for me, too. My handwriting is messy, and hers is really nice. It said JONATHON at first, but we corrected by coloring an address label in with a highlighter to make it match the neon background and turn the O into an A. It would look bad to spell his name wrong.


• I have to go make copies. I need to run through the tour again, and practice the reading. I was revising one of the scenes I'm going to read this week. Felt good, but the shifts and writing on the page could make me stumble.


• Thunderstorms tomorrow. That's what umbrellas and a sense of conviction are for. Plus, a commitment to really projecting. Jonathan Edwards was terrified of thunderstorms early in life, until he found himself able to face and praise the wrath of God. Then, by his account, he feared them no longer, but, according to her children, his daughter Mary was completely freaked out and frightened by thunderstorms all her life.


• I'm really glad I'm doing this. I needed to move the story of the book forward in the world instead of waiting for the publishing profession to do it for me. If I'd waited for what counts as the book business without the support of the women's publishing movement, none of my books would have been published, nobody but a handful of friends would have read them, my whole inner and outer life would be greatly diminished. So, yeah, it feels good to stop waiting. Which is not to forget all of the work I've already put into getting this book to where it is, and to try to help it find its place. And which is also not to be confused with GIVING UP. That's not it all.


• Friends are traveling to come to the reading.


• The Northampton Historical Society sent out a special email about Jonathan Edwards, featuring the reading and cemetery tour.


• The Advocate, the local arts and entertainment weekly, totally mangled the listings, as if they weren't able to tell even what they were.


• I woke up this morning thinking about The Fat of the Land, which is tomorrow, too, in London. That event, and its organizers (those that I know), are inspiring me.

Here's something I posted on Facebook, too. I might quote it at the reading or the tour. She's writing about cities, but I'm thinking about historical fiction.

Rebecca Solnit: That nothing lasts forever is perhaps our favorite thing to forget. And forgetting is the ruin of memory, its collapse, decay, shattering, and eventual fading away into nothingness.

from "The Ruins of Memory" in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

Tags: jonathan edwards, northampton, rebecca solnit

01:02 pm: In Motion!


Tags: jody wheat, northampton, susan stinson, trike

03:11 pm: Dancing, Barking
Dancing was sweet this morning. There were babies there. I crawled with one for a little while, and kept my glasses from getting grabbed when he needed to stand up. Oh, my knees. My favorite belly dancer was there, and a friend I'd had an amazing dance with a couple of weeks ago. Afterward, there was a short benefit performance by a dance troupe, which was great to watch.

But then, just now, riding my trike home on Route 9, beautiful sunny day after yesterday's rain, a silver SUV full of young men waited until they were just next to me to make a horrible barking sound right into my ear, so loud that my head still hurts from it, and drove on, one of them shouting something about "baby."

I've been slowing reading essays from Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit (terrific writer), and just finished one in which she writes about landscape and gender. She writes that now that she is middle-aged, she doesn't get harassed on the street any more. She's advocating the many benefits of walking in public places (I think most of what she says applies to biking, too.) Saying that the arguments apply to parks, paths, plazas as well as streets, she quotes a group called Reclaim the Streets:

Vacated, the street seems dangerous, indefensible; sped through, it becomes a haze of fumes and a grating of brakes. But when populated, the street can be a clash of viewpoints, a mess, a morass that can challenge our little orthodoxies and take us out of ourselves...As a communication line between the familiar and the strange, between those we know too well and those we don't know at all, the street can still be the place where the most important connections are made. In it, we begin to see how our home is connected to that home, this house to that house, this street to that street, this city to all those other cities, my experience to yours.

This is a small city, but I do, I spend a lot of time out in it in a public way, not enclosed in a car. It is full of rich experiences, just as described in the quote above. People speak or gesture to me often when I'm out on the trike, and there is almost always an explicit or implicit comment about my size. I count really loud barking right in my ear from a fast moving vehicle beside me. I count the many, many times I've heard, "You go, girl." There is sometimes a specificity and connection in the exchanges, or a general sense of goodwill, but subtext about size sometimes starts to wear on me. Rebecca Solnit, beautiful writer and thinker, very serious about gender, about people together in the landscape, writes that the more a person stays home, the more they are afraid to go out. Then:

It's become increasingly clear that there's another corollary to all this staying home with television and advertisements and super-sized sodas and Oreos and Doritos and creme brulee and the Cooking Channel and microwave popcorn: obesity. The United States is in the midst of an epidemic of obesity and related health problems, and that creates another reason why too many people aren't going to go roaming around on foot in beautiful landscapes.

Does she know that conflating body size, diet and activity levels does a lot of harm? Or that this read of fat bodies is part of what sometimes keeps us off the streets, keeps us from moving the bodies we have before the gazes of so many who see our physical selves as metaphors for serious cultural problems? Or who see us as easy targets, shapes to shame and humiliate just because the sun is out and spirits are high and we, I, am a blight on their beautiful view? I do, I want to be out there moving today, I have energy from dancing. I want to work on the cemetery tour, a walk through one of my most beloved landscapes, one that I got to know so deeply from walking it. And, also, from sitting there, writing, watching, thinking. That's a piece of landscape that literally holds the human, a resting place, full of history, full of reasons for reverence and grief. I'll be back out moving through it, soon.

Now, though, my head hurts. The barking was (is) so loud.

Tags: dance, fat, northampton, rebecca solnit, trike

05:55 pm: Lesley Dill
Last night, I went to see a talk and a film of an opera by artist Lesley Dill. It's the last few days of her show, I heard a voice, at the Smith College museum. I linked to images, but this work, which incorporates thread, fiber, horsehair, wire, fabric and poems, doesn't reproduce well. I found it enormously compelling in person.

The talk was in the gallery, and I was there early enough to get a seat, but they were fold-out wood and cloth stools, and I didn't have confidence in their structural integrity, so I wandered around looking at the work and reading the text of the poems, most by Emily Dickinson (although there was a mix of poetry and prose by Kafka, Neruda, and Philip Larkin, as well). Dickinson was one of the poets whose work I immersed myself in when I first started reading poetry, and so now her work brings me memories of other intense encounters with its charged language in other places and as another version of myself. It's got quite a kick. The combination of the poems, the ways the words were obscured and offered in the pieces, the tension in the figures, and the gorgeous deployment of so much tactile stuff traditionally associated with sewing, with women's work, and the willingness to evoke heightened states like ecstasy moved me a lot.

The room filled up, and I was standing at the back of the crowd when she started to talk. She invited those standing to come forward and sit, so I sat down on the floor where I was (too crowded to try to make it to the front). She had laryngitis and there were problems with the mike, so she was very hard to hear. I couldn't see her from the floor, either, but since we were in the gallery I had great views of some of the work. She answered a question I couldn't hear by talking about having a vision, I couldn't tell when or of what. The hearing problem got worse and worse as people in the back, who, like me, couldn't hear, started talking, and others turned and glared. The experience reminded me of the time I read at a burlesque performance at the femme conference, and people in the huge crowd started both talking and shhhing. amarama, listening from a balcony, told me later that it was aurally beautiful to her, an experience of a voice whose words she couldn't make out, and which didn't stop. I'm into people being able to understand the words, and that was tough, but I got some of the beauty of it half-hearing Lesley Dill.

One question I did understand was when someone asked why, since words and reading were so central to the work, the words were so difficult to read in the pieces, and most of the figures had eyes and mouths that seemed closed or nearly gone. Lesley started talking about having lived in India without being able to understand Hindi, and what an aesthetically interesting experience that was for her. Hearing her say that was another layer of texture on the gorgeous time I was having looking at her work and catching snatches of words, although the frustration of others around me was sometimes distracting.

She said she missed her pieces, missed how they felt under her fingers.

She talked about an image she'd heard of in India, of frogs being born in the heart and hopping out of a person's mouth off the tongue without having anything to do with the brain. Her work, she said, was like that sometimes.

Then, in another room with better seats, we saw the film of the opera. It started with a fat soprano singing, most beautifully, "I am afraid to have a body. I am afraid to have a soul." Lesley explicitly pointed out that the baritone sings this, too. She made the costumes, which were rich with words. Some of them had invisible ribbons that could be unrolled through openings in the cloth into very long, lyrical strips of color. Lots of Emily Dickinson, again, sung by three soloists and a chorus, incorporated into the clothing of the singers, dancers, and the string quartet, projected on a screen, and in subtitles, too. Gorgeous music. It was moving. Here's one of the poems.




Tags: art, emily dickinson, lesley dill, northampton, poetry

10:19 am: Parker Runs
My nephew Parker's high school cross country team got picked as #1 in the country for the first time ever. What aunt wouldn't be proud?

Here's a video interview with him.

Tags: family, parker stinson