Susan Stinson

11:43 am: Shadow on a Tightrope
mermeydele asked me a question about the influence of Shadow on a Tightrope on fat feminists in the 1980s, and I just dug out a copy of a review I wrote about the book for Gay Community News when it came out in 1984 (the actuall year of publication was 1983). What a trip to read that now, yellowing sheet of newsprint stapled to a scrapbook as it is. If I get the energy at some point, maybe I'll type it in here for prosperity. I had just turned twenty-four when I wrote it.
,
The review was a full page, but here's one thing I said:

Shadow was not an easy book for me. I was conscious of my body as I read it: leaning over the kitchen table with my breasts pressing against the edge, shifting sideways in a chair with one leg hanging over the arm. Lying on the bed with the book propped up on my belly and my jeans unfastened to give me room to breathe. I was aware of myself as a fat woman listening to other fat women, always with one eye on how we look to thin people, the only people who have ever counted. I’ve spent a lifetime feeling repulsive, so I’m not about to wake up to the fact that I’m a full human being (and I mean full) without hesitations and suspicions. But the honesty in these articles, interviews, and poems reached me, and I forgot, for a while, anyway, those other eyes and the compulsion to laugh…”

And here's how it ends:

Shadow on a Tightrope leaves me with a lot of anger and some unmet needs, but it also leaves me with the voices of fat women as sensitive, articulate, creative beings. That’s a rare sound in literature. I’m starving for more.”

It was an overstatement to say that I'd spent a lifetime feeling repulsive. I'd always had plenty of joy, but it's true that there was a current of that feeling alive inside me, and this was the first I'd seen that there might be ways to address it other than the endless dieting merry-go-round that, even then, I'd already spent more than enough time on.

Tags: fat

02:20 pm: Fat in The New Yorker
Wow. The Fat Studies Reader, which I've got a piece in, is reviewed as a part of an article about obesity in The New Yorker. The author is Elizabeth Kolbert, who writes brilliant articles about environmental issues. Here's one of her responses to the anthology:

To claim that some people are just meant to be fat is not quite the same as arguing that some people are just meant to be poor, but it comes uncomfortably close.

I don't agree, to put it mildly. Also, the cartoon that illustrates the article is profoundly insulting.

Here's the article online.

Here's a place to submit questions about the article for Kolbert's response.

ETA Here's the question I asked her:

I’m a contributor to The Fat Studies Reader discussed in your article. I’m a novelist, not a health researcher, but wanted to ask if you are familiar with the work of nutritionist Linda Bacon and other advocates of the Health At Every Size approach to weight and health? (Here’s a link to a brief position paper about HAES on her website: http://www.lindabacon.org/HAESbook/HAES_manifesto.pdf ) She takes the position that the overweight category is meaningless as a health risk predictor, and that focusing on weight is a problem in itself. Do you see any merit in these points?


Here's where and how to submit a letter to the editor.

ETA Here's the letter I sent:

As a contributor to The Fat Studies Reader (I’m a novelist and no expert), what I want to say to Elizabeth Kolbert is that it’s not, as she writes, “that putting on weight is a subversive act.” It’s that trying to move outside of the cultural obsession with fatness creates a profound shift in perspective which can intensify, not diminish, commitment to things like better school lunch programs, more public parks and interventions in the links between economic status and health which focus on things like adequate access to medical care, clean water and decent food; things other than weight.

Tags: elizabeth kolbert, fat, fat studies reader

11:39 am: A Place To Go
Michael Jackson and I were about the same age, so I literally did grow up listening to his music. I didn't buy it, I just heard it. I had a radio with a green leather case that I used to carry around with me sometimes. I'd listen with it pressed to my face so that the plastic strips over the speaker left red grill marks on my cheek. I can remember being out in the car port as a kid in Colorado, listening to Ben. (Clicking the link takes you to a video performance of the song).

The song, which is from a movie about a rat named Ben, had lyrics that just completely hit my little fat queer girl vulnerabilities:

Ben, you're always running here and there
You think you're not wanted anywhere
If you ever look behind
and don't like what you find
there's something you should know,
you've got a place to go.

There's also a part about how most people would turn Ben away, but Michael doesn't listen to a word they say. What I remember about listening to the song in the carport, with its familiar stain on the concrete that made my hands smell of oil if I touched it (I touched it a lot), was both that I really wanted someone to sing that song to me, and that I also wasn't sure if I myself could ever sing anything like it to a rat. I wanted to be accepting, but I had seen the movie, which I found scary and not a little gross. Did love for a rat match the song? Could I find it in myself to give that kind of love to a rat, and, if not, was there any hope for anybody finding it in themselves for me? I wasn't sure. I was loved then, and I knew it -- I was very solid in family love, but this was about something elusive, something else.

Later, I had a friend who I dedicated my first novel, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, too. She loved to dance, and when albums Off The Wall and Thriller came out, she was wild about them. Off the Wall was the summer after we had graduated from high school, and Thriller came out my last year of college. I never watched music videos, but I can remember being on a dance floor somewhere with her while she, so excited, described the Thriller video to me in detail. I didn't really get it, but I remember. Just a little later, it was Billie Jean at the Marquee, a no frills women's bar I used to go to in my early twenties in Central Square in Cambridge. And that was, until last week, pretty much the end of Michael Jackson music in my head. I've seen animikwaan (who also posted a link to this poignant, insightful essay) writing about this and it's true: it has been so strange how last week's flood of his music has taken me back to specific times of my life, in sudden, unexpected detail.

Tags: deaths, fat

02:43 pm: Buddha Body Yoga: New York City
I had a really lovely experience this morning: a chance to dance with Michael Hayes, who teaches yoga classes in New York City for people with bodies of all sizes. His work was recently written up in the New York Times (there's a link to the article on his website).

Here's his site: Buddha BodyYoga. If I were in NYC, I would SO be signing up right now. Dancing with him let me do things I didn't think possible. With him, they just seemed calmly, clearly right there for me if I wanted. Such a gift.

Tags: dance, fat

01:42 pm: Reading, Night, Trike
Last night, I rode the new trike to a reading by Holly Black (blackholly) and Mark Doty at the Juniper Institute at UMass in Amherst, and back.

It's strange being on the trike, since it looks just like the old one, but it's not. One thing I realized is that I didn't have a chance to say goodbye to the old trike at all. I wasn't down there when my love and her partner picked it up at my house to take it in for repairs, and then it became clear so fast that a getting a new trike made more sense than putting money into this one, and that my dear ones would give it to me, so it was possible. So the new one is a love trike as much as the old one is (may I remember to be appreciate how lucky I am), but I've put nearly four years and a lot of miles on the old trike, and this one, weirdly feels different. The new seat was uncomfortable, so I went back to the bike shop and got them to swap out the seat for the one on my old trike, rust and all. They also had kept my bell, but I got it back. My light disappeared Monday, so I got a new one. The seat made a huge difference ("There it is!" I said when I sat on it), but the trike also has a bunch of new and different noises, and the handlebars are more upright. I asked the guy to ride it around the block to make sure that the noises aren't new problems with bearings (he said no). Mostly, it's like a mind game -- since, when I get on the trike, it looks and feels as if I've been doing the same thing I've been doing for years, but there are all sorts of small differences that give me a bodily experience of not-quite-right. The front tire has a lot more tread, and makes a grinding sound going up hills. Small muscles ache.

But the ride last night -- for me, about an hour and fifteen minutes each way -- helped me get to know it. I was riding into a bit of a head wind on the way there, and it was threatening rain. Since it's been raining for days and days, that was no surprise, but the real showers were supposed to come later, and maybe hit on the way home.

Holly's reading, from a forthcoming novel called The White Cat intrigued me, with its con artist boy narrator who had done something truly terrible. Mark read poems that went to unbelievably difficult emotional territory and lit them up. His work is all about the sublime for me, and it dissolves calcified places in me, it just does. Also, he read a poem about being kissed by a goat. My love used to have goats, and I'm here to say that he nailed that experience, cold. It was so good to see him, and Paul, whose work and self I love. It was a rare and lovely thing to get to sit next to Paul and listen to the poems with him.

Paul is reading on Thursday. I'm not missing it, that's for sure.

We only talked very briefly before and after the reading. They offered me a ride home, but since I was on the trike, I had to say no and leave so quickly. It was eighty-thirty, and I was racing the rain and not sure that I could find the start of the bike path in the dark. I found it, though, and once I was on it, the ride was very beautiful. The trees along the path brought on fuller darkness with their cover, and also their roots raised the asphalt in spots from underneath. The resulting ridges can make for a pretty hard series of bumps, and are painted orange to make them easier to spot, but, of course, that doesn't help in the dark. Also this part of the bike path was made with recycled bottles, and the ground glass works its way to the surface in glittery patches that cause flats. No way to spot those, either, but the obscuring darkness was filled with fireflies along the whole length of the path. The ride was sensual, flickering, filled with small insects. Some hit my face, one caught in the strap of my helmet. More than one hit my closed lips, and, at one point, my mouth unwisely open, I had a sudden small pellet of life on my tongue before I spit. These were mostly gnats, I think, or mosquitoes, although one firefly flew past my glasses so close that it looked a comet.

I was submerged in the darkness, getting used the the different way my legs were working on my new trike, having bits of poems and feelings come back to me from the reading, and thinking about telling the story of the ride to Paul, who has a truly extraordinary gift of presence and responsiveness, I think, and who has been turning grieving into stunning moments of language in his blog in ways that make me want to both support him and to learn from how he's carrying loss. Losses.

I finally crossed the bridge over the river, which had men on it, leaning and talking, looking out at the water. Except for one runner, they were the only people I had seen in the hour I'd been on the path. I got back on the street, and was doing the little leg of Route 9 that had me in sight of my apartment, when a grown man in a pick-up, big bushy mustache, probably drunk, leaned out the passenger window to yell, "Hey, you fat girl, hey!" I looked up, and he looked back at my face as they passed, flicking a cigarette ash at me.

Then, I was home. It was nearly ten. I parked the trike, and jumped a little when good-hearted neighborhood boys gave each other a loud, "Hey!" as some pulled up in a car. Then I went upstairs and wrote the story of the ride to Paul.

Tags: art, fat, holly black, mark doty, paul lisicky, reading, trike

02:32 pm: The Coils of Our Doctrine
Life is uncertain and imperfect (to state the obvious), but on Saturday, I felt so happy. I rode my trike to Look Park and sat on a bench next to the pond with the people in their paddle boats getting in splash fights (and getting yelled at about it). I had the library copy of Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness and my computer. It turned out to be easiest to type with the book and the computer balanced on the edge of the trike's big basket (which is bungeed together and has white paint chipping off.) A woman with a gray bowl cut came limping by in a green shirt and shorts, not the green of the leaves with the light behind them, but she was so alive in her clothes, the effect was the same. Insects came, and I stopped and wrote about them.

Here's something from the essay I was reading, "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity."

The convenant made it possible to argue that while God elects whom he pleases, He is pleased to elect those who catch Him in His plighted word, and that it is up to fallen man to do so. The subtle casuistry of this dialectic is altogether obvious. Yet the spectacle of these men striving in the coils of their doctrine, desperately striving on the one hand to maintain the subordination of humanity to God without unduly abasing human values, and on the other hand to vaunt the powers of the human intellect without losing the sense of divine transcendence, vividly recreates what might be called the central problem of the seventeenth cenury as it was confronted by the Puritan mind. (Miller, p. 74)

This helps me a lot to understand something about how Puritans thought. I love the phrase "the spectacle of these men striving in the coils of their doctrine." I was talking about it with my friend L., who is working on her profound and beautiful book this week. Entering the intellectual conversation about fatness with any kind of critical stance is very much to engage with a spectacle of twentieth century (with, I hope, just a little overlap into this century) people striving with the coils of our doctrine.

Tags: fat, perry miller, trike

12:45 pm: New National School Health Policy
It's a little overwhelming, and snarky at the beginning, but even scanning the impressive juxtaposition of evidence and arguments is compelling. Here, from Junkfood Science, is a very critical look at the new national school health policy around fat children.

I'm thinking about pulling some kind of event together in response to the new Massachusetts policy on sending BMI reports home to parents. Not sure what yet, and am thinking small-scale, but something.

Here's one of many passages I found striking. That piece about mandating much more extensive testing for fat kids (and adults), and then blaming us for those costs rings true:

The NASBE School Health Policy Guide says: “Obese children are two to three times more likely to be hospitalized and are about three times more costly to care for and treat than the average insured child… Children covered by Medicaid account for $3 billion of those expenses. Annually, the average health expenses for a child treated for obesity under Medicaid is $6,730, while the average expenditure for all children on Medicaid is $2,446.”

Fact checks: Fat children burdens? (It turns out, there is no correlation between a young person’s BMI and emergency room usage or visits to the doctor. Higher medical expenses are not because fatter children are sicker. They were 5.5 times as likely to have extensive laboratory and screening tests ordered in accordance with Medicaid guidelines for fat children or children with a family history of obesity, despite no evidence for efficacy. Then, the costs of those added medical tests are used to blame the fat children for raising health costs!)

Increasingly, Medicaid recipients must follow the state’s prescribed healthy diets and preventive wellness management in order to receive benefits, such as care for their special needs children.

Tags: fat

09:59 am: Fat Studies Reader and Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere
The Fat Studies Reader is available for pre-order from NYU Press. Edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, it's got my short essay, "Why Fat Girls Need Fiction," and tons of other great stuff, including essays by charlottecooper, mermeydele,bearsir, and I don't even know who all else. There's a foreword by Marilyn Wann. I really do think that the publication of this anthology represents a kind of watershed moment for fat liberation, making a lot of thought, writing, research and scholarship about fatness more visible as active, engaged, insightful, important and of interest to a lot of different individuals and groups than it has been before.

Also, Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere by Marianne Kirby and Kate Harding is available for pre-order, too. Marianne blogs at The Rotund (link to lj syndication), and Kate blogs at Shapely Prose. I first noticed Marianne's writing on fatshionista, and it's really interesting to see voices come out of these online forums and make an impact on mainstream culture.

And not a moment too soon. Go team!

Tags: fat, fat studies reader, lessons from the fat-o-sphere, publishing

12:45 pm: Bullying: queerness and fatness
I just saw the terrible news that, in the nearby city of Springfield, 11-year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover has hanged himself after enduring anti-gay bullying. Evidently, his mother's attempts to talk with school officials about the bullying did not result in an effective response. Oh, I feel for that child and his family.

It makes my heart ache, it really does, for all of the children who are harassed at school, who have to fight so hard to find the inner resources to get through the attacks, often in isolation. It happens so much around perceived gayness or queerness. It happens around so many things. It happens around fatness.

I experienced harassment around being fat as a little girl and a high school student, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. Other kids didn't perceive me as queer, but there was no missing the fact that I was fat. I've heard stories of children who have killed themselves in response to fat-related bullying, and a quick google turned up more. I'm not going to link to them -- reinvoking all of that waste and loss and sadness seems as if it might not be helpful.

But, I also heard this week that Massachusetts schools are starting to send reports on students' BMI home to their parents. And, very sadly, I think that this kind of institutional focus on weight and the bullying of fat children is related.

Here is an excellent article linking school programs that focus on fat kids with bullying by Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, who wrote The Tyranny of Health.

Here is the main page of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian Straight Education Network, which looks to be doing amazing work against bullying in schools.

Here are strategies around children and weight from Body Positive.

Tags: fat, lesbian, queer, western massachusetts

01:38 pm: Fat Girl Flea
The Fat Girl Fleamarket is today in New York City. Open until 8.

In honor of such a mighty moment, I give you:

• Charlotte Cooper's account of the Invasion of the Chubsters event at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. That's in her rich blog, Obesity Timebomb.
  
  Bonus:
youtube video of a closing song and spontaneous dance at the event that made my eyes well up. Honor also to jasonelvis for curating and all.


• Deb Malkin of Re/DressNYC interviewed in Plus Model Magazine. As Deb talks about in the interview, she is one of the founders of the Fat Girl Flea and, although she can't be there this year, she has poured a lot of work and love into it over the years.



• The lineage of what I was wearing yesterday when I was videoed reading excerpts from my novel for the Jonathan Edwards Center website. I had been thinking that we were just doing audio, so I hadn't picked out my clothes to be on camera, but what I had on was:
  
  
  
  • the black linen jacket that I got at the Re/DressNYC opening. I would have succumbed to being overwhelmed with options at that event, if not for the intensity and focus of beccawrites, and I'm really loving that jacket. We were thinking job-hunting clothes, but I'm wanting to wear it all the time.
  
  
  • a gold and black sleeveless silk top with calla lilies, hand-me-down from my beloved friend, Lynne.
  
  
  • The black skirt I got for Christmas that my mama hemmed to the perfect length for me. She's making me a top out of some blue checked fabric out of her fabric stash right now. I never appreciated these arts as much as I should have when I was a girl. They are highly charged with complicated feelings and practical advantages. How lucky am I that my mother can and is still willing to pick up a needle and thread on my behalf?
  
  
  • black leggings
  
  
  • marled ankle socks from Sock Dreams, which I learned about via theoryofgravity.
  
  
  • my sturdy, new balance black shoes, because those are pretty much always the shoes.
  
  
  • I had on the vintage pearls that my friend gave me after she heard I had lost the other string!
  
  
  
  Can you see it? The beautiful way that varied relationships and communities are threaded into the clothes I had on? The power that the histories of those articles of clothing drape me with when I go somewhere like Yale Divinity School (where another community of people has been consistently wonderful to me)? The ways that the clothing that has been given to me or made or altered for me or made available to me has expanded the vocabulary I have with which to address the world?
  

And how events like the Fat Girl Flea and the Invasion of the Chubsters keep doing that -- in cloth, in images, in experiences, within and outside of language -- for expanding circles of people who are able to find ways to get themselves there or to make such moments on their own?

Tags: charlotte cooper, clothes, deb malkin, fat, fat girl flea

03:17 pm: Sunday Morning Dance Report
There were a few light flakes of snow as I rode in. There's supposed to be a big storm coming tonight.

Following me up the steps this week was the man who cried last week. He was very polite, almost meditative in the way he went my pace as he walked up the stairs. About the third flight, he said something I couldn't understand, and laughed in a friendly way, but when I said, "What?" He said, "Oh, nothing." Then, he mumbled something like, "We're going the same place." I smiled and nodded, both because we were and because it made me happy. I stepped aside and gestured for him to go up the last flight ahead of me. It felt a little like starting the dance on the stairs, with all the placards telling us anyone can dance.

I spent some time with a cushion on the floor, stretching and playing a little with how it feels to get up and down. I watch people go to the floor with so much grace, but what is between me and the floor is something else. For one thing, if the chairs of the world are too flimsy or too small, the floor and the grass or the ground always stretches out to accommodate me, and I take it up on that, sometimes regardless of propriety. Because my arthritic knee needs padding under it if I rest my weight on it on the hard floor, I get up like a baby, walking myself up with my hands on the ground, my legs a little straddled and and my butt in the air. I was self conscious about that when I first had to figure out how to do it, but now it comes naturally. So, yeah, I don't swoop down and leap up, but I bent over and slapped the floor for a while today, like people make steps with their feet.

They played Rock Steady! What it is what it is.

I was trying not to jump around because my knee was sore all week, so I spent a long time planted in one spot. But then they played some kind of country song, and I couldn't figure out what to do with it until I started skipping all over the room, which felt like flying, it was so fun. Other people started doing something like it, too, and it was pretty delicious to weave in and out of everybody dancing (a young willowy girl in a black leotard and filmy skirt who danced with her even younger sister like a ballerina letting her hair down; an older woman doing contact improv with a young man -- her son? -- who might have been autistic, rolling him over her back, dancing with another woman her age as they both kept physical contact with him; a little girl tossing a rubber snake back and forth to her mom; couples doing swing dance moves), I liked it, and my mess-with-me friend from last week was doing it, too, but I has to skip out the door in the middle of the song to gasp and drink water, because I am not so used to moving that fast.

Later, when I was dancing in a corner, a young woman came over to hug me and tell me that I radiated joy. A guy who had been dancing behind me said, "You have more fun than anyone." Which might be true. I think that this was something that I've been needing -- in a time when I'm looking urgently for paid work, and holding the experience of getting so much no and silence back from putting my beloved book out into the world, when my personal obstacles can set up a clamor with the big struggles and hard times -- to have somewhere to stretch physically, socially, emotionally, to explore connection and separation, to move. It's very wild to me that this is a bodily thing, not an intellectual thing, not about language, and that I've started to feel reflected back there in a way that I've been thirsty for. There are a lot of things about it that almost embarrass me, especially once people start talking, but I can't afford the luxury of indulging my taste for critique, not now, not yet, maybe not at all. Mostly, I'm just grateful that it's there, even for the likes of me, and that all I had to do was find it, drop my five dollars in the basket and dance.

Tags: daily life, dance, fat, northampton

10:14 am: Pages Falling Out
I got interviewed last week for a book on fat and stigma that will be coming out from NYU Press (which is also publishing The Fat Studies Reader). I'll let you know when it's published. It is a powerful thing for me that the author, Amy Farrell, who I had met when we both presented in the Fat Studies track of the Popular Culture conference a couple of years ago, has read all of my books. It was a pleasure to talk with her. She asked me about poems from Belly Songs that I wrote more than twenty years ago, bringing the emotional resonance of that work to life again with the intensity of her engagement. Before she came, I went out on the porch and got out the ladder to reach the boxes with my books about fat. I spread them out all over the table and the couch: chapbooks of poems, Panza Monologues from Texas, copies of FaT GiRL (Bertha making vegetable pudding -- yum!) and Size Queen, Fat and Proud, so many books by people I know or have met or may never meet. The weight of them is something. Among them was Shadow On A Tightrope, which was the first fat liberation book I ever read, read so hard that its pages are falling out, like my copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Tags: fat

05:48 pm: Bird/Window

• I was going to skip dancing this morning, but my body wanted to do it, so I jumped on my trike and went downtown. I liked shaking, liked the drummers, liked rolling around on the floor and kicking my legs in the air, walking my feet up the heated pipes along the wall. Okay, maybe I really am a hippie. I was singing "The Age of Aquarious" as I pedaled away.


• I rode to State Street Fruit to get a ticket for a poetry performance, then read about Dickens and mesmerism at the bagel place.


• The big poetry show was at the Academy of Music. There were slam poets I enjoyed, but the deep heart of it, for me, was Richard Wilbur. I got to hear him read poems I love, including this one.
  
  In which he says to his daughter, who is working on a story, about writing:
  
  
  It is always a matter, my darling,
  Of life or death, as I had forgotten.
  
  
  I'm needing nerve, focus, and flexibility. There are so many ways to keep getting there: movement, poetry and community among them.
  

Tags: daily life, dance, dickens, fat, northampton, poetry, richard wilbur, writing

01:29 pm: Re/Dress
The Re/Dress NYC opening reminded me of a reading at a women's bookstore in the eighties, except with an overwhelming amount of gorgeous, big-enough clothes and burlesque dancers instead of books and novelists. But the feeling, that feeling of an excited crowd pouring in and being welcomed in ways that they couldn't quite believe (except for those who know, for whom this is home, and those folks, in between eating strawberries, trying on hats and making Sputnik plans -- I asked, it's a monthly dance -- they were all pretty cheery and happy to say hi) and finding things that they might not have been able to say they wanted, that old time gonna-change-the-world-one-poem-at-a-time headiness totally translated into vintage linen and rhinestones.

That's surprising to me, but it's true. A lot of that's about Deb Malkin, the store's owner, who was resplendent on Wednesday in a corset and a plaid bustle skirt from Bertha at Size Queen. The store has a narrow, open space above the huge floor, and looking up at Deb with her decollatage and bustle while she leaned over the rail to talk to somebody below was the kind of vision of determined joy in action that can go a long way to get a person through a cold, tight February. I know Deb through fat activist circles, and, as so many of you do, here on livejournal, and I feel graced by that. And, for me, that was a huge part of the experience, getting there with Leah and Tony and Becca, abundance already, and then seeing so many folks who I respect or admire or feel slow affection for, and so many others who were in the midst of their community, having a party, and so many others blissed out by treasure hunting, dazzled by what they could find and wear and afford. I think I got the last glass of champagne, but I was long since high on the sheer, crackling plenty of it all.

As I'm writing here about clothes shopping, about plenty, I keep getting little scratching thoughts about my own money worries and about how it's a moment of economic change and fear for many (and nothing new in that for many more), but, for me, this strange, sudden abundance in the form of a vintage clothes store beyond a fat woman's dreams didn't feel out of balance. It felt like a palpably generous human endeavor, a beautiful risk in inviting the fat girls (self defined! a big range of folks! many genders, and plenty not girls, but this was my feeling, my experience of the moment) in to play.

The truth is, I didn't even begin, literally did not even begin, to scratch the surface of looking at the clothes. I don't know if I could have taken a fraction of it in if I were there on a quiet afternoon, and as it was, I was too excited by it all to have a chance. But I decided to look for work clothes, and Becca helped me try on jackets and gathered a whole bunch of possible pants for me, and gave advice and got feedback. I came home with a short black linen/polyester jacket, size16 (I'm telling you -- the whole world tilted), and I'm wearing it as I'm typing. It cost me $12. I'm kind of in love with it. It's a simple thing, but it's clearly a power object, and smells, ever so faintly, of a good, gone perfume. Becca made me swear that I'd iron it, but I haven't, just yet.

A tall woman at the back near the row of spectacular, glittery dresses held up a long brown item that swept low in the back and high in the front, and asked us, "What is this?" We decided that it had to be a dress, because it was so long, but eventually we talked someone else into to putting it on, and it was a ballgown skirt. It swept the floor and made a magnificent funnel tornado twirl when she spun. It zipped together in a v at the back. I was in line to check out before the dancing started behind a woman who was bought two elegant purple bags full of things, one of them with black boots sticking out of the top. Her voice shook with emotion when she said thanks. I think the neighborhood word is going to spread fast.

I didn't see into the dressing rooms with the zebra striped curtains because they were all occupied, but I saw the eponymous picture on the one named for Mama Cass. I just took off my leggings and tried on pants in my pink tights in the wide, wide spaces between racks. Deb showed me my own picture among all the others in the cozy lounge, with its gold couch (the woman sitting next to me explained that she was a graduate student in journalism liveblogging the event). Someone from the Mayor's office read a proclamation making it Re/Dress day in Brooklyn, so much better than trying again to put the whole borough on a diet. The dancers could do amazing things, and I was struck by their athleticism, the strength they used to move, along with everything else. Bertha literally made me cry by talking to me in an enormously present way about my novel, and the hard moment I'm in with its fate in the world. We didn't get a chance to talk much, but she went in so deep so fast and looked in my eyes. It almost makes me cry again, just thinking about it. I talked a little with Geleni (so many people there! so many faces shining among the clothes), who said that having online lives together was like being in touch through the collective unconscious. This trip to Re/Dress really did feel like a wade into that kind of common pool.

And the store is there, open, ready for other, quieter other days, ready for other explorations of what kinds of cuts and fabrics people have the means and the impulse to inhabit. I ran across a phrase recently in Netherland, a novel I loved: entrepreneurial wistfulness. It's been haunting me for various reasons: because I have that for my novel, I think, in that, separate from what it has in it as a book, as what I want (I always want this) to be art, I also want very much to have it make its way in the world. I can taste it, I can feel it, as a character in Netherland dreams of a cricket stadium. Re/Dress (that tiny poem of a name) is past wistfulness into the very tactile present, and it's a fabulous place to walk into. I'm going again, when I can.

Tags: clothes, fat, new york city, re/dress nyc

03:04 pm: Sunday Morning Dancing!

• I found out about it on usaservice.org. I'm going to go fold clothes for the hospice shop and collect canned food for the survival shelter tomorrow from an event I found there, too. There's a lot to be seen about the Obama administration, but I appreciate that they found me a place to dance.


• It was snowing this morning. Not too much, but it made for hard triking! They had barely plowed, so I had to ride right in the middle of Route 9, in the only place that wasn't thick with snow. The cars had to go my speed until I pulled over to the deeper stuff and let them by. I almost didn't go because of the snow. (And, you know, fear.)


• When I got to the drive for the Fitzwilly's building (site of an encounter last summer with a rude man and his motorcycle) I had to get off and push the trike through the slush. A woman walking asked if I needed help, but I was waiting for her to go by. She was nice, then she went into the door I was headed for. Two other people, looking happy, went in, too. Okay!


• It was on the fourth floor. (Another reason I almost didn't go.) I could hear the drumming. There were placards along the stairs with quotations from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They were saying beautiful, profound things. I went slowly up the stairs and read the placards. This made me both less winded and less scared.


• I took off my boots in the anteroom. I like an anteroom -- it's good to have another moment of transition. I peered into the room -- everyone was the floor while someone danced in the middle. Yikes! But they looked like old hippies, and other generations of hippies. Hippies and artists taught me how to dance in the first place. I like them, in general. I'm not exactly one of them, but I dance like them and I understand a lot of their ways. I liked the sound of the music.


• Then, there was a little dressing area, where I took off my coat and my jeans, and saw the nice woman who had offered to help me with my trike. She said that she hadn't been there in a long time, and I said that I never had before. "Oh, you'll love it," she said. I go too many days when I don't have nice, simple, small conversations in person with someone else. This was very good, and I was also glad that there was no talking once a person went in to dance.


• I put my can of baked beans into the basket. I put my five dollars in another basket. People were up and dancing now, and, why not?, I started to dance. There were handsome women drumming and singing in the front. There were grey-haired men in tie dye. Some people rolled over each other or lay down on mats and did acrobatic dancerly moves, alone or together. They were fun to watch. Lots of women my age or older, including a couple of fat women. A few kids running and laughing. Mostly white, but not everybody. I started dancing at the back near the nice lady from the driveway. People looked at each other lightly, not demanding, but with some sense of welcome. There was a window with a ledge that always had someone sitting in it.


• The drumming was good for shaking, arriving that way. It felt so good to move. I was quickly too hot. I had on leggings and a body suit and a little brown dress that came in the amarama's magic box for my birthday, with straps on the sleeves that dangle and fly. I liked having a skirt I could swirl by the hem.


• After a while, a grey-haired man who was tie-dyeish came up to dance with me. He did a shaking all over thing, like me, and hand motions, like me. It was funny and fun for a minute or two, and then the song was over, and I sat down on the floor, and that was enough of that.


• I liked the live drumming and singing. After they left, I liked the highly altered version of We Will Rock You. I stomped and even jumped up and down, which might not be wise. There was a tall, blonde woman who struck me as an lgbt person, who was smiling very sweetly at me and pressed her hands together and bowed a little when I smiled back, stomping.


• I didn't dance in the big line and circle with most people at the end. Wasn't quite ready for that, but did stand up and dance on the outside, and that song ended with a piece of a speech by Martin Luther King, not "I Have A Dream," but he was talking about a call to love.


• Then we watched a video on the wall. The Dells doing the Star-Spangled Banner, with a background of intense images from African American history, including slave imagery and a lynching. I watched, and felt it, and followed the lines from the writing I've been doing over the past few years to these images and back.


• Then, there were circles. We said our names, and drew a quality from a basket. I got "education. " Then we went around with announcements. Afterwards, most people left, but I stayed for a small circle in which people talked about their experience at the dance and anything else that was coming up for them. Nothing was perfect, but the whole thing had this quality I love of a bunch of people trying to keep something happening because they care about it and because they think it might be a good thing in the community. I folded up a couple of scarves and put away a few placards.


• Right before I left, the tall blonde woman came up to me and whispered in my ear, "I loved to watch you dance. You're a dancer. " That was lovely. And it felt true -- I felt like a sweaty, hippie dancer, in my body, ready to trike home (the roads were plowed! an old hippie guy that I'd seen at the dance actually threw me a peace sign with his fingers from his car window as I pulled out on my trike!), and being the other things that I am, hot to tell the story to you.


• Now it's 3 pm and I better eat lunch and do the next thing. But the dancing felt so good!

Tags: daily life, dance, fat, northampton, trike

08:37 pm: Ideal Weight and Cancer Treatment
According to reports on a recent study published in Gynecologic Oncology , fat women have the same survival rates for ovarian cancer as thinner women when their chemotherapy dosage is based on their actual weight, rather than on ideal weight.

Here's a quote from the MedPage Today summary:

All patients received chemotherapy administered according to their actual body weight. Often, chemotherapy is administered based on ideal weight, which may lead to insufficient doses for obese patients, according to the researchers. Emphasis mine.

I'm sitting here, breathing into my hands for a minute. Women, I don't know how many, have died because their treatment was based on the body that the culture insists they are supposed to have, rather than the bodies that they actually have. Fat women in our millions have been told that we bring a higher risk of death from ovarian cancer upon ourselves by being fat when that higher risk of death has been and is being caused by a failure to adjust treatment to the size that our bodies actually are.

And note that the action points in this article, addressed to doctors, involve two suggestions about explaining the study, but not the obvious suggestion that chemotherapy be administered based on actual body weight rather than on ideal weight.

Yes, of course, I absolutely would get on the scale at a doctor's office if it actually resulted in treatment that would benefit me rather than another follow-the-pointing-finger-dance-through the flamier regions of the BMI chart. The last time I was scheduled for minor surgery, the anesthesiologist called me the night before because he hadn't been given my file, and wanted to know if there was anything about me that he might need to know. That he thought to call me up made me respect him a lot. I gave him an accurate estimate of my weight. He was noticeably surprised, but made appropriate adjustments, and the surgery went well.

This seems so obvious and matter of course, but now it also seems that it doesn't routinely happen for patients receiving chemotherapy, and so more fat patients are dying.

And so more fat patients are dying.

I am so angry.

bearsir posted the first link I saw about this. ETA: There is also now a response from foamcore to bear's post that gives some useful medical context, and suggests a way to advocate for more research about the specific effects of drugs on fat people.

We have to advocate for ourselves and our loved ones. What else? What would change this practice? What would help?

ETA: nerd_dog pointed out that Kate Harding wrote a post about this today at salon.com. Although there is plenty of vituperation, some of the responses raise the point that fat sometimes responds to drugs differently than other tissue, and so sometimes it might be appropriate to dose based on "ideal" weight (although, to me, the use of this term is a pretty clear marker for bias), or on other things, such as skin surface, rather than weight. The news in this article seems to be that this is not the case with ovarian cancer. I don't have the skill or time to try to tease out bias from science here (although past experience would suggest that often there may be some of both in operation), but one point is clear: in terms of ovarian cancer, this study suggests that dosing should be based on actual weight. And, to this point, it often has not been.

And me, I feel reminded to ask careful, insistent questions about body size and dosing in relationship to healthcare.

Tags: fat

04:42 pm: Fat Politics Lecture at Smith

• In getting ready for the talk last night, I went into the box of old files in the bottom of my closet. I've got a lot of stuff in there, programs from various fat gatherings over the years, a set of consciousness-raising questions about fat that a group called WOW used in NYC in the seventies (might have lost that...), an outline of a workshop an older fat activist gave me when I was first starting to do public speaking around these issues -- she had used it in the late seventies/eighties. (I'd cite her by name, but I should probable ask permission before I do that on the internet.) And my own stuff in various forms, including answers from workshops where I asked people to interview each other about fat politics, and written responses to Fat Girl Dances With Rocks from a college class on women and economics that had been assigned to read it. Also chapbooks and zines. Not to mention at least three or four antique fat liberation t-shirts. I wonder if I could get the Sophia Smith Archive interested in some of it.



• I talked about this past Nolose and the cold pool and quoted stillwell's keynote before I read Drink. I talked about FLARE and read poems dedicated to cherry_midnight, and had a conversation with a charismatic and fired-up young person who has applied to law school at Berkeley, is eager to work on legal issues with the disability rights center there, and who asked me what needs to happen to end fat oppression. (I said something like I think that the whole economic and political system needs to be built over from the ground up, and that the only way I know to start that is to do whatever you and your friends can come up with next, learn from your mistakes, and keep going.)
  
  She also said, "Don't be offended, but I think that fat has a lot in common with disability, especially facial or cosmetic disability." I said, "I'm not offended! There are serious political alliances to be made, lots and lots of common ground, including in many of our own bodies."



• It was moving to me to be reading work from Belly Songs, some of which I wrote in the mid-eighties, and to experience the aging in my body in some of the changes over time in how it feels to move with the poems. And to have Sally there, and be able to talk in public about how she helped publish Belly Songs when three of us formed a micro press out of a lesbian writers group we were in way back in the day, and how she helped organize the speakout against fat hatred when I was reeling from fat hate mail, and how stepping up for the hard parts and taking full pleasure in the rest of long, deep friendships is so central to sustaining political, artistic and intellectual work, especially on hetereodox, complicated issues like fat oppression.



• I cited amarama's box of clothes and charlottecooper's recent beautiful draft of a paper about fat activism. Some folks took copies of the paper. I was feeling the presence of some of y'all on my friendslist, for sure.



• There was a warm feeling in the room. People were listening with beautiful, serious intensity. It was good to see maryjholliday and somechicksings. It was good to talk with the organizers from Size Matters about what they've been doing and thinking about. It was good to let the writing have the life of being heard. It felt good to do the work.

Tags: fat

12:12 pm: Fat Politics: Resources
Here are a bunch of resources on fat politics for folks who come to my talk today for Size Matters at Smith College. And, of course, for anybody else who is respectfully interested (ETA: There may be other good links that come up in comments; in fact there already is one to the excellent Body Impolitic.):

Big Fat Blog

Body Image Bibliography

Charlotte Cooper

Council on Size and Weight Discrimination

Fat Activist Network (new!)

Fat Liberation Archives

Fatshionista Livejournal Community

Fatshionista Website

Fat Studies Forum

Fat Studies UK

JunkFood Science

Linda Bacon, especially her Health At Every Size Manifesto

NAAFA
One program I particularly like at NAAFA is The FLARE Project: Fat Legal Advocacy, Rights and Education.

NOLOSE

Obesity timebomb

Susan Stinson
Read fiction! It expands a person's capacity for empathy, imagination and other adventurous qualities crucial to creating gorgeous social change. Good stories make the heart pound and beautiful language quickens the blood.

My books:
Belly Songs: in celebration of fat women
Fat Girl Dances with Rocks
Martha Moody
Venus of Chalk (there's a link to an excerpt here.)

Tags: fat

09:35 am: Make Your Own Kind of Music: Cass Elliot
Happy Love Your Body Day. (That's more complicated, grueling and gorgeous than it sounds for any mortal human, says me. And maybe we can extrapolate and expand from the whole "day" thing, too, yes?)



Tags: fat

08:36 am: Boys on the Bike Path
On Wednesday evening, I was riding my trike on the bike path to go to the house of friends for dinner. Near the beginning of the path, a group of maybe twelve or so boys (junior high age? or high school?), came out of the wetlands on their bikes and gathered in a big clump across the path in front of me. They were some distance away, but, immediately, I heard the overexcited, loud voice of a kid looking my way and saying rude things about my body, intended, I think, both to be heard by me and so be hurtful, and also, for sure, to be noticed by his friends for wit and nerve in breaking the ordinary rules of how people treat each other.

He decided it would be funny to break away from his friends and ride his bike as hard as he could directly at me, looking me right in the eyes, and yelling, "Aw, shit," over and over. It was very theatrical, the joke being that I was so huge that he was in terrible danger that I would crush him. He actually was putting both of us in some danger, because that was some stupid bike riding. I just kept going, so if it was also a game of chicken, he lost. It played out without other commentary -- his friends didn't laugh or move, at least until, glaring and relieved, I finally rode by the big group, and a couple of them muttered something about heavy machinery.

Dinner was beautiful and abundant. So good to see my friends.

I haven't replaced my bike light yet (it's $60, and when I took it into the shop, they said to try cleaning the corrosion on the inside with steel wool, but the result was that I went from having uncertain light to none at all), but I'd brought a flashlight to strap to the handlebars with bungy cords for the darkness of the path, away from streetlights, on the ride home. First I had it strapped wrong, so all of the light went up into the trees, but it was pitch dark at the start of the path, and I rode off the edge into dirt right away because I couldn't see. So I adjusted the light. The part of the path that goes through Florence was easy, since there were lights from the town to help me see, but just before I got back to a darker section, a rider with no lights, who, in my quick glimpse of him looked like another boy, slipped onto the path in front of me from the street. He stayed just in front of me for the rest of the path, and I had to keep adjusting my flashlight to catch his reflectors so I wouldn't run into him.

It's almost poetry now: the shapes farther up the path, approaching or riding away, the kind of ugly thoughts they pulled out of me, and also the beauty. One of the things that sticks with me is how clearly I saw the first boy, the one who charged me, as I stared into his face. I saw his moment of calculation before he started yelling. I had on sunglasses, so he would have missed my eyes, but my face must have been so present for him, too. And then, on the way home, the flickering shape in front of me, comfort and obstacle both, maybe wanting to stay on the asphalt with my little capsule of light, maybe wanting the company, too.

Tags: fat, trike