Category Archives: Book Notes

Tips from a Year of Indie Book Marketing

It is I, your favorite obscure novelist, here to share with you the good, the bad, the immeasurable, and the pleasurable results of a year of marketing my second novel, Origin Story. Which, by the way, makes a great Christmas or Hanukkah gift for an emo homosexual, comic book fan, theology nerd, or person who really needs to set boundaries with their family. Stuff your stocking with Peter and Julian today!

Best Value for Money

Pride Book Tours is a Bookstagram tour service run by Sasha Zatz. For just 125 pounds, she’ll get your LGBTQ book featured on about a dozen Instagram book recommendation sites. A lot of her clients are romance writers but my literary fiction book did quite well with her contacts. The real benefit was that several of the Instagrammers also wrote insightful, quotable, 4- and 5-star Goodreads reviews for Origin Story in addition to featuring it on their social media.

Worst Value for Money

Publicist John Madera’s firm Rhizomatic charged me $4,000 for a 3-month campaign (after I talked him down from his $10,000, 6-month offer) whose sole purpose was to secure blurbs and reading dates. I sent him contact information for a dozen bookstores and twice that many queer authors to approach. He delivered zero results. Three people supposedly agreed to write blurbs, so I sent them the book at my own expense, yet they never met the deadlines he kept promising. Moreover, he actively discouraged me from following up with any of the blurb writers after our contract’s end date, because he wanted to keep those relationships proprietary. As part of the inducement to sign with him, he said he’d publish any review that I couldn’t place elsewhere in his magazine, Big Other. However, when I sent him such a review, he ghosted on me until it was no longer timely, then rejected it without explanation.

The more widely applicable lesson here is that freelance publicists probably can’t do more for you than you could do for yourself. They’ll never have the same access that a Big Five publisher’s on-staff publicist has. Also, a contract that is worded subjectively (“so-and-so will use their best efforts to secure blurbs,” etc.) isn’t going to be easy to enforce.

NetGalley and Other Mysteries

In retrospect, it wasn’t cost-effective for me to pay $550 for a NetGalley listing, still less so to pay $700 for a featured spot in their LGBT Books email. Of the approximately 75 people who downloaded my book, only a handful wrote reviews, and these tended to be lower-quality in terms of their understanding of this admittedly challenging novel. If your book fits more securely within NetGalley readers’ genre expectations, you may get more out of being listed there. But I had to find out!

I can’t track whether the $350 full-page ad in Shelf Awareness sold any books. They did design the ad for you, which you could use in all your other digital promotions for free. It was marginally worth it for me because I have no patience to muck about with Canva. The ad itself was pretty generic, however, and the first version was full of errors–the inclusion of random text from my email signature made me suspicious that it had been “designed” by AI.

Review Outlets

Not all of these venues reviewed Origin Story but they’re good places to contact about your literary and small press books. Eternal love to Solstice Lit Mag, a longtime supporter of my writing, for this in-depth discussion of my novel’s innovative structure and theological themes. Oyster River Pages also ran a great review. DIAGRAM is the place to send your quirky hybrid writing and reviews of the same, especially if the review itself plays creatively with form. Best of the Net sponsor Sundress Publications recommends new poetry books, especially those with social justice and queer content, in their e-newsletters. The Masters Review regularly reviews literary prose books.

Electric Lit’s Reading Lists column is a good way to get your book featured in this prestigious online journal. Your article should be a list of 6-8 books that have a similar unusual angle as yours, with mini reviews, and in the process you can summarize and link to your own book. Mine was “8 Graphic Novels About Healing from Sexual Abuse” because Peter, the main character of Origin Story, recovers his memories by writing a superhero comic book.

Similarly, you can pitch a guest article for a website that’s related to your book topic. My personal essay “Companions in the Mirror: How My Novel Characters Are Allies in My Healing” was featured on the Curated Stories page of Time To Tell, a child abuse survivors’ support organization.

Though paid reviews have low prestige among knowledgeable literati, I wagered $59 on one from Readers’ Favorite. I liked their policy of only posting 4- and 5-star reviews; if a book doesn’t merit that ranking, they give the author private feedback instead. They did give Origin Story 5 stars, but I was a little disappointed that the review lacked depth. It mostly restated the jacket copy and added some generic superlative praise.

I’m starting to write book reviews at The Rumpus so if you’re about to release a literary small press novel, memoir, story or essay collection that you think would fit my interests, email je***@wi************.com .

Readings

You know a great way to get your indie book into more bookstores? Interview your friends at their book launches! Thank you, Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, for asking me to emcee her Brookline Booksmith event for Off the Books, her political thriller/road trip/love story about a Chinese-American rideshare driver whose handsome client has a secret in his suitcase.

Both in terms of book sales and in emotional satisfaction, I gave the best reading of my life at Easton Mountain, a clothing-optional retreat center for queer men. Events are not videotaped for obvious reasons, so you’ll just have to imagine me standing in front of a crowd of 60 guys in my sequin mesh briefs from Skull & Bones. Hat tip to my fellow Authors’ Night guests Mike De Socio (Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts–and America) and Carl Siciliano (Making Room: Three Decades of Fighting for Beds, Belonging, and a Safe Place for LGBTQ Youth). If you’ll be at Easton for Bear Your Soul in January, come say hi!

Easton is a good example of a nontraditional reading venue with a really engaged audience. Think outside the usual list of bookstores and libraries. What affinity groups or community service organizations would be uplifted by your story? Could you give a workshop based on the book’s themes or your writing and research process?

For example, Tarot played a big role in both my writing process and Peter’s healing journey, so I led a class for our local Tarot society about ways to use the cards for fiction plotting. I sold two books to an audience of about 20 people, which is a pretty good return on investment, and we all had fun. Moreover, once you design the curriculum, you can take it to other venues where you might sell more books.

Inspirational Thoughts

My resolution for 2024 was “Appreciate those who appreciate me.” I resolved to manifest “satisfaction” as well as “success” and let the former be a touchstone for the latter. We can always make ourselves dissatisfied chasing more fame, more sales, more recognition from people we think are more important than ourselves. To step off this treadmill can feel abandoning ambition, because we’re unaccustomed to trusting that we’ll still do our work if not driven by fear and lack.

Knowing that my work was obscure and likely to stay that way, I asked myself about each marketing goal: Why do I actually want this? What do I hope it’ll make me feel? Is this something appropriate to ask from my writing? What community do I want this book to bring me into?

I do feel satisfied with Origin Story. I wrote it to encourage survivors that they won’t end up alone when they choose truth over toxic relationships. I said what I wanted to say about abuse-enabling Biblical religion, mental health stigma in the social work and adoption industries, and alternate spiritual paths that affirm our bodies’ wisdom. Reviews made me happy when my readers recognized the connections I made between these phenomena. That’s a benefit that isn’t about marketing per se, but can be remarkably rewarding.

I was able to afford a license for the cover image that I’d dreamed about for a decade, by artist Jim Shaw. The editors at Saddle Road Press always reply promptly, are well-informed and detail-oriented, have a great design sense, and take risks on innovative literature whether or not it’ll make money. (So please buy my book and keep them in business!) When you’re shopping around your filthy hybrid-genre novel about radical theology, look for a press like SRP that builds community among its authors.

Writing is mycelial. Market like a mushroom. You and other writers are part of the same organism, although your connections may be subterranean. My anxiety diminished when I absorbed the witchcraft worldview about interdependence. I realized that my life as a writer makes an impact, not only through my personal creations, but through promoting other people’s writing that matters to me.

When I started writing fiction seriously in 2006, underneath all the career concerns was my barely understood yearning to be included in the erotic, cultural, and spiritual world of gay men. Two Natures taught me I was trans. Origin Story helped me take risks to live my truth. Lying on the massage table at Body Electric this past autumn, sharing a transcendent ritual with my fellow nude homosexuals, I thought to myself, “This is why I wrote those books!”

I hope your writing brings you to such a moment, a joy that is an end in itself.

June Links Roundup: Speaking for the Trees

Happy Pride Month! Or, if you prefer one of the other so-called deadly sins, how about Rainbow Sloth Month?

“Diversity leads to resilience, and it is the reason we, and every other living thing on the planet exist,” says Ames Reeder at the Sloth Conservation Foundation.

At the ecology-minded literary journal Terrain, Ana Maria Spagna’s essay “Yes, and… Talking Wings, Queer Ecologies, and the Rights of Rivers” profiles a pair of queer environmental activists who are attempting to give legal rights to some rivers in upstate New York. They belong to a growing global movement to assign “standing”–the right to sue for injuries, or to be recognized more generally as a rights-holding entity under the law–to nonhuman natural phenomena. The movement traces its rationale back to Christopher Stone’s 1972 Southern California Law Review article “Should Trees Have Standing”, which is quite readable for the non-specialist and veers into poetic and spiritual territory by its conclusion.

Essentially, the argument is that our legal system should value trees, rivers, and ecosystems for their own sake, not merely for their economic or recreational use to humans. Their well-being would then have to be balanced against proposed developments that cause pollution or habitat destruction, just the same as any other stakeholder’s property rights or their right to be free from injury. Spagna quotes one of the activists in Talking Wings:

How can we give rights to a nonhuman entity? We do it all the time, they said, with a hint of incredulity. We give rights to states and municipalities, to estates, to infants (who know less than, say, a chimpanzee), and most damningly, if you consider real damage to humans and nonhumans alike, to corporations.

Stone eloquently questions the whole impulse behind our cramped and anthropocentric notions of property rights toward the end of his law review article:

A radical new conception of man’s relationship to the rest of nature would not only be a step towards solving the material planetary problems; there are strong reasons for such a changed consciousness from the point of making us far better humans. If we only stop for a moment and look at the underlying human qualities that our present attitudes toward property and nature draw upon and reinforce, we have to be struck by how stultifying of our own personal growth and satisfaction they can become when they take rein of us. Hegel, in “justifying” private property, unwittingly reflects the tone and quality of some of the needs that are played upon:

‘A person has as his substantive end the right of putting his will into any and every thing and thereby making it his, because it has no such end in itself and derives its destiny and soul from his will. This is the absolute right of appropriation which man has over all “things.”‘

What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to object-ify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance? Can it all be explained on “rational” bases? Should we not be suspect of such needs within us, cautious as to why we wish to gratify them?

…To be able to get away from the view that Nature is a collection of useful senseless objects is…deeply involved in the development of our abilities to love–or, if that is putting it too strongly, to be able to reach a heightened awareness of our own, and others’ capacities in their mutual interplay. To do so, we have to give up some psychic investment in our sense of separateness and specialness in the universe. And this, in turn, is hard giving indeed, because it involves us in a flight backwards, into earlier stages of civilization and childhood in which we had to trust (and perhaps fear) our environment, for we had not then the power to master it. Yet, in doing so, we–as persons–gradually free ourselves of needs for supportive illusions. Is not this one of the triumphs for “us” of our giving legal rights to (or acknowledging the legal rights of) the Blacks and women?

This invitation to shift our consciousness is also expressed in Claire Kohda’s beautiful, disorienting story “An End” in Electric Literature, which is told from the viewpoint of a river observing species extinction and human interventions therein. A sense of foreboding, as in a horror story, is created by the gaps in the river’s knowledge and the alien-ness of its ethical code.

The poet Richard Siken has become a beloved Twitter oracle of late, creating a collective call-and-response poem with his aphoristic answers to people’s advice questions. You can ask him if you should call that guy back, what is the meaning of life, or how to spend less money on groceries. I think the secret of his success is his combination of compassionate acceptance and bluntness. There’s always hope in his answers but it’s not cheap. And he treats every type of question or questioner with equal importance.

@FernandaHofm: @richardsiken how do I make it stop hurting for good?

@richardsiken: You don’t make feelings do anything. You feel them as long as you need to. They go away when you’re done.

****

@h3ll0t17ty2: richard siken how do I stop being so afraid all the time?

@richardsiken: Some things are scary. Some things only seem scary. Practice distinguishing between them.

In the Spring 2024 issue of BOMB Magazine, Z.L. Nickels interviewed Siken about his forthcoming poetry collection, I Do Know Some Things, a book that came out of his recovery from a severe stroke four years ago. As he does on Twitter, he comes across as a person who is willing to feel deeply and investigate his experiences even when they are devastating. Maybe that’s why he’s become a beacon for others trying to cope with sudden unwanted changes, i.e., life.

On readers’ insistence on conflating the author and the speaker of poems:

People would still ask, “Is this true?” I think they were asking, “Can this happen to me?” and the answer to that is “Yes.”

On his new book’s primary concerns:

In the first poem I wrote, which is the first poem of the book, I considered my death. Other themes arose naturally: What do I know? When is now? Am I a liar, and is that why no one believes me? What belongs to me? How do I make this leg move? What if I can’t make that leg move? And what parts of me died? Truly, a version of me did die, and I had no baseline for the old me or the new me who was writing these poems.

In this exchange, his humility is expressed with such dry wit that it comes all the way round to supreme confidence, like something a British aristocrat would say:

Nickels: This is a selfish thing to say, but I am so grateful you’re doing this. As someone who has closely followed your work, this book really matters. My first thought when I heard about the stroke was, My god, I hope he’s okay. My second was, Oh no. Because there aren’t many writers who are capable of achieving what you have in this book, much less your previous collections. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have your work, and thankfully I don’t have to. But you haven’t published a whole lot of poetry.

Siken: About sixty pages every ten years. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.

But I think he really means it, because this book was written for himself, out of gratitude and a need to piece his mind back together. I admire that attitude so much.

My neurologist said the fact that I am a painter and a poet is why I recovered. Because of the building of pathways—I already had such weird pathways built on lateral thinking, that continuing to paint and write poetry would help with the neuroplasticity. I made an amazing recovery. I’m lucid, and I can walk, and when I’m rested you can’t really tell I have a limp. I can use my right arm pretty well. So I can make a pretty good recommendation for the power of language and the need for poetry and painting. And maybe I do need to write, but I don’t need to publish and I don’t need to share—and that’s a different thing.

…I needed to write the book so I could figure out who I was. But the idea of having a publication date? That’s weird.

Read some poems from his books Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 2004), War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming 2025) on his website.

Spooktober Reading Roundup

I love horror. Not gore, so much, but the creepy stuff. Give me dark family psychology (gee I wonder why), cursed objects from dusty archives, the uncanny blankness of our modern built environment and the soulless things lurking beneath its plastic surfaces. Lately I’m especially drawn to historical atrocities with a supernatural twist, a sub-genre where a lot of writers of color are currently making their mark.

I read every horror anthology I could get my hands on in the 80s and 90s, mostly from school and public libraries because our family was broke. I knew I was “movin’ on up…,” as The Jeffersons theme song went, when I could afford to buy the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror trade paperback for $25.

Nowadays I get most of my literary scares from NetGalley or thrift stores, a nice mix of old and new. Honestly sometimes the most chilling aspect of these pulp paperbacks is how much sexism and homophobia you could get away with in the 1990s.

Certain flavors of horror don’t appeal to me, but this is my personal taste rather than an aesthetic pronouncement. I don’t usually pick up zombie stories because (I assume) they will be gross and violent. Same for serial killers, whose psychology is not as interesting as they themselves think it is. I can’t picture myself as a character in a post-apocalyptic survival novel, because it’s drearily obvious that I would immediately die from falling into a hole, just like I do in Minecraft every time my son demands that I play. Or else I’d be the person killed and eaten by my starving companions in the first week for complaining too much about the lack of flush toilets.

With respect to horror fiction based on real-life historical injustices, I find these books uniquely satisfying because they have a purpose beyond momentary thrills. I learned about the Negro Travelers’ Green Book from Lovecraft Country. Victor LaValle’s cosmic horror Western Lone Women, one of the best books I read this year, taught me about the diversity of 19th-century frontier homesteaders. Often, the terror and suspense in these books arise from oppressive forces that persist in the present day. The ghosts and monsters, on the other hand, may be a powerless group’s unlikely allies. If cosmic justice isn’t forthcoming, at least coding these stories as horror is refreshing in its honesty, compared to the whitewashed narratives of progress in our “realistic” history books.

A standout in this category is Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, coming out Oct. 31 from Gallery/Saga Press. Set in rural Florida in 1950, it’s based on a horrendous “reform school” where one of her ancestors perished as a teenager. Robbie, the 12-year-old son of a Black labor activist, is sent there on trumped-up charges to bring his father out of hiding. The sadistic warden takes a special interest in the boy because he can see the ghosts of other young inmates who were killed by beatings, rape, and hard labor. Capturing the ghosts will allow the warden to cover up his crimes. In return, maybe he’ll let Robbie go free. But the ghosts are going to make Robbie a counter-offer that he’s afraid to refuse.

This week in Jessica Dore’s Tarot newsletter, I came across a citation to Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts”, which is a meditation on the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of reconstructing the voices of sexually exploited female slaves. Hartman’s remarks about the archives’ “libidinal investment in violence” resonated with themes in The Reformatory, where the warden keeps a secret stash of photos of the boys he’s abused. Robbie and his allies hope to use this evidence against their tormentor, yet they know there’s no guarantee that the images will inspire empathy, let alone effective action from the authorities. The archive is contagious and uncontrollable as the Necronomicon, titillating the white gaze, while infecting Black viewers with further traumatic images.

Comedian and horror movie director (a combo that makes sense if you think about it) Jordan Peele is the editor of Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, just published last week. This one was a mixed bag, for me, with some amazing stories and others that didn’t have enough of a point, but I recommend checking it out anyhow. Tananarive Due contributes another solid tale based on Jim Crow history, this time about Freedom Riders seeking supernatural aid to fend off white supremacists. Nnedi Okorafor’s elegiac story of a Nigerian-American haunted by an Old World deity contains a wry moment when two white Karens in her neighborhood see the monstrous figure in her driveway and demand that she show them her parade permit! You may see the twist coming in Terence Taylor’s virtual-reality nightmare “Your Happy Place” but it’s no less horrifying, because you know that if the technology existed, America would happily sign onto this method of extracting prison labor.

Also out this month, Raul Palma’s A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton) is a tragicomic ghost story about an impoverished Santeria priest in Miami who promises to exorcise his debt-collection lawyer’s McMansion in exchange for loan forgiveness. The book is both a Dickensian satire of capitalism and a poignant exploration of survivor guilt, as the priest learns that some emotional debts must be lived with, not expunged.

A pulp anthology that deserves to be rediscovered is Women of Darkness (Tor/Tom Doherty Assocs., 1988), edited by Kathryn Ptacek. Intentionally feminist without being didactic, this collection of horror stories by then-contemporary women writers holds up better than its male-dominated counterparts from this era. Lisa Tuttle’s haunting yet humorous tale “The Spirit Cabinet” reminds me of Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” in how even a nice husband can dismiss his wife’s perceptions, with fatal consequences. Kit Reed’s “Baby” explores the darker side of the all-consuming bond between mother and child. Elizabeth Massie’s grotesque “Hooked on Buzzer” deals karmic revenge to people who exploited a disabled young woman.

From the same period (and batch of tag-sale paperbacks), I enjoyed Shadows 6 (Berkley Books, 1983), edited by Charles L. Grant, and Supernatural Sleuths (Roc, 1996), edited by Martin H. Greenberg…but with the caveat that both include some cringey sexism and ethnic stereotypes. Some of the new-to-me authors whose work I especially liked were Leslie A. Horvitz, Jack Ritchie, and Lee Killough.

The anthology Dark Fantasies (Legend, 1989), edited by Chris Morgan, evokes the gritty and despondent vibes of Thatcherite Britain, with contributions by Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Ian Watson, and others. In a lot of these tales, you’re not sure if something supernatural is happening or the characters have had a psychological breakdown, but either option is suitably unsettling.

Out of Tune, Book 2 (JournalStone, 2016), edited by Jonathan Maberry, is an anthology of horror and dark fantasy stories that each take inspiration from a spooky folk song or murder ballad. Books organized around a gimmick tend to be uneven in quality but this one, in my opinion, was consistently strong. Contributors include Cherie Priest, Delilah S. Dawson, and David J. Schow. Pretty sure I got this one at the NecronomiCon Providence vendor hall in 2017. The Young Master has graduated from “Paw Patrol” to “Wednesday Addams” (and not a moment too soon) so the stars may align for a family trip to NecronomiCon next August.

Just another Sunday afternoon in Northampton.

Helen Leslie Sokolsky: “In the Company of Books”

Winning Writers subscriber Helen Leslie Sokolsky has just released a new poetry collection, When We Had Orchards When We Had Moonbeams. I favorably reviewed her earlier book Two Sides of a Ticket on this blog a few years ago. Helen has kindly allowed me to share a poem from her new book below. She says, “It was written for a dear friend of mine, an Auschwitz survivor. She and her two sisters were in the camps and her love of life for all the years I knew her was an inspiration to so many of us. Regina loved literature and poetry. That poem was on her night table when she died in her apartment a year ago last June. I was told by her neighbor next door that she had asked to hear it read shortly before she passed away.”

In the Company of Books

I sit on the other side of the table reading to her
she grasping the pages in a long good-bye
she who for so long has struggled to hold back an endless night.
Now with light beginning to abandon her as shadows move into her lens
she reaches for my hands to guide her back to a familiar landscape
that hallowed place she has created
a pyramid of nested books, many of them shelved in weathered jackets.

I look at myself in the lens of her glasses, featureless
trying to imagine what it is like in that sea of darkness
and continue reading to her believing in the power of language
letting the music of words flow into her hands
which she cups as if they were scattered butterflies.
Outside the window birdsong trill their scales across the field
the wind chases in and out of sycamore branches
like a cloud reshaping itself sounds become the new vista.

I pause for a moment, let that moment rest on my lap
nothing moves but my hand across the page.
Here in the company of books we share I keep turning the pages
applaud a smile that slides across her face
when she tilts her head to listen and inhale
the crickets just beginning their nightly crescendo
a welcome background chorus.
Sounds continue to magnify within her lens
leaving behind a filtered beam of light
as if someone had just lit a candle for her.

 

New Reviews for “Made Man” and a “Two Natures” Book Talk Video

Last month I had the pleasure of co-hosting a Zoom book talk with Canadian novelist Jessica Pegis, “Divine Non-Duality and the Queer Body”. We read excerpts from my gay male coming-of-age novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016) and her new book The God Painter (Stone Table Books, 2021) and explored their common themes of exile, divine love, and spiritual and sexual integration. The God Painter is a work of Catholic-infused speculative fiction in the tradition of Mary Doria Russell and Ray Bradbury. Intersex aliens rescue humanity from our destroyed planet, but are they angels, demons, or something outside our limited categories altogether? Watch the 80-minute video on the Winning Writers YouTube channel:

Poet and critic Michael McKeown Bondhus wrote a wonderful review of my new poetry book, Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022), for Full Stop Magazine this month. I have this novelty greeting card on my office shelf where one 1950s lady exclaims to another, “Sometimes I wish someone who understands me would tell me what I mean!” Michael has done just that…and saved me the labor of explaining myself to cis people quite so much. The review captures the specificity of gender transition but also its continuity with the dynamism of human life (however much we try to arrest its progress with laws and dogmas). We are not, after all, foreign objects or monsters compared to the rest of you.

As much as people claim to loathe change, it is also understood to be an elemental part of existence. The need to change one’s body, then, can be read as another manifestation of this universal impulse. Therefore, Made Man becomes an examination and celebration of change writ broadly along with all its magickal implications.

…Is Made Man’s goal, at least in part, to simultaneously muddy and clarify gender? Desire seems simple — person A wants person B — yet it is full of contradictions and taboos. Racist uncles are clearcut assholes, yet their worldviews are rooted in a version of reality they have absorbed from outside sources, including Russian bots. Gender, as Reiter and many others suggest, is both a social construction and an intimate part of the self. It can appear to be reducible to labels like trans man and genderqueer, yet those labels carry different meanings from person to person. By highlighting ambiguity and algorithms in some of their poems, Reiter finds another, less direct way to address the messiness of gender and compares it to the messiness of so many other parts of our lives.

Goodreads reviewer Transgender Bookworm rates Made Man 5 stars, saying:

Poet Jendi Reiter has written a beautiful and inventive collection of poems that explore gender and the pain of existing beyond society’s rigid binary in a new and exciting way. Tackling subjects both serious and lighthearted Reiter explores the way our absurdly gendered world informs our understanding of each other and the world at large. I found myself chuckling on one page and then gripping my seat in anger the next.

Enjoy this sample poem. Or don’t. I don’t care.

 

Prettyboy in Pink

This generation of lavender-haired pronouns only knows Molly Ringwald as hot Archie’s small-town mom on “Riverdale”. They play the torso drinking game as russet-top KJ Apa square-jaws his way from high school wrestling showers to prison cagefight to skinny-dip in the lake of girls beside the maple sugar factory. Who knew there was so much wealth in syrup? Like his nipples stretched immobile over muscle, mother Mary/Molly is contractually slated to appear in every episode, offering pants-suit credibility to his scheme to rescue the malt shop from mafiosi.

But we assigned-X’ers will forever stan Molly’s bricolage of girlhood, pretty in pink slicing and stitching the bridesmaid shells of teen tulle into a skin she could survive in. Lovestruck Duckie was too much a sister to her, with his manic pompadour and emotional hands. She required the prep-school prince’s genes for her supreme tailoring experiment. When Archie’s done running through his day’s foolish script, those maple-golden eyes go blank. It’s her body now, her finest dress.

Two Poems from Suzanne Ondrus’s “Passion Seeds”

Suzanne Ondrus is a poet and literary scholar whose work explores cultural exchange and understanding, intimacy, oppression, and history. Her poetry book Passion Seeds, about love and longing long distance between an American woman and a Burkina Faso man, won the 2013 Vernice Quebodeaux Prize from Little Red Tree Publishing. Suzanne has taught writing and literary theory in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Russia, Benin, Ghana, Uganda, Italy, and Germany, and was a 2018-2020 Fulbright Scholar to Burkina Faso in West Africa.

Her new collection, Death of an Unvirtuous Woman, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in September 2022 and will be available for pre-order in May. It is a true story of female resistance to domestic violence involving an 1881 Ohio-German immigrant couple. Read three poems from this book in the feminist journal S/tick.

Suzanne kindly shares these poems from Passion Seeds.

Let’s Go Green

Dante had Beatrice blazing blond before him
guiding him from the ice of hell to heaven’s
summits.

Beatrice burned forever in his heart.
Her hands filled with air
and her smile shouldered the world.
From afar he would watch,
happy for a view of her on Sunday.
In the Duomo, his heart arched over
the bridge his eyes made to her,

silent,
unaware
he prayed.

My black angel, you are afar.
How shall I say you burn for me?
My love for you glows like coal or
you are my black angel of coal glow?
But you are not coal, licorice, chocolate,
tar, oil, rubber, sod, tires, or asphalt.
You are seed in my heart,
the green promise.
I want to be the seed of your heart;
I believe I am the seed of your heart.
Please water me with your tears
and bring your heart to the light
so our seeds can grow and glow green.

****

Bleached History

I.
White through fire circles,
mud houses, lingering handshakes
white through indigo, slit goats’ necks
and the dolo-filled calabash.

II.
A congregation so large,
piled high up to the sky
for only one step to his throne,
to finally come home.

III.
Missionaries pleaded, cajoled
for their congregation to reach that throne!
They even stole boys to enroll
and control,
promising parents future rewards.
Their heads were shaved
and their mother tongues shamed,
with the antelope skull worn at least
once by all.
Cultural carving beyond bones,
branding
Jean,
Marc,
Antoine
over Narelwindé’s
wings
to God,
on top Awa’s whisper
to the river
and Yalle’s hope risen.

IV.
The red soil with its orange puddles
held this pain,
so full from
what the whites called religious school.

They tried to stitch boys against the hum
of their ancestors in the wind,
and with white cloth, bread and wine
wind their minds for Christendom and
the French curriculum.

But whispers of songs
sung in the field,
lingering handshakes,
compounds with family
and thatched roofs commanded feet
home, through thorned brush

stealthy under the moon,
back close to Mother’s womb
from where solid like the baobab
they did first bloom.

 

Author Note: This poem was inspired by Burkinabe shaman Malidome Patrice Somé’s autobiography, Of Water and Spirit. Somé was kidnapped as a young child by missionaries and taken to missionary school; he escaped in his late teens, returning to his village. In the 1950s children were punished if they spoke their native languages at school; French was the language of instruction in Burkina Faso. Dolo is homemade grain alcohol. Calabash is a gourd. Calabash are dried and used as bowls, among other things. Wearing an antelope skull signifies shame, akin to wearing a dunce cap. Narelwindé, Awa and Yalle are Burkinabe first names. Baobab is a tree of utmost significance to West Africa, signifying strength and groundedness.

Two Poems from “The Chessmaster’s Daughter” by Barbara Regenspan

Barbara Regenspan is a poet, scholar, and opinion writer who has taught leadership in social justice-focused education at Colgate University. Her books include Haunting and the Educational Imagination. Now, her debut full-length poetry collection, The Chessmaster’s Daughter, is available from Cayuga Lake Books. This collection combines lyricism and philosophical inquiry, meditating on the tensions between appreciation of the present moment and responsibility for the burdens of history. Regenspan appreciates the complexity of her Jewish immigrant legacy: its silent traumas, restless search for truth, and ancient rituals of renewal. In a familiar trajectory for progressive American Jews, she also turns to Buddhist mindfulness and nature-centric practices to counterbalance the intellectual ferment of her ancestral religion.

Barbara says, “I am a strong supporter of the local Tompkins County Workers’ Center (they are among the original national fighters for a living wage) and I have offered the book as a fundraiser.” Donate $13 or more to this upstate New York labor advocacy group, and they will send you a copy of The Chessmaster’s Daughter.

She kindly shares these poems below.

Little Animal Lessons

The day after Ruth’s fatal fall
a squirrel found its way into an
upstairs waste basket,

apparently unfazed when David
released it to the outside sill.

Then a toad preceded our steps on
the path to the market, committed to
the journey on the dry concrete,

avoiding the lush summer growth to
the right and left,

demanding from us a walking meditation
under its peculiar green leadership.

I’ve known this before:
The smaller living things, not
your usual friends, acting out,
commanding:

“Slow down, heed
the closures,
the new possibilities.”

****

Argue for Life

Try to leave your life without dying.
It’s impossible; you were always
a detective anyway and must find
the crime the suspect did not commit.
You’ll be given away by wind chimes
left on the porch,
whose commitment to a furious
system leaves a trail of resonance.
The pain you need to escape has
its own residue, because the separation of
you from everybody else that you almost
believed in is defied by the difficulty leaving.
Stay here with me in this house on the canal
where the lovers we’ve hardly seen walk
by and look in the window, or touring groups
ignore us to take in the sights—approaching the
gorge trail, the path of depth and turns.

April Is Poetry Month: Two Poems from Mahnaz Badihian’s “Ask the Wind”

Since April is National Poetry Month, it seemed like a good time to run excerpts from some poetry collections I’ve recently enjoyed. Mahnaz Badihian is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and visual artist in San Francisco. She sent me a copy of her new poetry book, Ask the Wind (Vagabond Books), to review for Winning Writers. I was pleased by her original turns of phrase, delight in nature’s signs of renewal, and hopefulness about peace in our tortured world. She has kindly permitted me to reprint these poems below. I love how she takes an expression that usually denotes sadness, “not belonging,” and rethinks it as joyful non-attachment.

NOT BELONGING

Like a bird, she floats in nature
like water, she seeps through the earth
the cells in her body,
do not identify with anyone
she is everyone

She has no motherland
she’s free from friends and enemies
the recycled woman rises to far horizons
with no destinations in mind

She’ll not be wounded, not be sad
she’s free of old memories,
from belonging to one particular land
from heavy gold necklaces
her ancestors left behind

Now she puts her feet on fresh grass
opens her arms and lets the sun plant
flowers on her fingertips

Gives her naked bosom to the hands
of the breeze under the glory of
the apple trees
giving herself to the flowing creeks
letting the fish swim in her veins
for the birth of more new happiness.

****

DNA

It was Monday morning and
I was passing the big statue
In the lobby of Johns Hopkins hospital
searching for Room 202,
the first interview with Mrs. Willis

She had a kind smile on her lips
her hands were wrinkled with red nail polish
Mrs. Willis looked me in the eyes,
how do I pronounce your name, dear?
I said, MAH NAZ,
the exact same way it’s written

Mrs. Willis with her M.S. degree said, I’ll try
MENAZ Manos, Maha-noss
then gently she changed her voice and
said, Can I call you Mary?

Marry? Merry? Morry? Echoed in my head
I felt like evaporating morning dew,
like a branch of a tree under heavy rain,
like fruit just fallen from a tree

I looked Mrs. Willis in the eyes and said,
“But my name is the charm of the moon
the name I was called by my mother
and by the man with black hair
dark mustache and brown eyes.”

Mrs. Willis was looking at me
with wide-open eyes
I said: “Mrs. Willis,
is my name more difficult
than Deoxyribonucleic acid?”

April Links Roundup: And the Real (Estate) Monster Was…

Happy April Fool’s Day to the readers of this increasingly sporadic blog. I pranked my son this morning by telling him that the Nutella company was going out of business. We both love to eat this sugary spread for breakfast (him without benefit of spoon). Never fear, the nut supply is still abundant.

For genuine everyday horror, I’ve just finished reading Robert Marasco’s 1973 haunted house novel, Burnt Offerings, reissued by Valancourt Books. This book is like what would happen if a “Better Homes and Gardens” magazine became sentient and started eating your brain. Our protagonists flee the grime and noise pollution of low-income apartment life in New York (something I know well!) only to be seduced by the luxuries of an upstate mansion that consumes tenants’ life force in order to repair itself. Unlike typical haunted houses, this one is delightful to live in. The horror arises from watching the lengths to which people will go to delude themselves because they want a room with a view.

That this impulse remains strong, especially when New York real estate is involved, is documented by Morgan Boyle’s essay at Fence Digital, “Imaginary Liminality Steps From the Train: How to Dreamwalk the World of Craigslist Apartments”.

Occasionally the ceilings are high, the rent is cheap, the deli is two doors down, the kitchen is large and there’s no sink in the bathroom. The listing says the apartment is unique. The apartment is unique. The kitchen is big black and white tile and good to dream about. You think about never washing your hands after using the toilet. You think about never washing your face at night. You think about brushing your teeth over the kitchen sink. The living bodied broker waits expectantly, digitally behind a computer screen. The listing says it is unique. Are you unique enough for this apartment? What’s a bathroom sink? You think about a potential lover standing in the bathroom looking expectantly for a sink that isn’t there. You think about the moment the realization of the lack dawns. You think about the look they give you upon exiting the bathroom with the missing sink and their unclean hands. You think about the unspoken shared knowledge of filth between you. You stop daydreaming in the apartment and click to the next listing. There is not a lot of room for this type of uniqueness in a pandemic world.

The Guardian’s Meg Conley takes a deep dive into the history of kitchen design and social class in this October 2021 article, “Invisible fridges and cooling cubbies: how kitchens have been designed for the rich”. Since the labor of home management historically fell to lower-status groups–women, and particularly Black women in white households–it was important to conceal it because oppression is such a downer when you’re throwing a dinner party. Rather depressing to learn that in 1908, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the classic feminist tale “The Yellow Wallpaper”, proposed liberating white women from household duties by creating a forced labor corps of Black men, women, and children!

Along those lines, the ever-astute Brandon Taylor suggests in his Sweater Weather newsletter that costume dramas like “Bridgerton” or “The Gilded Age” can never adequately represent historical injustices such as racism, because we watch them to enjoy the pretty stuff and the rich people behaving badly, but where do you think that wealth came from?

American period dramas are exercises in self-delusion, always evading the twin horrors of colonization and enslavement. The reason is simple: the history as it happened is too horrifying to turn into a rosy bourgeois narrative. There are no good guys to root for. No way of affirming Protestant sexual and social values in a way that flatters contemporary audiences. That’s why every period drama is ultimately a confection. Because to tell the truth how it really was, how it truly was, would be too much. Implicating.

Don’t miss Taylor’s searing short story “Urgent, Necessary, Vital” at Esquire. A college pottery class becomes a microcosm of sexual and racial politics, as a Black photography student finds that artistic success doesn’t insulate him from being othered, merely gives the problem a different form.

Glennon Doyle’s podcast “We Can Do Hard Things” last month interviewed trans activist and mixed media artist Alok Vaid-Menon about breaking free “from every socially constructed binary that does not allow us to live out our full humanity, our divinity, our infinite creativity and possibility.” Listen or read the transcript here. Alok says:

I see so much of what the trans movement being in the world is a love letter that says, I believe in your capacity for transformation, I believe in your capacity for self-determination. And then in response to that love, we’re told that we are wrong, that we’re disorderly, that we’re foolish, that we’re ridiculous, that we’re delinquents, that we’re predators, that we’re violent. That’s a pain that I continue to face as my words reach more people, is this extreme and coordinated backlash to tarnish me and by extension tarnish the ideas that have been here, they’re ancient ideas, because I think what patriarchy does is it makes us publicists. We find ourselves speaking it, doing it, living it, thinking it with such a fierce allegiance that if someone dare say another way of living is possible, people would rather eradicate and extinguish that alternative than confront that kind of spiritual nudity of asking, who am I outside of what patriarchy wants me to be?

I love their reframing of beauty standards: “Beauty is looking like ourselves.”

Devon Price’s Medium article “The Power of Defiance in the Age of Trans Bans” expresses an understandable exhaustion with the political process. How many times do we have to convince voters and politicians that we deserve to exist?

As a Millennial…I still received the message that being gay was strange and disgusting, and being trans was freakish and deluded. To be both gay and trans was too bizarre to even consider. Anti-gay laws convinced me I was an impossible, dangerous thing. Children and families needed protection from even the idea of me.

Believing all that about myself was absolutely shattering. It ruined my physical and mental health, and for many years destroyed my ability to love others. This is exactly the fate states like Iowa, Texas, and Florida are currently setting trans kids up for. The many political victories gay people have won in recent years have done nothing to prevent this. It was always conditional acceptance, as easily taken away as it was given.

But our autonomy and dignity should not belong to others like this. It should only ever belong to us.

I am not here to write inspiring calls to political action. I’m not interested in begging people to call their representatives or get to the polls. I don’t want to waste anyone’s energy or hope like that anymore. I no longer believe there is any liberation to be found within a legal system that has already tried, many times, to legislate entire groups of people out of existence. I think our power as trans people will not be attained through conventional political channels, but by standing together in proud disobedience of the laws that attempt to control our identities and bodies. I think our committed cis allies must be ready to disobey unjust laws too.

If your professional life is touched by these anti-trans laws, I believe you have a moral obligation to break them. If you’re a teacher, doctor, therapist, or school psychologist in Texas, you must be willing to protect transgender kids and their families. If it proves necessary, refuse to report trans kids’ existence to the government. Disrupt and thwart your colleagues’ attempts to report trans families, too. Lose documents. Slow down processes. Lie. Find any methods you can to grind this dehumanizing machine to a halt.

If you’re a healthcare provider in Iowa, find surreptitious ways to deliver care to your trans patients. Help trans families find the resources they need, and build networks with your colleagues in other states, to keep trans kids treated and safe. If you’re a school teacher in Florida, protect your gay and trans students from harassment, and quietly provide information that will help them understand themselves. If you are a parent or educator anywhere in the country, be on alert for transphobic, homophobic policies and undercut them at every possible turn. Every unjust rule is an opportunity to break it. You have so more power than you realize — and far more options than our political system would like you to see.

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2021

How it started:

Jennifer Melfi - Wikipedia

How it’s going:

Silvio Dante Picture

Another year around the Block. I definitely don’t take that for granted. It’s one thing to know intellectually that life is short and unpredictable, entirely another thing to feel that urgency as one wakes up every day in a country under threat from fascism and disease. What am I waiting for?

High Spirits: I tried marijuana edibles for the first time in November. It was pleasant to feel my brain slow down for about 5 hours. No time to do it again till February, I imagine. I really need to readjust my work-life balance.

Salem’s Lot: Studying witchcraft this year has brought me great satisfaction, mind-body integration, and optimism. ICYMI, I blogged about it earlier this month. My first year of training will wrap up in March 2022. Time to start selecting my magickal name, which may coincide with applying for a new passport and driver’s license with a male gender marker. (My desire for gender affirmation conflicts with my basic laziness regarding paperwork and my Ron-Swanson-esque opinion that my gender is none of the government’s business anyway.)

Personal Soundtrack: Remember that week in January when everyone was singing sea shanties on TikTok? I got hooked on The Longest Johns, and particularly their song “Bones in the Ocean”, a poignant ode to survivor guilt that seemed extra meaningful as America’s COVID death toll reached 800,000. The Young Master independently discovered this song at summer camp and now we listen to shanties together on Spotify. His fourth-grade music teacher also introduced him to 2Cellos, an energetic pair of HOT guys who play pop tunes in a classical style. And I still can’t get enough of that German Karneval music.

Bookbag: Some of the extremely homosexual books I enjoyed this year were Aden Polydoros’ Jewish paranormal mystery The City Beautiful, Brandon Taylor’s literary short fiction collection Filthy Animals, and the poetry collections Mutiny by Phillip B. Williams and The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed. I’d been meaning to read Glen David Gold’s historical novel about vaudeville magicians, Carter Beats the Devil, for almost 20 years, and it was all I hoped for and more. Julie Murphy’s queer YA romance Pumpkin gave me the courage to sign up for a transgender runway show next month. Pictures forthcoming!

The Writing Life: I finished a major revision of my novel Origin Story with guidance from the peerless editor/sensitivity reader Denne Michele Norris, co-host of Food 4 Thot Podcast and the new editor-in-chief of Electric Lit.

Once again, I took part in the 30 Poems in November fundraiser for the Center for New Americans, while binge-watching “The Sopranos” on HBO’s streaming service. The conjunction of those two pastimes generated The Waste-Management Land, a poetry chapbook manuscript in need of a good home.

My third full-length poetry collection, Made Man, comes out in February from Little Red Tree and is now available to pre-order. Cover art and interior illustrations by Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel. This book explores female-to-male transition and gay masculine identity through the voices of unusual objects and fictional characters. Enjoy the opening poem, first published in Crosswinds Poetry Journal.

Self-Portrait as Pastry Box

Under my roof, cathedrals of piped
icing breathe out the sacred stale
sweetness of cream and cardboard
white as a right-hand man’s
final satin bed.
Under my roof we pay our respects.
The family is a thin shelter, soon wet.
If you don’t believe me, open
and see the red smash where tiered berries kissed
the jostled lid. No shifting
the ingredients. No loose knots in the string.
Under my roof I’ll thank you
not to take knives in vain.
Remember him who was lifted
from the river, from the box he was sealed in.
The snapped wafer laid on your tongue like a secret
recipe. Religion‘s root means to tie
string round the wrists, the trash
bag sinking, the harbor’s surface restored.
Under my roof the family’s bound
to gasp, glorying in the sugared name
I display to be sliced after the blown-out wish.
Take the cannoli, broken for you.