Happy 2017, readers! This year on the Block, you can look forward to more poetry book reviews, queer musings, sales pitches for The Novel, and theological opinions that I will probably retract in 5-10 years. Also, I will try to develop some interests beyond nonbinary handwringing, Netflix series, and bitterness toward my family of origin.
January Links Roundup: The Usual Obsessions Read More »
“Turn your face away from the garish light of day, Turn your thoughts away from cold unfeeling light, And listen to the music of the night,” the Phantom of the Opera sings in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. These lines captured my heart when I saw the show 25 years ago. Darkness as fertile, safe, restful,
December Links Roundup: Into the Dark Read More »
Conservatives, and liberals still in the denial stage of grief, have been calling for “unity” after this week’s presidential election. I think we need to talk about solidarity instead. Not making nice with people who are ideologically committed to hurting us, but taking a hard look at the ways that our different marginalized groups have
November Links Roundup: Queer Connections Read More »
Today, November 1, is All Saints’ Day in the Episcopal Calendar, when we honor and commune with our dead. In our tradition, saints are not only the officially canonized heroes of the church, but all members of the community, just as we are “a priesthood of all believers”. This fall, the American poetry community lost
Poets in Memoriam: Ritvo, Kelly, Perillo Read More »
“My gender is witch,” proclaimed poet Charlie Bondhus, concluding a masterful set of published and new works he read at the LGBT Center in NYC last month. (Witch? Which? Switch!) In four words he summed up the elusive quality of our overlapping identities: queer, magician, writer. All involve a commitment to phenomena that may be
Coming Out Witchy, and Other Links on Spirituality and Trauma Read More »
Hello, readers. As you can see, things have been busy around here, and the dishes (and emails to myself with “blog about this!”) have piled up. We return this month with some links about gender roles and personal grooming. This piece about body-hair positivity, from the feminist website Bust.com, got a number of sympathetic comments
October Links Roundup: Did I Shave My Legs for This? Read More »
Denise Turney, author of the popular novel Love Pour Over Me, runs Chistell Publishing, an independent press with a special interest in African-American and inspirational books. Her free monthly e-newsletter, the Book Lover’s Haven, features freelance writing jobs, literary conferences and events, and author interviews. Subscribe here. We’ve been connected online for several years because
Interview About My Poetry at the Book Lover’s Haven Read More »
Apologies for another long blog hiatus due to book promotion, practicing witchcraft, and reading the picture book Construction Trucks twice a day to the Young Master. (I highly recommend this one, by the way: very informative, with illustrations of multi-ethnic male and female workers. Bet you didn’t know how cement gets to the top of
September Links Roundup: Could This Be Magic Read More »
This past March I attended the 5 College Queer Gender & Sexuality Conference at Hampshire College. One of the best workshops was “Sex-Negativity Never Happened”, led by Skramz Geist, a radical philosophy professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. We talked about how the “sex-positive” norm in queer communities can be exploited to push people’s
August Links Roundup: The Negative in Sex-Positive Read More »
Coming out is peculiar when you don’t know what you are yet. I’ve been having a lot of conversations like this: “Um… I wanted to tell you… I’m decided I’m genderqueer now? But I’m not going to do anything about it? Like, I still use female pronouns and my husband likes boobs, so…” At which
Nonbinary Femme Thoughts Read More »