Leverett

Lise Weil

I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence.
Adrienne Rich, "Splittings"

Heading west on Rte. 2 on that Sunday in April there was no question in my mind. I was driving to my destiny. It was cold and raw and rainy. The branches on the maples on either side of the highway were bare, but their tips were red with expectation. Leominster, Lunenberg – even the place names told me I was moving into another dimension. "Exit at Millers" Falls. And don't get your hopes up – it's a grimy old mill town and there isn't any falls, at least not that I've ever been able to see." I loved Grace's directions. Empathetic like her, and full of landmarks, so that the whole way there I was already picturing the road winding along the Sawmill River that led to the pumpkin-colored farmhouse across from the hill.

I'd been trying to picture the farmhouse for a week now, ever since the first phone call, that line cast boldly into her world. From the sound of the ring – muffled,old-fashioned – I imagined it was so deep in the country phone lines barely reached that far. And the phone rang so many times I was on the verge of hanging up when she finally picked up. . "Sorry... I was out in... nature." Her voice... how is it possible to be so dry and so warm at the same time? She was happy to hear from me. We talked for two hours that first night. Three hours the next. And the whole time I was trying to picture the room she was sitting in and the rooms adjoining that room and the apricot tree she said was growing right in back and the hill across the way.

"It's my qualitative leap," she said about this move to the country, using the kind of language I was now coming to expect from her. The phrase was from Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology. She had come here to listen to the silence. And to commune with the trees, the birds, the streams. She was already planning a garden. "Don't you think gardens are wholesome?" I'd noticed an ironic remove whenever she talked about nature. It puzzled me until she told me that in Worcester she had lived downtown in an apartment building. But of course she hadn't only come here for nature. Three women from the study group lived in this area. The meetings usually took place out here. And the house belonged to Daly, who had plans to live here someday herself.

What else did I learn about Grace during those conversations that swallowed up whole evenings, despite her mounting insistence that this was bankrupting me and we should hang up? That she had been a devout Catholic as a young girl and the divorce from God had been traumatic. That the divorce from her husband, after six years of marriage, had been more so. That she grew up in Georgia, the oldest of four sisters. That she was once a cocktail waitress. Maybe because of the way it clashed with everything else I knew about her, this last piece of information impressed me most of all. It made me ache that she'd ever had to do anything so beneath her. And it fired me up with righteous indignation. She deserved more than what she'd been given so far in life. I would help her get what she deserved.

Leverett. I've never seen it, I can't even picture it, but I know it's going to become part of my history. I am entering the territory of the women whose letters I've been reading. Alice who lives nearby in a cabin in the woods, who writes of the dew crystals on the dried grasses sparkling in the morning sun as she brings up the last of next winter's wood, who is trying to arrive at a satisfactory definition of "wild." Jordan who's divorced and lives in Northampton and works with fibers and writes about color and rhythm and light. Noni who's studying literature and feminist philosophy at Umass. I am driving toward the farmhouse where they've met so often to discuss philosophy and literature and feminism. . .

What would we do when we saw each other? I couldn't imagine it any more than I could imagine the interior of that pumpkin-colored house. What kind of taste did she have in furniture? I'd been a bit dismayed to see the car she had driven to Aviva's was bright orange. But maybe it was borrowed. I was on Leverett Road now, with the river beside me. On my right was a rundown old shack with a gas pump out in front. A crooked sign on the side said "Chapin's." "If you pass a little general store on your right you've gone too far." I did a U-turn and headed back down the road. Colored Easter eggs hung from the bare branches of a tree in someone's yard. Then there was a long field on my left and, up a little rise on my right, yes, a house that could pass for pumpkin-colored, and beside it the orange car. As I came up the driveway she appeared on the porch, waving, with a piece of toast in her hand. She had on brown corduroys with a blue hooded sweatshirt that made her look a little goofy. I loved her for that. I thought: I'm going to have to give her a lesson in color coordination.

"My breakfast," she said, apologetically, indicating the toast. "I don't seem to have been able to get started with anything today." Once inside we hugged briefly and then she said "Would you like a little tour?" and pulled me right through the kitchen and out the back door. There stood the famous apricot tree, just beginning to bud, and behind it a little cabin and way out back a big brown sagging barn. Just beyond the barn was her little garden with a larger one beside it. "The Debbies" she said. The couple who lived in the other part of the house were both named Debbie and were both organic gardeners. She led me inside the barn and pointed proudly to one wall. Draped across it was a huge white banner painted with the words WE HAVE DONE WITH YOUR EDUCATION!

"Wow!" I had seen pictures of this very banner in Off Our Backs. It was a relic from the great student protest a year ago when Boston College tried to fire Daly. There'd been a huge roster of feminist speakers and performers. I had read about the event in Cazenovia, had even considered driving in to Boston for it. Seeing this piece of it here was like entering the stream of feminist history.

Back in the kitchen I took in the roughhewn walls, the low ceilings, the giant woodstove, the slate sink with a little red pump beside it. A card table sat incongruously in the middle of the room with folding metal chairs. We sat down on them while she finished her toast. I shook my head when she offered me a bite. I told her how much I liked her directions. She wasn't making much progress on her toast. Finally I pulled my stool up beside hers and she put it down and we kissed. In between kisses we laughed. Not nervous laughter, happy laughter. Sister laughter. And after awhile she asked would I like to move upstairs to her room. So we did. On our way we passed a small parlour into which were crammed sections of a burgundy velour modular sofa. Again, incongruous. "My plush," she said, with that rich ironic dip of her voice, as if reading my mind. Only one word, but enough to dispel all my aesthetic concerns. On the futon bed in her small room with its blue walls and no sound but the rain on the panes and the occasional whoosh of a car on Leverett Road we made love for the first time....

The next weekend I drove out again, on Saturday this time. I kissed the greening mound of earth when I got out of the car before going into the house to kiss her and this time we moved right into the bedroom and we weren't shy, we were just happy. We spent almost all day in bed. She showed me her secret seal: the labyris tattooed onto her hip, below the panty line, which she explained was not only a link to ancient female power but also a bid for continuity. There was so little of it in her life, she said. We talked a lot about our sisters, how we loved to laugh with them. How we loved them. We were both of us oldest sisters, both responsible, and a little repressed.

Both of us were wary of the "dyad" as a basic unit of human relating. Between us we'd seen too many friends disappear into couples that consumed all their time and energy. "The relationship as bottomless pit," is how Grace put it. And she told me about the Debbies next door and how every week they set aside time to "bring things up." Grace put her finger down her throat as she said these words and I cracked up. I asked; what went wrong with her last lover, who'd been much younger. She'd wanted a mother is all Grace would say. When I asked her why it took her so long to be with women –the young woman was her first –she said after college she lived in a lesbian household and saw too much pain and destruction there. She worried about jeopardizing what she already had. "And really, I couldn't have loved women any better." Oh, I thought. Oh. What have I done to deserve someone so pure so good.

It was hard to leave the next day. I was in my car, I'd rolled down the window and we were holding hands. On the radio that awful song that was always playing came on – "You light up my life you give me hope to carry on" and we both sang along camping it up. Just before I pulled out she said to me "Do you know how much you lighten up my life?" So I wasn't imagining it. There was a space for me in her life. I could make it better. I already was. She loves me, I can feel it now I know it I love and am loved and my new life is beginning.

The study group met in Leverett the following Saturday and I'd been invited to join. Aviva and Grace both put in a good word for me. I was a little anxious knowing the others all had a background in philosophy but Grace said I'd make up for it with my knowledge of literature. No sooner had we put snacks and drinks out on the card table than the women arrived: first Aviva, who threw her arms around both of us at once, then Noni, short and round and dark and fiery. Alice, tall and vibrant in a red plaid lumberjacket, sparkled like those dew crystals she'd described in her letter. Jordan, a tall, graceful woman with gray hair, deferred to everyone else. We filled our glasses and plates and then at Grace's invitation we all "moved to the plush" and the session began. Say what you liked about the plush it was very comfortable.

Alice was this evening's presenter. She began by talking about reality. She knew what she meant when she used this word, and so did the rest of us. But now deconstruction had put us all on the defensive about it, there wasn't supposed to be any such thing as an unmediated, preverbal reality. By way of response to the deconstructionists and the culturally constructed world they were trying to foist on us, she wanted to talk about a book she had just stumbled across, The Real World of Fairies. Alice said the answers to the most profound questions are often found in the simplest places. And she then read out loud a passage about cloud fairies, who sculpt fantastic shapes in the air, and who work especially hard around sunset because they know more people are watching. So much for my fears the discussion would go over my head

Alice found this book revelatory. According to its author, fairies were nature spirits. They are "extraordinarily happy – always" because they're in rhythm with all natural things. They thrill with the sense of being alive. People on this planet die of boredom all the time – but fairies live forever because they're in touch with the wonder of life. Here there were murmurs of pleasure from Noni and Grace. "What place does talk of fairies have in 'serious' philosophical discussion?" Alice asked. "Well, let's turn to our friend Friedrich Nietzshe." And she opened one of the books in the pile that sat beside her and quoted: "`the lovely human beast always seems to lose its good spirits when it thinks well; it becomes "serious." Where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking does not amount to anything: that is the prejudice of this serious beast..." The Gay Science, #327.

A loud "yes!" from Noni, who'd been casting admiring glances at Alice throughout this talk. She testified to the dour seriousness of the academy, which goes hand in hand with the dulling of the senses and the absence of any sense of wonder. I backed her up on all of those counts. And then "Oh!" I said, because I had just realized something. "Dour seriousness" – it was an exact description of the meetings I'd been attending this year in Boston. "The oppression model of feminism" I said, borrowing Aviva's words, and I began to talk of the heaviness and humourlessness of those anti-racism sessions in Boston: the furrowed brows, the unending talk of pain and struggle. "Are we saying, then" Grace interjected, "that this latest tendency in feminist politics is actually a move in the direction of the patriarchal academy?" "Yes!" said Aviva, "Identity politics – it's all about fragmenting us into little pieces. There's a total absence of wonder or magic." "That's because connection," said Jordan, "is where the magic is." And she went on to talk of how light and light-filled she felt when she worked with her yarns, and how that made sense because light is color and color is light...

The next day was warm and Grace and I worked out in the garden most of the day, taking pleasure in going back over the whole conversation of the day before. Everyone had assured me what a valuable addition I was to the group and Grace wanted to be sure I'd taken it in. I was beginning to believe it myself. "So. . . do you think you might finally be persuaded to start reading Daly?" she said. Considering how tuned in to their thinking I was, it was a matter of curiosity to everyone in the group that I had yet to open one of her books. Jane had been trying to get me to read her for over a year now but I kept resisting. I liked my feminist illuminations to come by way of poetry if not experience; I didn't want them all spelled out for me, especially not in prose with lots of word games and alliteration. But now having met these remarkable women whose common denominator was Mary and her classes I decided the time had come. I would begin reading Gyn/Ecology.

In the late afternoon we made love and after that I sat out on the front porch. It had rained all week and the earth was really waking up now. The pasture on the other side of the road was pale green now, the trees on the hill were bursting into bud. A friend in Boston had given me a magic mushroom the week before, saying "You'll know when to take it" and I felt this was the moment. Before long I found myself being drawn out back to the meadow up behind the house. There was a big maple tree right by the garden – Grace once referred to it as a "particularly benevolent tree." I leaned against that tree, feeling Grace's presence in it, feeling her behind me, supporting me. And standing there, looking out at the field, I had a vision.

The earth begins to move. It breaks up into plates that heave and swell like waves and harden into scales that whirl and spin, then softens into earth again, gentle rolling motions, and I begin to rock with it my whole body rocking with the rhythm of the earth so sexual I can feel the juices flowing from me it's the same rhythm as our lovemaking and the earth is also Grace, I can see her opening, welcoming, wanting, and then I have such a craving to touch the earth to caress the rolling field to make love to it and then I do, in my mind, I make love to the earth mouth wide open with desire and love until I start to cry. There is absolutely no difference, I know then, between loving her body and loving the earth: the infinitely shifting plates of the earth's body, her utterly unknowable center. And I know it is true there has been another way of life. And we were at the center of it. Not on top, but at the source. Everything flowed from us.

"Yes," Grace said, when I told her, or tried to tell her, what I'd just seen and felt. The power of her empathy was such that it often felt to me as if she were able to lift out of her own skin and enter mine. She seemed to know exactly what I had experienced up there behind the house. And soon her face began to flush and she said" I want to take you somewhere." So we got into her orange car and she drove very fast up Leverett Road then took a sharp right onto a dirt road that led us to a small river. "Rattlesnake Gutter Road," she said. Both Mary and Alice had reported fairy sightings here. She parked by the river and we began walking up a steep spiraling path through the woods. Beside us was a deep gulch with huge boulders. On either side of us were tall trees. Their needled branches looked to me like dexterous fingers at a loom spinning webs into the darkening sky.

And all at once we both became conscious of the moonlight. Everything was bathed in it. We climbed higher and then suddenly there was the moon between the branches, incredibly strong and bright, like a huge white eye staring down at us. And when I looked at Grace I saw her teeth were shining just like the moon. "Your teeth!" I said."They're glowing.""Well what do you think yours are doing?" And then it came to us with the force of revelation – our teeth are little moons!" We laughed and laughed to think of these features that brought us so much grief in high school – we both wore braces – now revealed as a power source. And Grace told me how she used to love the song "Moonlight Becomes You" until she found out what it really meant. "What does it really mean?" "You know, you look good in moonlight." "NOOOO!" I said, and realized I still thought it meant "Moonlight becomes you." How could it mean anything else? And then we began to hear it – the peep peep peep" in the bogs, growing louder and shriller and more voluminous as we listened, as if to tell us ours was only one of infinite conversations being carried on all around us in thousands of other languages, that we were one with this massive swell of burgeoning spring life, all of us becoming moonlight and moonlight becoming us. And I thought of the postcard from Jane and Zoey when they were camping out West saying "we are women and nature" and in this moment understood exactly what they meant.

"I haven't seen any fairies yet," I said to Grace. "But I kind of think we are fairies. Don't you?"

"Without a doubt," she said.

"It's pure Rousseauism!" my father said, the one time I tried to explain it all to him: these new friends, this farmhouse in the country where I was spending more and more time. I think I had mentioned that among these friends, all of whom were very smart and literate, Descartes was considered the root of modern evil. What kind of brain comes up with a statement like "I think, therefore I am." What about: "I feel, I hear, I see"?? "Well," my father said, "I suppose you all believe in going back to nature, throwing off the yoke of culture, embracing the earth." He made it all sound insufferably stupid. "Go back and read Rousseau if you think you invented these ideas. Or better yet, the German Romantics."

As a matter of fact I had been thinking a lot about the German Romantics since I began spending time in Leverett. I used to feel such an affinity with them, back when I was still trying to translate male experience into my own. And there were undeniable affinities, considering their belief in the power of the imagination, their kinship with nature, their striving for integrity of life, work, and thought. But the parallels only went so far. It was inconceivable to me that males had ever cared this passionately about the world. Weren't they always competing with each other, trapped in their wars of ideas: classical versus romantic, reason versus feeling, culture versus nature. The Romantics were after all reacting to the movement that had preceded theirs, another band of men who had in turn displaced the band preceding them. Taken together, all those movements merely described the periodic fluctuations of the male psyche.

Whereas we. . . were the first in recorded history to see the things we saw. Never before in this span of time had the perceptions of women entered the realm of representation; never before had women in large numbers attempted to reclaim not only our own bodies, but the body of knowledge that had been stolen from us. No one in recorded history had lived or loved this way before. We stood on the brink of profound, earth-shaking changes, we were not only the instruments of but the embodiment of those changes. The way that we lived and loved – we were certain of this – was of significance for all living beings.

Life in Leverett began to take on a rhythm. Friday afternoons I would arrive laden with fruit from the truck on Somerville Ave. I passed on my way out of town: strawberries and peaches and bananas. I'd discovered that if you bought several varieties of cereal and mixed them in different combinations you could eat cereal every day without getting sick of it. Grace and I would rouse each other every morning with murmurings about muesli and fruit and maple syrup. After breakfast we would sit out on the front porch and gaze at the hill across the way; there were tiny white blossoms now and more shades of green than I ever knew existed and purples and mauves and pinks. The air smelled impossibly sweet.. Saturday we would run errands in Amherst: the health food store, the hardware store, the bookstores. One day I insisted we stop at an antique store and there we found a lovely dropleaf pine table to replace the card table in the kitchen.

Study group met every other week and each time I thought it couldn't get any richer or more exciting, that the women couldn't become any more beautiful or eloquent. But it did, and they did. Each time more connections were made, more threads were spun, and when it was over I would be both achingly full and hungry for more. Finally, it seemed to me, the women I knew were rising to the level of my highest intuitions about us. I was pleased with myself for having had such intuitions for so long, for having loved women my whole life. The thought that any kind of stigma could be attached to this love was now simply laughable.

Often we were joined by Eleanor, an ex-nun from an activist order who'd spent a lot of time in prison. She was a large woman with a big heart and huge feet. We used to joke that if she ever needed to "claim an identity" she could just point to her size 12 shoes. Eleanor was there the day it was Grace's turn to present. I remember this because it seemed to me that her presence somehow reinforced everything Grace was saying. Grace started by apologizing for not having prepared anything. But she had some questions to put on the table about love. Is love a function of the will? I.e., can we choose whom to love? According to the terms of patriarchal romance, not at all. "Just look at the language of love," she said: " 'falling in love,' 'helpless as a kitten up a tree.' As if there is something about love, when it's powerful, that defies choice. But if we don't exercise choice in this arena of our lives, where does that leave us?"

"With 'lesbian sexuality,'" Noni offered, "and its flavors-of-the-week."

"Yes, exactly," said Grace. This topic had come up before in the group; indeed there was hardly any lesbian gathering at the time where talk did not turn to lesbian s/m or bondage. The lesbian magazines were all full of controversies about it. Some heralded these practices as the new sexual frontier; dykes who engaged in them were said to be exploring power and trust issues out on the edge. Though I didn't know anyone who was actually doing bondage much less s/m, it seemed everyone was curious about it.

Alice was nodding furiously. She said she was coming to think that no real political change for women could happen without deep friendship – and if this was true then what Grace was saying was of the essence for our entire movement. The outcome of this session was that we all decided to overturn the patriarchal verdict and proclaim love as the supreme function of the will. In addition to being in vehement agreement, I couldn't help feeling proud because implied in what Grace was saying was that she had chosen me.

The weekend of the Lesbian Poetry Reading Grace came to stay with me in the city. It was held on a Saturday night at The Arlington Street Church downtown. Some of the great lesbian poets of our time would be reading: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn. From our seats in the balcony, we looked down on a sea of women; the church was full to the rafters. There was the usual rowdiness and high spirits when lesbians convene in large numbers, and the sense of expectancy was keen. For weeks I'd been looking forward to taking in the words of these poets with Grace by my side. In Cazenovia I'd come to know women's poetry readings as great celebratory events. There was rarely a reading there that did not create community among its listeners, that did not leave us all vibrating with the words we had heard, solemn and expansive. But this one was different. There was a heaviness about the stage that never lifted. Racism was the pervasive subtext; several of the Black writers read angry poems and most of the white writers seemed to be weighed down with something I later decided was guilt. Rich read a poem about a cripple and a skier that ended with the words "the skier/and the cripple must decide/ to recognize each other." As she read I saw Grace's hands go to her stomach and when I looked up I saw tears in her eyes. When I asked her about it later that night she said "Don't you see? She's given up." It would be years before I would fully understand this response.

But the next day we attended a reading by Audre Lorde at my friend's loft, the same place where Jane had performed three months before. She read a story called "Tar Beach," about sunning with her lover on a city rooftop which, in the course of an afternoon of feasting and making love, becomes a little patch of paradise. As it happened, Grace and I had spent part of that afternoon on a blanket up on my roof taking in the spring sun and the panoramic view of city rooftops now veiled in pale green. We listened with complete abandon, our chairs pulled close together and our hands on each others' legs, bathing in the sensuous detail and luminosity of Lorde's prose. Here was transport, and sisterhood. Almost enough to make up for the day before.

And it is happening now this is the big one what I've been building towards my whole life. When Grace tells me the title of the book Mary Daly is writing now – Pure Lust – I think I know exactly what these words are saying and everything they connote. This movement towards her this desire to know her knowing and loving not being separable this coming together of body mind spirit every cell of my being engaged . Pure Lust. My desire for her not separate from my desire for this world we are remaking, these friends we are remaking it with. Embracing the object of my lust and my lust itself with the most absolute unconditional "yes" – yes this was meant to be and yes all the fairies are backing me up yes this is what I was put on earth to do. What Dante imagined in his Paradiso: "will and desire become one."

One Sunday in mid-June we were taking a late afternoon walk together, up Cave Hill Road. The bugs were out and they were biting Grace so she turned back after only a few minutes. I had smoked a joint before we left and found myself falling into a kind of blissful trance, wanting to walk forever between the hill on my left and the row of oak trees on my right beyond which stretched endless meadows. I wandered on for quite a while, then considered that perhaps I was being rude, Grace would be waiting if not worrying. But she would not be angry with me, I reasoned. She had infinite patience and understanding. She was not one to ever stand in my way. She would encourage me always to do what I needed to do, in fact in all my life I had never known anyone so encouraging. I was lost in these thoughts when I began to hear them: beads of water falling on the leaves, drop by drop. So this is why the birds had been chirping so loud in the afternoon, why the bugs were so ferocious, all creatures in this dense valley screaming for release. The rain began to come down. . .and somehow along with it came a conviction, one that I realized had been building for a long time, a knowing what I had to do, and what I had to say. When I turned around and headed back down the road it was with the intention of going home to say it. In my mind was an Adrienne Rich poem, one she had read the other night, in which her life with her lover was braided into the lives of the feminists who'd come before them, and which ended with words Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to Susan B. Anthony: "Yes, our work is one, / we are one in aim and sympathy / and we should be together. . ."

The patter on the leaves began to intensify and rain began to blacken the road, drenching me in a matter of seconds. I heard thunder, and began to worry. Where was I? How far had I walked? I wasn't even sure if I'd turned around yet, but I had to have since I was walking downhill. Now I began running down the hill, as fast as I could, sometimes tripping or losing my balance. I would spot a familiar landmark – Chapin's, the Sawmill River – only to have my certainty overturned in the next moment, when it looked nothing like it used to. I was in one of those German fairy tales where nature suddenly turns as alien and menacing as it was gentle and familiar moments before.

I turned left and made my way down Leverett Road relying on memory. Up ahead a porch light shone like a beacon in fog. I told myself that had to be her light, she had put it on for me, even though the hill wasn't where I thought it should be and the house looked much bigger than it ever had before. But I kept approaching it and then, yes, there was the porch, recognizably hers, and the screen door, which I walked through, and there she was in the kitchen standing beside the stove. Vegetables cooking in the cast iron pan. "Did you worry?" I said. "I'm sorry." She wasn't angry, only relieved. She said she couldn't decide if it was wiser to stay here or go out looking for me and risk being gone when I got home. "You made the right decision," I said. And then I sat down at our new old pine table in my wet pants and shirt, with a beer and a cigarette and I said "Grace, let's have a talk."

She had to go pee first and while she was gone I took a look around me: the flowers on the table, the red door open to the rain, the smell of lilacs. Fruit in the fruit bowl. Supper cooking on the stove: onions, mushrooms, eggplant, summer squash. What more could I ever want? "Well it's Sunday and we haven't had our session yet," she said when she came back in. "Is there something you'd like to bring up?" I laughed, but was not to be deterred. "Grace I've been thinking so much about it and now I just have to tell you. She nodded, smiling, and sat down across from me and then it was as if she was drawing the words out of me as I said them, "How do you think it would be if I moved in here with you?"

"I thought you'd never ask." She confessed she'd been waiting for me to say something.

"Really?" I said, "For how long?"

"Well let's just say it was reaching critical mass." The house was too big for her to manage all by herself. She needed my help. Those were her words. But beneath them were layers of unspoken longing, and unspoken love. We both knew it. "Come live with me. Our work is one," she might as well have said. She didn't say, but I knew.

working notes

This is an edited-down version of a chapter from a work-in-progress, In Search of Pure Lust, which began as a meditation on lesbian desire and morphed into a memoir. At the heart of this memoir is the intersection of my life with the grand experiment of lesbian feminism of the '70s and '80s. Lesbian desire in that context was explosive and intensely political. We were part of a revolutionary experiment; our love for women was going to save the world, or so I thought. It wouldn’t be long before this construct came crashing down around my ears. But for now, in this chapter, I am revelling in a wild waking dream.

about the author

Lise Weil moved to Montreal, PQ from Montague, MA in 1990 and has never regretted it. She was founding editor of Trivia, A Journal of Ideas, which grew out of the study group she describes in "Leverett." She is encouraged by the vitality of this online reincarnation of Trivia at a time when North American feminist culture seems to be operating mostly under the radar. She teaches in Goddard College's Individualized MA program.